Letra Studio

Dune ★★★

2026-03-28T02:21:46+00:00

Watched 27 March 2026, rated 3 out of 5 stars

I always wondered how this movie managed to fit the whole book into little more than two hours. Turns out it never could. Scenes go by so quickly and disjointedly that it feels more like watching a weird music video that’s left up to interpretation. If you take away all the dialogue and leave only the sound effects and Toto score, it probably works very nicely as a Heavy Metal-style psychedelic rock opera trip.

I didn’t think it was possible, but the ASMR whispers of characters’ thoughts managed to bring my least favorite aspect of Herbert’s writing to the big screen.

It’s fascinating how faithful to the original book it can get. Lynch was seemingly uninterested in, or unable to, bring his own flavor to the story, only really imprinting his personality on the aesthetics. And it seems to me like Lynch’s aesthetics turn really goofy when he is using them to illustrate a story that’s so clearly not his own.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Alien Earth, Season 1 ★★★★

2025-09-30T13:08:40+01:00

Watched 16 August – 24 September 2025, rated 4 out of 5 stars

With shows of this caliber taking several years of production time between seasons, who thought it was a good idea to provide absolutely zero plot resolution with the finale?

Some great episodes, but I’m already annoyed that I’ll probably have to rewatch this season in 2027.

Sorcerer ★★★★★

2025-08-31T15:12:18+01:00

Watched 28 August 2025, rated 5 out of 5 stars

couldn’t wait for the movie to end so i could open my internet browser and type in “sorcerer 1977 how did they do that”

Also posted on Letterboxd

Friendship ★★★★

2025-08-31T15:08:02+01:00

Watched 29 August 2025, rated 4 out of 5 stars

i always wanted a full episode-length ITYSL sketch, but never thought feature-length could actually work. it did work, but felt a bit too constrained by the realities of Big Movie. giving myself galaxy brain by imagining this as a 20 minute ITYSL skit that never lets you catch your breath

Also posted on Letterboxd

The Empty Man ★★★

2025-08-31T14:48:57+01:00

Watched 31 August 2025, rated 3 out of 5 stars

not very relatable when the protagonist blows on a bottle to summon the empty man. highly relatable when the protagonist checks what the empty man is about on wikipedia

Also posted on Letterboxd

Weapons ★★★

2025-08-30T16:54:41+01:00

Watched 30 August 2025, rated 3 out of 5 stars

i don’t like playing armchair casting director but i feel pretty strongly that Tim Robinson would have been a good choice here

Also posted on Letterboxd

Companion ★★

2025-08-12T19:52:14+01:00

Watched 12 August 2025, rated 2 out of 5 stars

has nothing new to add in terms of sci-fi, lazily adding an iphone app on top of all the basic robot tropes. barely qualifies for the horror or comedy tags. could have been a fun Love, Death and Robots short

Also posted on Letterboxd

Pacific Rim ★★★★★

2025-08-08T23:42:23+01:00

Rewatched 8 August 2025, rated 5 out of 5 stars

ELBOW ROCKET

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Century-Scale Storage

2025-07-04T12:07:41+01:00

Maxwell Neely-Cohen:

We are on the brink of a dark age, or have already entered one. The scale of art, music, and literature being lost each day as the World Wide Web shifts and degenerates represents the biggest loss of human cultural production since World War II. My generation was continuously warned by teachers, parents, and authority figures that we should be careful online because the internet is written in ink, and yet it turned out to be the exact opposite. As writer and researcher Kevin T. Baker remarked, “On the internet, Alexandria burns daily.”

Link: lil.law.harvard.edu

Via adactio.com

Alien: Romulus ★★★★

2025-04-12T16:33:57+01:00

Watched 12 April 2025, rated 4 out of 5 stars

This review contains spoilers.

Sure, it has some issues, but what can I say, I’m a sucker for spaceships with CRT monitors and a good acid vagina humomorph baby coming of age story

Also posted on Letterboxd

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris ★★★

2025-01-22T14:33:43+00:00

Watched 21 January 2025, rated 3 out of 5 stars

I would have been way more excited about this movie from the get go if only the marketing mentioned why Mrs. Harris goes to Paris (obviously because of her ADHD)

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: In defense of an old pixel

2024-07-01T14:17:32+01:00

Wonderful talk about pixel fonts by Marcin Wichary.

Link: youtube.com

Via @jenn

Metroid Dread ★★★★

2024-06-29T18:12:58+01:00

Played 6–29 June 2024 on Nintendo Switch, rated 4 out of 5 stars

Direct and engaging, with a nice digestible length. But I can’t help but feel like the Metroid formula needs to shed some legacy baggage.

Leave the World Behind ★★★

2024-02-01T20:50:01+00:00

Watched 1 February 2024, rated 3 out of 5 stars

[ominous music playing]

🍿

Also posted on Letterboxd

Decision to Leave ★★★★

2023-11-21T23:57:09+00:00

Watched 21 November 2023, rated 4 out of 5 stars

A beautiful puzzle box. Pieces fitting together so satisfyingly, I could practically hear the clicking sounds.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ★★★★

2023-05-06T22:00:56+01:00

Watched 6 May 2023, rated 4 out of 5 stars

I really wish this series could just be its own thing outside the “marvel” “universe”

Also posted on Letterboxd

65 ★★

2023-04-23T00:03:09+01:00

Watched 22 April 2023, rated 2 out of 5 stars

Creative team really should have given more control to whoever pitched “t-rex with big burly arms”

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’

2023-04-02T17:28:59+01:00

Taylor Lorenz:

When the pandemic broke out, people on TikTok and other apps began referring to it as the “Backstreet Boys reunion tour” or calling it the “panini” or “panda express” as platforms down-ranked videos mentioning the pandemic by name in an effort to combat misinformation. When young people began to discuss struggling with mental health, they talked about “becoming unalive” in order to have frank conversations about suicide without algorithmic punishment. Sex workers, who have long been censored by moderation systems, refer to themselves on TikTok as “accountants” and use the corn emoji as a substitute for the word “porn.”

“One, it doesn’t actually work,” she said. “The people using platforms to organize real harm are pretty good at figuring out how to get around these systems. And two, it leads to collateral damage of literal speech.” Attempting to regulate human speech at a scale of billions of people in dozens of different languages and trying to contend with things such as humor, sarcasm, local context and slang can’t be done by simply down-ranking certain words, Greer argues.

Link: washingtonpost.com

Link: The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

2023-02-26T03:00:44+00:00

Andy Greenberg:

Hutchins hadn’t found the malware’s command-and-control address. He’d found its kill switch. The domain he’d registered was a way to simply, instantly turn off WannaCry’s mayhem around the world. It was as if he had fired two proton torpedoes through the Death Star’s exhaust port and into its reactor core, blown it up, and saved the galaxy, all without understanding what he was doing or even noticing the explosion for three and a half hours.

Link: wired.com

Via waxy.org

Andor, Season 1 ★★★★★

2022-12-31T19:24:46+00:00

Watched 11–28 December 2022, rated 5 out of 5 stars

Star Wars: we live in a society
Me: omg so true!!

Ponyo ★★★★★

2022-12-04T03:19:17+00:00

Rewatched 3 December 2022, rated 5 out of 5 stars

Ponyo fills my heart. It overflows.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Don’t Worry Darling ★★

2022-11-02T02:18:08+00:00

Watched 1 November 2022, rated 2 out of 5 stars

Top 50 Flashiest Visual Tricks to Delay Your Mystery Movie Plot Twist as Much as Possible

Also posted on Letterboxd

Thor: Love and Thunder ★★

2022-09-14T02:47:15+01:00

Watched 13 September 2022, rated 2 out of 5 stars

Cringe.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Top Gun: Maverick ★★★★★

2022-05-29T00:41:04+01:00

Watched 28 May 2022, rated 5 out of 5 stars

The original may be aesthetically superior, with those citric pink sunsets, extended plane porn montages, and glamorously lit sweaty bodies, but this one delivers on thrills and excitement on a much more real and visceral level — and they kept Danger Zone!

Top Gun is a postcard. Maverick is being there.

Also posted on Letterboxd

After Yang ★★★★★

2022-03-10T01:19:34+00:00

Watched 9 March 2022, rated 5 out of 5 stars

I really want to follow Yang on Instagram and cry at his intensely beautiful and melancholy Live Photos.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Uncut Gems ★★★★★

2022-02-20T01:35:39+00:00

Rewatched 19 February 2022, rated 5 out of 5 stars

Gets better every time.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Nightmare Alley ★★★★

2022-02-14T01:47:10+00:00

Watched 13 February 2022, rated 4 out of 5 stars

The tone is pitch-perfect — the aesthetic, the performances, down to how karmically predictable some of the twists are. Love all the little props, such delicate artefacts, all feeling like they could tell a whole story. I couldn’t stop thinking of Ricky Jay, and now I find myself wishing for a Del Toro film about him. Or maybe just the objects he left behind.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Yellowjackets, Season 1 ★★★★

2022-01-27T23:53:57+00:00

Watched 22–26 January 2022, rated 4 out of 5 stars

Brings me back to when TV shows didn’t take themselves super seriously and writers had to include mini cliffhangers before commercial breaks so you wouldn’t change the channel. I love the bits where you can see the seams, like when characters are driving and you can tell that the road projection framerate stutters because it doesn’t match the camera. If only people weren’t scared of pillarboxing this show could have been shot in 4:3 and look even cooler.

Station Eleven ★★★★★

2022-01-14T22:36:41+00:00

Watched 21 December 2021 – 14 January 2022, rated 5 out of 5 stars

A miracle unfolding in slow motion. Pure, clear, and brimming with understanding. Every episode destroying me and building me back up, each time a different person. I wasn’t ready.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Star Wars: Visions

2022-01-03T09:56:45+00:00

Watched 17 December 2021 – 3 January 2022

Cool animation, but the presence of lightsabers in every single episode reveals a frustrating lack of imagination.

Finch ★★★★

2021-11-15T01:08:48+00:00

Watched 14 November 2021, rated 4 out of 5 stars

For nearly two hours, the entire world disappeared and I wanted nothing more than to see a dog trust a robot.

Also posted on Letterboxd

The Voyeurs ★★★

2021-10-25T01:06:26+01:00

Watched 24 October 2021, rated 3 out of 5 stars

I couldn’t possibly predict twists this dumb, and that just made them all the more effective. Hats off to this movie!

Also posted on Letterboxd

Nobody ★★★★

2021-09-19T22:12:49+01:00

Watched 19 September 2021, rated 4 out of 5 stars

John Wick has been losing its way but this movie knows what it’s all about. A blur of a 90-minute punch in the face — just enough to put you in the hospital, not enough to kill you of overstimulation.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: 25 Edits That Define the Modern Internet Video

2021-09-19T15:10:14+01:00

Vulture:

Suddenly, anybody could shoot and edit a video, building the vocabulary of what that could look like: transition videos, lip syncs, and green-screen-driven storytelling began to cohere as distinct subgenres. That’s only accelerated in the age of TikTok, an app that offers more and easier editing tools for users than any that came before it.

Online video is an inherently communal form; it’s defined by thousands of people iterating on the same idea. Every once in a while, though, there’s a leap forward. Every video on this list represents an evolution in the form or exemplifies a particularly influential editing style — whether the creator was one of the first to attempt it, or just pulled off a jaw-dropping editing feat all their own.

Link: vulture.com

Via waxy.org

Link: Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS

2021-09-14T22:06:58+01:00

Josh Comeau:

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to transform typical box-shadows into beautiful, life-like ones.

Link: joshwcomeau.com

Via adactio.com

Link: Why are hyperlinks blue?

2021-09-01T03:32:35+01:00

Elise Blanchard:

To truly understand the origin and evolution of hyperlinks though, I took a journey through technology history and interfaces to explore how links were handled before color monitors, and how interfaces and hyperlinks rapidly evolved once color became an option.

Link: blog.mozilla.org

Via adactio.com

Stowaway

2021-08-20T04:08:25+01:00

Watched 19 August 2021

I learned that Toni Collette is australian in real life. Next: do solar storms actually look like that? This movie is great at making me want to check Wikipedia.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time

2021-08-12T23:53:07+01:00

Watched 12 August 2021

Release, at last.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Animal Crossing: New Horizons ★★★★★

2021-08-07T00:37:30+01:00

Played 20 March 2020 – 27 April 2021 on Nintendo Switch, rated 5 out of 5 stars

Just… so many good feelings from this game. I’ll cherish it forever.

For All Mankind, Season 2 ★★★★

2021-04-24T10:58:02+01:00

Watched 22–24 April 2021, rated 4 out of 5 stars

Once again this show attempts to strike a good balance between People Drama and Society Drama, but this season’s timeskip tilted the scales and made it clear that the long game is always going to be about the societal outcomes first. Character moments are less emotionally effective as a result, but boy is the spectacle of the alternate timeline geopolitics worth the tradeoff. Season 1 got me invested. But now I’m excited.

For All Mankind, Season 1 ★★★★

2021-04-23T02:43:06+01:00

Watched 19–22 April 2021, rated 4 out of 5 stars

I’m super into this space trauma and societal progress nerdfest.

It may sometimes feel predictable and clichéd but I just want to engross myself in this alternate history, and the level of realism is more than good enough to support that by my standards.

The Year Earth Changed

2021-04-21T20:12:44+01:00

Watched 21 April 2021

Like leafing through a big coffee table book. Not particularly insightful, but very nice pictures.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Lena @ Things of Interest

2021-04-16T15:07:11+01:00

This terrific short story by qntm contemplates the hellish potential consequences of brain uploading, in the form of a typically impassive Wikipedia entry:

MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031.

Link: qntm.org

Via @JohnDiesattheEn

Godzilla: King of the Monsters ★★

2021-04-09T07:14:25+01:00

Rewatched 8 April 2021, rated 2 out of 5 stars

The uncanny valley between the ponderous Godzilla 2014 and the bombastically campy Godzilla vs. Kong. I’m sorry but if you want to make a serious movie you have to stick to the serious monsters, you can’t put on the three-headed electric dragon and big moth. Pokémon aren’t scary.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Microbes Don’t Actually Look Like Anything

2021-04-07T21:13:50+01:00

Found this wonderful YouTube channel on Kottke.org. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting it to be so thought-provoking:

Our brains play tricks on us to make us believe the world looks one way, but the world looks different at night than in the day, and both of those things have more to do with the physiology of our eyes and brains than with objective reality. Asking what a microbe actually looks like is, to some extent, forcing our own experience onto something that is beyond it.

If, like me, you somehow recognize the narrator’s voice, that’s because it’s Hank Green (!).

Link: youtube.com

Via kottke.org

Godzilla vs. Kong ★★★★

2021-04-01T03:19:33+01:00

Watched 31 March 2021, rated 4 out of 5 stars

Silly as heck. No hesitation. This movie delivers.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Metric Paper & Everything in the Universe

2021-03-27T12:33:57+00:00

CGP Grey’s take on Powers of Ten is very beautiful and evocative and terrifying.

Link: youtube.com

The Expanse, Season 5 ★★★★★

2021-02-03T12:15:11+00:00

Watched 16 December 2020 – 3 February 2021, rated 5 out of 5 stars

This series has built so much, and gone so far. The transition from “Game of Thrones in space” to one of the most poignant human dramas in science fiction has been a true joy to witness.

The X Files ★★★

2021-01-14T23:40:38+00:00

Rewatched 14 January 2021, rated 3 out of 5 stars

More exciting than I remembered, but still disappointing and, at best, inessential. It tries too hard, and also not hard enough. Like most TV-to-film adaptations, the texture feels wrong. Character-wise, the plot isn’t much more than condensed retreading of old ground. And worst of all, it shows too much! It’s certainly a big-screen adventure, but the desire for one-upmanship has the side effect of making the world, the conspiracies, and even the aliens seem small and shallow.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Newsletters

2021-01-04T19:45:42+00:00

Robin Rendle:

It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process.

The web today is built for apps—and I think we need to take it back.

Link: robinrendle.com

Drill Dozer ★★★

2020-10-19T06:05:20+01:00

Played 4 September – 19 October 2020 on Game Boy Advance, rated 3 out of 5 stars

There’s some interesting ideas and clever mechanics here, but I could never get past the clunky, sluggish controls. Movement expressiveness is limited to such a degree that neither platforming nor combat feel good.

Link: Nine Scenes From the Recently Discovered Cut of Flubber Where Flubber Has Bones

2020-10-17T13:33:29+01:00

Important content.

Link: mcsweeneys.net

Link: Workers Durable Objects Beta: A New Approach to Stateful Serverless

2020-09-30T09:20:38+01:00

Super interesting new stuff from Cloudflare:

Durable Objects provide a truly serverless approach to storage and state: consistent, low-latency, distributed, yet effortless to maintain and scale. They also provide an easy way to coordinate between clients, whether it be users in a particular chat room, editors of a particular document, or IoT devices in a particular smart home. Durable Objects are the missing piece in the Workers stack that makes it possible for whole applications to run entirely on the edge, with no centralized “origin” server at all.

Link: blog.cloudflare.com

Via @lorenb

Good Sudoku ★★★★

2020-09-27T18:10:47+01:00

Played 23 July – 27 September 2020 on iPhone, rated 4 out of 5 stars

In just a few short weeks, this game took me from sudoku dilettante to completing Sunday “Pro 💀” puzzles in 20 minutes without hints (if I’m feeling patient enough). Good Sudoku has taught me more about sudoku than I ever thought I’d want to learn.

Jan Willem Nijman said it best:

This game is incredibly cyberpunk, like you just slam a new ai deck into your neocortex to kick ass at sudoku.

Link: Google blew a ten-year lead.

2020-09-24T18:13:31+01:00

Will Schreiber:

I haven’t installed MSFT Office on a machine since 2009. Sheets and Docs have been good enough for me. The theoretical unlimited computing power and collaboration features meant Google Docs was better than Office (and free!).

Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software.

Docs and Sheets haven’t changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated. Sheets freezes up. I can’t easily interact with a Sheets API (I’ve tried!). Docs still shows page breaks by default! WTF!

Link: secondbreakfast.co

Via @pierce

Link: What is the Value of Browser Diversity?

2020-09-24T00:49:35+01:00

Dave Rupert:

I’ve thought about these questions for over a year and narrowed my feelings of browser diversity down to two major value propositions:

Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow

Browser diversity fosters consensus and cooperation over corporate rule

They are similar, but slightly different concepts for me.

Link: daverupert.com

The Finest Hours ★★

2020-09-06T13:55:19+01:00

Watched 3 September 2020, rated 2 out of 5 stars

Gotta get over the bar

Also posted on Letterboxd

Tenet ★★★

2020-08-27T03:14:17+01:00

Watched 26 August 2020, rated 3 out of 5 stars

A very cool sensorial experience, but emotionally shallow. It tries, but there’s too much time bullshit for character motivations and plot structure to survive. A movie made for endless YouTube explainers.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

2020-08-16T08:18:24+01:00

George Cave:

Piloting an ocean exploration ship or Martian research shuttle is serious business. Let’s hope the control panel is up to scratch. Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2x2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world.

These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.

Welcome to the world of LEGO UX design.

Link: designedbycave.co.uk

Via @helvetica

Link: Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google

2020-08-16T08:12:26+01:00

Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin look into how Google search gives preferential treatment to Google’s own results:

In Google’s early years, users would type in a query and get back a page of 10 “blue links” that led to different websites. “We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible,” co-founder Larry Page said in 2004.

Today, Google often considers that “right place” to be Google, an investigation by The Markup has found.

We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls “direct answers,” which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.

When we examined the top 15 percent of the page, the equivalent of the first screen on an iPhone X, that figure jumped to 63 percent. For one in five searches in our sample, links to external websites did not appear on the first screen at all.

Link: themarkup.org

2020-07-24T04:20:00+01:00

I usually only keep one game on my phone at a time. More often than not, they’re @helvetica games. Now it’s gonna be Good Sudoku’s turn for a long while.

𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗱𝗼𝗸𝘂 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘄!

A beautiful & intuitive Sudoku including an AI genius whose only mission is to help you learn and love this classic game.

Site: playgoodsudoku.com

Appstore: apps.apple.com/us/app/id1489118195

~~
pic.twitter.com/anKY6D9SeW
— Zach Gage (@helvetica) July 23, 2020

Also posted on Twitter

Rick and Morty, Season 4 ★★★

2020-06-09T01:56:23+01:00

Watched 11 November 2019 – 2 June 2020, rated 3 out of 5 stars

My diagnosis: Rick and Morty has gone too meta. I want to laugh because the show is funny, not because the writers are clever.

Underwater ★★★

2020-05-11T04:33:31+01:00

Watched 11 May 2020, rated 3 out of 5 stars

Solid genre entertainment. Not much more than what I expected, but it’s well done, straightforward, looked cool. 90 minutes club!

Kirsten Stewart has the best shaky hands I’ve ever seen on film. This movie is worth watching for her performance alone. The rest of the cast was… okay.

In the end I was left with some questions: Was this at some point meant to be a Cloverfield sequel? Why does it look like it was edited for commercial breaks? Were the voice-overs really necessary? Was the girlboss-beat-drop end credits song picked by a focus group?

Also posted on Letterboxd

Lumines Remastered ★★★

2020-03-19T10:57:08+00:00

Played 23 December 2019 – 15 January 2020 on Nintendo Switch, rated 3 out of 5 stars

It’s cool, but I’d rather just play Tetris.

Link: Don’t forget: disasters and crises bring out the best in people

2020-03-14T07:41:29+00:00

Some welcome positivity from Rutger Bregman:

For every antisocial jerk out there, there are thousands of doctors, cleaners and nurses working around the clock on our behalf. For every panicky hoarder shoving entire supermarket shelves into their cart, there are 10,000 people doing their best to prevent the virus from spreading further. In actual fact, we’re now seeing reports from China and Italy about how the crisis is bringing people closer together.

Link: thecorrespondent.com

Link: Reply All #158: The Case of the Missing Hit

2020-03-12T02:19:24+00:00

A man in California is haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth. He can remember the lyrics and the melody. But the song itself has vanished, completely scrubbed from the internet.

This is a perfect podcast episode, and now I really miss Mystery Show.

Link: gimletmedia.com

Via @kottke

The Outsider, Season 1 ★★★

2020-03-11T19:10:15+00:00

Watched 13 January – 9 March 2020, rated 3 out of 5 stars

First half was great: intriguing mystery and plot developments, great characters. Then the mystery is completely resolved, and the second half is mostly seeing the characters catch up with what the audience already knows and doing lots of talking in cars. It ended with a whimper, and I was disappointed.

Picross S ★★★

2020-03-11T18:15:18+00:00

Played 12 January – 11 March 2020 on Nintendo Switch, rated 3 out of 5 stars

I love me some Picross, but they really phoned it in with the UI and controls in this one. No touchscreen support and no option to use the right stick means you can never really play one-handed, and that’s just incredibly frustrating for such a simple game.

Celeste: Farewell ★★★★★

2020-03-10T15:59:00+00:00

Played 9 September – 23 December 2019 on Nintendo Switch, rated 5 out of 5 stars

Not many games have rewarded me with such a deep sense of accomplishment. Celeste gives me life.

Wonder Woman ★★

2020-03-08T18:58:13+00:00

Watched 8 March 2020, rated 2 out of 5 stars

I’m glad women can use violence for good too, but this movie is… kinda basic? It’s as if they couldn’t get approval for “girl power” without putting in some bad tropes and clichés to balance it out. Yes, representation matters, but it depresses me that this is what we’re settling for as progress. Excusing it as an escapist piece of pulpy action would be fine, but I don’t think it’s very good at that, either.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Behind the Soundtrack: ‘Uncut Gems’ with Daniel Lopatin

2020-03-03T09:00:53+00:00

Alongside filmmaker Josh Safdie, composer Daniel Lopatin sat down with us to detail the creative discoveries behind his synth-packed score for ‘Uncut Gems.’

The score is such a big part of the cosmic magic in Uncut Gems, and this short documentary does a great job at exploring some of its highlights in detail.

Link: youtube.com

Link: Casino Royale — How Action Reveals Character

2020-03-03T08:50:18+00:00

Lessons from the Screeplay:

An action scene, just like any other scene, should help expose a character’s true self. But in the case of “Casino Royale,” the opening action sequence needed to do even more than that. It needed to introduce the world to a whole new James Bond.

So today, I want to dissect the film’s freerunning chase sequence to see how it uses action to develop the characters, to examine how it forces the protagonist to make choices which reveal his key characteristics, and to demonstrate how its underlying structure brings Bond’s deepest flaw to the surface.

Casino Royale is the best.

Link: youtube.com

Jumanji: The Next Level ★★★

2020-02-29T06:46:07+00:00

Watched 28 February 2020, rated 3 out of 5 stars

Put Awkwafina in every movie

Also posted on Letterboxd

2020-02-21T16:14:00+00:00

I guess this is worth posting. If not for navel gazing, when even twete? #MyTwitterAnniversary

Also posted on Twitter

Ford v Ferrari ★★★

2020-02-10T06:46:34+00:00

Watched 10 February 2020, rated 3 out of 5 stars

Silly me, I thought this was going to be a film about famous automotive designer Carroll Shelby designing and building a car from scratch. Nope, at some point Matt Damon just pulls a tarp and there it is — the car got designed and assembled off-screen and just needs some tweaks under the hood. The design differences that give Ford an edge over Ferrari are never quite explored except for “ours is faster” and “Italians are arrogant.” I guess dramatizing the design process doesn’t quite fit into the standard cookie-cutter biopic formula.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Little Women ★★★

2020-02-08T11:10:22+00:00

Watched 7 February 2020, rated 3 out of 5 stars

This story has a point to make and the film certainly gets to it. The nonlinear editing wasn’t hard to keep up with, but it feels like an attempt at injecting more nuance and challenge into a script that didn’t have much of either. There are several effective emotional moments, but as a whole it just didn’t reach me on a very profound level. It might simply not be for me, or I might have ruined it by watching Uncut Gems right before.

Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh were brilliant. I know Emma Watson is like that in real life too, but on camera her acting always looks a bit over the top. And I can’t say I cared for Laura Dern’s performance as the saint-level impossibly emotionally stable mother. And boy was casting Bob Odenkirk a mistake — I couldn’t control my laughter when he showed up, and all attempts at seriousness just failed whenever he was on screen.

Despite all the faults I saw in it, I still very much enjoyed my time with the film. It’s refreshing to see a drama where everyone is just so nice every now and then.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Uncut Gems ★★★★★

2020-02-08T01:42:01+00:00

Watched 7 February 2020, rated 5 out of 5 stars

The world feels a little different after watching Uncut Gems, and I don’t know that I can pay a bigger compliment to a work of art.

Also posted on Letterboxd

The Good Place, Season 4 ★★★★★

2020-02-07T16:08:24+00:00

Watched 13 October 2019 – 7 February 2020, rated 5 out of 5 stars

A perfect conclusion to the most wholesome show I’ve ever seen. Life sure is a wave.

Link: Frustration grows in China as face masks compromise facial recognition

2020-02-06T12:55:55+00:00

Ah, the irony. Anne Quito:

Face masks are mandatory in at least two provinces in China, including the city of Wuhan. In an effort to contain the coronavirus strain that has caused nearly 500 deaths, the government is insisting that millions of residents wear protective face covering when they go out in public.

As millions don masks across the country, the Chinese are discovering an unexpected consequence to covering their faces. It turns out that face masks trip up facial recognition-based functions, a technology necessary for many routine transactions in China. Suddenly, certain mobile phones, condominium doors, and bank accounts won’t unlock with a glance.

And beyond quotidian transactions, the technology is a linchpin in the Chinese government’s scheme to police its 1.4 billion citizens.

Link: qz.com

Via @hotdogsladies

Link: Google Maps Hacks

2020-02-05T08:59:01+00:00

Simon Weckert:

99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic.

Link: simonweckert.com

Via @beep

Link: The Raccoon King of Garbage Mountain

2020-02-03T15:48:15+00:00

Frank Chimero writes about the design process for the header navigation on his personal site:

You’d imagine that a seasoned and soured designer would side-step all of these complications whenever they could. And indeed, most do. Visit many designers’ websites and you will see two links in the navigation: Work and Info. Bully for them. I am, on the other hand, an unsympathetic and frustrated creative. I have a sprawling empire of conflicted uselessness locked into the coordinates of www dot frankchimero dot com. Welcome to my personal website, my empire of shit.

Oh how I understand Frank’s plight.

Link: frankchimero.com

Link: Wuhan: The Truth About “Dramatic Action”

2020-01-29T15:53:10+00:00

Da Shiji (达史纪) reports on the the Chinese government’s handling of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, and the current situation in Wuhan:

Politics first. Stability preservation first. In such an environment, science can only sit by and watch. The scientific results could not be clearer, and the authorities likely had a decent grasp of the real situation. But nevertheless they could not speak the truth, and they spared no effort in keeping the outbreak under wraps. Front-line doctors who spoke up about the outbreak were taken in for questioning. Eight Wuhan citizens who dared to post about the outbreak online were summoned by the police and singled out in public announcements through official media in order to terrify the public and force people to remain quiet.

The focus of restrictions was to prevent the truth of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus from getting out.

Link: chinamediaproject.org

Via @benthompson

Link: Shopping Sucks Now

2020-01-24T16:12:34+00:00

Casey Johnston tries to come to terms with a problem that I, too, suffer from — if you’re trying to buy the right thing, there’s no longer any limit to the amount of work you can put into research:

For a long time, our problem was there were not enough things to choose from. Then with big box stores, followed by the internet, there were too many things to choose from. Now there are still too many things to choose from, but also a seemingly infinite number of ways to choose, or seemingly infinite steps to figuring out how to choose. The longer I spend trying to choose, the higher the premium becomes on choosing correctly, which means I go on not choosing something I need pretty badly, coping with the lack of it or an awful hacked-together solution (in the case of gloves, it’s “trying to pull my sleeves over my hands but they are too short for this”) for way, way too long, and sometimes forever.

The degree to which you feel this problem definitely depends on your income, or at least, being in the privileged position of not having to make do with the only thing you can afford. But for people with even a limited ability to make an investment purchase, if it’s worth it, there’s even more pressure to get it right. Knowing you wasted a big chunk of money on a cheaper, worse thing that falls apart when you could have spent a little more money on a thing that is good and lasts feels like failure. You’ve then wasted your money, wasted your time, you’ve contributed to global warming, and now you have to start the entire thing over again and hope you don’t somehow end up making the exact same mistake.

Link: vice.com

Black Mirror: Smithereens ★★

2020-01-16T13:33:05+00:00

Watched 16 January 2020, rated 2 out of 5 stars

The most boring Black Mirror episode yet. Did you know people look at their phones a lot?

Freaks ★★

2020-01-12T02:39:01+00:00

Watched 11 January 2020, rated 2 out of 5 stars

This movie is so ugly i WANTED to cry blood

Also posted on Letterboxd

Fleabag, Season 2 ★★★★★

2020-01-10T23:10:17+00:00

Watched 8–9 January 2020, rated 5 out of 5 stars

How can this show be both the funniest and saddest thing I’ve seen in a long time? How can it be so potent, accomplishing so much with just a few short episodes? Now that I’ve tasted the emotional high of Fleabag, I’m afraid I might never again allow a show to waste my time with padded out writing. I absolutely loved the first season, but I had to put myself back together after this one.

Fleabag, Season 1 ★★★★★

2020-01-10T22:34:22+00:00

Watched 20–23 December 2019, rated 5 out of 5 stars

“They shouldn’t have just locked him up.”
“He pencil fucked a hamster.”
“Yeah, but he’s obviously not happy. Happy people wouldn’t do things like that.”
“Fair point.”
“And anyway, that’s the very reason why they put rubbers on the end of pencils.”
“What, to fuck hamsters?”
“No, because people make mistakes.”

Despite my incredibly high expectations, I was still blown away by this show in ways I don’t even quite understand. Exceptional in every way.

Link: What Did We Just Watch? A Guide to TV Shows in the 2010s

2020-01-08T16:22:56+00:00

This is a great overview that truly puts the entire decade in perspective. The only show missing is Patriot, but, well, of course.

Link: vulture.com

Via @tvaziri

Link: How Bong Joon Ho Designed the House in “Parasite”

2020-01-08T15:28:13+00:00

Chris O’Falt interviews Bong Joon Ho and production designer Lee Ha Jun about Parasite’s brilliant set design:

According to Bong, the challenge he gave his “Snowpiercer” production designer was not only to create a believably “visually beautiful” set, but a stage that served the precise needs of his camera, compositions, and characters, while embodying his film’s rich themes. In an interview with IndieWire, Bong described the home as “its own universe inside this film.” He added that he took pleasure in hearing that the famous directors on this year’s Cannes jury — which included Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Kelly Reichardt — were all convinced that the movie took place in a real home. In truth, Bong asked his production designer to create an “open set,” built on an outdoor lot.

Link: indiewire.com

Via @tvaziri

Nathan for You: Finding Frances ★★★★★

2019-12-27T06:06:34+00:00

Watched 26 December 2019, rated 5 out of 5 stars

People aren’t normal.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ★★

2019-12-26T01:19:32+00:00

Watched 25 December 2019, rated 2 out of 5 stars

So much plot, so little courage. It’s already fading away in my brain.

Also posted on Letterboxd

What Remains of Edith Finch ★★★

2019-12-20T23:47:48+00:00

Played 20 December 2019 on Nintendo Switch, rated 3 out of 5 stars

I wish I had been able to play this back in 2017, as it might have felt fresher. In a post-Breath of the Wild world I sometimes find it hard to appreciate linear experiences without wondering how much better they could be if they just let go of my hand. This game triggered that feeling a lot.

Comparing it to Gone Home, a lot has evolved, but this game still feels stuck in the same uncanny valley: it’s not a true interactive experience as much as it is a museum exhibit. While that can be super interesting, video games seem capable of so much more. And now that Return of the Obra Dinn exists, we know that the valley can be crossed. I’m hoping that future “walking simulators” keep going in that direction.

Knives Out ★★★★★

2019-12-20T00:57:24+00:00

Watched 19 December 2019, rated 5 out of 5 stars

As entertaining as they come. Will the numerous present day references date this film quickly? Well I sure hope so, because I can’t wait to watch it again as an even more charming old time classic.

Also posted on Letterboxd

6 Underground ★★★★

2019-12-15T23:53:27+00:00

Watched 15 December 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars

It’s grotesque and unrelenting, careless with death and violence to a shocking degree. While the premise is idiotic, even immoral, the writing shows enough self awareness to let you know that it doesn’t care. The action is at once vivid and artificial, grandiose yet somehow shot to feel claustrophobic. The whole thing clashes with itself, with good taste, with common sense; a bunch of absurd juxtapositions and contradictions firing at your eyeballs at extremely rapid pace. Watching it was both exhilarating and distressing, and judging by my headache, just too much for my feeble brain. I love it and I hate it. It is, without a doubt, an incredibly accomplished work of art.

Also posted on Letterboxd

2019-12-11T22:08:00+00:00

I want to believe

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵
— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) December 11, 2019

Also posted on Twitter

Link: “Link In Bio” is a slow knife

2019-12-11T05:45:45+00:00

Anil Dash:

And the ultimate triumph of being anti-web is to make links scarce. The smallest possible number of links a platform could allow is zero, so Instagram gets as close to that theoretical limit as possible, and gives you… one. You can have one link. Aren’t you grateful? One!

Link: anildash.com

Via micro.inessential.com

Ready or Not ★★★

2019-12-06T03:25:54+00:00

Watched 5 December 2019, rated 3 out of 5 stars

Very fun but not one for the ages. I feel like it could either have been campier or more grandiose, but it kept to a more normalized middle ground, never truly defying expectations. I keep imagining that had this movie been made in the 1980s (with all the differences that would entail) it would most likely be a cool as heck cult classic.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Ad Astra ★★★

2019-12-05T23:19:44+00:00

Watched 5 December 2019, rated 3 out of 5 stars

2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite films, yet I found this one very boring.

Started out interesting — exciting even — but the story kept shrinking on itself, the ideas growing smaller and smaller. By the end, and much like the sad astronaut, I felt nothing. Please allow me to narrate to you how empty I feel, I’m such a sad sad lonely astronaut help me daddy

Yeah this would have been a two star review if not for the moon rover chase sequence. That part was cool.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Why Journey’s last song was the hardest to compose

2019-12-01T19:01:18+00:00

Link: youtube.com

The Lighthouse ★★★★★

2019-11-22T01:06:07+00:00

Watched 21 November 2019, rated 5 out of 5 stars

That scream really did it for me. This film could have been bad and that scream would have saved it. But no, the whole thing was excellent. Sets itself up as an incredibly precise and fastidious formal exercise, only to break with expectations in very unfamiliar, surreal ways. Rule-breaking cinema.

And meeting real-life Willem Dafoe not within one minute of the credits starting to roll was also a surreal experience. That’s two for the price of one. (Humblebrag, I know.)

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Who Can Use

2019-11-16T17:19:28+00:00

Great site by Corey Ginnivan for testing color contrast under different vision conditions like color blindness, cataracts, and glaucoma, and situational conditions like direct sunlight.

Link: whocanuse.com

Via @css

Link: How NYT Cooking Became the Best Comment Section on the Internet

2019-11-16T15:08:34+00:00

Zach Gage tweeted:

i wish all internet comments were like the comments on nyt recipe pages

Turns out a big part of why they’re so nice has to do with nomenclature:

This might be because Cooking’s comments aren’t comments at all—they’re notes, a distinction Times food editor Sam Sifton emphasizes several times over the course of our conversation. “We made the conscious decision not to call them comments,” Sifton tells me. “The call to action was to leave a note on the recipe that helps make it better. That’s very different from ‘Leave a comment on a recipe.’ And the comment might be ‘I hate you.’ ‘You’re an asshole.’ ‘This is bad.’ And that’s helpful to no one. I see that on other recipes, and I’m glad that we don’t have those comments, because we don’t have comments. We have notes.”

While it’s delightful to think that that could be enough, human moderation is also involved:

On the internet, moderation is something of a dying art, often outsourced, automated, or even discontinued altogether by resource-strained news outlets. At Cooking, however, every single note is approved or rejected by an actual human being.

Link: theringer.com

Via @EricBrookfield

Link: 16-Inch MacBook Pro First Impressions: Great Keyboard, Outstanding Speakers

2019-11-16T14:52:25+00:00

John Gruber spent some time with the new MacBook Pro:

It feels a bit silly to be excited about a classic arrow key layout, a hardware Escape key, and key switches that function reliably and feel good when you type with them, but that’s where we are. The risk of being a Mac user is that we’re captive to a single company’s whims.

Great that they fixed the keyboards, but I’m guessing repairability hasn’t improved. My 2014 MacBook Pro’s battery started expanding recently, and I was surprised to learn that a battery replacement isn’t a simple job, even for this older generation. The battery is glued in place, so replacing it means an entirely new top case, keyboard, and trackpad — and in my case a week without my computer. That’s bad design too, and a side of it that Apple isn’t getting enough flak for.

Link: daringfireball.net

Link: The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising

2019-11-07T07:02:49+00:00

Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn:

It might sound crazy, but companies are not equipped to assess whether their ad spending actually makes money. It is in the best interest of a firm like eBay to know whether its campaigns are profitable, but not so for eBay’s marketing department.

Its own interest is in securing the largest possible budget, which is much easier if you can demonstrate that what you do actually works. Within the marketing department, TV, print and digital compete with each other to show who’s more important, a dynamic that hardly promotes honest reporting.

The fact that management often has no idea how to interpret the numbers is not helpful either. The highest numbers win.

Link: thecorrespondent.com

Via @rcbregman

Link: Tech and Liberty

2019-11-06T05:19:43+00:00

Ben Thompson defends Facebook’s recent decision to let politicians lie in ads, arguing that free speech should be considered in terms of culture, not law.

Here are his concluding remarks:

Facebook, obviously, is not the government, and thank goodness: the fact that Zuckerberg answers to no one is deeply concerning to me. To be fair, in the case of political ads, this was arguably a benefit: I think he is making the right decision in the face of massive resistance. In the long run, though, it is very problematic that such a powerful player in our democracy has no accountability. Liberty is not simply about laws, or culture, it is also about structure, and it is right to be concerned about the centralized nature of companies like Facebook.

To that end, the fact that this debate is even occurring is evidence of the problem: those opposed to Facebook’s decision about ads wish the company would wield its power in their favor; my question is whether such power should even exist in the first place. Facebook can close Munroe’s door on anyone, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Ben makes a good case, but I have conflicting feelings about it. These last few moves by Twitter and Facebook have left me hopelessly lost in this debate. When does a lie become fraud?

Link: stratechery.com

Link: CGP Grey: Which Planet is the Closest?

2019-11-01T03:46:21+00:00

This is one of the most incredibly delightful and mindblowing Turns Outs.

Link: youtube.com

Link: This essay is just Harry Potter for people who think comparing things to Harry Potter is stupid

2019-10-30T14:21:40+00:00

Rosa Lyster:

“Fight club is just the matrix for incels.” “Big Thief is just Fleetwood Mac for sad bois.” “The Handmaids Tale is just Harry Potter for middle aged liberals.” “Otessa Moshfegh is just Mary Gaitskill for girls who talk too much about how they sometimes miss their periods due to being so waifish and slender.” “Bob Dylan is just Joni Mitchell for men who beat their wives.” “American Psycho is just the Joker movie for older white perverts.” “ABBA is just Fleetwood Mac for middle-aged suburban housewives whose drug of choice was cocaine instead of marijuana.” “Billie Eilish is just Avril Lavigne for girls who have too many cups in their bedroom.” This is fun to do, and definitely hilarious for people who love zingers, but it also sucks, and replaces the flash of real insight with the far cheaper thrill of recognizing things. It turns a constellation of possible meanings through which we might better know each other and ourselves into a vast Extended Universe.

Damn, that’s pointed.

Link: theoutline.com

Via @mrgan

Super Mario World ★★★★

2019-10-29T04:04:10+00:00

Replayed 22–28 October 2019 on Nintendo Switch, rated 4 out of 5 stars

As fun and timeless as ever. Nostalgia factor is huge with the new wireless SNES controller. But I’ll never rate this game five stars because I was a Sonic kid during the 16-bit era. No matter how many times I play it, Super Mario World will always feel somehow foreign, as if I’m still only allowed to play it for a little while at a friend’s house.

I played more as a tourist this time. I wanted to explore more than to be challenged, and I wanted to get to 100% completion (which I’d never done before). So I used the rewind feature in the Switch emulator liberally. It’s funny how “lazy” you get once you can instantly fix your mistakes. It deeply changes the experience for some games.

Succession, Season 1 ★★★★

2019-10-27T23:16:40+00:00

Watched 9 September – 20 October 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars

Watching Succession I often found myself at one of two extremes: either laughing and cringing at the sheer debauchery of it all, or depressively contemplating how the real world is probably even worse.

This duality seems to be the show’s core mechanic. The writers know that now, seemingly more than ever, reality is stranger than fiction. If you want to satirize it, you have to take it down a notch first — like putting on those special glasses so you can look at a solar eclipse. So Succession is a very impressive oxymoron: a satire that is also a toned-down version of reality. It’s gripping, though-provoking, hilarious entertainment. I just don’t understand why Connor is there.

One-Punch Man, Season 2 ★★

2019-10-24T22:41:15+01:00

Watched 9 May – 24 October 2019, rated 2 out of 5 stars

One-Punch Man is lost. The charm, variety, and incredibly kinetic animation that set the show apart are nowhere to be found in season two.

The writing has no redeeming qualities to offer. It’s all over the place. The outrageous premise of the series was fun for a while, but it doesn’t seem strong enough to sustain being prolonged like this. The writers compensate by spending way too much time on a huge number of underdeveloped characters and subplots that I couldn’t care less about. In the end, none of those plots and characters even get any resolution; if there is a cohesive thematic undercurrent to this season at all, I was too bored to notice it. Meanwhile the main characters get so little airtime that I struggle to piece together what happened to them over the course of a dozen episodes. They are on screen only just enough for you not to forget what show you’re watching. It’s maddening.

This series has clearly been kicked into a lower gear, setting itself up to coast on the merits of season one for as long as possible. I won’t be sticking around.

Link: AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks

2019-10-22T17:28:58+01:00

Fred Benenson:

When people talk about the effects of automation and artificial intelligence on the economy, they often fixate on the quantity of human workers. Will robots take our jobs? Others focus instead on threats to the quality of employment—the replacement of middle-class occupations with lower-skill, lower-wage ones; the steady elimination of human discretion as algorithms order around warehouse pickers, ride-hailing drivers, and other workers.

What’s less understood is that artificial intelligence will transform higher-skill positions, too—in ways that demand more human judgment rather than less. And that could be a problem. As AI gets better at performing the routine tasks traditionally done by humans, only the hardest ones will be left for us to do. But wrestling with only difficult decisions all day long is stressful and unpleasant. Being able to make at least some easy calls, such as allowing Santorini onto Kickstarter, can be deeply satisfying.

“Decision making is very cognitively draining,” the author and former clinical psychologist Alice Boyes told me via email, “so it’s nice to have some tasks that provide a sense of accomplishment but just require getting it done and repeating what you know, rather than everything needing very taxing novel decision making.”

Link: theatlantic.com

Via @helvetica

Link: Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs

2019-10-22T17:05:52+01:00

Kevin Kelly:

In the coming years our relationships with robots will become ever more complex. But already a recurring pattern is emerging. No matter what your current job or your salary, you will progress through these Seven Stages of Robot Replacement, again and again:

A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do.

OK, it can do a lot of them, but it can’t do everything I do.

OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.

OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks.

OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do.

Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more fun and pays more!

I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do now.

Link: wired.com

Via @andrewparker

Link: The Sound of the Spider-Verse

2019-10-22T16:49:00+01:00

What happens when you get a kid from Brooklyn, a radioactive spider, and some leitmotifs and mix them all together?

Link: youtube.com

Via @DANIELPEMBERTON

Link: The World-Wide Work

2019-10-22T15:52:08+01:00

Finally watched Ethan Marcotte’s talk from this year’s New Adventures conference. It’s as good as everyone said.

The sewing machine was introduced to the public in the middle of the 19th century. When it was made commercially available, it was advertised as an appliance that would free women from the routine drudgery of hand-sewing.

A few short decades later, this pamphlet said that a female operator could use a Singer sewing machine to produce 3,300 stitches per minute.

That shift in tone is really intriguing to me: as the technology improved, the messaging around sewing machines shifted from personal liberty to technical efficiency.

People are promised that technology will free them; ultimately, as the technology matures, it captures them.

I’d like to propose that what happened with the sewing machine is currently happening with the Web: that the Web is becoming industrialized in the same way that the sewing machine was.

Link: ethanmarcotte.com

Link: Coffee and Chocolate Make You Smarter, According to the Latest Neuroscience

2019-10-21T15:06:23+01:00

Geoffrey James:

Neuroscience continues to uncover new ways that coffee and (to a lesser extent) tea and chocolate, tend to make brains healthier and more resilient.

When studies prove my habits are good, I believe them.

Link: inc.com

Via shapeof.com

2019-10-19T23:21:00+01:00

This is fine

Want to view a single image on @imgur (literally its only job)? Good luck! You gotta successfully download (354KB) and run (1.21MB) of client-side React in order to get your image requested as resource 110 of 553. What should have been an IMG element became… this. pic.twitter.com/XkrbZcLQQg
— Harry Roberts (@csswizardry) October 19, 2019

Also posted on Twitter

2019-10-18T01:03:00+01:00

This is fine

Oops the JS has increased by 700% (w/@tameverts) #jamstackconf pic.twitter.com/7vbmbStaQJ
— Thomas Randolph (@rockerest) October 17, 2019

Also posted on Twitter

Link: Catalina Vista

2019-10-17T19:41:09+01:00

The macOS Catalina situation seems to be pretty bad. My biggest reasons for upgrading are Apple Arcade and Reminders, but in return I’d have to:

give up Photoshop CS6
give up a bunch of games on my Steam library
deal with my old Aperture libraries as the app is finally broken
learn a new shell, or replace it
fix all the tooling stuff that will break due to the new read-only system volume
put up with all the permission annoyances
deal with all the damn bugs

Marco Arment’s take on ATP is right: “not enough carrot to take the stick”. For the first time ever I might actually skip a major version of macOS.

Link: mjtsai.com

A Game of Thrones ★★★

2019-10-17T17:54:47+01:00

Read 23 May – 17 October 2019, rated 3 out of 5 stars

I’ve watched the first season of the show more than once, so there were no surprises to be found in this book, only details. That made it a slog to get through, even as it matched my expectations exactly.

The book is fine, but most of its strength lies in finding out what happens — not so much in the flair of its style, or the inventiveness of its ideas, and certainly not in the very systematic, episodic structure that often threw me off pace.

On the one hand, it did give me what I craved: more detail and cohesiveness than the show could bear to sustain. On the other hand, there is a certain ’80s fantasy corniness in some of those details that the show did well to correct in its art direction. Why does everyone wear impractically ornate animal-shaped helms? Sure, make armor fashion a thing, but those appendaged helms just seem like they’d be a hindrance in battle, existing more as flavor text than as a realistic part of the world. They remind me of the “no capes” gag in The Incredibles.

Nonetheless, I am into it, and I plan to keep reading the books. As the story drifts from the show’s, I can only hope that the experience of reading it will feel less like a chore.

Also posted on Goodreads

Super Earth Defense Force ★★

2019-10-16T22:02:01+01:00

Played 16 October 2019 on Nintendo Switch, rated 2 out of 5 stars

This is the worst-sounding video game I’ve ever played; the sound effects are frankly ridiculous. The visual design is also quite poor and hard to parse, with enemies, bullets, and background all blending together. And the later levels are extremely punishing. No checkpoints? Okay… But is that testicle/bird final boss even supposed to be beatable by a human? I’ve never used rewind so much in any other classic title. Nintendo, bring us good SNES shoot ‘em ups, please.

Link: Are China’s Tantrums Signs of Strength or Weakness?

2019-10-16T14:59:44+01:00

Zeynep Tufekci wonders about China’s motivations around the Hong Kong situation:

So why is China demanding significant censorship from Western companies—as in the case of this app—in the absence of a real threat? One thing to note is that while the original events being censored are minor to the point of trivial, the backlash creates a huge amount of publicity. You might be tempted to think that China has a Streisand-effect problem, in which trying to censor an event creates even more publicity. But that assumes the Chinese government doesn’t understand the Streisand effect, and that can’t be right, because if one government understands attention dynamics online, it’s China’s.

Significant amounts of scholarship show that the Chinese government has been very good at burying important news by distracting from it with other, flashy but unrelated news. This shows a subtle and powerful understanding of the Streisand effect: Instead of censoring, China diverts attention.

Link: theatlantic.com

Via @zeynep

Midsommar ★★★★

2019-10-15T17:48:20+01:00

Watched 14 October 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars

William Jackson Harper’s character is my closest audience surrogate in this film: instead of wanting to escape from this horrific, beautiful place, he wants to learn more about it. That’s what worked so well for me in Hereditary, and it worked brilliantly once again in Midsommar. I really love this vibe of deep detail and interestingness that Ari Aster is bringing to horror.

This was the theatrical version but I’ll definitely be watching the director’s cut as soon as I can.

PS: I have that same mortar and pestle! (From the dance scene.) It’s from Ikea, which is hilarious

Also posted on Letterboxd

Mini Motorways ★★★

2019-10-13T20:12:49+01:00

Played 11–12 October 2019 on Apple Arcade, rated 3 out of 5 stars

Cool premise, but lacks depth. I hate playing armchair designer, but I think this game needed a few obvious extra features:

More achievements for each city. Why make lists called “Achievements” if they’re all limited to one item? I was expecting more stuff to unlock as I played.
A gallery of what your cities looked like at their peak, and a way to share that. When you lose, the camera zooms in, so you can’t even take a screenshot of your glorious metropolis.
A free build mode. Let me just play around without risk of failure, and let me place buildings myself. The more I played, the more I wanted to just put in a cheat code and build without restrictions, SimCity style.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie ★★★★★

2019-10-12T02:56:19+01:00

Watched 11 October 2019, rated 5 out of 5 stars

I didn’t know how much I wanted this, just as much as I wasn’t expecting to cry in the end. Yet here we are.

It doesn’t escape the TV-to-film curse of feeling incomplete and slightly outside its comfort zone and somehow wrong. But taken as the missing Breaking Bad episode that time forgot, it’s absolutely flawless.

Yet I don’t think it would have worked had the show just included this back then as its final final episode. We needed the wait, and it was worth it.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Youtube’s Biggest Lie

2019-10-11T00:36:01+01:00

Nerd City:

We tested fifteen thousand common words and phrases against YouTube’s bots, one by one, and determined which of those words will cause a video to be demonetized when used in the title.

If we took a demonetized video and changed the words “gay” or “lesbian” to “happy” or “friend”, every single time, the status of the video changed to advertiser-friendly.

YouTube’s apparently unassailable dominance over web video is a real shame. I dream of a world where web video is like podcasts: a decentralized system where anyone can participate without ceding control to a giant corporation with black box policies.

Monetization is already going the way of podcasts: crowd-funding and ad reads. Big video creators just can’t afford to trust that YouTube’s ever-changing policies will be on their side. The next step is decentralizing distribution, which seems like a harder problem to solve. But we’ve done it before: let’s bring back video podcasts. Let me get my video subscriptions in my RSS reader. Let’s take video away from YouTube and give it back to the web.

Link: youtube.com

Via @cgpgrey

Link: The China Cultural Clash

2019-10-10T23:55:49+01:00

Ben Thompson:

I am increasingly convinced this is the point every company dealing with China will reach: what matters more, money or values?

John Gruber summarizes Ben’s points really well:

The gist of it is that 25 years ago, when the West opened trade relations with China, we expected our foundational values like freedom of speech, personal liberty, and democracy to spread to China.

Instead, the opposite is happening. China maintains strict control over what its people see on the Internet — the Great Firewall works. They ban our social networks where free speech reigns, but we accept and use their social networks, like TikTok, where content contrary to the Chinese Community Party line is suppressed.

Worse, multinational mega corporations like Apple and Disney are put in a bind — they must choose between speaking up for values such as the right to privacy and freedom of speech, or making money in the Chinese market.

And Nilay Patel makes a great comparison:

It’s not hard to understand that carmakers in the US market build to California emissions standards because they are the strictest - it’s the most efficient choice.

Not a leap to think global companies will hold themselves to China’s speech restrictions for the same reason.

Link: stratechery.com

Link: A Like Can’t Go Anywhere, But a Compliment Can Go a Long Way

2019-10-10T23:11:16+01:00

Frank Chimero:

The features of software with massive reach always have unintended consequences. For instance, social media, by making positivity easy and quantifiable, has ensured that negativity looms large. It’s become a place where we count the good things and experience the bad things.

Link: frankchimero.com

Card of Darkness ★★★★

2019-10-10T17:52:00+01:00

Played 28 September – 9 October 2019 on Apple Arcade, rated 4 out of 5 stars

This game is awesome and what phone games should have evolved into all along. Loved it.

Now I’m only missing the hidden achievement and I’m sure it’s got something to do with that fart card probably

Also posted on Twitter

Link: The imitation game

2019-10-03T14:53:01+01:00

Jeremy Keith:

Jason shared some thoughts on designing progressive web apps. One of the things he’s pondering is how much you should try make your web-based offering look and feel like a native app.

This was prompted by an article by Owen Campbell-Moore over on Ev’s blog called Designing Great UIs for Progressive Web Apps. He begins with this advice:

Start by forgetting everything you know about conventional web design, and instead imagine you’re actually designing a native app.

This makes me squirm. I mean, I’m all for borrowing good ideas from other media—native apps, TV, print—but I don’t think that inspiration should mean imitation. For me, that always results in an interface that sits in a kind of uncanny valley of being almost—but not quite—like the thing it’s imitating.

People have been gleefully passing around the statistic that the average number of native apps installed per month is zero. So how exactly will we measure the success of progressive web apps against native apps …when the average number of progressive web apps installed per month is zero?

Link: adactio.com

Link: The Nerdwriter: The Real Fake Cameras of Toy Story 4

2019-10-03T06:19:50+01:00

Toy Story 4 looks incredible, almost hyper-realistic. And it’s not a simple matter of technology getting better; there is artistic intent in the imperfections that give it that edge. Among other techniques, Pixar is simulating real-world camera lenses (along with their limitations). Evan Puschak explains:

Animation has always drawn from the lessons of live action film, from the visual language of cinematic storytelling. Everyone who worked on Toy Story 4 understands that the imperfections — the way a lens distorts, or a camera operator shakes, or a light bounces — contain their own expressive potential. And when you combine these with the limitless world of animation, the results can be stunningly tactile.

I hadn’t noticed that split diopter shot — it’s brilliant.

Link: youtube.com

2019-09-29T01:10:00+01:00

Cancel Hollywood. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

Also posted on Twitter

Link: The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers

2019-09-26T01:10:40+01:00

Nature has put together a comprehensive series of charts that do a really great job at showing just how fucked we are.

Whatever they decide, nations will have to reckon with some difficult numbers that will ultimately determine whether the world can avoid the rapidly approaching climate meltdown. Nature documents the scale of the challenge in an infographic that explores energy use, carbon dioxide pollution and issues of climate justice. At a time when countries have pledged to curb greenhouse gases sharply, the data show that annual emissions spiked by 2.1% in 2018 — owing in part to increased demand for coal in places such as China and India.

Link: nature.com

Via @kottke

Link: Accessibility Wins

2019-09-16T13:58:30+01:00

Marcy Sutton is collecting good examples of websites and interfaces where accessibility and beautiful design go hand-in-hand. Subscribed.

Link: a11ywins.tumblr.com

Via @heydonworks

Link: Simplicity (II)

2019-09-15T12:51:25+01:00

Bastian Allgeier:

I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to programming:

less code === less potential issues

This rule of thumb controls my own feelings towards a solution. It shouldn’t take 120 MB of code to uglify some JS. But maybe I’m wrong.

In practice, this dependency hell has bitten me so often already that my life expectancy probably sank by 2-3 years. You want to build a JS file? Please update Webpack first. Oh, that new version of Webpack is no longer compatible with your Node version. Oh, your new Node version is no longer compatible with that other dependency. Oh, now you have 233 detected security issues in all your node_modules but you can’t fix them because that would break something completely unrelated.

Link: bastianallgeier.com

Via css-tricks.com

Link: 5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe

2019-09-15T12:42:56+01:00

Scott Jehl:

Faster networks should fix our performance problems, but so far, they have had an interesting if unintentional impact on the web. This is because historically, faster network speed has enabled developers to deliver more code to users—in particular, more JavaScript code.

Ugh. Jeremy Keith comments:

The longer I spend in this field, the more convinced I am that web performance is not a technical problem; it’s a people problem.

Link: filamentgroup.com

Link: The Myth of the Pixel Perfect Grid

2019-09-15T04:40:43+01:00

Terence Eden explains how different screen technologies, human biology, and fingerprint grease make “pixel perfection” a pointless goal:

There is no grid. There never has been. You can align to theoretical pixels - but as soon as the image hits a physical screen, it will be adjusted to best fit reality.

An obsession with pixel perfect rendering is futile.

Every Layout expands on this idea, specifically as it pertains to CSS:

Suffice it to say that, while screens are indeed made up of pixels, pixels are not regular, immutable, or constant. A 400px box viewed by a user browsing zoomed in is simply not 400px in CSS pixels. It may not have been 400px in device pixels even before they activated zoom.

See also: Ian Mallett’s Subpixel Zoo: A Catalog of Subpixel Geometry.

Link: shkspr.mobi

Via @heydonworks

Link: Styling Links with Real Underlines

2019-09-15T03:13:37+01:00

Ollie Williams welcomes the new CSS properties for styling underlines:

Finally we can demarcate links without sacrificing style thanks to two new CSS properties.

text-underline-offset controls the position of the underline.

text-decoration-thickness controls the thickness of underlines, as well as overlines, and line-throughs.

I’ve been working on a blog post about this topic, and Ollie does a good job of covering some of the points I want to make. But I want to go further and explore implementation quirks, the details where the new properties don’t quite go far enough, and make a case for why underlines shouldn’t be pixel-aligned.

Link: css-tricks.com

Link: Introducing caniemail.com

2019-09-10T02:48:27+01:00

Rémi Parmentier:

Last march, I wrote a proposal for Can I email, a website similar to caniuse.com dedicated to support in email clients.

Today, barely six months after, I am really happy and pleased to announce that with the help of my colleagues and members of the email geeks community, we’re officially launching caniemail.com.

Wow, this was sorely needed.

Link: caniemail.com

Via @zachleat

Link: Hackers Hit Twitter C.E.O. Jack Dorsey in a ‘SIM Swap.’ You’re at Risk, Too

2019-09-06T15:49:07+01:00

Nathaniel Popper:

Called SIM swapping, it allows hackers to take control of a victim’s phone number. In recent months, SIM swapping has been used to hijack the online personas of politicians, celebrities and notables like Mr. Dorsey, to steal money all over the world and to simply harass regular people.

Victims, no matter how prominent or technically sophisticated, have been unable to protect themselves, even after they have been hit again and again.

“I’ve been looking at the criminal underground for a long time, and SIM swapping bothers me more than anything I’ve seen,” said Allison Nixon, the director of research at the security firm Flashpoint. “It requires no skill, and there is literally nothing the average person can do to stop it.”

We’ve been hearing about this exploit for years. Of course, things seem to only have gotten worse.

Link: nytimes.com

Via @zeynep

2019-09-03T05:23:00+01:00

Do you want to be afraid of the dark? It’s quick and easy. When walking into a dark room just ask yourself “what would David Lynch put in there”

Also posted on Twitter

Link: Less Data Doesn’t Mean a Lesser Experience

2019-08-31T00:22:39+01:00

Tim Kadlec explores strategies for dealing with the Save-Data header without degrading the experience, because not every user that enables it will be aware of the potential consequences:

The possibilities are endless. If you treat data as a constraint in your design and development process, you’ll likely be able to brainstorm a large number of different ways to keep data usage to a minimum while still providing an excellent experience. Doing less doesn’t mean it has to feel broken.

Link: timkadlec.com

Link: Lucas Pope on the challenge of creating Obra Dinn’s 1-bit aesthetic

2019-08-28T09:23:21+01:00

PC Gamer’s Steven T. Wright interviews Lucas Pope on the process of creating Return of the Obra Dinn:

“When you’re developing a game as one person, you have a lot of advantages and a lot of disadvantages,” he says. “One of the advantages is that you can afford to make a game for two years without even really knowing what it is, which is exactly what I did. One of the disadvantages is that you have to do something different visually to stand out. This means I have to solve all sorts of problems that nobody else has solved, at least recently. But I think that can be fun in its own right.”

The game’s development seems to have been more of a process of discovery and improvisation than one of decisive creativity. That explains a lot.

Link: pcgamer.com

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum ★★★

2019-08-27T06:38:57+01:00

Watched 26 August 2019, rated 3 out of 5 stars

It might be a case of too much of a good thing, but I was not as entranced by this one as I was with the others. It might have benefited from a bit more breathing room around the mayhem, more of an emotional connection to its origins, maybe even (dare I say it?) a little less violence. It is spectacular, but numbingly so.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Return of the Obra Dinn ★★★★★

2019-08-27T02:42:00+01:00

Played 16–18 August 2019 on Mac, rated 5 out of 5 stars

A masterpiece of game design. An impossible combination of brilliant ideas and flawless execution that is so unlike any other game I’ve ever played, it’s hard to understand how it could even be conceived.

Link: NetNewsWire 5.0 Now Available

2019-08-27T01:39:58+01:00

Brent Simmons:

NetNewsWire 5.0 is shipping!

In case you haven’t been following along until just now: NetNewsWire is an open source RSS reader for Mac. It’s free! You can just download it and use it. No strings.

My RSS reader of choice.

Link: inessential.com

Godzilla: King of the Monsters ★★

2019-08-25T17:18:34+01:00

Watched 15 August 2019, rated 2 out of 5 stars

Wake me up if Hideaki Anno ever makes another one

Also posted on Letterboxd

2019-08-25T06:27:16+01:00

If you can read this, then I have achieved micropub capability and nothing can stop me now 🚀

Link: What I Like About Eleventy

2019-08-25T00:24:21+01:00

Dave Rupert is, like me, a longtime Jekyll user. He’s trying out Eleventy — which I’m super curious about — and getting good results. The massive performance difference when compared to Jekyll is very compelling to me, but so is the flexibility to write little bits of code to extend functionality without much fuss:

On the Cathedral vs. Bazaar spectrum, Eleventy operates more on the bazaar end. By that I mean it doesn’t prescribe much. You want a bunch of filters? Write your own, Eleventy only comes with two. You want multiple layouts? Write a bit of JS to get those registered. Did you remember to setup an .eleventyignore? Even the Sass and JS pipelines are BYO.

Link: daverupert.com

Link: Altruism Still Fuels the Web. Businesses Love to Exploit It

2019-08-20T18:52:55+01:00

Zeynep Tufekci on the miracle of open source software:

As a social scientist myself, I can say that convincing a colleague from the past that Wikipedia and Linux actually work the way they do would be a pretty huge lift. Given the assumption, common to many 20th-century schools of thought, that humans act in incorrigibly selfish ways, the notion that tens of thousands of people would collaborate to create, respectively, a living monument to human knowledge and a foundational piece of computing infrastructure, free of charge, simply sounds too fanciful.

Link: wired.com

Via @zeynep

Link: IndieWeb Link Sharing

2019-08-12T10:11:53+01:00

Max Böck:

Posting a new short “note” on my site currently requires me to commit a new markdown file to the repository on Github. That’s doable (for a developer), but not really convenient, especially when you’re on the go and just want to share a quick link.

It me.

The new link sharing basically has three main parts:

a small Javascript bookmarklet to act as a “share button”

a form that collects and sends the shared link data, and

a serverless function to process it and create a new file.

Gotta get on this train! I’m already working on it, though my solution will be based on the Micropub spec. But that live preview is sweet and now I want it too.

Link: mxb.dev

Link: A Framework for Moderation

2019-08-07T21:18:06+01:00

Ben Thompson on internet content moderation:

The top of the stack is about broadcasting — reaching as many people as possible — and while you may have the right to say anything you want, there is no right to be heard. Internet service providers, though, are about access — having the opportunity to speak or hear in the first place. In other words, the further down the stack, the more legality should be the sole criteria for moderation; the further up the more discretion and even responsibility there should be for content.

This passage made me feel a little queasy but I think I agree?

I ultimately reject the idea that publishing on the Internet is a right that must be guaranteed by 3rd parties. Stand on the street corner all you like, at least your terrible ideas will be limited by the physical world. The Internet, though, with its inherent ability to broadcast and congregate globally, is a fundamentally more dangerous medium that is by-and-large facilitated by third parties who have rights of their own.

Link: stratechery.com

Link: Introducing the Pika REPL

2019-08-06T18:43:37+01:00

Test packages directly in the browser, without installing anything locally. Perfect for quickly evaluating packages before bringing them into your important projects.

Taking npm packages for a test drive: incredibly useful.

Link: dev.to

Via @zachleat

Link: The web without the web

2019-08-05T17:22:34+01:00

Laura González:

In elevating frontend to the land of Serious Code we have not just made things incredibly over-engineered but we have also set fire to all the ladders that we used to get up here in the first place.

Link: dev.to

Via adactio.com

Link: Why Don’t I Read All My Books?

2019-08-04T02:55:46+01:00

Karen Olsson thinks about the importance of the many books she owns but will never read:

Perhaps in some cases it has actually meant more to me to possess a book than to read it, because as long as its contents remain unknown to me, it retains its mystery. The unread book is a provocation, a promise of something that might dissipate if I slogged my way through the text. I’ve read a little of Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey Through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, a sumptuous art book about a 16th-century pictorial manuscript from Mexico […]. I keep this book around even though I don’t wish to make anything of it in a literal sense—I don’t want to write fiction or nonfiction or a nutty screenplay about a mesoamerican document, but I wish for it to somehow whisper in my ear while I write something not at all about the map, for its enigmatic presence to leave some ineffable trace.

I love this idea, and I must admit that I suffer from the same affliction. Design books, self-help books, nonfiction books… I want them to somehow transmit that “ineffable trace” to me just by virtue of sitting on my desk, mostly unread; no matter how many cookbooks I buy, it seems I always end up going to Serious Eats when I need a recipe.

I’m trying to read more by divorcing the physicality of owning a book from the process of reading it, so I bought an eReader. Now I get paper versions of the books I want to own, and digital versions of the ones I want to read. Totally normal, I know.

Link: lithub.com

Via kottke.org

Link: Truths about digital accessibility

2019-08-04T02:38:27+01:00

Eric Bailey posted a terrific list of principles that should be kept in mind when working on web accessibility.

Digital accessibility work is not easy, but it is vital. It is a holistic, multifaceted discipline that touches on multiple interconnected social and technological issues.

Link: ericwbailey.design

Link: Fast Software, the Best Software

2019-08-03T13:38:32+01:00

Craig Mod:

Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused. Like a good tool, it often means that it’s simple, but that’s not necessarily true. Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. Fastness in software is like great margins in a book — makes you smile without necessarily knowing why.

Link: craigmod.com

Speed Racer ★★★★★

2019-08-03T07:54:20+01:00

Rewatched 2 August 2019, rated 5 out of 5 stars

Our world doesn’t deserve the unbridled vibrancy and earnestness of Speed Racer. The climactic Grand Prix is so dazzling I had to watch it twice. This film gets better every time I watch it, and I suspect I’ll be doing it quite a few more times.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.

2019-08-01T15:11:56+01:00

Chris Coyier’s latest talk puts all the complexity of modern front-end development in perspective:

All the very huge responsibilities front-end developers already have:

Pulling of the design

Making the design part of a system

Making sure it is accessible

Worrying about the performance

Testing things across browsers

Testing things across devices

Sweating the UX

Oh hello, big pile of new responsibilities

Component-driven design, designing our own abstractions

Site-level architecture

Routing

Fetching our own data

Talking to APIs

Mutating data

State management

Oof.

Link: full-stack.netlify.com

Via @chriscoyier

Link: The Real Dark Web

2019-08-01T06:45:48+01:00

Charlie Owen:

The vast majority of respondents are still using Sass and vanilla CSS? Wow! This made me pause and think. Because I feel there’s an analogy here between that unseen dark matter, and the huge crowd of web developers who are using such “boring” technology stacks.

These developers are quietly building their sites and apps, day in, day out. But they are rendered invisible as they are not making use of the cutting-edge technologies that the 1% of the bleeding edge love to talk about.

They are the 99% of the web universe that is quietly getting on, not blogging about their technology stack, not publishing amazing new tooling. Simply building things.

Sass and not much else? It me. Though I am using some state-of-the-art tech like the fancy underlines made possible by CSS Text Decoration Module Level 4 😎

Link: sonniesedge.net

Link: Self-Care for Men

2019-07-29T22:35:15+01:00

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”)!

Link: newyorker.com

Via @meganamram

Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro ★★★★

2019-07-29T16:04:51+01:00

Watched 28 July 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars

Best car chase of all time?

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Chinese vertical dramas made for phone viewing show the future of mobile video

2019-07-29T15:41:34+01:00

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.

Link: thenextweb.com

Via kottke.org

Link: The Possibility Gap: It’s Time to Label This Dark Pattern

2019-07-27T02:03:33+01:00

Quinn Keast:

The Possibility Gap is a dark pattern that arises when a product takes advantage of unknown unknowns on the part of their users, as it relates to their understanding of what is possible in digital products today.

Link: quinnkeast.com

Via @css

Link: Motion Smoothing is Ruining Cinema

2019-07-25T03:06:43+01:00

I’m linking to this just so I can go on the record on this here blog and say: motion smoothing is an abomination.

Link: vulture.com

Via @tvaziri

Alita: Battle Angel ★★★★

2019-07-24T23:39:19+01:00

Watched 24 July 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars

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.

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: Intrinsically Responsive CSS Grid with minmax() and min()

2019-07-20T17:20:24+01:00

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().

Link: evanminto.com

Via adactio.com

Link: What I Like About Vue

2019-07-18T04:47:18+01:00

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.

Link: daverupert.com

2019-07-17T12:00:00+01:00

Download video.

Viaduto Jaceguai, São Paulo

Also posted on Instagram

Link: How to Kill IE11 - What the Deaths of IE6 and IE8 Tell Us About Killing IE

2019-07-16T14:10:06+01:00

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.

Link: mike.sherov.com

Via adactio.com

The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game ★★★★

2019-07-15T12:02:00+01:00

Played 15 July 2019 on Mac, rated 4 out of 5 stars

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

Link: The Accessibility of Styled Form Controls

2019-07-12T22:05:34+01:00

A repository of styled and “styled” form control elements and markup patterns, and how they are announced by screen readers.

Link: scottaohara.github.io

Via @css

Link: Jony Ive’s Fragmented Legacy: Unreliable, Unrepairable, Beautiful Gadgets

2019-07-07T21:53:12+01:00

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.

Link: ifixit.com

Via @marcoarment

Link: Maybe You Don’t Need a Date Picker

2019-07-06T21:28:29+01:00

Adrian Roselli:

What we know is that native and custom calendar controls are often a problem for users and applied where they are not needed. Before dropping the code on a screen as a matter of habit, consider if it genuinely helps the user or just your workflow.

Link: adrianroselli.com

Link: Ebert’s Walk of Fame remarks

2019-07-04T23:21:08+01:00

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.

Link: rogerebert.com

Via @tvaziri

Link: Accessibility Support

2019-07-04T10:26:55+01:00

An open-source community effort to map support for web accessibility features across different Assistive Technologies. It’s still early days, but I hope this flourishes — accessibility interop is a complex topic in dire need of de-mystification.

Link: a11ysupport.io

Via andy-bell.design

Link: We Are Tenants on Our Own Devices

2019-07-04T10:03:14+01:00

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.

Link: wired.com

Via @zeynep

Hollow Knight ★★★★★

2019-07-03T14:21:00+01:00

Played 21 June – 1 July 2019 on Nintendo Switch, rated 5 out of 5 stars

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.

Barry, Season 1 ★★★★

2019-07-02T15:35:00+01:00

Watched 29 June 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars

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.

Link: Frank Chimero on causing ‘good trouble’ and re-imagining the status quo to combat achievement culture

2019-06-29T20:44:02+01:00

Great interview. Frank Chimero is always thought-provoking:

Everyone has their lean years, but I think they make a poor compass. You can always work more. We need to disabuse ourselves of the thought that work is the solution to our problems, or that by keeping up we are getting closer to something worth having. Being more active is not being freer. I won’t romanticise those months on peanut butter and jelly as freedom, but I can confidently say that in retrospect the problems of that time were no better or worse than the ones I’ve experienced at the peak of my successes.

Link: creativeboom.com

Via @frank_chimero

Link: Relearn CSS layout: Every Layout

2019-06-20T17:31:26+01:00

Heydon Pickering and Andy Bell have created a terrific resource for CSS layout patterns following algorithmic design principles.

We make many of our biggest mistakes as visual designers for the web by insisting on hard coding designs. We break browsers’ layout algorithms by applying fixed positions and dimensions to our content.

Instead, we should be deferential to the underlying algorithms that power CSS, and we should think in terms of algorithms as we extrapolate layouts based on these foundations. We need to be leveraging selector logic, harnessing flow and wrapping behavior, and using calculations to adapt layout to context.

This approach is precisely what I’ve been striving for ever since Jen Simmons’s Intrinsic Web Design talk from last year.

Link: every-layout.dev

Via @brad_frost

Link: Drop caps & design systems

2019-06-17T23:31:15+01:00

Ethan Marcotte:

When I’m asked to describe design systems work, I say the word that springs immediately to mind is mapmaking. As designers like Matthew Ström and Alla Kholmatova have argued, every website has a design system underneath it. Take yours, for example: your website’s interface is built from a library of components, each shaped by a series of design decisions and business needs. Your design system may not be explicit—maybe you don’t have a polished pattern library, or a set of well-defined design principles, or maybe your documentation’s not as robust as you’d like it to be—but it’s still a system. And in order to improve that system, you have to research it before you can begin to gradually, slowly improve it.

Link: product.voxmedia.com

Via @beep

Link: 20 Rules For Making the Best Salads of Your Life

2019-06-17T22:02:41+01:00

Sarah Jampel:

Every additional ingredient should bring a contrast in flavor or texture: If the salad is primarily crunchy, add something soft. If it skews sweet, add something salty or bitter. If it’s on the rich side, use acid to nudge it back to equilibrium. And if what you’re about to throw in achieves none of that? Save it for something else.

Link: bonappetit.com

Via @kottke

Link: The New Wilderness

2019-06-16T13:26:54+01:00

Maciej Ceglowski writes about privacy and I want to quote the whole thing:

Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us. Just like you can’t drop out of the oil economy by refusing to drive a car, you can’t opt out of the surveillance economy by forswearing technology (and for many people, that choice is not an option). While there may be worthy reasons to take your life off the grid, the infrastructure will go up around you whether you use it or not.

Because our laws frame privacy as an individual right, we don’t have a mechanism for deciding whether we want to live in a surveillance society. Congress has remained silent on the matter, with both parties content to watch Silicon Valley make up its own rules. The large tech companies point to our willing use of their services as proof that people don’t really care about their privacy. But this is like arguing that inmates are happy to be in jail because they use the prison library. Confronted with the reality of a monitored world, people make the rational decision to make the best of it.

That is not consent.

Link: idlewords.com

Link: Keep it simple

2019-06-11T21:41:13+01:00

Andy Bell:

One thing that is often forgotten about accessibility is that keeping things simple and utilising semantic HTML gets you most of the way towards providing a fully accessible experience for everyone.

Link: andy-bell.design

Link: Tech and Antitrust

2019-06-11T21:33:04+01:00

Ben Thompson:

Suggesting that users changing ecosystems is a sufficient antidote to Apple’s behavior is like suggesting that users subject to a hospital monopoly in their city should simply move elsewhere; asking a third party to remedy anticompetitive behavior by incurring massive inconvenience with zero immediate gain is just as problematic as making up market definitions to achieve a desired result.

Link: stratechery.com

Link: WWDC 2019 First Words, Which I May End Up Eating Later, but Hopefully Not

2019-06-09T19:14:40+01:00

Brent Simmons on SwiftUI:

The future of app-making looks more and more like web development. Declarative. Semantic. Dynamic — adapting to context (interaction styles, accessibility settings, screen size, etc.). Runtime-editable.

Link: inessential.com

Link: Reducing motion with the picture element

2019-05-29T08:54:45+01:00

Brad Frost:

I was just talking with Dave about the accessibility of moving images on the web, and he said:

hm… I wonder if you could use picture + prefers-reduced-motion?

He then sends the following code:
<picture>
  <source srcset="no-motion.jpg" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)"></source> 
  <img srcset="animated.gif alt="brick wall"/>
</picture>

Whoa! This is a revelation.

Link: bradfrost.com

Game of Thrones, Season 8 ★★

2019-05-22T00:00:00+01:00

Watched 21 May 2019, rated 2 out of 5 stars

It is still mindblowing that this show could get made, but it’s a shame that it couldn’t quite fill its own shoes towards the end. Guess I’ll read the books, then.

Link: How Aladdin Changed Animation (by Screwing Over Robin Williams)

2019-05-21T00:20:49+01:00

Lindsay Ellis:

So here’s a question: when did animated movies start selling themselves on their bankable celebrity talent?

Robin Williams was such a treasure.

Link: youtube.com

Link: He Crossed the Atlantic in a Barrel.

2019-05-16T07:38:54+01:00

Emily S. Rueb interviews Jean-Jacques Savin, a French adventurer who “spent 127 days alone in a large, barrel-shaped capsule made of plywood, at the mercy of the winds and currents.” It sounds like he had a lovely time:

If it was nice, I swam, and dove underneath the barrel to catch a fish, sea bream, to supplement my meal.

I made a breakfast in the morning, and a nice dinner in the evening. I had a lot of time to write my book. I played a lot of bluegrass on my mandolin.

Link: nytimes.com

Via @kottke

The Wandering Earth ★★

2019-05-11T05:38:51+01:00

Watched 11 May 2019, rated 2 out of 5 stars

This movie doesn’t know when to calm down. Exhausting!

Also posted on Letterboxd

Link: The Potential Advantages of a JavaScript Whitelist

2019-05-10T12:31:07+01:00

Nick Heer:

When you think about it, it’s pretty nuts that we allow the automatic execution of whatever code a web developer wrote. We don’t do that for anything else, really — certainly not to the same extent of possibly hundreds of webpages visited daily, each carrying a dozen or more scripts.

Link: pxlnv.com

Link: Let People Enjoy Things

2019-05-07T08:20:16+01:00

Esther Rosenfield:

It’s no coincidence that you never see the comic posted in response to criticism of some understated indie drama or underground Bandcamp musician. You only ever see it used to defend the commercial output of mega-corporations; your Marvel, your Game of Thrones, your Ariana Grande, etc. It’s no surprise, either. A recent development in corporate art is the positioning of it as a cultural underdog, constantly under siege from Haters and Trolls. You see it most with the nerd properties mentioned above. They parry the childhood fear of being bullied for liking nerd stuff into the suggestion that those bullies are still out there, waiting to pounce, and they take the form of everyone who dares to not like the IP in question.

Link: medium.com

Via @EstherOnFilm

Link: Underlines Are Beautiful

2019-05-04T14:23:08+01:00

Adrian Roselli:

Underlines, the standard, built-in signifier of hyperlinks, the core feature of the web, are beautiful.

This is objectively true. They are aesthetically one of the most delightful visual design elements ever created.

They represent the ideal of a democratized information system. They are a frail monument to the worldwide reach of ideas and discourse. They are proof of our ascension from trees and swamps, a testament to our species’ intelligence, and a witness to our inevitable downfall.

❤️

Link: adrianroselli.com

Link: Details / Summary Are Not [insert control here]

2019-05-04T14:20:43+01:00

Adrian Roselli:

Once major browsers started supporting <details> & <summary> developers immediately started to play with them to see what sorts of patterns they could enhance or replace. This is a good thing. Experimentation pushes boundaries, improves understanding.

However, we need to be careful of christening this new-to-us interaction as the solution to all our coding struggles.

Link: adrianroselli.com

Via @css

Link: Into the Breach Design Postmortem

2019-05-03T08:47:57+01:00

In this 2019 GDC session, Subset Games co-foudner Matthew Davis details the Into the Breach design process from early drafts to the final balancing decisions. Davis dives into years of cut content and iteration to show how Subset Games approached the difficult design challenges of making Into the Breach.

Link: youtube.com

Link: All Podcasts Are Shows; Not All Shows Are Podcasts

2019-04-27T09:35:31+01:00

John Gruber:

These companies are trying to usurp the word podcast for one simple reason: people love podcasts. What I think and hope they are missing is that part of what people love about podcasts is the openness. It’s one of the last remaining areas of the internet that works exactly as the internet was intended to work.

Link: daringfireball.net

The Final Girls ★★★★

2019-04-26T04:10:05+01:00

Watched 25 April 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars

I was pleasantly surprised by how genuinely funny and creatively consistent this movie is — and it’s clear that everyone was having fun while making it. Pretty great!

Also posted on Letterboxd

The Hitman’s Bodyguard ★★★

2019-04-26T02:16:50+01:00

Watched 25 April 2019, rated 3 out of 5 stars

You can tell that they tried (most of the time), but it’s not as sharp as it clearly thinks it is. Also, they shouldn’t have let Ryan Reynolds pick all the songs.

Also posted on Letterboxd

2019-04-25T16:20:00+01:00

There are a few CSS techniques for hiding content visually while keeping it accessible to screen readers, but none of them are perfect — and in some cases may even be harmful.

@zellwk has put together a great round-up of the issues.

UPDATE! This approach has bugs. Best solution so far is by @_josephwatkins.

I updated my article with my latest findings: https://t.co/UosivA8R5h https://t.co/Qk2Hzqye67
— Zell Liew 🤗 (@zellwk) April 25, 2019

Also posted on Twitter