Welcome to 5 Quick Things that I saw since last month that I thought were interesting enough to share with you. None of them are particularly timely so feel free to just enjoy 🙂

>Number One<

The State of Work

I wanted to spend the end of the year shouting out the most random small YouTube videos I found and this one from Page Melt brings together a lot of thoughts I’ve been having about work for the past two years as the economy takes a nosedive, inflation grows, and companies try to stave off people by using “AI” for things that it is not explicitly meant to do. The truth is that I don’t think the state of work, even in Europe is in a good place and there seem to me, less and less meaningful reasons to abuse people through work. Anyway this also talks about Office Space and I feel like we don’t talk about how Office Space was only 2 decades ago and already work is not like that and more like Severance. It does not make me optimistic about work in 2 more decades.

>Number Two<

The Holidays Remind Me Hobby Lobby Exists

Rosencreutz comes at history usually through a lens of video games. However, in this video he simply lays out how Hobby Lobby, the company that doesn’t have barcodes in their stores because of the devil or something, stole over 1,000 artifact from Iraq. You probably saw this as a passing news story and the actual in depth level of what happened is so dramatic and horrifying that it’s worth a watch.

>Number Three<

Brain Rot and Literacy

I think this was a year where both “media literacy” and “brain rot” were good contenders for (if not literally) word of the year then concepts that we as a society really focused in on. Dummy takes a different lens of media literacy that doesn’t focus on the angle of it from a literary standpoint but from a standpoint wherein news and information are the type of media that we’re losing the war of literacy on. Some reports seem to show we’re losing the war on basic literacy as well but I guess we have to focus on one crisis at a time today.

>Number Four<

Praise Be Productivity Culture

I had to attend a bunch of business lectures at one point in my life and I’m glad to see that Urgently Firing is pointing out something that I thought might be the case but then never looked into. There’s plenty of religious based or religious directed things that make the main stream that I feel similarly ick about including love languages, MBTI, Dave Ramsey, etc. but to see the line drawn so clearly between these courses and their origins. It’s wild that probably a lot of these are courses that government and private institutions have spent millions enriching.

>Number Five<

Towards A Definition of Urban Planning

I’m one of those sickos who reads urban planning papers about trying to improve the traffic in Jakarta so of course I liked Radical Planning‘s video about searching for a more cohesive definition of urban planning than the abstract nonsense you have in your head or worse, the one you might have read from an extremely conservative white man on your journey to find out what “third places” were.

That’s all for this month and hopefully I’ll see you back again next month with some more exciting and cool things!