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February 2019

  1. Managing Flow and Rhythm with CSS Custom Properties
    24ways.org

    Andy Bell suggests using CSS Custom Properties together with Heydon Pickering’s lobotomized owl selector to manage vertical spacing. It’s an elegant solution that works well with the cascade:

    .flow {
  --flow-space: 1em;
}  

.flow > * + * { 
  margin-top: var(--flow-space);
}

    I’ve been experimenting with old-school margin collapsing for vertical rhythm this past year, in Cobalt. I’m a proponent of spacing being an inherent property that exists by default instead of something that has to be explicitly added. But margin collapsing doesn’t really play well with Grid layout (until we get something like margin-trim), so I might give this method a try.

  3. Astronauts arriving on Mars won’t be able to walk. VR may save them
    wired.co.uk

    Katia Moskvitch:

    Astronauts returning to Earth after a long stint in space are so badly disorientated that they usually can’t walk properly for 24 hours or longer. Turns out human brains function differently in space and when an astronaut gets back, it takes his or her brain some time to re-train itself. Now Marissa Rosenberg, a neuroscientist at Nasa, plans to use virtual reality headsets as a tool to short-cut the training.

  4. Oscars 2019: ‘Burning’ Would Have Won
    gq.com

    Kristen Yoonsoo Kim investigates why Korean films keep getting snubbed at the Oscars:

    At the time, the submission of Age of Shadows made no sense to me. But in early 2017, a government blacklist created by Korea’s former, impeached president Park Geun-hye was uncovered. Thousands of Korean artists and cultural figures were banned from receiving government support, and one of the most prominent figures on that blacklist was The Handmaiden director Park Chan-wook, thought to be too leftist and thus a threat to the government’s agenda.

    The Handmaiden, Okja, and Burning are among my favorite films of the last few years. It’s a shame they’re not getting wider recognition.

  5. Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked
    technologyreview.com

    Mike Orcutt:

    A miner who somehow gains control of a majority of the network’s mining power can defraud other users by sending them payments and then creating an alternative version of the blockchain in which the payments never happened. This new version is called a fork. The attacker, who controls most of the mining power, can make the fork the authoritative version of the chain and proceed to spend the same cryptocurrency again.

    This sounds less like a hack and more like a consequence of “it’ll never happen” dismissal of possible abuses of the system as it’s designed.

  6. FOREVERYONE.NET
    foreveryone.net

    A great little documentary about the birth of the web, featuring Tim Berners-Lee front and center.

    FOREVERYONE.NET connects the future of the web with the little-known story of its birth. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet creating the world wide web.

  7. CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild
    worldwideweb.cern.ch

    Digital archeology — a working simulation of the first ever web browser:

    In December 1990, an application called WorldWideWeb was developed on a NeXT machine at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) just outside of Geneva. This program – WorldWideWeb — is the antecedent of most of what we consider or know of as “the web” today.

    In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the origins of this transformative technology.

    It’s amazing just how resilient and backwards-compatible HTML is. My site is already quite usable in WorldWideWeb, but now I’ll have to resist the urge to add some optimizations for 1990 web users.

  8. All the President’s Men ★★★★☆

    1976 film

    Watched 15 February 2019

    I wasn’t quite expecting this to be The Post 2: Watergate, but man this was different. In a sharp contrast to Spielberg’s heavy-handedness, Pakula didn’t make an easy movie to follow. It’s incredibly dense with information, seemingly disinterested in simplifying to get to the point. Not knowing much about Watergate beforehand, I wasn’t able to follow every fizzling plot thread, but the emotional through-line was so well put together that it never lost me. I was struck by how realistic it feels — the events unfolding naturally and the camera just happening to be rolling nearby, capturing the dizziness and unease, warts and all. Loved the split diopter shots very much.

    Sidenote: Now I get the final scene in The Post — it’s close to a shot-for-shot replica of this film’s opening. That only makes it more of a wink-wink tacky addition, though.

  9. The Post ★★★★☆

    2017 film

    Watched 14 February 2019

    Does an amazing job at projecting emotion and conveying historical heft, knowing full well how much the present day amplifies its message. It’s just a shame that Spielberg felt the need to go “belt and suspenders” and make sure to have some characters spell out the implications of what you’re seeing, just in case the extremely powerful acting and imagery don’t do the trick.

    Also: the Watergate bit at the end was just silly. It reminded me of the final warehouse shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark, except bad and tacked on.

  10. Burning ★★★★★

    2018 film

    Watched 12 February 2019

    Three people watch a sunset in rural South Korea.

    Wow. Whenever a filmmaker can find so much beauty and excitement in being deliberately mundane I sit up and pay attention.

    It’s slow. The smallest of details are just as carefully pondered as the grandiose gestures, all vividly blending together. The quiet moments compel the subjective experience of seeing rather than the objectivity of just looking, only to then make you question what you really saw. The mystery itself felt novel because it feeds off this slowness — instead of being built on plot twists or needless complexity, it’s challenging through imperfection by forcing you to see for yourself. Really great.

  12. ‘Apollo 11’ Review: Astonishing NASA Documentary Is One Giant Leap for Film Restoration
    indiewire.com

    David Ehrlich writes about the upcoming Apollo 11 documentary, made using recently discovered 65mm footage:

    It’s rare that picture quality can inspire a physical reaction, but the opening moments of “Apollo 11,” in which a NASA camera crew roams around the base of the rocket and spies on some of the people who’ve come to gawk at it from a beach across the water, are vivid enough to melt away the screen that stands between them. The clarity takes your breath away, and it does so in the blink of an eye; your body will react to it before your brain has time to process why, after a lifetime of casual interest, you’re suddenly overcome by the sheer enormity of what it meant to leave the Earth and land somewhere else.

    This looks absolutely incredible.

  14. Eighth Grade ★★★★☆

    2018 film

    Watched 2 February 2019

    A powerful reminder of the absurdities of being 14, and how becoming an adult seems to rob us of the ability to understand them. How strong and valid the experiences, yet how quickly we want to forget them, and grow up, because that’s the only escape. I can’t think of any other film that captures that feeling so well, both the good and bad of it.

    The insight into how kids deal with recent technology and social media was fascinating to me as well — the script seems intent on documenting what that’s like, with genuine earnestness. Parts that initially read as comedic exaggeration are, in retrospect, no stranger than reality. Things have changed a lot since I was 14, but somehow stayed the same. I think the kids will be alright.

  17. How do you figure?
    scottohara.me

    A deep dive into figure accessibility from Scott O’Hara:

    A figcaption is meant to provide a caption or summary to a figure, relating it back to the document the figure is contained within, or conveying additional information that may not be directly apparent from reviewing the figure itself.

    If an image is given an empty alt, then the figcaption is in effect describing nothing. And that doesn’t make much sense, does it?

  18. How Much of the Internet Is Fake?
    nymag.com

    Max Read:

    Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

  19. Deep dive CSS: font metrics, line-height and vertical-align
    iamvdo.me

    Vincent De Oliveira:

    Line-height and vertical-align are simple CSS properties. So simple that most of us are convinced to fully understand how they work and how to use them. But it’s not. They really are complex, maybe the hardest ones, as they have a major role in the creation of one of the less-known feature of CSS: inline formatting context.

    No kidding, this stuff is complex.

  20. Openness and Longevity
    garrettdimon.com

    Garrett Dimon:

    If you’ve spent any significant time on the web, you can likely feel how a website is built from the moment you open a page. Does it load quickly? Is anything broken? Does it work well with your password manager? Is it readable? You likely make a dozen judgments in a split second.

    On the other hand, you know the moment you open a site that was built well. Everything just works. The people who built it took care with their markup and CSS to take full advantage of the power and built-in features of those languages.

    These differences aren’t arbitrary. They’re the difference between a team that embraces and understands the web with all of its quirks and a team that scoffs at it and its constraints. But when constraints disappear, so does consideration. Forward progress is important, but we should take more time to consider the digital detritus that’s left behind. Bloated web pages. Sites that barely load.