Inconspicuous Consumption / Navigating by aliveness / Mini electric shaver

Recomendo - issue #524

Small obsessions

Like the podcast 99% Invisible, the newsletter/blog Inconspicuous Consumption pays obsessive attention to minor details that most people don’t even see. For instance: long essays on whether the final button holes on shirts should be vertical or horizontal, or Where Should the Apostrophe Go on a Vertically Lettered Sign?. More on ashtray designs, the colors of butter, security envelope patterns. The less significant the details are, the more attention they get. Entire worlds can be glimpsed at the end of an office stapler. The tagline for the site is Big Enthusiasm for Small Details. Few who descend down these rabbit holes return the same. — KK

Navigating by aliveness

I love the core question this piece “Navigating by aliveness” offers when wondering if you’re on the right track: “Does this feel like it’s taking me in the direction of greater aliveness?” Aliveness here means fully inhabiting an experience and shifting your attention away from what you’re feeling and toward the depth and clarity with which you’re feeling it, whether it’s painful, dull, or joyful. The author goes on to explore why this matters in an AI‑shaped future, and suggests we relate to technology a bit like the Amish do: only adopting tools if they clearly serve our deepest values, rather than assuming they’re automatically good. For me, this definition alone feels like a daily way to check my own presence, and how fully I’m actually here in my life, moment to moment. — CD

Mini electric shaver

I bought this tiny Mbzoey Electric Foil Shaver to take on trips, but it’s become my everyday razor. It’s rechargeable via USB-C and lasts at least a few weeks of daily shaving on a single charge, with an LED display that shows how much charge is left. No more shaving cream — I just run it over my face dry. I can do an early-evening touch-up before going out in under a minute. — MF

Mashup renaissance

I love this mashup of electronic music plus French medieval instrumentation, sometimes called Bardcore. A good example of bardcore is the French group Courseval doing Daft Punk’s cover song Veridis Quo. As one commenter said “Proof that we could have had Daft Peasant any time in the last 500 years.” — KK

See the rhythm of your writing

Text as Music is a simple browser tool where you paste your writing and it colors every sentence by length, so you can literally see the rhythm on the page. Micro sentences turn one color, short another, and medium and long each have their own. It’s inspired by Gary Provost’s line, “Don’t just write words. Write music.” — CD

Seth’s Riffs

My friend Seth Godin — author of Purple Cow, Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, and This Is Marketing — writes a daily email full of excellent short ideas about life and business. But it turns out he has even shorter ideas that don’t make it into the daily email, and he’s collected them on a page called Seth’s Riffs. Each one is a sentence or two. You can vote for your favorites, which sorts the best to the top. A few of mine:

• The question shouldn’t be, “does it scale?” Instead, it might be, “is it worth it?”

• Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.

• Defending mediocrity is exhausting.

• Using an existing idea to solve a new problem isn’t theft. Ideas shared are the most powerful kind.

— MF

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Recomendo is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, Cool Tools Weekly Newsletter, and Book Freak.