My family watches an awful lot of anime. We also like horror and thriller movies, so we enjoyed Perfect Blue, a violent, disturbing, R-rated psychological thriller from 1997 about a former pop idol who loses her ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. If you like the films of Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) you’ll like Perfect Blue, because Aronofsky is a fan of the anime and even recreated a scene from it in Requiem for a Dream. — MF

I like to follow people who consistently surprise me. Tyler Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution is a prime source of the unexpected. He collects surprisingly interesting papers and posts he unearths from different corners, plus trivial oddities, and profoundly insightful essays, and all of it thought provoking. He posts at least a handful of items per day. (I follow his blog via my RSS reader.) — KK

There’s really no excuse for food waste. On Save the Food you can find recipes to cook with your leftover scraps and food that’s “past its prime”. You can build a meal prep plan and create a shopping list based on the people in your household and how many days you are cooking for. They even have a storage guide with all the tips and tricks you need to keep your food fresh. — CD

Google’s .new domains are exclusively reserved for action-based shortcuts, like doc.new for creating a new Google Doc. And now there’s a growing list of companies who have created easy-to-remember shortcuts for things you might already do. Like “story.new” to create a new post on Medium or “sell.new” to create a new listing on eBay. For the up-to-date list check out this page. — CD

Ronnie Chieng makes me laugh. Might be because most of my relatives are Asian American, but I think his humor is much broader than that. You can catch him on Netflix’s stand-up special Ronnie Chieng: Asian Comedian Destroys America. — KK

I bought the original Fire TV stick when it first came out a few years ago. When the HD version with a voice-activated remote control came out a couple of years later, I bought that and I appreciated the extra speak and talk-to-search feature. Amazon recently released the Fire TV Stick 4K. The remote comes with volume controls and an on-off button for the TV so I don’t need to use the TV remote anymore. It’s also much faster than the previous versions of the Fire TV stick. It’s a worthy upgrade. — MF

Asknature.org is a free online tool where you can search thousands of nature’s solutions to various challenges. Like how a decentralized society helps ants to recover from a food shortage or how maple tree seeds twirl in a tornado-like vortex to increase the reach of where their seeds are planted. You can also discover nature-inspired ideas like this design for a thermos inspired by polar bear fur. Just ten minutes a day exploring this website will get you thinking differently. — CD

Permute is a Macintosh desktop app that converts video, audio, and image files from one format to another. It’s versatile and has not failed me yet. I was able to use it to convert a video that was terribly jittery that no other application could fix, but Permute converted it to an mp4 and it came out perfect. It costs $15 from the developer and it also comes with Setapp’s large library of applications available by subscription for $10 a month, which is how I found it. You can try Setapp for 7 days for free. — MF

I publish the same material on different social media platforms from my computer using a web-based app called Hootsuite.  With Hootsuite I can pre-schedule material ahead of time. I can post images from my camera on Instagram, which otherwise is hard to do. I get analytics, respond, and manage Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc, all from one dashboard. There is a limited free version but I pay for the basic $30/month small business version. — KK

I believe in “earning” any best-in-class tools; start out cheap and move up through use. Over my 50 years in photography I’ve used and owned many tripods, so I was ready — and willing to pay for — a world-class state-of-the art tripod. Last year on Kickstarter I sprung for what I consider the best portable travel tripod ever. It’s a carbon-fiber Peak Design Tripod. It’s ingeniously compact (full size folds into the diameter of a water bottle), feather lightweight, opens and closes rapidly easily, and is remarkably ridgid, even at 6 feet. Its head mount is fast, fluid, and agile. It fits into a daypack, or carry-on luggage, and is optimized for a tripod you have to carry a lot, but of course works in a studio as well. The Peak Tripod is a masterpiece of design and fabrication. I love using it. The aluminum version is $350, while the ultimate carbon fiber model is $600. — KK

My family is drinking a lot more coffee than we used to. We go through about a pound of whole espresso beans per week. On a whim, I bought Amazon’s brand, Go for the Bold, which comes in 2 lb bags. It’s better tasting than Starbucks, about the same as Pete’s, and costs quite a bit less. — MF

I like having The Measure of Things handy for those really random moments when I want to visualize the size of something, like how big or how much, in units I might understand better. For example 4 fluid ounces is about three-fourths as big as a tennis ball, and 500,000 acres is 1.075 times bigger than the size of Maui. — CD

I’ve found another way to keep up with what’s happening in the world, that doesn’t involve “doomscrolling,” and that is signing up for The Weeklypedia. Once a week, I’ll get an email summarizing the top 20 Wikipedia articles with the most changes, the 10 most actively edited articles created in the past week and most active discussions on Wikipedia (No. 5 last week was Kamala Harris citizenship conspiracy theories). Here is the most recent issue. — CD

By the early 1990s television cartoons had hit a depressing nadir. The stories, art, characters, and animation were terrible, and the cartoons existed for the sole reason of selling toys and merchandise. Then along came Ren & Stimpy, a hyperkinetic, rubbery, explosive, hilarious, and beautifully animated cartoon that harked back to the era when Bob Clampett and Tex Avery were producing insanely great work for Looney Tunes. Ren & Stimpy changed the course of animation. The documentary Happy Happy Joy Joy recounts the tragic history of Ren & Stimpy and features extensive interviews with everyone involved, including its creator, John Kricfalusi, a supremely talented animator, a sadistic tyrannical boss, and sexual predator of teenage girls.  — MF

If you are a “person of influence,” particularly when it comes to books, and you’d like to read books before they are published (so you can rave about them when they are), you can sign up at NetGalley and get digital “advance reader copies (ARC)” of upcoming books. This is an early ebook edition used to promote the book. Most titles are available to all members, but some books need to be requested. For avid readers who like to talk about what they are reading, NetGalley is a handy service. — KK

Just a gathering of advice and ideas that I have come across in the last few months and has stayed with me since. — CD

Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne.

“I have been alive for a very long time, haven’t I?”

Totally impossible to translate, but the nuance is something like: I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I a humbly and deeply grateful. P. Arai calls it the “gratitude tense,” and says the beauty of this grammatical construction is that “there is no finger pointing to a source.” She also says, “It is impossible to feel angry when using this tense.” — Ruth Ozeki (found in the Social Social Distance Club)

“To realize your existence, do the things you know you should do — the duties that echo from deep below. Stop avoiding your life.” — u/TheEmployedMoth1 on Reddit

“When you are making plans, you are actually not making plans but you are creating reality…” — Somewhere on Reddit

“A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. … Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.” — Sam Altman, How To Be Successful

A few years ago a reader turned me onto a nifty variation of my favorite Pilot G2 gel pen, which is a mini pocket version of the same pen. Same liquid black, same fine tip, same profile, just a lot shorter to better fit into my pocket. The Pilot G2 Mini is my everyday carry. — KK

Two Minute Papers is a YouTube channel featuring short videos (sometimes 5 minutes long) created by a professor who reviews new research papers in visual programming, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer graphics, simulations, and other state-of-the-art computer science. He explains the research’s significance, while running very cool graphics demo-ing the results. I find it a painless way to keep up in this fast moving field.  — KK

For years, my family has been using Le Creuset cast iron pans. The large one is almost too heavy for my wife to deal with. Also, they take a long time to heat up. While we are not ready to get rid of them, I recently discovered Carote non-stick frying pans. They’re coated with some kind of natural Granite material and they have a bakelite handle that stays cool (unlike the Le Creuset handles that get extremely hot). The aluminum Carote heats up quickly, and it is the best non-stick frying pan I’ve ever had. Everything just slides right out of it and it’s very easy to clean with water and a paper towel. you can try out the 8-inch frying pan, which costs under $15 to see if you like it before buying a larger pan. — MF

The most recent “drop” of MSCHF (which deserves it’s own deep dive) is masterWiki. They claim to have stolen MasterClass’ content and paired it up with wikiHow’s iconic visuals. I’m not sure how accurate or effective these summaries are, but as someone who prefers to read rather than watch video tutorials, I appreciate this little unauthorized sneak peak into the MasterClass series. I’m not sure how long this website will be up, so I’ve taken screen captures of the ones that interest me. My favorite is RuPaul’s How to Be Your True Self. — CD