This is the fourth edition of my monthly newsletter, M31, that was sent out on Tuesday, December 2 — you can subscribe here. and read the first edition here.

Hi everyone, and welcome to the December edition of the M31 newsletter! I’m Jean Snow, and this is where I share monthly updates on what I’m up to here in Shanghai. Let’s get to it.

What’s M31? It’s a name I used close to two decades ago as my sort of publishing imprint/company label for the activities I was doing while I lived in Tokyo, and I’ve decided to revive it. It’s simply inspired by my birthday of May 31. The logo you see above was designed by Ian Lynam, and is part of a set of 31 logos he created for me back in the late 2000s, which I’ve decided to start re-using for this newsletter.

All the activities I organize in Shanghai have dedicated groups in WeChat, where you’ll get the latest updates, and so please contact me to be added to any of them.

PauseTalk

On the PauseTalk side of things, no big updates since last month except that I’ve decided to postpone the upcoming Vol. 100 to sometime in January (instead of December). With a PechaKucha Night planned for early December (see below), and the second-half of December feeling like it might not be the best time to do an event, with many busy during the holidays, I felt like it was best to wait a bit.

I’ll settle on a date in the coming weeks, and share it in the usual places (the PauseTalk website and in the WeChat group).

You’ll find archives of past events on the PauseTalk website, which includes recaps for each session.

PechaKucha Night

In November we had our Vol. 48, which was a fun event, held in yet another new space for us (pictured above).

Our next PechaKucha Night (Vol. 49) is happening next week, on Thursday, December 11, and it will take place at a lovely space called Haworth. As I’ve already mentioned, this will be the 20th event George and I have produced since re-launching the series in 2023, and we decided to have a theme this time, “Transformation.” Also, I’ll be doing a presentation — something I’ve been doing every December, so it’s turning into a tradition — about “The Movies That Made Me,” in which I talk about my passion for movies, and how various movies influenced me throughout my life. I’m also introducing the “PechaKucha Mix” for the first time in Shanghai — basically, an improv activity in which I create a presentation, and will have someone present it without having seen the slides. This time, our “someone” will be two members of a local improv troupe, so should be lots of fun.

And looking even further, we are already circling January 22 for our first PKN of 2026, which will be our Vol. 50, which is a nice milestone to celebrate as well.

You can always check our Shanghai page on the official PechaKucha website to see the listings for the latest events.

FOTO5

The latest themes we explored in the FOTO5 group were FAMOUS, EYES (my contribution is pictured above), NATURE (and I did a part 2 as well, as I had traveled to Chengdu), and COOKING. This time, I reacted with a 100WORD comment to one of the photos that had been shared for the EYES theme.

—

It was a dangerous time to be meeting, considering the current escalation, but his handler had been clear. Contact at this time was essential, as there was an update to the operation that needed to be shared immediately.

He was dreading it but was expecting it.

It was a burn notice.

Despite everything he had done for his country (even if it was an adopted one), and the sacrifices made, trust had been lost, and now this.

Looking up, he then noticed the camera.

—

It was for this photo:

If you’re interested in participating in the FOTO5 photo club, contact me so I can add you to the group on WeChat.

Shanghai Design Pins

Here are some of the latest Shanghai Design Pins that were shared in the group since last month.

• 15th Shanghai Biennale (Hypebeast) — was held in November

• Barraco (Instagram) — a tiny bar that was made up almost entirely of reclaimed doors and windows (sadly, now closed)

• Espace Gabrielle Chanel (Designboom) — beautiful new library space for art books at the Shanghai Power Station of Art (pictured above)

• Miu Miu Literary Club (Vogue) — literary event held recently in Shanghai

• Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art in China (Dezeen) — designed by BIG, opening in 2026 (pictured below)

• The Silent Gaze (The Spaces) — flagship store on Yonguyan Road for fashion brand theboyhasnopatience (TBHNP), designed by Beijing-based FON studio

• Yuanverse Living Paradigms (ArchDaily) — not in Shanghai, but developed in collaboration between AOMOMO studios and Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Shanghai Design Pins is a group on WeChat where we share design-related spots (and events) in Shanghai — contact me to be added.

One More Thing

Last Friday night ended up being quite good — after the end-of-day apéro at the studio, I had a burger at Goodman — certainly one of my favorite burgers in town — and then we went to a couple of cocktail bars, ending at Pop Corner, which has a lovely retro atmosphere inside (and is also quite popular, as we tried going first, it was packed, so ended up going again later when it was less crowded).

Well, that does it for this December edition of the newsletter. If you’re in town, do come to our upcoming PechaKucha Nights (or even PauseTalk), and here’s hoping for a great start to 2026.

For more on me, you can alway have a look at my personal website (where I share the newsletters in case you missed them) — I’ve been blogging since 1998 — or for lighter stuff (and lots of movie reviews) you can follow me on Bluesky.

Not every 80s home gets a second life this stunning. But in Alcudia, perched above the jaw-dropping Mallorcan coastline, Germany-based design studio Holzrausch has turned a once-underwhelming vacation home, Casa da Praia, into a summer retreat where mid-century California vibes seamlessly merge with touches of Brazilian and Mexican influences.

On the exterior, the house looks deceptively toned down – until you spot the pops of color drenching the poolside walls (where there’s an outdoor shower), much like you’d find at Luis Barragán’s house and studio in Mexico City. The monochromatic exterior reads like a single sculpted volume, thanks to textured plaster that replaces the original stone facade. The landscaping surrounding the three-bedroom house features Mediterranean and native plants that add life to the outdoor space.

Holzrausch preserved the two-level layout and original pine beams, then incorporated teak wood into the cabinetry, wall panels, and kitchen furniture. The studio even opened the central false ceiling to flood the once-dark core of the home with daylight from the terrace – an architectural choice that instantly makes everything feel more connected to the outdoors.

Color, again, plays a huge part – this time inside the villa. Holzrausch leans into the geometric quirks of the original structure and the clients’ love for Latin American design, pulling inspiration from the architectural masters, including the aforementioned Barragán. The kitchen alone is quite impressive, with its pink-painted doors and a glossy yellow suspended ceiling that glows as natural light enters the space. To meet the owner’s needs, the kitchen was outfitted with a large island made from tropical wooden slats and countertops made by local manufacturer
HUGUET.

Furnishing the home, Holzrausch blends iconic pieces with local brands, building an atmosphere that’s equal parts relaxed and refined. Soft, indirect lighting from favorites like Vibia and Marset creates a warm shimmer at night, while the Roche Bobois Mah Jong sofa adds a layer of relaxed, sprawling comfort. While lounging, the owners can take in views of the swimming pool and surrounding landscape. Custom touches – like a built-in bench in the living room – make the flow appear effortless and the overall aesthetic feel polished.

The bathrooms join the fun with locally made terrazzo sinks by HUGUET and patterned tilework that add grit, texture, and a major burst of personality.

On other side of the villa, floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors open to a dark-stained wood deck that overlooks the coastline with breathtaking Mediterranean views. An extended overhang provides protection from the elements when the owners want to spend time outdoors in warmer months.

The result is a rare kind of holiday home: one that celebrates its roots while happily remixing them, a place where tropical ease and mid-century modernism can work alongside expressive color.

For more information on Casa da Praia by Holzrausch, please visit holzrausch.de.

Photography by Salva Lopez.

As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.

Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification. 

The other states include Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Arizona, and Ohio.

“As you may know, your elected officials in Missouri are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” DeVille says in the video. On the blocked homepages there’s also a link to an explanation of the “Restricted to Adults,” or RTA label, which porn site administrators place on their sites to signal to device-based parental controls that the websites are inappropriate for minors.  

Like most of the other 24 laws across the country, Missouri’s age verification law requires websites containing more than one third of material that’s considered “harmful to minors,” or sexual content, to perform age verification checks. Similar or more restrictive laws have swept the country since Louisiana became the first state to enact age verification legislation in 2023.

Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet

Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver’s license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.

404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg

Age verification laws reach beyond porn sites, however. In Wyoming, South Dakota, Mississippi and Ohio, where the laws are written broadly enough to cover social media sites and any platform hosting adult content, Bluesky users have to submit to a face scan by the third-party company Yoti or upload a photo of their credit card to verify they’re over 18 years of age. In July, Bluesky started requiring all UK users to verify their ages in response to the Online Safety Act. We’ve previously reported on the security risks in uploading sensitive personal data to identity verification services, including the potential for hackers to then get ahold of that information themselves. In October, after Discord started requiring UK users to verify ages, the platform announced hackers breached one of its third-party vendors that handles age-related appeals, and said it identified around 70,000 users who may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of the breach. 

Last week, Pornhub’s parent company Aylo sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft, urging them to support device-based age verification in their app stores and operating systems, WIRED reported. “Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, said in the letter. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.” 

Instead of protecting minors, age verification laws spike usage of virtual private networks and send users—including, potentially, minors—to unregulated or unmoderated sites that don’t care about complying with U.S. or UK laws. In Missouri, searches for VPNs spiked following the law’s enactment. 

Missouri schools are not required to teach sex education, leaving it up to local school boards to decide what, if anything, children are taught about sexual health. School districts that do teach sex ed are required to promote abstinence, a modality long recognized as ineffective at protecting children from engaging in risky sexual behaviors. Even if a district offers sex ed, parents are allowed to pull their kids out of that class altogether. But despite research showing age verification laws don’t work either, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway believes forcing adults to undergo age verification protects the children in her state. “We are proud to stand on the side of parents, families and basic decency. Missouri will not apologize for protecting children,” Hanaway said in a press release. 

Like with most things that have been infinitesimally incorporated into an increasingly compact smartphone, the album art that pops up when we’re listening cannot be fully appreciated – a disconnect Tuneshine aims to remedy.

Album art is an oft-overlooked creative form that can be incredibly subtle and bold in directly or indirectly expressing the intended emotion of the intangible music track playing. These carefully composed visuals are arguably more accessible and widespread than fine art. And yet, they can be abstract or representation, nostalgic in the embodiment of a bygone era, and visionary in the speculative suggesting a potential future.

On a 5.91 × 2.83 inch handheld, it’s hard to fully comprehend all the nuances of composition, minute detail, and image-making technique: photography, painting, drawing, collage, or any mix thereof.

That all changes with the new 6.3 x 6.3 inch Tuneshine square LED display, designed by San Francisco entrepreneur Tobias Butler. The compact device seamlessly connects to music apps like Spotify, Apple Music, Sonos, etc. and existing speakers for direct image diffusion. The brightness can be controlled. When not playing music, one can even program Tuneshine to display other types of images.

Seeming to distort the visuals, the vivid 64×64 extra-bright pixel screen animates them in an unexpected fashion. It borrows from the resampling technique used by graphic designers and photo editors to blow up low-resolution pictures. They essentially break down the pictures into grids of smaller circles. Though not a true replication, the overall effect is preserved. One can even use Shazam’s new image search function to discover the music someone else is playing.

“If you grew up flipping LPs or studying CD covers, Tuneshine brings that magic into today’s streaming world,” says Butler. “And for a generation raised on playlists and AirPods, Tuneshine adds something new and unexpected to the music experience: visuals.”

There’s something to discounting and recontextualizing these two aspects of listening to music and having an endless stream of changing visuals appear from the corner of the room. The 1.6-inch thick case is finished in light and dark wood options, not cheap plastics. There are also special edition colors like pearl, ruby, and sapphire. As a “piece of furniture” it fits in well within different types of interiors. It adds a touch of retro-styling but with a contemporary modality.

Tuneshine is kitted out with a 6-foot braided USB-C cable and 20W power brick (with a 100-250 AC input). It requires an iOS or Android device for setup, and a 2.4GHz WiFi connection.

Tuneshine founder Tobias Butler

To learn more or to purchase Tuneshine for $199 (and up, depending on the model), please visit tuneshine.rocks.

Photography courtesy of Tuneshine.

Nachdem es hier gestern schön auf die Zwölf gab, grooven wir uns heute zu feinstem Deep Tech und Minimal ein und gehen auf Reise. Mit der Mondkröte. Wo auch immer die uns hinführen wird. Vertrauen wir ihr – Vertrauen ist wichtig.

Mr. Galonga und sein MinMon Kollektiv sind hier in der Stadt mittlerweile auch so eine altehrwürdige Institution. Nie so richtig ein Big-Player, aber die Fühler immer unter dem Kopfhörer und auf dem Radar immer dort, wo es um gelebte Kultur der kleinen hiesigen Szene geht. Und das sind hier halt wirklich nur eine Hand voll der Guten. Manchmal treffen wir uns auf Demos oder einfach auf’m Rad in der Stadt, die eigentlich auch nicht mehr als ein großes Dorf ist.

Das, was er hier musikalisch bringt, macht er jetzt auch schon seit gut 20 Jahren. Seine Mondkröte reist deep und minimal ins Irgendwo – lasst einfach mal mitreisen.

Style: Deep Tech/Minimal
Length: 01:13:05
Quality: 320 kBit/s

Tracklist:
None.

Alle der diesjährigen Kalendermixe finden sich hier.

Spending all the money you have and all the money you can get and all the money you can promise has a number of side effects, such as gigantic data centres full of high-power chips just to run lying chatbots. These are near actual towns with people, and people object to things like noise, rising power bills, and AI-induced water shortages.

So what if, right, what if, we put the data centres in … space!

This idea has a lot of appeal if you’ve read too much sci-fi, and it sounds obvious if you don’t know any practical details.

Remember: none of this has to work. You just have to convince the money guys it could work. Or at least make a line go up.

A lot of people who should know better have been talking up data centres in space over the past couple of years. Jeff Bezos of Amazon wants Blue Origin to do space manufacturing. Google has scribbled a plan for a small test network of AI chips on satellites. [Reuters; Google]

But what’s the attraction of doing data centers on hard mode like this? They want to do their thing with no mere earthly regulation! Because people are a problem.

Space is unregulated the same way the oceans are unregulated — that is, it’s extremely highly regulated and there’s a ton of rules. But rules are for the peons who aren’t venture capitalists.

Startups are on the case, setting venture cash on fire. Lonestar Data Systems sent a computer the size of a book, riding along with someone else’s project, to the moon! The lander tipped over and it died. Oh well. [Grist]

Starcloud is targeting the AI bros directly. They’ve got a white paper: “Why we should train AI in space.” [Starcloud, 2024, PDF]

Last month, Starcloud sent up a satellite, Starcloud-1, containing one Nvidia H-100 processor. It didn’t die on launch, so that’s something! [Data Center Dynamics]

Starcloud-1 was a test. Starcloud-2 is the big deal: [Starcloud]

Our first commercial satellite, Starcloud-2, features a GPU cluster, persistent storage, 24/7 access, and proprietary thermal and power systems in a smallsat form factor.

That’s written in the present tense about things that do not exist. It’s a paper napkin scribble that got venture funding.

A good friend who writes under the pen name Taranis is an actual ex-NASA expert who has personally built electronics to go into space. Taranis also worked at Google on deploying AI systems. And Taranis has written an excellent blog post on this stupidity: “Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.” [blog post]

You can send a toy system into the sky, and it might work a while before it breaks. You can’t send up a data centre, with tens of thousands of expensive Nvidia chips, with any economic feasibility, any time in the near future.

Firstly, you don’t actually have abundant power. The solar array for the International Space Station delivers 200 kilowatts and it took several trips to get it all up there. You could power about 200 Nvidia H-100 cards with that 200 kilowatts.

Secondly, cooling in space is an absolute arse. Space is an excellent insulator for heat. That’s why a thermos works. In space, thermal management is job number one. All you can use is radiators. Getting rid of your 200 kilowatts will need about 500 square metres.

Thirdly, a chip in space needs radiation tolerance. Cosmic rays zap it all the time.The chips degrade at best and short out at worst.

If your GPUs are cutting edge, they’re fragile already — they burn out all the time running in their optimum environment on Earth. Space is nastier:

GPUs and TPUs and the high bandwidth RAM they depend on are absolutely worst case for radiation tolerance purposes. Small geometry transistors are inherently much more prone both to SEUs [single-event upsets] and latch-up. The very large silicon die area also makes the frequency of impacts higher, since that scales with area.

If you want chips that work well in space, you’re working with stuff that’s 20 years behind — but built to be very robust.

And finally, your network is slow. You have at most a gigabit per second by radio to the ground. (Compare Starlink, which is on the order of one-tenth of that.) On Earth, the links inside data centres are 100 gigabit.

I’ve seen a lot of objections to the Taranis post — and they’re all gotchas that are already answered in the post itself, from people who can’t or won’t read. Or they’re idiots going, “ha, experts who’ve done stuff! What do they know? Possibility thinking!” Yeah, that’s great, thanks.

If you really want to do space data centres, you can treat the Taranis post as a checklist — this is every problem you’re going to have to solve.

So space is a bit hard. A lot of the sci-fi guys suggest oceans! We’ll put the data centres underwater and cooling will be great!

Microsoft tried data centres in the ocean a few years ago, putting a box of computers underwater off the coast of Scotland from 2018 to 2020. They talked about how it would be “reliable, practical and use energy sustainably” — but here in 2025, Microsoft is still building data centres on land. [Microsoft]

Microsoft admitted last year that the project was dead. The only advantage of going underwater was cooling. Everything else, like maintenance or updating, was a massive pain in the backside and underwater data centres were just not practical. [IT Pro, 2024]

Space is going to be just like that — only cooling’s going to suck too. This is unlikely to slow down the startup bros for one moment.

• Video — Podcast