Links, page 17

Sarah Jeong, for The Verge:

Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours our parents spent keeping their address books up to date, knocking on doors to make sure everyone in the neighborhood was invited to the weekend BBQ, doing the rounds of phone calls with relatives, clipping out interesting newspaper articles and mailing them to a friend, putting together the cards for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and more. We don’t think about what it’s like to carefully file business cards alphabetically in a Rolodex. People spent a lot of time on these sorts of things, once, because the less of that work you did, the less of a social network you had.

Aaron Gustafson:

Last week, two events reminded us, yet again, of how right Douglas Crockford was when he declared the web “the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable.” Both were serious enough to take down an entire site—actually hundreds of entire sites, as it turned out. And both were avoidable.

Start simply. Code defensively. User-test the heck out of it. Recognize the chaos. Embrace it. And build resilient web experiences that will work no matter what the internet throws at them.

Mathew Dyason:

Celeste is a poignant exploration of facing anxiety, helped in large part by its deeply personal soundtrack by Lena Raine. Let’s look at how the music approaches the theme of anxiety, whether by inducing it, or turning stress into something more productive.

I often listen to film and video game soundtracks to help me focus while working (including the Celeste soundtrack!). This video gets to why that works so well. The idea that stress can be positive (eustress instead of the negative distress) is a powerful concept that I wasn’t aware of.

Frank Chimero:

I find that the more input I have in the content and strategy of the project, the less burden I place on the aesthetics. Perhaps this is because I believe the aesthetic of the work should be an extention of its objectives, so if you get the strategy right, the look follows. Since I like to tackle problems sideways, I must risk being plain and rely on direct visuals to keep the work comprehensible.

A compendium of tech-related laws, fallacies, and other wisdom.

Comprehensive.

Jason Pontin for Wired:

In a groundbreaking study, 102 healthy subjects and 48 responsive but brain-injured patients were “zapped and zipped” when conscious and unconscious, creating a value called a “perturbational complexity index” (PCI). Remarkably, across all 150 subjects, when the PCI value was above a certain value (0.31, is it happens) the person was conscious; if below, she or he was always unconscious.

Massimini’s test is important because it is the first real proof of integrated information theory (IIT), a theory of consciousness invented by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin.

IIT doesn’t try to answer the hard problem. Instead, it does something more subtle: It posits that consciousness is a feature of the universe, like gravity, and then tries to solve the pretty hard problem of determining which systems are conscious with a mathematical measurement of consciousness represented by the Greek letter phi (Φ).

Jen Simmons introduces the concept of Intrinsic Web Design. It’s a bold idea that brings together all recent advances in CSS layout. It really feels like a paradigm shift — I love it.

Jeremy Keith’s notes are a good companion to the slides, and code examples can be found in Jen’s CodePen.

Update: a video of the talk is now available.

Walter Chaw feeds into my obsession with this weird, wonderful film:

What’s impressive is Annihilation’s willingness and ability to evoke the soul-sickness that leads to great moments of art, great moments of self-destruction, and an equation of the two. Its heroes suffer from cinematic time: years can pass and outside the theatre it’s a mere two hours. They suffer, too, from this idea that you can enter into a space, experience something that is entirely alien, and then re-emerge struggling to articulate the crucible of your experience. How many versions of your old selves have you left behind in a museum, a theatre, a concert hall, a book? Is it a thousand? How many new versions have emerged into the uncanny bright of the day outside?

Mark Brown demystifies something I’ve long considered to be a dark art: puzzle game design.

How do you make something that leaves a player stumped and scratching their head, and then makes them feel very smart when they finally figure out the answer? What makes a puzzle too hard, Or too easy?

Michael Tucker:

The horror films that stick with us are often the ones that provide a unique twist on the characters’ perspective of the horror.

Get Out follows in this tradition, providing an unfamiliar perspective on the horror. But in this case, it’s not some exotic setting or a filmmaking gimmick. It’s simply that the protagonist is black.

The conversation around video game difficulty and accessibility is noticeably evolving in a positive way.

Frank Chimero:

At first I was bummed about my studio’s lack of visible progress, but then it hit me: what if I nailed it? Why change if it’s working? I’ve been able to approach a lot of different projects from many different angles, and I’m happy to report that I’ve gotten pretty good at a lot of it! Time and practice really do help.

Except with the websites. They separate themselves from the others, because I don’t feel much better at making them after 20 years. My knowledge and skills develop a bit, then things change, and half of what I know becomes dead weight. This hardly happens with any of the other work I do.

I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times. If you’ve been working in the technology industry a while, please tell me this sounds familiar to you.