TEJI TUESDAYS 
Issue #009 · 26th Dec, 2023

Merry Christmas!

I hope you have been enjoying the festive season with the ones you love. Here is your weekly dose of TEJI, a weekly round up of what I’m pondering and exploring. Feel free to forward along to a friend if you think they might enjoy.

I Found Virgil’s old Blog

I love diving into my favourite creators histories and seeing early works from the people I look up to. Last week I stumbled upon an old blog that Virgil Abloh used to contribute to years before any of the success he found. The blog is called THE BRILLIANCE and there’s content on there dating all the way back to 2005. If you’re in anyway interested in design and culture go through a few pages and read through some of the posts written by Virgil. They’re often quite short but are an interesting insight into his lens into the world prior to finding success.

The Design Bible

While I’m on the design tangent I thought I might include another monumental resource from one of the most influential designers in the world, Massimo Vignelli. The man behind the iconic New York Subway design distilled his timeless design philosophy into a bible like book called The Vignelli Canon. The book details things like typography, layout, fonts, timelessness, the list goes on. This resource is an essential read for anyone interested in design. It’s only 50 pages so it doesn’t take long to get through.

What does Elden Ring & Golf have in common?

They’re both fucking hard. I just wrapped up a game of golf with my Dad and brother today for Boxing Day and found myself actually getting slightly better. From being completely terrible in the beginning to now being able to actually finish an entire round of golf. It reminds me of my latest video game purchase, Elden Ring. One of the hardest games I’ve ever played. The game has no difficulty settings and it requires an endless patience if you want to make any progress in the game. Which is where I draw this parallel between both Golf and Elden Ring where I can clearly understand how developing patience especially when you’re a complete beginner in any field is so important. Wether you want to get shredded for summer or you’re trying to learn a new language. Learning to accept the feeling of being a beginner is a crucial step in any journey. Not to mention there is extreme fulfilment going from terrible to slightly okay to even better. I urge you to learn try something new as we enter into 2024!

I’ve been building in the background

Over the past few weeks I’ve recently been trying to build things beyond just myself. The majority of the TEJI content on YouTube is mostly centred around me being the main character in a lot of these videos. However, lately I’ve been feeling the need to build something beyond me and my name. Something that has no association to me at all. Which is where I’d like to introduce BIFL.xyz an online platform built by the community for the community that aggregates the worlds most durable products that last a lifetime.

For context BIFL is short for Buy It For Life and it's a movement that's been popularised all over the planet by fellow humans who want to buy less junk by investing in goods of superior quality.

The Buy It For Life mentality champions the ethos of durability, quality and sustainability in consumer products. The BIFL movement is a protest against the disposable culture of the modern day. It advocates for goods designed to last a lifetime, supporting a more sustainable way of living with less waste and greater value.

I haven’t announced this platform anywhere else online but here and I urge anyone reading this to submit a project to our database for ranking on our leaderboards. The website is up and functioning but I still need to edit a few things prior to officially going live.

Also, over the past few weeks while I’ve been teaching myself how to code and build online applications I’ve also built two other apps:

1) DataMeter for YouTube - a simple chrome extension that estimates how much data a YouTube video will consume. I built this because the week I moved into my new place I didn’t have any WiFi and I kept chewing through all my mobile data while hot spotting my computer.

2) commonroom.chat - an ephemeral text based chatroom where you can chat to strangers in group chats. Inspired by the fleeting conversations I’d have in hostels during my recent travels around Africa.

Now, how good or successful these apps will become, I’m not sure and I don’t really care. All I care about is how I identified something I wanted to create, figured out how to do it and did it. Turning ideas into a reality is one of the favourite things for me to do.

Library Cards are Underrated

As mentioned earlier when I moved into my new place I had no WiFi for about a week. This forced me to goto my local library to get internet access. However, one thing I didn’t realise was how useful a library card is. Apart from the ability to borrow and rent any book you want. Your library card can actually replace a tonne of the subscriptions you’re paying for. This video here goes into detail about all the bonus services you get access to completely for free simply by owning a library card. I know these things sound out dated as fuck and you would probably say to me why are you telling me to get a library card, but I urge you to look into the video linked above. Libraries are such important places that are one of the last remaining ‘third places’ people can visit and hang out in between being either at work or home.

Thank you for reading this weeks newsletter! I wish you all the best for 2024 and am excited for what it has in store for all of us. Feel free to give me feedback on Twitter. What did you like? What do you want more of? What do you want less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @TEJITOPIA and put #TEJITUESDAYS at the end so I can find it.
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Hope everyone enjoys their week!
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Love
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TEJI (@tejitopia)

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