Dear reader,
The internet is good at being big and small. Unfortunately, we often forget the latter and focus only on things that reach millions.
Tiny Awards is our little antidote to the internet’s scale and speed obsession. It is a celebration of the small, poetic, and creative web, and the other week we announced this year’s winner: fiftythousandnames.org.
Tiny is not negligible. It is like walking hand in hand with your son, taking small steps, picking up sticks, pennies, and flowers, and being asked if kids can die.
Yes, I answered. If they get sick or get in an accident, but I left out mentioning what is happening across the Mediterranean Sea. There is only one word for that, and I was not ready to explain it to my five-year-old son.
With care,
Kristoffer
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧
Shen: Consumed.Today
Shen is a maker and playfellow living in Toronto.
What is Consumed.today?
consumed.today is a site documenting everything i consume (and what consumes me!!). bits of the feed have been tucked away into the archive, and the format has morphed a little over time, but the process has always been deliberately manual. i’ve been serving up daily digests in (somewhat slow-cooked) html batches for over a year now.
Why did you start it?
i started it in 2022 after finishing high school and learning How To Be An Adult in a big new city. i’ve always had weird consumption habits, but for the first time, i had full reign over how i carried them out. naturally, i used this power to mainly eat baby carrots, pretzels, spinach, questionable takes on fried rice, and hershey’s kisses.. while consuming more media than i ever had.
this project was a response to this erratic era, and has since grown into an experiment in archival and self-surveillance. putting it out on the internet (with the vague idea of that it might be perceived) sometimes makes me more aware of what i take in, and at other times, makes it all feel like a silly study in self-anthropology. in any case, it’s been fun to look back every now and then to see how it has served me..
Who or what inspired you?
people often say you are what you eat. i still don’t know who i am or what that would even mean.. but i do know that my diet of foods and feeds has shaped how i experience the world, just as my experience of the world shapes what i reach for next.
in that sense, i am (and this site is) a smorgasbord of so many friends, strangers, meals, and media.. each of which has fed me in ways in i can’t quite begin to map, but that have incrementally changed the very shape of my person. and i think that’s pretty neat!!
WITH LOTS OF LOVE AND A BILLION APOLOGIES..
—shen, creator of consumed.today.
𓆉
Field notes
1.
Putting some soul into tech. It’s Nice That wrote a sweet article about the Tiny Awards nominees. It’s nice that there is a focus back on the web outside of esoteric newsletters like this.
2.
Introducing Areal. Did I want to read about a new font? I thought no. But I loved getting to learn more about Arial through this conversation between Johannes Breyer, Charles Broskoski, and Meg Miller.
3.
Internet Phone Book. We sold 80% of the books. Thank you :)
4.
Call for Participation: Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the Digital (Sep 30), Forms of digital publication (Oct 10), and Lullaby Machine (Oct 15).
5.
Poetic Web Calendar: TechnoMirage (Sep 21, NYC), Breaking the Gloom (Sep 27, London), Start Up - Sounds (Oct 2, London), Wikigame Jame (Oct 3-5, NYC), Extending Poetry through Computation (Oct 10, Online), Triple Canopy Symposium (Oct 10-11, NYC), Peckham Digital (Oct 16-19, London), New Platforms (Oct 18, Sthlm), New Ways of Seeing (Oct 24-25, Paris), and (De)Growing Infrastructures (Nov 27, AMS).
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
Wayside flowers
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