50 Watts is still going strong after almost 20 years. It describes itself accurately as "a growing archive of weird and wonderful visual ephemera from around the world."
The other day I got an email from Tyler Ibrahim, one of the creators of Pools, a new app for "personal and intentional sharing – social but not social media." It's available for iPhone and Android.
I gave it a look and it appears to be an interesting take on many of the functions social media offers but absent many of the functions that make social media awful. For instance, there's no followers or following. There's likes and hearts, but only the person who posted the thing you're liking or hearting can see your reactions, thus eliminating the performance aspect of social media. If you comment on something, you can make it so only certain people can see the comment, or only the person who created the post, and your comment cannot be viewed by people you're not already connected to.
Since there's no following/followers, there's also no way to search for users. That means no one can find you on Pools. The only people you're connected to are those you send an invite to — or those who you accept an invite link from.
There's also no algorithm. You see things when you choose to in the order they're posted.
The app is new so things may change, but they seem dedicated to the anti-social media stance they're launching with.
I'm not an app developer, but I had a similar idea years ago when I launched Volver. I was looking for an app that would allow one-to-group posting and I was mostly thinking of businesses who want to reveal things to their customers and have a way for customers to respond, but not a way for customers to connect to one another. I don't believe Pools has this function, but perhaps it's something they'll consider in the future.
PoetiCal is a publication that can only be viewed through a Calendar app like Apple Calendar or Google Calendar. You subscribe to the publication the same way you would add any new calendar to your calendar app. For instance, you can open your Apple Calendar app, click File > Add New Calendar Subscription, and paste this URL into the box: https://poetical.day/cal.
Then, each day that an entry is set for publication, it'll appear in your calendar, right next to your work meetings, or reminders to drop your dog at the salon.
23 year old Emma Jones absolutely stuns with this cover of the Bee Gees' To Love Somebody:
If you're unfamiliar with the song, here's the original:
One of my favorite Bee Gees covers is Low's take on I Started A Joke:
The Original:
I was once somewhat obsessed with Orange Grove Tool Sheds and Utility Boxes of Oliva, Spain. I photographed thousands over the course of just a few months.
Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter of Basic Instinct, Flashdance, Betrayed, Music Box, and many others, once said that all his screenplays discuss the same thing. If you've seen these films, you'll know that they're quite different from one another, so it's a rather curious comment. Then he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "But I wasn't aware of it. It was someone else who pointed it out to me, the theme that I return to over and over again: Can you really know the one you love?" Indeed, that is what all those films are about.
I once heard author and Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano say that he writes the same book over and over again and that he likes to think of himself as a photographer with one subject. Before exploring them again, he just moves the camera to see them from another angle.
I like when artists do this. When they repeat themselves without being repetitive. It seems to me that this is what Seth Armstrong is doing with his urban landscapes:
Wonderful stuff. More on Armstrong's site.
That's three from Laurie Lipton. See the complete series: Day of the Dead.
There's also this, should you want more:
First person footage from the winner of the 2025 Red Bull Cerro Abajo Valparaiso race. This video is short at just 2 mins and 40 seconds, but incredibly intense. I've gotten my bike up to almost 60KPH and have never seen faces blur like this.
Here's the run from a third person perspective. Not as exciting but still worth a watch:
Dude is pushing 40. Incredible.
I don't usually post stuff this old, but this video is simply delightful from start to finish.
There's an airport in St. Maarten (SXM) that's famous for how close it is to the beach. Josef Hoflehner's got some spectacular shots of the planes coming and going.
You can view the whole series on Hoflehner's site.
For those of you who think these may be faked, or collages, here's an extraordinary vid of one landing (posted 9 years ago, so pre-mainstream-AI):
On Youtube you can also find vids of tourists intentionally standing behind the planes in order to be propelled by their exhausts during takeoff.
