The galling thing about not updating this site for a whole month is that our stats actually went up. A few bits of house-keeping. things 17-18 is still available to buy, along with a selection of back issues. Apologies to those subscribers who haven't received their issues yet, but we've just about caught up with the online orders.

things 19 is still a twinkle in our eyes, but any suggestions and submissions are, of course, most welcome. The links below will invariably be stuff that everyone has 'seen before', but which we clipped for re-visiting during the month. Hindsight is a rare and precious commodity online.

You can't exactly send your prose before the cliche-finder general, but you can ask it nicely to suggest cliches that slot right into your business proposal / essay / letter home. After all, at the end of the day, good things come in little packages. And to those who wait.

Some insider views of the favelas, Rio, snapped by the children who call this landscape home / to opposite extremes: rent out Frank's place / background trivia about The Shining. Trivia on Eyes Wide Shut / the Stalker Manifesto / Green Cine Daily, a cinema weblog.

Typographica has moved. Actually, not so much moved, but evicted by the authorities as it didn't conform to something called the 'Canadian Presence Requirement'. There's a new typographi.ca on the old domain - as lame as you'd expect. An extraordinary decision.

Le Vie Parisienne seems to epitomise all that slightly saucy inter-war elegance / contemporary lighting design at gnr8 / the Marvel Swimsuit specials, yet another corner of American culture we are entirely unfamiliar with / a short history of Sunday.

The history of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC). See also Docklands Transport 1980 vs Docklands Transport 2000, part of Starting from Scratch, a website tracking the development of transport in the Docklands area.

Protoformers, little robots cunningly disguised as folded-up bits of paper (via Gizmodo). More robots, Sega's 'Near Me' is a sort of 'replicat', a fluffy companion for the allergy sufferer or truly absent-minded. The video doesn't demonstrate any ability to walk (a bit like a squitten, just one of many fascinating terms at the Messybeast Cat Resource Archive). It also reminds us of the mechanical cat in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Oh wait, there's a website devoted to it. We also like Animal Makers, who can supply any kind of mechanical fauna. We should only start worrying when this lot get in league with Sega. Check out their sheep (.mov file).

Enjoy endless hours of fun with the advanced anagram generator / home-made three-wheeler projects (Mmm. This one looks touched by the hand of Photoshop) / bottle collecting / classic monster models / space station concepts (both via who else but The Cartoonist) / vintage transport ads / the Mercedes C111 / car weblogs (mostly angry): autoguy, cars cars cars, motoblog, the view through the windshield, ride, and our favourite, autoblog.

Very British imagery, to be perused with a stiff upper lip (and compared, perhaps, with these ripping titles noted by the ever observant Roddy Lumsden / Disney hall plot thickens: the story of Larden Hall - was it shipped over to Disneyland? Probably not, but apparently bits of timber made it over the Atlantic. The fate of Larden Hall is nothing compared to the architectural rag-bag that is San Simeon (where bits of European heritage keep turning up, like the Chapter House of the Abbey of Santa Maria de Ovila. Amazingly, once this has been reassembled, it 'will be the oldest freestanding building west of New York').

Avni Patel, one of the contributors to things 17-18, has her own site. Worth a visit / seen everywhere: I found a camera in the woods. Continuing modern society's obsession with trees and forests as a harbringer of evil? (see The Blair Witch, Evil Dead, etc., etc.)

Building society: the world of the icon, an article at Spiked on the pros and cons of iconic architecture / The Vortex, the much-vaunted (but site-less) first design by Ken Shuttleworth's new firm MAKE Architects. Compare and contrast: Kobe Port Tower, Nikken Sekkei's 1963 design for a tower at Kobe Harbour, Japan / the architecture of Olivetti.

Team galleries aren't usually as fun as this / Collection de Billets de Loteries et de Tickets d'alimentation Seconde Guerre Mondiale (via Coudal) / Ilovebees, an 'augemented reality' game set up to promote forthcoming XBox game Halo2 (via Test).

An excellent article: The Tricks of the Trade (augmented here) / Design Observer points to a selection of art, design and culture reading. posted by things at 12:45

We're taking August off. As you can see, we are now the proud parents of things 17-18, our biggest ever issue. Click on the link to order your copy, which comes with a free poetry CD and our endless gratitude.

We'll be back in September with more links and - hopefully - new articles, stories and reviews as we start to think hard about things 19.

Have a lovely month.

The editors posted by things at 12:31