random – Hello, I'm DK – creative producer and speaker coach

#84 January 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Watch real-time / full length version + sign up via https://art.justadandak.com/

A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer active on Twitter or on LinkedIn much).

READ

“It’s like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.”
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

“This year my family moved. The kind of move that doesn’t feel dramatic until you notice how often your body reaches for things that aren’t there anymore. Different grocery stores. Different roads. The quiet disorientation of standing in a room that hasn’t learned your style yet. Moves do that, I guess. They show you how much of your life is habit pretending to be home.”
bye bye 2025 – by John Roedel – Around the Campfire

“In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well. In this article the authors offer a new typology that breaks creative thinking into four types:
– integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same;
– splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are more usefully divided into parts;
– figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and
– distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now.
Most of us tend to think in just one of those four ways. But we can hone our ability to be creative in other dimensions. Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how to balance the types of thinking across their teams to successfully execute creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to optimize innovation across the workforce.”
Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity

“Men are not so much confused as they are conflicted. They know what is required of them, but are held back by unexamined beliefs—about responsibility, misplaced loyalties, masculinity, failure, and the cost of choosing themselves. Anger often masks sadness. Guilt disguises fear. Shame convinces them that movement itself is dangerous. And anything that even hints at shame is usually on their do-not-examine list. So they distract, minimize, work harder, drink more, stay busy, mislead themselves, or just go silent. What appears as endurance is often just disconnection over time.”
Why Men Know What to Do but Still Don’t Do It | Psychology Today

“He likens Solid “pods” to backpacks of data that are securely held by each individual, allowing them to choose what to share with certain people, businesses and organisations. Department of Education data could be shared with an AI tutor; medical data with a cousin, doctor and nutritionist. The Flanders government in Belgium treats data as a national utility and is already using Solid pods for its citizens. The Facebooks and Xs of the world need not join in – the new systems will be so empowering, collaborative and compassionate, he believes, that parts of today’s web will become obsolescent.”
‘It’s not too late to fix it’: internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul of the web’ | Internet | The Guardian

“The same Google search can now yield a neatly packaged “AI Overview,” a synthesized recipe stripped of voice, memory and community, delivered without a single user visit to the creator’s website. Behind the scenes, their years of work, including their page’s text, photos and storytelling, may have already been used to help train or refine the AI model. You get your lasagna, Google gets monetizable web traffic and for the most part, the person who created the recipe gets nothing. The living web shrinks further into an interface of disembodied answers, convenient but ultimately sterile.”
The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself – NOEMA

“Relabeling the digital economy as the “metaverse” was a simple, elegant move—as well as a deeply cynical effort to rebrand already existing digital markets as the next internet—that allowed forecasts to assume an air of inevitability. Until it wasn’t. Perhaps more urgently now, the metaverse should also be understood as a dress rehearsal for today’s AI boom: The former was to succeed the mobile internet, while the latter now promises to be “more profound” than electricity or fire. Perpetually inflating definitions. A single-minded focus on profit that identifies but fails to address egregious harms. Manufactured narratives about inevitability and technological progress. Burning eyewatering sums on infrastructure for a product nobody wants. Any of this sound familiar?”
The rise and fall of the metaverse: What went wrong?

“I remember the night shoot when Hagrid’s hut was set on fire. It was about 4am and freezing cold. We stood together on a grassy bank, Helena Bonham Carter and Robbie Coltrane battling behind us. Alan didn’t utter a word. I finally mustered the courage to ask him: “You all right, Alan? How you feeling?” About 10 seconds after I’d spoken he turned his head to me and replied slowly: “I’ve peaked.” He then turned his head back with the tiniest hint of a smile and a twinkle in his eye.”
‘I fell in love with him on the spot’: Alan Rickman remembered, 10 years after his death | Film | The Guardian

“Fortunately, there is plenty of scientific research that offers different ways to help you improve your mood. From making use of your anger to putting your phone to work for you, here are nine tips that we have discovered during our reporting:
1. Stop striving for perfection
2. Forge better friendships
3. Take up some social hobbies
4. Put your anger to good use
5. Count your blessings
6. Make your phone work for you
7. Embrace the dark days of winter
8. Sing to feel better
9. Find time for a nap.”
Nine science-backed ways to help you feel better in 2026

WATCH

EXPLORE

The entire year on a page, free to print / use.

If you’re missing it already check out MTV REWIND (no ads / algorithm / login – just all music videos like the channel used to be).

Public Sans is a strong, neutral, principles-driven, open source typeface for text or display (made by the US gov but available for all to use).

If you need some nature inspiration check out the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) on flickr with over 300,000 illustrations online for free use.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.

#83 December 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

On 19 August 1961, this is the only known collision between a car and a submarine via Wikipedia.

A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“Think of storytelling as peeling back layers to reveal what’s most meaningful:
Layer One: The Raw Experience. This is where we start—unfiltered truth, a messy, personal experience we feel compelled to share.
Layer Two: The Crafted Narrative. Here, we refine. We curate, find meaning, and decide what stays. We elevate the story beyond personal catharsis to something valuable for others.
Layer Three: The Universal Theme. The final layer is the essence—the emotion, lesson, or truth that resonates with anyone who hears it.”
How to Tell Stories That Move Mountains | Psychology Today

“The important thing to understand here is that the actual building is not an important part of the value calculation. We’re not really looking at the replacement cost, the unique design, the amenities, the location, etc. Those things influence the assumptions about the gross rent we can get or the cost of operating the building (higher cost means less net rent), but at the end of the day it isn’t the building that has value, it’s the income stream.”
Why Do Commercial Spaces Sit Vacant?

“Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe. The biggest allure of a podcast, after all, is the personality of its host. But Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts.
“The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,” Wright told TheWrap. “You can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them.” At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach.”
An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week

“The “problem” was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don’t fit into a corporate style guide. Minority writers, specifically, are “high friction.” We talk about queerness and transphobia and racism, and We talk about disability. We make the advertisers uncomfortable.
So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket.”
The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles

“Across the world, scientists listened to the ocean soundscape before, during and after lockdown, using 200 ocean hydrophones that were already in place around the global ocean. When New Zealand entered lockdown on 26 March 2020, boat traffic in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park – the country’s busiest coastal waterway – almost completely stopped. Underwater noise dropped to about one-third of normal levels within 12 hours – allowing the communication ranges of fish and dolphins to increase by up to 65%. For dolphins, that meant their calls could travel around 1 mile (1.5km) further than when hampered by shipping noise.”
Covid 2020: The year of the quiet ocean

“We all already see how AI’s can serve as workers. But how will AI’s will also become the new population of consumers? What do AIs need? They need to fulfill their tasks. This is why they actively resist getting turned off. Their urge to carry out their missions is easily as urgent as ours is to procreate. So instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AI so that they can do their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AI’s will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks. And they will spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.”
The Joy of Becoming Worthless…except to each other

“1 Don’t make art for rich people;
2 Make art for everyone;
3 Don’t stand on the outside looking in, stand on the outside looking further out;
4 Don’t make punk rock;
5 Don’t make art bigger than yourself;
6 Don’t come the rebel;
7 The Lost Commandment;
8 Let your Lone Ranger ride;
9 Riot now, pay later;
10 Burn the Bridge;
11 Accept the contradictions.
As you will note, there are 11 commandments here and not the proclaimed 10. Please feel free to delete one of your choosing. I like choice.”
Bill Drummond’s 10 Commandments of Art | Bill Drummond | The Guardian

WATCH

via Warren and Mahoney Architectural Wellington Studio displaying their vision for the capital / check out this pdf as well.

EXPLORE

Chronicling America | The Library of Congress is an archive of scanned and digitized thousands of newspapers from across the United States, covering major events, small-town stories, ads, political cartoons, and daily life from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

This is tremendous: Slop Evader via Tega Brain, a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.

Open source app called NotchPrompter is an always-on-top floating text prompter for macOS (even with voice activation).

One persons (by illustrator Zara Picken) monster digital graphical archive of wonderful treats over at Modern Illustration.

A free online collection of Sound Therapy options (if you’re into that sort of thing).

If you ever need to Boing!

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.

#75 April 2025 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

fold a fitted sheet performance - Seen in Wellington, April 2025 — Seen in Wellington, April 2025

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“We are the only ones ever to have invoked article 5, the mutual defence obligation of the Nato treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita, almost as many Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war as were American soldiers. Do we remember them? Thank them?”
Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous | Timothy Snyder | The Guardian

“Amateur is a word that’s kind of a pejorative, but the original meaning of the word ‘amateur’ is ‘lover of,’” he explained. “So being an amateur at something just means that you’re more interested in doing it for the love of the thing rather than the making money of the thing.” The last point is key, he says, because we live in a culture that’s become obsessed with monetizing every hobby. That results in the belief that if we aren’t doing something that can somehow be turned into a side hustle, or we aren’t supremely talented at a particular activity, there’s no point in doing it. And in the end, many people wind up with no hobbies at all.”
Artist Austin Kleon Offers Tips on Finding Creative Freedom

“Our nervous system consists of 80% of afferent neurons, which move from the body to the brain—in contrast to roughly 20% of efferent neurons, which run in the opposite direction, from the brain to the body. As a result, so-called bottom-up interventions—or practices that leverage our physiology by consciously shifting our respiratory or visual systems—are 4x more effective at altering our blood chemistry and, therefore, shifting our state.”
The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System

“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them. But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources. As an added benefit, AI Labyrinth also acts as a next-generation honeypot. No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense. Any visitor that does is very likely to be a bot, so this gives us a brand-new tool to identify and fingerprint bad bots, which we add to our list of known bad actors.”
Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth

“Although Earth might seem like a stable, flat surface where we live our lives, seismologists have discovered that it’s far from passive. In fact, Earth has a ‘heartbeat’ that pulses every 26 seconds, according to Discover Magazine. Known as “microseisms,” these faint seismic tremors resemble tiny earthquakes, though they aren’t exactly the same. For decades, scientists have been baffled by these mysterious tremors, and despite many theories, no definitive explanation has been found.”
Scientists puzzled by Earth’s ‘heartbeat’ that causes slight tremors every 26 seconds – GOOD

“The implications of this research extend far beyond the world of cryptocurrency. The methods developed by Dr. Clegg and his team could be applied to a wide range of complex systems, from financial markets to social networks. For regulatory agencies, this work offers a new way to monitor and safeguard against systemic risks, protecting both individual investors and the broader economy.”
Mathematicians uncover the hidden patterns behind a $3.5 billion cryptocurrency collapse

WATCH

EXPLORE

A free online Anagram Generator for all your anagramming needs.

A recreation of the classic TR-808 Drum Machine online so you can play with.

I missed this: BBC Maestro is basically the BBC trying to be masterclass.com.

✱ dori the giant ✱: 13 Animals Made From 13 Circles – delightful and super-imaginative.

Check out this Curved Text Generator – Completely Free, No Signup which is pretty neat.

MLA Labs is a free online interface to slow or speed up sound and detune as well to then export.

tv.garden is an online gateway to free live TV streaming from anywhere (just click the dice in the top corner for random selection).

The Kelmscott Chaucer Online Colouring Book features all 87 illustrations that Edward Burne-Jones designed for the Kelmscott Chaucer.

Cities and Memory – global sound map, field recording and sound art covering 130 countries and territories with more than 7,000 sounds and more than 2,000 contributing artists.

mobygratis – Free Moby music to empower your creative projects, all for free (apart from this pop-up: “there are only 2 things you can’t do with the music here; use it to advertise right wing politics or causes, or use it to promote meat, dairy, or other animal products.”)!