Category Archives: nostalgia

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike

Posted on October 22, 2019 by things magazine

A fascinating Video Game Map Size Comparison. See also VGMaps.com, the Video Game Atlas, as well as this piece at Retromash, the beauty of retro video game maps. This in turn links to an illustrated story on the hand-drawn maps … Continue reading →

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Golden Rabbits (or hares…)

Posted on April 7, 2019 by things magazine
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Warm electronics

Posted on March 6, 2019 by things magazine

Material Matters is a new podcast about objects and making by the design writer and critic Grant Gibson / Synchedelia: Beyond the Dark Side of the Rainbow, which links to the epic MovieSyncs.com and Alternative Synchs, but fails to mention … Continue reading →

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More nostalgia, carefully sequenced

Posted on March 21, 2018 by things magazine

A selection of things from around and about. ‘I looked through all 14,227 Apollo photos… and made GIFs‘ / The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa” Remixed to Sound Like It’s Playing in an Empty Mall. Seen also at MeFi … Continue reading →

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See you around

Posted on January 19, 2018 by things magazine

Locrating presents huge quantities of mapping data about commuting, schools, etc. ‘Outstanding’ schools are of green green, ‘good’ ones are yellow and woe betide your property prices if you live in close proximity to the little bomb-like red ones / … Continue reading →

Posted in cartography, nostalgia | 1 Comment

Hugged to death

Posted on November 22, 2016 by things magazine

Modern Berlin is the latest map from Blue Crow Media. The spike of interest in architecture-related travel continues unabated with Phaidon’s Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA. Modern architecture has always had this problem of being reduced to … Continue reading →

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Flailing, not drowning

Posted on January 7, 2016 by things magazine

The Food Timeline takes you on a historical journey back to the earliest recipes, and before / Taste, a ‘Design Observer Symposium on Food and Visual Culture’ / Various Small Fires has a piece on Adrian Street, a 70s-era wrestler … Continue reading →

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Down the whirlpool

Posted on August 14, 2015 by things magazine

The Downstairs Gays, a tale of double kitchens, cyber-stalking and of digging yourself deeper and deeper with Google: ‘the second hit was his website, [hisname].com, which featured a sidebar of links, including his Twitter, his Instagram, his résumé, his portfolio, … Continue reading →

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Islands in the sun

Posted on June 22, 2015 by things magazine

Nostalgia and technology, music and memory / the Aibos are dying. Back in 1999, they really did seem like the future / a post celebrating the glorious world that was SNUB-TV, coming via the world of Spamula.net, one of those … Continue reading →

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In the city

Posted on November 6, 2014 by things magazine

Cities and their functions, failings and quirks.Dan Hill on the perils and impracticalities of the predictive city, data mined into homogenity / an ultra compact Parisian apartment / London Reconnections assembles information about the capital’s transport systems, past, present and … Continue reading →

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Ooooh. Eeeep.

Posted on November 4, 2014 by things magazine

The Art of Smallfilms from Four Corners Books looks at the of Oliver Postgate (who died in 2008) and Peter Firmin (still producing beautiful prints). There’s a preview of the book at Creative Review or you can visit The Smallfilms … Continue reading →

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Looking back with everyone else

Posted on November 3, 2014 by things magazine

Old school memories today. Another volume of the great Bedroom Cassette Masters series has just been released / a huge tranche of pixel-perfect original arcade emulations is now live over at The Internet Arcade (via MeFi, from whence this instructional … Continue reading →

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“Told you so, didn’t I?” observed the Rat to the Mole.

Posted on October 8, 2014 by things magazine

A fantastically creepy whispered version of The Wind in the Willows. The book has one of our favourite endpapers: The Wind in the Willows, illustration by E.H.Shepard (as is the above image) – the definitive edition. Visit the Kenneth Grahame … Continue reading →

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Technological What-ifs and sky-high dreams

Posted on May 23, 2014 by things magazine

Many of the great British designers and inventors of the modern era have a nostalgic glint in their eye for boyhood dreams that never quite came to fruition. Norman Foster is probably the leader of this group of overgrown schoolboys: … Continue reading →

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Printed pause

Posted on March 27, 2014 by things magazine

Yet another shape for future magazines, House takes the meat of House & Garden magazine and splices it with a Pinterest-y scroll of nugget-sized article. Against the increasingly homogenised view of publishing that is emerging from this model, lovingly curated … Continue reading →

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Monuments to a ruined age

Posted on March 25, 2014 by things magazine

The Japanese island of Hashima regularly crops up in online discussions of the ruins of the industrial age. A rocky island, ‘populated from 1887 to 1974 as a coal mining facility,’ it’s featured regularly in documentaries and photographic essays, the … Continue reading →

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Pretty Things Organized Neatly

Posted on February 4, 2014 by things magazine

If we were twittering types, we’d disseminate this one far and wide: the Playmobil Furnished Shopping Mall, presented in its current catalogue as ‘a girl’s dream brought to life in the Modern Shopping Centre’. Ah, someone else has done exactly … Continue reading →

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Boldly going into the back bedroom

Posted on February 3, 2014 by things magazine

Make your own space. Following on from the space simulator built into a caravan, we trawled around to find this list of ‘five homemade flight simulators‘. Alternatively, if you have a spare £3.25m you could buy this South London mansion, … Continue reading →

Posted in architecture, nostalgia, technology | 2 Comments

Tune out the past, and just say yes

Posted on January 17, 2014 by things magazine

Coming to an office near you: ‘One recent study by academics at Oxford University suggests that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades.’ / wish we’d thought of this: Craigslist Mirrors (via, and also picked … Continue reading →

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Experimental jetsetting with no stars

Posted on January 3, 2014 by things magazine

Experimental Travel is the art of travelling in new ways, including such sub-genres as Aerotourism (‘in which a tourist visits the local airport and explores it without going anywhere’) and Erotourism (‘in which a couple travels separately to the same … Continue reading →

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