S2_01: A hit of the 80s, sadness in every colour, and how to build your dream library
Hello and welcome to Tiny Wonderful Things Season 2, Issue 1. Today's featured image is quite a tiny wonderful thing indeed: a mouse with wavy, golden fur due to a genetic mutation. Or as Reddit user /ProfessionalDawg puts it: this is what happens "when you successfully escape 1000 cats". The image has been making its rounds on the internet for years so I'm not sure what the original source is.
The enduring allure of choose-your-own-adventure books
Okay, so this article by novelist Leslie Jamison is a deep-dive into the history of choose-your-own-adventure books, but it's also written choose-your-own-adventure style. It's 50 minutes long so reader beware, but if you have some time and a cozy spot to settle in, get ready for a major blast to the past.
This guy built a 1980s video store in his own home
I'm old enough to remember, in relatively recent memory, what it was like to walk into a video store to pick out a movie. I'm also old enough to remember how jarring it was when, just a few years later, all of them had closed down except that one in Oregon. Now that memory, the smell of video store and the anticipation of a night about to begin set to the mood of whichever title chosen, will forever be locked in a vault in my mind labelled nostalgia while I'm stuck flip-flopping among an endless array of options on my TV in 2022. This guy knows where it's at.
How to build your own personal library
How refreshing it is to find an article cultivating the slow and steady curation of a personal library, not for show or for likes but for pure personal pleasure. Since we're on the subject of libraries: Is there a Little Free Library in your neighourhood? I used this website/app and found four within walking distance.
Beyond the blues: finding sadness in every colour
It's always interesting to me how we're able to box colour in certain feelings and moods and associations when shades and tints and hues within colours are so varied that any generalization of colour is exactly that: generic. Still, can you imagine yellow as a sad colour? What about pink? Grey's not too hard, but how would you distinguish it from blue sadness? Poet Mary Ruefle shows us in her book, My Private Property:
Gray sadness is the sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum, ointments and unguents and movie theaters. Gray sadness is the most common of all sadnesses, it is the sadness of sand in the desert and sand on the beach, the sadness of keys in a pocket, cans on a shelf, hair in a comb, dry-cleaning, and raisins. Gray sadness is beautiful, but not to be confused with the beauty of blue sadness, which is irreplaceable. Sad to say, gray sadness is replaceable, it can be replaced daily, it is the sadness of a melting snowman in a snowstorm.
A fantasy perfume line inspired by sci-fi
Oh hey, this marks my first TikTok Thing. Seems a bit strange but it shouldn't be: I'm constantly linking to other social media platforms and I've been adamant from the start that wonderful things are channel-agnostic, to be found anywhere. Here is a gorgeously lush description of a fantasy perfume line inspired by sci-fi from lc, also known by their moniker, nearlynoseblind.
