I Would Like Everyone To Applaud My Restraint

The most popular link last time was Sarabet Chang Yuye's steps for "stupid cleaning", with the Sub/Title game second.

1. When did "this is great marketing" become a universal compliment?
2. I would like everyone to applaud my restraint at including only one Taylor Swift link today. It's also partially about Dostoyevsky.
3. On the peculiarities and techniques of Japanese web design.

4. From When Harry Met Sally to Too Much, an ode to the screen trope of women looking at women on their phones.
5. A scattergun list of unwarranted advice. Some of it is quite good, such as Jia Tolentino's maxim to "always give 70 per cent".
6. As someone who read and moderated thousands of hateful comments in the 2010s, I'm glad to see that we've seemingly found a way to outsource this successfully to the robots.
7. I've seen a lot of Penelope Fitzgerald appreciations in the US media recently, I think because it's the 25th anniversary of her death this year. Apparently she is having a moment over there? I recommend her novel Offshore, by the way, which was a very important book to me while I was writing The Way to the Sea.

8. This is an entire YouTube channel dedicated to instructional videos for all manner of letter-locking techniques (this being how you securely enclosed your missive prior to the adoption of the envelope). The one above is a Jane Austen special.
9. In an era of constant surveillance, the case for becoming unoptimisable.
10. I have no particular opinion of R.F. Kuang (other than the fact that the footnote indicators in my edition of Babel were too bloody small) but this is an interesting critique of her media persona and a strong argument, I feel, for public earnestness.
11. Behold, The Fancy Rug Dilemma.
12. An account of walking from the southern Japanese city of Yamaguchi to Tokyo (by a Japanese person, not Craig Mod).
13. A good warning sign that puts a stick figure in peril never fails to lift the spirits.