Flicktion is one of my favourite things right now

Andrew Losowsky is releasing a series of pictures of Florentine doorbells on Flickr, each accompanied by a new short fiction. It is really quite wonderful. Witness:

Via Dell'Ariento, 11
Originally uploaded by andrewlos.

The inevitable conclusion, however, occurred in Spring 1988. The hidden shoeboxes were suddenly raided empty. The culprits: children, stirred into a pre-Pokémon frenzy by a popular craze to collect the entire town. The game was created, it is thought, in a small town in Eastern Tuscany.

Soon, stockbrokers' private lines were exchanged in the playground for the fax numbers of academics. Games of Happy Families became Happy Companies. Cards with gold lettering were worth two of cheap white card (even those unmarked by grubby fingers). The uniqueness of design meant scarcity - and that was everything in the school yard.

Parents were at first amused by this. But then they became outraged as they realised that they had been traded by their own children as a set, along with their spouses and neighbours, in exchange for a single plumber with a fetching pipe design on the back.

Other favourite web destinations, in Flickr and beyond: wastedpapiers, origamikid and This isn't London