Le Griffon remains one of the most enduring wrecks in the world, but how much does the search for it cost? — Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones / And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones.” So sang Stan Rogers of the Northwest Passage, the English moniker for a long-theorised western sea route to Asia. Sought as early as 1000 C.E., when Viking navigators started trading with Inuit tribes following…

No matter how much they try to position themselves as a force for good, bidding sites remain an ethical mire. — Back in 2020, I wrote about what makes Fiverr a hellscape. With how hard it works to assert its primacy among low-cost/low-quality platforms, it’s easy to assume Fiverr is the only platform that matters. But there is a whole industry out there of sites that take money away from workers…

The 1989 film remains relevant to young creatives, but why? — A girl flew through the night sky. “The wind blowing past her grew stronger, and the bristles of her broom sounded like a running river. Now and then she saw a scattering of lights between the dark mountains.” The roar of a plane engine and the beams of headlights…

Enjoying work guilt-free is great until you bolster hateful platforms. By examining and acknowledging how our feelings about art contribute to their position, we can better assess how to address their problematic behaviour. — J. K. Rowling’s at it again, folks. This time taking to Twitter to conflate trans women with rapists in order to criticise Police Scotland’s move to recognise trans identity among offenders. With it came the typical support from the privileged cisgender users who view Rowling’s Tweets as a game; encouragement…

On seeing a company you admire exclude disabled people. — Being disabled is hard. In the UK, a criminal low level of social care is killing us by the tens of thousands while we also make up 60% of COVID-19 deaths. Consider also that 1 in 10 suicides in England are linked to chronic illness, and it all looks a…

Informed that such a monumental task was impossible, Ernest Cox managed to raise thirty-five of the fifty-two German ships scuttled at Scapa Flow. — No one noticed that Rear Admiral von Reuter was in full battle dress. Yet on the 21st June 1919, he pinned his medals to his chest and stepped onto the deck of the Emden. His orders had been carried to the other seventy-three ships by the Royal Mail — the…

Chirp is a readability and accessibility nightmare — So, Twitter changed its font. While any change on the internet encourages pushback, Twitter’s soft rebrand appears to have ruffled a lot of users in a visceral way. A major reduction in colour highlights has made the site harder to parse for many. But it is really the fundamental design…

The women of the United States Radium Corporation were misled and left to die by a system that viewed them as unimportant — but these women fought back. — Discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, radium is an element that is extracted in trace amounts from uranium ore that, despite being radioactive, quickly became a sensation. America in particular adopted radium as a premium product of its day — a single gram could cost as much as…

Clients often avoid revealing their budget to freelancers, but there are good reasons why we ask. — Is there any exchange between freelancer and client more ingrained than the dance around the subject of budget? A creative has asked how much you can spend on a project, what do you do? You don’t tell them, of course. Instead, you request their rates. Once they tell you, you…