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five friday finds: museum fakes, dating games, digital switching

Outside of the weather, what brings seasonality to your life?

,   and  Gautam Ramdurai
2 min read

Big week! Today was the first day of primary school for the kiddo. The whole week has been jammed with prep, hype, mild jitters (mostly the parents), specific questions (“will there be show & tell?”).

One of the topics in my long “I think about this way too much” list is the lack of seasons in Singapore - I’ve mentioned it many times in the past in this very newsletter. I am actually excited about primary school becoming a part our life equation. Pre-schools run year-round, primary schools don’t. Maybe this is a mundane point, but I’m really looking forward to the seasonality the school breaks will bring into our lives.

As for this week’s art - fam, I have to give you some art substitute. Time slipped away with big chunks of strategy delivered for 3 businesses the same week. So I give you an oldie. This was when I was playing with brush pens - it’s supposed to be an old temple damaged by an earthquake.

Technicians inspect an earthquake-damaged temple. Ink & Brush Pen.

Here are your finds for the week:

  1. MUSEUM LOOT Many museums are wrestling with returning looted or unethically obtained ancient objects. An archaeologist considers how a shift in public attitudes toward plaster and 3D copies could make a difference.
  2. DATING GAMES As a person who has been in a super-long-term-relationship, I shudder to even think about how daunting dating can be today. From freeloading ‘foodie calls’ to TikTok content farmers, dating today has become a kind of Olympic sport – with increasingly intense new rules and tactics
  3. KILLJOY This piece about the Spotify trap rang so true. What we’ve gained in convenience, we’ve lost in curiosity. Sure, our unlimited access lets us listen to Swedish tropical house or New Jersey hardcore, but this abundance of choice actually makes our listening experience less expansive or eclectic.
  4. WE ARE NOT READY The default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.
  5. DIGITAL SWITCHING A new study from the University of Toronto Scarborough reveals that people’s quest to dodge boredom by “digital switching” — jumping from one video to the next or fast-forwarding through content — actually makes their boredom worse.

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