Look, we live under the crushing boot of capitalism and all that, I get it. But also, it's the time of year where we try and find things for our friends and family that might bring them a little joy, a worthy cause if ever there was one, always, but especially this year. So I've assembled a little gift guide of stuff I like a lot, largely from independent artists and makers, with an emphasis (but not exclusively) on things that are handmade and small-run. No stinkers in the bunch, these are all rad, no bad. ## Stuff from Pals _There's nothing more joyful than getting to hype your pals' incredible work._ Chicago letterpress printer Jen Farrell has built a career on stunning letterpress creations hand-printed on century-old printing presses. One of her truly unique specialties is building urban landscapes from metal type, and she did a beautiful tribute to Chicago's pushback against ICE this fall featuring a quote from Chicago's legendary Studs Terkel. Jen also made a print from something I wrote on this blog earlier this year, which was super cool to be involved with. My pals Nick and Nadine print under the name Sonnenzimmer, and their playful, inventive, and gorgeous prints evolved from gigposter to works of arts over many years. Their incredible, self-published tome, Per Diem: Graphics in Time by Sonnenzimmer, which is over 1000 pages long, collects 16 years of their work. It's a work of art unto itself, but also a remarkable collection of ideas, of moving in new directions, and of two people's creative collaboration over a decade and a half. I spent many late-night hours at the _Punk Planet_ office working on the magazine while Dan Grzeca was printing things in the other room. And I spent plenty of time drinking coffee with him in the early morning hours after. And so of course I love his new This Caffeine Kills Fascists shirt, which is also a fundraiser for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. But so much of Dan's stuff is incredible, including this beautiful Cooper's Hawk print. I shared office space with Jay Ryan at The Bird Machine for years, and I continue to be in awe of his work. Everything he does is joyful in a way that is so uniquely him, and his color palatte is always stunning too. Anything he does is worth picking up, but I'm especially in love with this portrait of 12 wooly mammoths. You can see more of Jay's mammoths at Chicago's Field Museum's After the Age of Dinosaurs exhibit. My pal Eve Ewing bought a bookstore earlier this year and this fall, when shit was getting rocky in town and we were all out on the street protecting each other, designed this wonderful totebag featuring a red winged blackbird in full attack mode. I love it so much. Plus, a percentage goes toward Organized Communities Against Deportations. Annalee Newitz is both a pal and one of my favorite authors, and their latest is the cozy little novella Automatic Noodle (that's an affiliate link), about a group of robots who open a noodle shop in San Francisco and build a community among themselves and their human customers. Looking for a nice read about the post-apocalyptic future where basically nothing bad happens? Yes you are. My longtime podcast collaborator Maureen Johnson, put out an absolutely stunning and really fun book, You Are the Detective, the Creeping Hand Murder (that's an affiliate link), where you get this beautiful little book that's a collection of letters, pictures, interviews, and more to help you solve a locked-room murder from the turn of the century. It's a ton of fun, really beautiful, and kind of shockingly inexpensive. A legit great gift for almost anyone. ## Chicago things _Chicago has been through a lot these last few months, and here are a few things to celebrate our great city._ The Chicago Transit Authority gift shop goes so much harder than it needs to. It's hard to pick out one thing, but I think this 60s-era logo beanie could be your new winter look. It's a Chicago Hot Dog Flag, what more explanation do you need? Chicago has many iconic buildings but I've always loved the pink towers of the former Edgewater Beach Hotel (now condos), and I was so happy that scrappy third-tier US soccer team Edgewater Castle FC put it on a totebag. And speaking of Edgewater Castle, you can buy season tickets for only $60. Games are super fun. Go Rooks! Chicago journalist, historian, and photographer Robert Lorzel created a breathtaking look inside the long-abandoned Uptown Theater in his book The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace. When I first saw some images from this book I was stunned at what good shape the theater was still in. It's so fun traveling back in time with Robert and his co-author James Pierce. Speaking of beautiful books,The Golden Era of Sign Design: The Rediscovered Sketches of Beverly Sign Co is a beautiful tribute to a classic Chicago hand-painted sign studio compiled and written by a current Chicago hand-painted sign studio. Filled with breathtaking sketches from the mid-20th century and assembled with real love and care, this is a gorgeous book you'll look at a lot. ## Other Awesome Things _There are so many great things, here are a few more._ Speaking of books on signage, Bryan Yonki's 380 page love-letter to the hand painted signs of Los Angeles, "Hand-Painted in LA: Some Los Angeles Signs" is just an absolute gorgeous collection. Whenever I walk around LA I feel like half the time I'm just jaw-hanging-down agog at the various storefronts and their painted signs. Yonki's book really captures the beauty of them. My family and I spent a really great week recently playing the wonderful Ministry of Lost Things game. It's less a board game than a series of puzzles to solve together, but the premise—you're helping lost items reunite with their owner—is really wonderful and the presentation, which plays out through opening envelopes filled with little artifacts like letters and calendars, and maps, is so satisfying. One of the things that truly helped define who I was when I was still an impressionable youth was the artist Jenny Holzer, whose "Truisms" series (think: ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE) changed everything for me. When I discovered that one-woman-print-shop Bread and Water Print Shop does a monthly design dedicated to Holzer's work, I was so happy. You can even subscribe to get a Holzer shirt every month, if you have enough drawer space. Rose, who prints everything herself, has a ton of really cool shirts, including this awesome Royal Tenenbaums/Royal Trux mashup. On the topic of rad shirt printers, this Garfield "I may be self employed but I can still hate my boss" T from High Desert Debris makes me laugh out loud every time I see it. It looks like they're almost out but they have a few sizes left. But also all their shirts are pretty rad. And speaking of being self employed, Chicago chainstitcher Vitchcraft makes one of my favorite patches of all time, "Self Employed: Tough Little Bitches." I have one on my favorite pair of coveralls. Jenna also has a ton of really cool things available at her shop, including custom-chainstitched items. OK, finally, I'm _definitely_ not telling you to spend $65 on a stamp (someone bought this for me because _I_ would never spend $65 on a stamp). But honestly this Japanese modular one-month stamp that you break apart and put back together to create a month-accurate stamp is actually really wonderful. It's transformed my setup for the frontmatter in my monthly journals, and is really unique and fun to snap together every month. That said: It's a $65 stamp, so obviously YMMV.

_Originally from notes written Tuesday, October 21 2025_ What I need you to understand is that it was relentless. Sightings miles apart at the same time, reports, misreports, they were at a Home Depot, a mall, the post office, six different intersections. Car makes and models rapid-fire. A Kia, a Ford, a Silverado, an Audi (an Audi??), a dizzying number of license plates. Too much to keep straight, so you look at every car and you wonder. There's noise, so much noise, but there's also signal and the signal was that they were _here_ that they were _everywhere_. Smash and grab jobs happening across the city nearly simultaneously. But the things being stolen aren't jewels, they're lives. Off streets, from yards. One roofer plucked off a ladder. A landscaper thrown to the ground, tackled by a half-dozen men in camo with weapons. Sixteen people on this day. Sixteen people disappeared, from just the northern side of the city and suburbs. More across the entire city. What I need you to understand is that nobody is letting them go quietly. The Feds' every movement is announced by a chorus of whistles, by a parade of cars honking in their wake, neighbors rushing outside to yell to film to witness these kidnappings that are unfolding in front of us. Neighbors running _towards_ trouble. What I need you to know is we are organized. What I need you to know is that you need to get organized. What I need you to know is they are coming. What I need you to know is you can stop them. They come not for the "worst of the worst," as they so repeatedly claim, because that would mean they would be coming for themselves. They are coming for people just trying to get by. Landscapers, roofers, tamale women, Lyft drivers waiting in a lot at Ohare, the people standing outside a Home Depot hoping that today might be better than yesterday. A report rang out that a child was hiding, and people converged. Whistles around necks, a half-dozen in moments. One heard whistles when dropping her own child off at school. Another rode up on a bike. Everyone unsure of what to do except to do what any parent would do: ensure a child is safe. The child was safe. This is how it works: We protect each other, period. These are our neighbors, our friends, our family. We do the things we have to do to ensure that as many of us can make it to tomorrow as possible. Not everyone does. I need you to understand that we tried. For some, living far away from Chicago, this may sound overwrought. I need you to understand that it's not. This is every day here. Every day, in any part of the city. As I write this, the onslaught is happening across Lincoln Park, one of the richest parts of Chicago, while yesterday it was in Little Village a working class Mexican neighborhood on the West Side. You never know when it's going to happen. You only know that it is going to happen. Life is lived on the edge now. I need you to understand that we'll still be here when it's over. I need you to understand that, eventually, it will be over. It will be over because we are here. I need you to understand they can't take us all. * * * ## A couple places to give your time and your money ## ICIRR Pretty much everything involving witnessing ICE and alerting neighborhoods is running through the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) Family Support Network and Hotline. * If you spot ICE (in and around Chicago) you can call the ICIRR FSN hotline at 855-435-7693. If you're in the greater Chicago area, put that number in your phone. * You can get alerts from the ICIRR's Eyes on Ice text network by signing up here. (note: this is Chicago-area specific) * ICIRR also runs Know Your Rights trainings regularly, which are open to anyone. If this seems like a very long list of things, it is. And I am positive they could use your donation ## Whistles/Pilsen Arts & Community House A huge amount of organizing is going on around the distribution of whistle kits, the amazingly effective on-the-ground street-level alert system for neighborhoods. * While the actual instructions for what to do with a whistle are very simple (short bursts if you see ICE, long blows if they're actively detaining someone), the Pilsen Arts & Community House has created a little zine that has become the iconic symbol of the rapid response effort. * There are "Whistlemania" and whistle assembly events happening across the Chicago area pretty much all the time. * If you are in a city that Trump has been threatening, the best time to start buying whistles was yesterday and the next best time is right now. They're getting harder to come by because so many people are ordering them. * People are also 3d-printing whistles, if that's your thing. As with ICIRR, the Pilsen Arts & Community House could very much use your money.

Who would have thought that raising prices on everything, cutting off food assistance, doubling health insurance, destroying our reputation around the world, decimating critical government agencies li...

Attached: 4 images During this hot, difficult summer I took a trip to the largest arcade in the world and fell in love with the art of the video game marquee. So I created a little gallery: https://dansinker.com/posts/2025-08-01-marquees/

Deploying ICE, the Border Patrol, the LAPD, the LA County Sheriffs, and now the National Guard and maybe the Marines over a small protest at a Home Depot is not the show of force they think it is.

Attached: 1 image The Times finally reporting what we all could see: Musk was absolutely tripping balls the entire time he destroyed the government. Very polite of them to wait to drop this until he’d left the position. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/elon-musk-drugs-children-trump.html

Attached: 1 image The Times finally reporting what we all could see: Musk was absolutely tripping balls the entire time he destroyed the government. Very polite of them to wait to drop this until he’...

We're living through the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore, while the government stomps its uncaring boot on our necks. But there's an easy way to fight back: Care. I wrote about it: https://dansinker.com/posts/2025-05-23-who-cares/

We're living through the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore, while the government stomps its uncaring boot on our necks. But there's an...

Earlier this week, it was discovered that the _Chicago Sun-Times_ and the _Philadelphia Inquirer_ had both published an externally-produced "special supplement" that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. There's been a lot written about this (former _Chicago Reader_ editor Martha Bayne's is the best), and I don't need to rehash it all. But the thing that is most disheartening to me is how at every step along the way, nobody cared. The writer didn't care. The supplement's editors didn't care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn't care. The production people didn't care. And, the fact that it took _two days_ for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn't care either. It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore. AI is, of course, at the center of this moment. It's a mediocrity machine by default, attempting to bend everything it touches toward a mathematical average. Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something _good enough_ , a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don't care, it's miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that _good enough_ is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don't care. (It's worth pointing out that I'm not a full-throated hater and know people—coders, mostly—who work with AI that _do_ care and have used it to make real, meaningful things. Most people, however, use it quickly and thoughtlessly to make more mediocrity.) It's easy to blame this all on AI, but it's not just that. Last year I was deep in negotiations with a big-budget podcast production company. We started talking about making a deeply reported, limited-run show about the concept of living in a multiverse that I was (and still am) very excited about. But over time, our discussion kept getting dumbed down and dumbed down until finally the show wasn't about the multiverse at all but instead had transformed into a daily chat show about the Internet, which everyone was trying to make back then. Discussions fell apart. Looking back, it feels like a little microcosm of everything right now: Over the course of two months, we went from something smart that would demand a listener's attention in a way that was challenging and new to something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later. Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays the other week, wrote about the rise of content that's designed to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif's case, he was writing about _Time Machine_, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees' seminal album _The Score_. Released in 2021, Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's no way it would have happened. He's right. Nobody's funding that kind of work right now, because nobody cares. (It's worth pointing out that Hanif wrote this using Stories, a system that erased it 24 hours later. Another victim of the Who Cares Era.) Of course we're all victims of the biggest perpetrators of this uncaring era, as the Trump administration declares "Who Cares?" to vast swaths of the federal government, to public health, to immigrant families, to college students, to you, to me. As Elon Musk's DOGE rats gnaw their way through federal agencies, not caring is their guiding light. They cut indiscriminately, a smug grin on their faces. That they believe they can replace government workers—people who care an _extraordinary_ amount about their arcane corner of the bureaucracy—with hastily-written AI code is another defining characteristic of right now. I keep coming back to the word "disheartening," because it all really is. Without getting into too many specifics, I recently was involved in reviewing hundreds of applications for something. Over the course of reviewing, I was struck by the nearly-identical phrasing that threaded through dozens of the applications. It was eerie at first, like seeing a shadow in the distance, then frustrating, and ultimately completely disheartening: It was AI. For whatever their reasons, a bunch of people had used a chatbot to help write their answers to questions that asked them to draw from their own, unique, personal experience. They had fed their resumes or their personal websites or their actual stories and experiences into the machine, and it had filled in the blanks, Mad Libs-style. I felt crushed. Until. Until I read an application written entirely by a person. And then another. And another. They _glowed_ with delight and joy and sadness and with the unexpected at every turn. They were human. They were written by people that cared. In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care. In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it. At a time where the government's uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going. As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book. Be yourself. Be imperfect. Be human. Care.

Attached: 1 image Guess where they got their weird trade deficit math from?

Attached: 1 image Guess where they got their weird trade deficit math from?