You don't live in a castle, chief
Home-Goods Recon Spectacular 2026 "Neighborliness is Swag" Edition
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Great news — today we’re releasing the latest edition of our Legendary Home Goods Guide, featuring an elite abundance of intel on very cool new & vintage…
lamps
ceramics
house numbers
rugs
paper-towel holders
wall hooks
shower curtains
chairs
shelves
storage
dish-drying racks
blankets
cutlery
and more gems to make the place you live truly “beautiful & blessed.”
On the subject of truly beautiful & blessed homes, though, it’s important to situate this week’s crib-enswaggening recon within a broader context.
Because, unless you’re a hinterland-dwelling Spyfriend (respect) — one of our off-the-grid readers who enjoys the sletter via a combination solar-powered/wood-fired broadband router, maybe — your home likely sits in a neighborhood.
And neighborhoods are very tight, to the degree that, if someone asked us, “Erin and Jonah, when you cut through all the idiot chatter of these topsy-turvy modern times, what is the underlying secret to true swag?” we’d be hard pressed to give you a better, more eternally resonant, and more concise answer than neighborliness.
Being neighborly takes many forms. And crucially, most of these forms involve leaving your home and being kind, helpful & chill to others. A truly beautiful & blessed neighborhood, after all, isn’t some wack agglomeration of little castles, gated off from the rest of the world, moated off even from one another, and inhabited by would-be sovereigns who’ve been warped by their mistrust and fear of the wider world…
No! A beautiful & blessed neighborhood is an organism… an ecosystem… a set of mutually enriching interpersonal and interspecies moral obligations, mapped across some of the most personal spaces imaginable. You might go outside and feed crows some peanuts every morning. You might join striking nurses on a picket line. You might cop from the local bookshop and hardware store instead of Am*zon. You might generate a ton of noise and otherwise make yourself extremely annoying (in a based and cool way) when masked losers arrive in town and try to disappear people from your community. And so on.
What does all that have to do with making your spot extremely pleasant and cool-looking with the help of Blackbird Spyplane Home Goods Intel? Everything, obviously.
Today we’re kicking things off with handy and ingenious intel for making the exterior of your home pleasant, charming and fire, not just for you but for everyone else in the neighborhood, whether it’s a place you own or a place you rent. Think of it as “blessed holistic curb appeal.”
Then we are blurring the line between exterior and interior with intel for lighting the cribbo beautifully. It’s borderline magical how an A+ lamp illuminating an otherwise B+ room will turn it into an A+ room, and the glow that emanates from a well-lit home out to the neighborhood is itself an ineffable gift to the community, too.
From there, we’re focusing squarely on elements of Mach 3+ interiors. These are an asset to you and the community as well, because living in a nice place gives you a foundation of joy & sauce to bring with you in your worldly travels, and you may well find yourself inviting homies and/or hotties over for breaking-bread purposes & more romantic purposes, and these guests will enjoy the swaggy environs, too.
FYI all of our previous home-goods guides & home-décor recon can be found in one place here.
Let’s get to it— !