This is a fun digital versionof the classic design book, A Dictionary of Color Combinations. If you're a designer then you might also want to grab these Figma/Sketch files with the color combos, too: https://hexpot.com/blog/sanzo-wada-color-combinations
A donation of scans from the brilliant instagram account Transit Tickets (go follow!). Tony found these in Tokyo, dug out of piles of paper and added to his collection. They were issued in the early 1980s, Showa Era 56/57. These were used to get entry into a train station.
Vintage Japanese train tickets!
Sortition social is a community RSS feed reader. Every day, a random feed is selected from our database and added to the timeline. After seven days, the feed falls off the end of the timeline and is replaced by a new one at the top. The timeline always shows the latest entries from the feeds it features.
Spend January 2026 on the Fediverse:
- Create an account (on our Mastodon server, or another one near you).
- Learn and explore.
- Then, bring your friends.
We can grow something better!
Over 70 bands and musicians spend the fall recording these demos, released exclusively as part of DEMO FEST on the winter solstice (December 21st) as a benefit for Solidarity Across Borders.
Punk music demos, yay!
It's almost nomination time for the Hugo Awards! As someone invested in recommendations as a type of critique/conversation, I'm thriving.
Good set of recs! I need to go through these more thoroughly later...
On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The literary highlights range from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage and the first four Nancy Drew novels. From cartoons and comic strips, the characters Betty Boop, Pluto (originally named Rover), and Blondie and Dagwood made their first appearances. Films from the year featured Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers, and John Wayne in his first leading role. Among the public domain compositions are I Got Rhythm, Georgia on My Mind, and Dream a Little Dream of Me. We are also celebrating paintings from Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.
Yay, public domain day! Also noted is another Lord Peter Wimsey book going PD this year.
Some fab projects completed AND a great list of videos about crafting history/feminism/activism to watch at the end.
omg these cookies are amazing! I love the ones that look like Greek pottery shards, and the medieval tile ones!
via @colossal@mastodon.art
Companion video from cookie creator: https://youtu.be/XDmaO-Ptvss?si=nUkfAzt7uX_EJMNk
Drop letters into place to spell the headline and reveal the story. Every day is a new installment and every week is a new story arc.
via @radiantfracture.dw
You can collaborate in creating the largest public orchard in the world. Participate in this collective artwork by planting a fruit tree in front of your home, business, school or community centre. Take care of the tree and share it with everyone by mapping it on endlessorchard.com. The Endless Orchard collectively creates the world’s largest public artwork – a noncontiguous public fruit orchard planted, mapped, shared and cared for by everyone who participates.
Very cool!
Falling Fruit is a massive, collaborative map of the urban harvest. By uniting the efforts of foragers, freegans, and foresters everywhere, the map already points to over a half million food sources around the world (from plants and fungi to water wells and dumpsters). Our rapidly growing user community is actively exploring, editing, and adding to the map.
Whaaat this is so cool!
20,000 words. 100-ish pages. Everything I knew about taking a bunch of disorganised stuff and turning it in to a Johnny.Decimal system. Lovingly edited and laid out by Lucy. We were really happy with it. We still are. It stood the test of time.
“I felt like Jason and the mods cared more about Claude than the welcoming community they built. Considering Jason is the owner of the server, I wouldn't trust him to be able to put the community first before putting AI first,” ML told 404 Media.
(Need free account to read full article or else here: https://archive.is/Ypur6)
There is a tedious point that advocates of AI art will periodically articulate to the effect of AI rendering art accessible to more people—ones lacking in time or ability to otherwise produce it. The response to this is generally that the time and labor involved is fundamental to art. But even more fundamental is the thought involved. At the end of the day what defines art is the existence of intention behind it—the fact that some consciousness experienced thoughts that it subsequently tried to communicate. Without that there’s simply lines on paper, splotches of color, and noise. At the risk of tautology, meaning exists because people mean things. Nobody else is going to do that work for us. If we don’t do it, really, what’s the fucking point?
INTERTAPES is an updating collection of found cassette tapes from different locations. The audio fragments include: voice memos, field recordings, mixtapes, bootlegs and more.
Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!
Very cool!
Tracking the use of generative AI by fascists and adjacent forces - CONTENT WARNING: distressing imagery in many flavours: violent, offensive, racist, supremacist, etc