Review: Prime, the Amazon restaurant

Also inside #11: 📰 The Box featured by The Verge ⏏️ End Meeting Buttons 🔮 mystery link

The core team of Prime, the Amazon restaurant. Notice anything about these guys?

Here’s the link to this week’s release if you prefer to read with zero context.

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Attention’s latest release is a:

1. Science fiction

2. Review of

3. Prime, a brand new restaurant by Jeff Bezos

4. Set in the year 2040

5. Written by Attention’s food critic, Lewis Berkeley III

6. Who is obnoxious and pretentious in equal measures

I’m very excited about this one. Sold? Dive in here. Or, here’s a preview:

I let my companion Sara choose the wine, even though she's dead. She prefers the term 'eternohuman', but I prefer dead. When I recently pointed this uncontroversial fact out to her, she was rather upset. So, to apologize, I promised her plus one for Prime.

Yes, I know. I promised her nothing less than the haute cuisine event of the year 2040: the Amazon restaurant…

👉 Continue reading on Attention 👈

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

This is Directing Attention, where we share a little about what's going on behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.

The Box was featured by The Verge

I was already feeling pretty good about the launch of The Box (about) last week, after burning every single one of my relationships by spamming it repeatedly to my entire contact book. (My dad no longer picks up the phone, worried that I’m going to ask him to post The Box to his Strava followers.) So yeah, things had settled down at a couple of thousand views and a lot of lovely feedback, the site was no longer very active — and then, everything blew up again!

Somehow, via a post on Metafilter — which I’d never heard of and now will be my first child’s name — journalist Adi Robertson found The Box and promptly posted it to The Verge’s front page (direct link here):

That led to thousands more views for The Box over the weekend and a bunch more people subscribing to this newsletter.

The Box’s launch has been nice in so many ways. For one, the feedback has been amazing, with loads of nice comments through LinkedIn, Metafilter, Slack groups, emails, and DMs. It’s made Nitya (co-author of The Box) and I feel less crazy for spending a lot of time on something a little edgy.

And also, it’s some validation to the assumption behind Attention: that the world could use a publication to make tech fun again through 🎨 creativity and 🤡 humour.

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

The part where we link to some interesting internet things.

Meet Justin Guo, a creative technologist under the moniker ‘unoptimal’. Justin came across The Box last week and got in touch with a question about the finer points of its design, which led to us having a fun brainstorm-chat yesterday.

Wow, I love Justin’s stuff so much. He’s made things like these End Meeting Buttons, which should be mass-produced and installed in every workplace, and a productivity browser extension TabBoo which helps you spend less time on addictive sites by threatening to scare the shit out of you. Not to mention many more brilliant projects which you can browse here. I intend to harass Justin on a regular basis until we work on something together.

And just in case that’s not enough cool stuff, here’s this week’s mystery link:

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That’s all for now! Back soon.