Andy Bell:
The majority of the web community are probably building—y’know—modest websites. There’s a reason why WordPress powers 33.5% of the web: because most of the web isn’t big applications or design systems—it’s straight-up websites. We would all do well to remember that.
Kevin Marks:
There’s a widespread movement in design circles to reduce the contrast between text and background, making type harder to read. Apple is guilty. Google is, too. So is Twitter.
My plea to designers and software engineers: Ignore the fads and go back to the typographic principles of print — keep your type black, and vary weight and font instead of grayness. You’ll be making things better for people who read on smaller, dimmer screens, even if their eyes aren’t aging like mine. It may not be trendy, but it’s time to consider who is being left out by the web’s aesthetic.
Dave Rupert thinks version number bumps would be a good move for HTML and CSS, marketing-wise. I agree!
A single number bump replaces a mountain of marketing. Every discerning technologist knows it only makes sense to invest in technologies that are moving forward. To invest in a stagnant technology would be a dereliction of duty.
I think this has effected web technologies deeply. HTML5 was released in 2008 and its handful of new elements and APIs was a boom for the language. Even Steve Jobs advocated for it over Flash. Web Standards had won, Firefox and Webkit were our champions. “We need to upgrade to HTML5” was a blanket excuse for auditing your website and cleaning up your codebase.
Jeremy Wagner:
It’s easy to slap something up on a web server, but it’s quite another to be a steward of it in a way that makes the web a better place. That starts with redefining our productivity with the goal of serving the interests of others instead of our own.
This New York Times report on Kashgar is a good visual companion piece to last year’s excellent Buzzfeed News report on the subject.
Outside the camps, Uighurs live in a virtual cage. China has built a vast net of controls that shows the Communist Party’s vision of automated authoritarianism. Neighbors become informants. Children are interrogated. Mosques are monitored.
Joshua Benton:
This is a great idea: In order to reduce the number of its old stories that get recirculated as new, The Guardian is making a story’s age more prominent, both to readers and to those who might only see a link on social media without clicking through.
Watched 27 March 2019
There is only one episode that actually delivers on what I was hoping for, combining great animation with stylish art direction and exploring cool, mature themes: Zima Blue.
There are four of five others that aren’t plain edgelord teenager bullshit, but they’re nothing to write home about.
Matt Zoller Seitz:
TV doesn’t feel the same when you watch it that way. It’s more of a solitary experience, no matter how many fellow fans discuss it with you on social media. And it necessarily reduces the level of excitement surrounding a season or series finale because the show has been deprived of that measured pace of one episode per week, with six days of contemplation and anticipation in between each chapter, all leading inexorably to that last run of episodes during which the fans, who’ve spent years living and breathing this thing, come to terms with the totality of the accomplishment, and ready themselves for the exquisite and horrible moment when the storytellers swing that sword at our necks and the birds take flight and the credits roll for the last time.
Watched 4 April 2019
This is the superhero equivalent of a zombie movie where the characters keep saying the word “zombie” all the time.
The writing here is even worse than Split. The core plot device (what Sarah Paulson spends most of the movie doing) simply doesn’t work! It never felt the least bit believable. It’s a premise completely at odds with Shyamalan’s direction in the previous films, what he’s been showing us this whole time. It doesn’t work for the viewer, and it shouldn’t have worked for the characters — which makes it a double-whammy of dumb. This is, of course, all done in favor of a big twist (and, in my case, a big sigh).
I really might have to revisit Unbreakable, which I thought was cool however many years ago I watched it. I’m hoping it holds up.
Watched 3 April 2019
Have Shyamalan’s films always been this shallow? Nothing feels real outside the very narrow confines of what is happening. Dialogue is often poor, with way too much “as you know, Bob” going on. And all the buildup fell flat for me — I was neither shocked nor emotionally invested. I guess I’d better not rewatch Unbreakable, or risk disappointment.
Watched 29 March 2019
Very weird and cool and artsy, but also funny — and it all fits together perfectly. I liked how subversive the plot structure felt; I often had no idea where it was going to go next, and that made for a really great experience. I went in completely blind, and it paid off quite handsomely. I watched the trailer afterwards, and boy is it spoilery! Don’t watch trailers, kids.
It’s impressive how strongly this film pairs with Get Out. They’re certainly different, but there’s a clear style forming. Jordan Peele is carving out a really cool niche for himself.
Danny Dimian, Visual Effects Supervisor, and Josh Beveridge, Head of Character Animation, for “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” share exclusive breakdowns and talk about their inspiration and the techniques they used to create a new visual language for their Academy Award-winning film.
Casper Beyer:
Research has shown that modals that cannot be closed have the highest conversion rates.
Putting this on Medium: *chef’s kiss*
Great writing on this well-researched story, by Jason Hoffman:
At first glance, the bug appeared to be fairly routine, most likely a small problem somewhere in the website’s code or a strange coincidence. After just a few hours though, it became clear that the stakes for this one particular bug were far graver than anyone could have anticipated. If Firefox were to release this version of their browser as-is, they risked breaking an unknown, but still predictably rather large number of websites, all at once. Why that is has everything to do with the way MooTools was built, where it drew influence from, and the moment in time it was released. So to really understand the problem, we’ll have to go all the way back to the beginning.
Avi Asher-Schapiro makes some good points about The Inventor that I failed to consider:
Missing from the film, however, is any sustained effort to understand how Theranos interacted with the larger economic and social forces that nurtured it. In the hands of Gibney, the rise and fall of Theranos is reduced to a sort of personality puzzle, driven by the banal questions like: What was Elizabeth Holmes thinking? Is she a liar? How could seemingly competent investors be so misled?
That’s a shame, because the story of Theranos is so much more than that. At its root, it’s a parable that cuts to the central dysfunctions in the American economic and political order, one that should dismantle our notions of meritocracy and put a strict limit on our forbearance for elites. It illuminates how the rich and well connected occupy different strata of life, enjoy a completely different set of opportunities from the rest of us, experience a different kind of justice, and are so often immune from consequences. Though the film gives some glimpses of these dynamics, they are always in the background, shadowed by other far less compelling narrative impulses.
Jeremy Keith:
It’s relatively easy to write and speak about new technologies. You’re excited about them, and there’s probably an eager audience who can learn from what you have to say.
It’s trickier to write something insightful about a tried and trusted (perhaps even boring) technology that’s been around for a while. You could maybe write little tips and tricks, but I bet your inner critic would tell you that nobody’s interested in hearing about that old tech. It’s boring.
The result is that what’s being written about is not a reflection of what’s being widely used.