What began as a blunt joke became a real, evidence-backed way to check infrastructure, messages, promises, outages, backups, and forgotten work without creating another dashboard.
I asked a tiny dashboard for reassurance ten times a second. It answered by manufacturing its own outage.
A ten-minute reconstruction of the November 21, 1980 MGM Grand fire in Las Vegas: the spark in The Deli, a guest who walks out of the casino just ahead of the flames, a guest on the 21st floor who never hears an alarm, and how smoke killed 61 people in a tower the fire never reached.
From one shouted sentence in a Boston workshop in 1876 to a phone on the kitchen wall, in about seventy years: the first call, the first exchange, the first operators, the switch built by an undertaker, party lines, the dial and the keypad. With a note on what is documented and what is legend.
The humming maze behind chain link was the neighborhood’s voltage-changing, fault-isolating traffic interchange.
The giant tank over the neighborhood stored water, pressure, and a surprisingly elegant answer to morning showers.
When the lights died, one beige corded phone kept working because its power came from somewhere else.
A nature documentary about a cell tower pretending to be a tree, a horror trailer about an invisible dictation bubble, and eight more short films. Every one is based on something that actually happened.
Blockbuster on a Friday night, four-player N64, dial-up, Windows 95 and 98, the Autoplex, and the year nothing broke, in 3½ minutes of pixel art.
The least glamorous lawn ornament in town helped turn cable television wiring into the broadband network.