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July 2019

  1. Self-Care for Men
    newyorker.com

    Megan Amram:

    Men and women have completely different needs in the skin department. While a woman’s skin is soft like a dying flower and barely strong enough to keep her insides in, a man’s skin is thick like the door to a safe. We men need makeup that covers our hungry-boy blemishes and larger-than-average pores. There’s a reason they call those sewer things manhole covers—it’s because they’re thick like a man and big enough to cover a man’s holes (“pores”)!

  3. Chinese vertical dramas made for phone viewing show the future of mobile video
    thenextweb.com

    Henry Sung:

    What’s remarkable about vertical drama is that it’s not just any scripted content cropped for a vertical aspect ratio. These shows are specifically imagined for the mobile screen from the ground up. This is evident in three features they all share.

    I am fascinated by vertical video — it feels like a completely different medium. To me, horizontal video always represents a very deliberate choice to “make a video.” Vertical video is much more spontaneous, like a long photo that lives on your phone.

    Seeing the vertical format used for more serious scripted stuff is still uncanny, but I suspect there’s a lot to explore there.

  6. Alita: Battle Angel ★★★★☆

    2019 film

    Watched 24 July 2019

    • There are many cool robots and body parts flying around.
    • Cristoph Waltz was terribly miscast and is the least believable character in the movie.
    • I wish the city itself had gotten more attention from the art department, but I guess the robots are what matters the most.
    • The robots are indeed very cool and they fight a lot, but not too much, which is perfect.

    A solid follow-up to the other two good anime-with-real-people movies, Speed Racer and Pacific Rim. More, please.

  7. Intrinsically Responsive CSS Grid with minmax() and min()
    evanminto.com

    Evan Minto:

    min() accepts one or more values and returns the smallest value. The magic of the function is that, just like calc(), the arguments can use different units, which allows us to return values that change dynamically based on context.

    min() is one of three new comparison functions introduced as part of the CSS Values and Units Module Level 4. There’s also max(), which naturally does the inverse of min(). Finally clamp() is a convenience function that applies both a minimum and a maximum to a single value.

    This is brilliant and I can’t wait until I can change my @supports queries from display: grid to min().

  8. What I Like About Vue
    daverupert.com

    Dave Rupert:

    Upgrading legacy applications was one of the usecases Vue was designed around. It means that developers can piecemeal upgrade bits of an application as necessary.

    In my experience Angular, React, and a lot of other frameworks ultimately require you to go all in early and establish a large toolchain around these frameworks. Angular prescribes a lot with its amazing CLI. React on the other hand doesn’t prescribe anything, but requires you to self-assemble and wield a somewhat complex toolchain. But as Evan put it in his JSConf Asia talk, Vue sits in the middle of the “Cathedral and the Bazaar”. Vue has useful tooling, but it’s all optional and you can use only what you need. In some ways, Vue’s grafting capabilities really does make it seem like a jQuery replacement you can drop in to give your components superpowers as needed.

  10. How to Kill IE11 - What the Deaths of IE6 and IE8 Tell Us About Killing IE
    mike.sherov.com

    Mike Sherov:

    In order to understand how best to kill IE11, we need to look back to how 2 previous versions of IE met their fate: IE6 and IE8. By examining the strategies employed to kill browsers, we can look at current efforts to sunset IE11. We can predict and evangelize for what may ultimately do it in, finally freeing the JS community from the burden of ES5.

    Interesting historical analysis but I think that attempting to “kill” browsers is a misguided goal. I think the right way to move forward here is Oliver Williams’ idea of applying the “mustard cut” technique to all versions of Internet Explorer and serving those users just barebones (but useful) HTML and CSS.

  11. The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game ★★★★☆

    2018 video game

    Played 15 July 2019 on Mac

    A charming little game that got me to smile a lot for the duration of a well-spent hour.

  13. Jony Ive’s Fragmented Legacy: Unreliable, Unrepairable, Beautiful Gadgets
    ifixit.com

    Kyle Wiens makes a great point:

    [Dieter] Rams loves durable products that are environmentally friendly. That’s one of his 10 principles for good design: “Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment.” But Ive has never publicly discussed the dissonance between his inspiration and Apple’s disposable, glued-together products.

    When a single broken key requires replacing a laptop’s entire top case, there is no denying that Apple has given too little consideration to the durability of its products.

    I’m extremely curious to find out how (if?) Apple’s design philosophy will change with Ive gone.

  15. Ebert’s Walk of Fame remarks
    rogerebert.com

    Thanks Todd Vaziri for tweeting about this great Roger Ebert quote that I had forgotten about:

    Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else’s life for a while. I can walk in somebody else’s shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

  17. We Are Tenants on Our Own Devices
    wired.com

    Zeynep Tufekci is worried about what ownership means for always-connected products:

    Today, we may think we own things because we paid for them and brought them home, but as long as they run software or have digital connectivity, the sellers continue to have control over the product. We are renters of our own objects, there by the grace of the true owner.

    I worry about this a lot, maybe too much. Unless I don’t have a choice, I avoid any device that superflously requires an internet connection (or worse, a smartphone app) like the plague.

  18. Hollow Knight ★★★★★

    2017 video game

    Played 21 June – 1 July 2019 on Nintendo Switch

    The Knight visits the Grubfather, who is surrounded by his happy family of Grubs.

    I just knew that as soon as I booted this game for the first time, I would fall down the rabbit hole and be completely transfixed. And so it happened. One of the most rewarding exploration games I have ever played.

  19. Barry, Season 1 ★★★★☆

    2018 TV show

    Watched 29 June 2019

    I started off a bit disappointed, because this seemed like little more than a duller version of Patriot; the writing felt meandering, the humor more surface-level, never as witty or pithy. Turned out I was looking at it wrong: it’s more of a drama than I’d figured from the premise, with the comedy falling a bit further into the background than it does in Patriot. It’s its own thing, delicately balanced, and a few episodes in it really clicked.