The Dice — 017

After avoiding any kind of illness for four years, this week I managed to get sick. Though I'm not happy about it, I did manage to get a few things done including soft launching a new store for Same Team Partners. It's fun to see the real brand for this company start to take shape. Go get a shirt and then come back here and get your weekly Dice fix.

Sometime around the late 90’s Jason Kottke blogged about a new track he had come across on Napter (I spent a bit looking for the original post but could not find it. Maybe it was on Osii8). It was Pete Tong’s Radio One Essential Mix with BT playing in Washington DC. The show was one hour and forty minutes long and the bootlegs I found were split in two. For years I was only able to listen to the second part, but what I heard will forever be permanently etched into my senses as the standard for what passes for good electronic music.

So, when I happened across this show: Yoyaku instore session with Tomoki Tamura—with similar vibes of its own—I felt that I had to share it. Here’s the complete set on Soundcloud.

Also, here’s an insane archive of previous Essential Mix recordings.

When I came across the Marber grid I could only think of four words, “what an elegant solution”. The grid is “one of the foundation stones of Penguin mythology, a design so clever that it is still studied more than half a century after it was made.” Go look at it yourself and marvel in its beauty.

Romek Marber, a holocaust survivor, also made major contributions to several publications including The Economist magazine. Working there he created the first art-directed covers with "bold images an immediacy that had a physical presence and visual force."

I love Marber’s recollection of the design process from those early days. “Sometimes the wait for an editorial decision could be prolonged in which case we would go for lunch, usually to ‘The French’, a pub in Soho, hoping that on our return the cover feature story would have been decided. I would then make a quick sketch of what I proposed to do. By then it was getting late, and I would rush back to the studio to carry out the design. The artwork had to be at the printers by 9 am the next morning. I liked the speed, there was no time for second thoughts, and I liked the lively atmosphere of The Economist art department, the days there were always stimulating.”

“Brad Montague is an illustrator, speaker, picture book author, video creator, and all-around maker. He’s a self-proclaimed dreamer and doer. Above all, he’s a storyteller.” He’s also a genius who co-wrote a children's book and created an event to normalize failure. “Failure is such a part of any creative endeavor or any human endeavor. And to normalize it as it’s not your identity, it is an experience, seems to be a rare thing.” Sadly it is and I’m glad to see other people working in different ways to do this. The topic was the broad theme for the second season of the Sprints + Milestones podcast. It’s amazing what we can learn from diving into how mistakes form, how to get through them and process what happened in the end.

Reading Brad’s Great Discontent interview also reminded me how liberating it can be to position yourself to chase ideas and the magic that comes out of those moments. I’m also reminded and further inspired by Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio who moved away from Austin, Texas to Bloomington, Indiana so they could afford to continue pursuing their own business ventures, UnderConsideration and BrandNew.

White House Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford recently retired after serving five different presidents over 30 years. NPR’s Ari Shapiro recently interviewed Comeford. I loved her perspective on where American cuisine fits within the global scene. Her tenured view is that our cuisine, full of foods from cultures all over the world, is “like American jazz”—dishes made with an emphasis on improvisation over authenticity. Listen and read the full interview or watch the short. I hope she shares more of her experience and perspective in the future.

I hope you all are keeping up with this season of Formula 1. I don’t typically say that because the last ten years have been dominated by three-team dynasties with very little competitive effort. 2024 however is very different including personnel shakeups that include the premiere F1 car design savant Adrian Neweym leaving Redbull—the absolute, giant, dominating team he co-created—for competitor Aston Martin.

Meanwhile, the design engineers at Lego built a drivable McLaren P1, and had F1 driver Lando Norris drive it around the track at Silverstone. This is all Lego, not just some plastic pieces on an existing frame but the entire car made up of “342,817 LEGO Technic elements and an electric motor.”

Earlier this week I wrote about my waning enthusiasm for new Apple technology. As for the automotive industry—Ford in particular—I have a very different and exceedingly hostile point of view. Two items came across the Opinion desk this week that are nothing short of stupid. Maybe worse.

First is the “Ultrawide Dashboard” which is a very long screen that stretches the entire width of the vehicle’s interior. If that's not enough, it has a second screen in the middle of the dash. Now, keep that image in mind when I share the second item: Ford has applied for a patent to monitor passenger conversations and trip data to serve real-time advertising. “By monitoring dialogue between vehicle occupants the ad controller system can determine when to deliver audio versus visual ads, providing ads to drivers as they travel ‘through a human-machine interface (HMI) of the vehicle [read: the Ultrawide Dashboard]. Such systems and methods provide maximum opportunity for ad-based monetization.’”

That’s worked so well for other industries this should be a slam dunk for Ford right? The Enshitification of Everything aka The Genesis of Idiocracy has begun.

Published in Tacoma, Washington while bouncing around to Yoyaku instore session with Tomoki Tamura