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I have chosen to live this way, to live near the sea without running water, to surround myself with simple beauty. My days have been emptied of all fanfare and complication.

Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, Joseph Monninger meditates on life, death, and beauty from his small seaside cottage for Down East.

Great site for the celiac in your life: Jodi Ettenberg's Gluten-Free Cards for international travel. Heading to Japan, Vietnam, Poland, Latin America... ? For $10 you can get a country-specific guide to eating gluten-free on your travels.

Here's Joan Westenberg on the onslaught of Tech where it's not needed:

I would have happily paid double for the experience of simply flipping through a menu and talking to another human being. ...

I can tell you right now that anyone working in a decent venue would rather have a line of people ordering at the counter than be juggling iPads and QR codes while barely interacting with human beings.

I won't say there's a ton in the article that I haven't thought myself, but mentioning the worker side of it is a nice touch. As a lifelong retail worker I can't help but agree with the points being made.

I'm somewhat privileged because I'm a hermit and couldn't give a damn about visiting the latest trendy places. I simply refuse to participate. "Oh, I can only order using Instagram? Thanks, but I'll eat elsewhere." Truly, there is not a meal on the planet that I'd download an app to eat.

Hell, a couple months ago I walked into what I thought was a CIBC (one of the largest banks in Canada), only to be told, "Oh no, you can't pay your credit card balance here. This is a cashless bank." What the actual fuck is the point of such a thing?!

Read the full article on Westenberg.

My dislike of Facebook and Instagram is probably obviously. I haven’t been on either service in years, but someone on Metafilter shared this one-page site created by Jon Oliver’s team and I thought it was worth sharing: How to Make Yourself Less Valuable to Meta, which tells you the steps you should take to best protect your data when using those services.

Ugh, this is depressing. BBC Eye Investigations found an "Indian pharmaceutical company is manufacturing unlicensed, highly addictive opioids and exporting them illegally to West Africa where they are driving a major public health crisis in countries including Ghana, Nigeria, and Cote D'Ivoire."

Full article: BBC Undercover Filming Exposes Indian Pharma Firm Fuelling Opioid Crisis contains footage of the exec talking about his ideal target market of teenagers, saying that it's very unhealthy for them but they just want to get high and this is the way business is done today.

The first four pictures are from DiDonato's Home series. The last two are from the Elsewhere series.

Everything visible at BookeDiDonato.com.

Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris has been made into two films, one by Andrai Tarkovsky and the other by Stephen Soderbergh. Honestly, I cannot stand either one (though the Cliff Martinez score for the Soderbergh film is delightful).

The novel has been published in numerous languages in dozes of editions. The Hype & Hyper site has cataloged a ton of them. Wonderful to see how one title can inspire so many different interpretations.

‘A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings for Cinema’ is an exhibition showing at Milan’s Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio from January 30th to September 8, 2025.

ArtNet’s got a great article on the exhibit: From ‘Raging Bull’ to ‘Un Chien Andalou’—A New Show Traces Cinema’s Greatest Storyboards.

Via Metafilter

Ana Cuba takes great pictures.

More on Cuba's site.

Mikkel Eye is an Architectural Designer who posts pictures of trees to his site, Meye.dk.

Mikkel explains: "All the trees are available as high quality PNG’s with transparent background. The trees are free to use for anyone who wants to add plantings to their visualizations, sections, and diagrams within the fields of landscape architecture, architecture, or urban planning. However, your project should be in focus. The trees of Meye are not to be used as free standing pictures or for advertisements."

You can filter by Species and Season. Niche-y, but for those in need: great resource well done.