aras diler

roald dahl had a weird talent for making children's stories feel magical and slightly disturbing at the same time.

charlie and the chocolate factory, matilda, the bfg, the witches. his stories were funny, dark, cruel, imaginative, and usually very suspicious of adults.

probably why they still feel different from most children's books. image

home is the place you start missing when you’ve been away long enough. (see: reno)

the bmw i8 still feels like a car that arrived 10 or 15 years too early. it came out in 2014 and somehow still looks gorgeous today. the design barely aged at all. my only issue is that i wish bmw had gone all in and made it fully electric instead of a plug in hybrid. it already looked like the future. the powertrain should have felt just as futuristic. imageimage

planned obsolescence sounds abstract until you look at the examples.

in the 1920s, major light bulb companies were accused of agreeing to keep bulb life around 1,000 hours even though longer lasting bulbs were possible.

decades later, apple got criticized for slowing older iphones as their batteries aged. apple said it was meant to prevent unexpected shutdowns, but the bigger issue was that users were not clearly told. after the backlash, they apologized, lowered battery replacement prices for a while, and added battery health controls.

futurism was an art and cultural movement that began in italy in the early 1900s.

it celebrated speed, machines, technology, youth, movement, and the idea of breaking away from the past to create something completely modern.

the internet’s unofficial countdown clock: keep any argument going long enough and eventually someone brings up hitler.

relationship translation: i'm either genuinely overwhelmed or slowly removing myself from your life. good luck figuring out which one.

someone who is a little too ready to believe what they are told.

a system where peasants were not exactly slaves, but were still legally tied to the land they worked. if the land changed hands, they usually went with it. they could farm, marry, raise families, and keep part of what they produced, but movement and economic freedom were heavily restricted. basically, you were not owned as a person. you were attached to the property.

basically the banker behind emperors.

fugger made his fortune through mining, trade, and lending money to europe's most powerful families. in 1519, he personally financed around two thirds of the money used to support charles v's election as holy roman emperor.

but my favorite detail is what survived him.

in 1521 he founded the fuggerei in augsburg, now considered the world's oldest social housing complex still in use.

around 150 people still live there today.

annual rent: €0.88.

the other requirement is three prayers a day for the fugger family.

five hundred years later, one of the richest men of the renaissance is still technically somebody's landlord. image

one of the few celebrities who kept speaking up about gaza when so many others stayed quiet.

she has consistently used her platform to talk about palestinian children and humanitarian aid, which honestly makes me respect her even more.

and on top of all that, she is basically a superhero in my house because my daughter absolutely loves her. image

basically the opposite of buying things just because the internet told you to.

when you lose in your head before anything has actually happened. a team goes 1 to 0 down in the first ten minutes and suddenly everyone starts playing like the game is already over. nothing has been decided yet. but once people start behaving as if defeat is inevitable, they often help create it. sometimes the first thing defeat takes is not the result. it is the belief that the result can still change.

a way of testing an argument by pushing it to its logical conclusion and seeing if it becomes ridiculous or contradictory.

someone says, "people should be allowed to do whatever they want."

okay. whatever they want?

the point is not always to mock the argument.

sometimes the fastest way to find the flaw in an idea is to keep following it until it breaks.

for a vacation, it’s hard to beat turkey. you spend a week or two seeing the best parts of the country and eating amazing food.

but when you are turkish and live abroad, there’s something strange about going back. people don’t really treat you like a local anymore. they see you as someone who’s just visiting, who’ll be leaving again soon, and you can feel it in the way they treat you.

you are coming home, but to everyone else, you’re just passing through. image