Retro Recomendo: Followable

Recomendo - issue #508

Our subscriber base has grown so much since we first started nine years ago, that most of you have missed all our earliest recommendations. The best of these are still valid and useful, so we’re trying out something new — Retro Recomendo. Once every 6 weeks, we’ll send out a throwback issue of evergreen recommendations focused on one theme from the past 9 years.

Home DIY videos

How To Home is a YouTube channel with excellent videos that demonstrate how to complete common household repairs, such as wiring switches, fixing faucet leaks, and threading wire through walls and ceilings. Unlike many DIY videos, these feature high-quality audio, are well-lit, and aren’t blurry. — MF

Culinary curiosities from around the world

Gastro Obscura is an Instagram account with photos and descriptions of unusual foods from around the world. You’ll find Japanese cream puffs that look like kittens, fruit that looks like an exploding planet, fruit that tastes like chocolate pudding, and lots more. It gave me a greater appreciation for just how diverse the world’s culinary options can be. — MF

Laugh out loud caricatures

Watch these sidewalk artists in Waikiki draw extreme caricatures of customers, and their customers’ hysterical reactions. The drawings are much more exaggerated than typical caricatures, yet they look uncannily like the subjects. I was laughing along with the people who bravely sat for the drawings. A guaranteed mood lifter. — MF

Quick research explainers

Two Minute Papers is a YouTube channel featuring short videos (sometimes 5 minutes long) created by a professor who reviews new research papers in visual programming, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer graphics, simulations, and other state-of-the-art computer science. He explains the research’s significance, while running very cool graphics demo-ing the results. I find it a painless way to keep up in this fast-moving field. — KK

Strange images

The Instagram account Welcome.jpeg calls itself a digital museum. It’s kinda art, kinda meme, kinda kitsch, kinda weirdo. It collects oddball, strange, unorthodox, found images and delivers these misfits as little visual collections. It’s my guilty pleasure. — KK

Joyful social media

I’ve intentionally cut down on my social media time, but there’s one account I never scroll past because it always makes me smile: Official Stick Reviews on Instagram. It’s the internet’s go-to spot for stick reviews submitted from around the world. Initially, I thought it was satire, but I soon realized the enthusiasm for finding cool sticks is both genuine and contagious. Here’s a good example. — CD

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Recomendo is an authentic, hand-crafted, human-written weekly newsletter that is free, but not cheap. Consider supporting our work with a paid option, now at the low price of $45 per year. Paid subs enable us to keep making it free for others. 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 Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper and Book Freak.