Watched 16 March 2019
I knew nothing about Enron before watching this, and I came in expecting explosive revelations. But the most shocking aspect here is just how little I was shocked by the whole scandal. We truly are living in a golden age of grifting. Things like this are now, if not normal, expected.
More on scammers, by Maureen Dowd:
As Maria Konnikova wrote in her book, “The Confidence Game,” “The whirlwind advance of technology heralds a new golden age of the grift. Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change” when we are losing the old ways and open to the unexpected.
We are easy marks for faux Nigerian princes now, when chaos rules, the American identity wobbles, and technology is transforming our lives in awe-inspiring and awful ways.
See also, on Wired: Nigerian Email Scammers Are More Effective Than Ever.
Prompted by the college admissions bribery scandal in the US, the hosts of Do By Friday had an interesting discussion about grifting on a recent episode of the podcast. This article by Tom Gara was mentioned by Max Temkin and caught my attention:
We are living in a golden age of grifting. For an ambitious scammer in 2018, this is like being a sculptor in 1500s Florence — every major force at play in our world is like a wind at your back. In politics, a team of all-star grifters now runs the United States, and their fake-it-till-you-make-it ethos bleeds into everything it touches and elevates aspirational young con artists into national figures. Technology now allows you to create and maintain an entirely constructed identity, giving you not just the tools to manipulate your image and massage the truth of your everyday life, but also an audience hungry to consume that image and believe in it.
Watched 15 March 2019
Time is a flat circle.
Watched 22 March 2019
Bad in all the wrong ways, trading the gaudy excess and over-the-top action for faux sentimentality and the least genuine attempt at ’80s nostalgia I’ve ever seen.
Particularly insulting is the score, constantly trying to trick you into thinking you’re watching a cute Disney moment, except it’s an ugly robot trying to sit on a sofa and almost crushing a dog.
Turns out only Michael Bay can make Transformers movies because he is an auteur. Bring back the breakneck-pace kinetic editing and the pyramids exploding and the robots peeing on each other.
Played 21 March 2019 on Nintendo Switch
Is this a dig at Silicon Valley techbros? I love it. Reminded me of an old New Yorker cartoon:
“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
Short and sweet, full of personality. The kind of game that makes me want to make games.
Prompted by an excellent Kurzgesagt video on the subject, Jason Kottke reflects on what to do with old blog posts that don’t quite pass muster anymore:
But so anyway, I don’t know what to do about those old problematic posts. Tim Berners-Lee’s idea that cool URIs don’t change is almost part of my DNA at this point, so deleting them seems wrong. Approximately no one ever reads any post on this site that’s more than a few years old, but is that an argument for or against deleting them? (If a tree falls in the woods, etc…) Should I delete but leave a note they were deleted? Should I leave the original posts but append updates citing my current displeasure? Or like Mister Rogers used to do, should I rewrite the posts to bring them more into line with my current thinking? Is the kottke.org archive trapped in amber, a record of what I’ve written when I wrote it, or is it a living, breathing thing that thrives on activity? Is it more like a book or a performance?
This is an issue I struggle with, too. I no longer agree with some of my older film reviews, and some even contain mistakes. Should I delete them? Do I need to rewatch the films and write new reviews?
I might implement something I’ve seen in other blogs: a notice on old posts saying something to the effect of “this post is old, I might not agree with it anymore.”
Tyler Sticka:
When everyone finished translating articles to semantic, accessible HTML, I let them in on a secret: This was still design. While we hadn’t yet incorporated color, typography or composition, we had made decisions about prioritization, hierarchy, information architecture and user experience. And those decisions would be the most resilient… accessible to virtually any visitor, not just those blessed few with perfect vision, hearing and mobility. The web was the only medium that offered designers the chance to craft one work for such a varied landscape with so few gatekeepers.
Timothy B. Lee:
In January 2016, Musk predicted that Tesla cars would be able to drive autonomously coast to coast “in ~2 years.”
Needless to say, this hasn’t happened.
More than a critique of Tesla, this article is a good roundup of current thinking around self-driving technology.
Philipp Ranzhin:
I was mad that, while I spent my nights learning F#, my daughter started calling everyone around “fathers”. And this guy, instead of getting better at his job, went home to his children. And I wanted to punish him.
Because I do code review for self-identification. I don’t give a toss about the project or the code. I’m simply a madman who’s allowed to hurt people. I’m a psychopath with a licence to kill. An alpha male with a huge stick.
When I realized that, I felt ashamed of myself.
Watched 25 February 2019
I constantly fight myself on whether I truly love or actually hate Nathan for You. I think that’s probably the point, so I can’t help but respect it.
Watched 27 February 2019
Verhoeven hasn’t lost his touch for twisting the knife, but I don’t see the point in this one — either I don’t like it or I just plain don’t get it. And what happened to the cat?
Andy Bell suggests using CSS Custom Properties together with Heydon Pickering’s lobotomized owl selector to manage vertical spacing. It’s an elegant solution that works well with the cascade:
.flow {
--flow-space: 1em;
}
.flow > * + * {
margin-top: var(--flow-space);
}
I’ve been experimenting with old-school margin collapsing for vertical rhythm this past year, in Cobalt. I’m a proponent of spacing being an inherent property that exists by default instead of something that has to be explicitly added. But margin collapsing doesn’t really play well with Grid layout (until we get something like margin-trim), so I might give this method a try.
Watched 24 February 2019
Feels like old memories.
Katia Moskvitch:
Astronauts returning to Earth after a long stint in space are so badly disorientated that they usually can’t walk properly for 24 hours or longer. Turns out human brains function differently in space and when an astronaut gets back, it takes his or her brain some time to re-train itself. Now Marissa Rosenberg, a neuroscientist at Nasa, plans to use virtual reality headsets as a tool to short-cut the training.
Kristen Yoonsoo Kim investigates why Korean films keep getting snubbed at the Oscars:
At the time, the submission of Age of Shadows made no sense to me. But in early 2017, a government blacklist created by Korea’s former, impeached president Park Geun-hye was uncovered. Thousands of Korean artists and cultural figures were banned from receiving government support, and one of the most prominent figures on that blacklist was The Handmaiden director Park Chan-wook, thought to be too leftist and thus a threat to the government’s agenda.
The Handmaiden, Okja, and Burning are among my favorite films of the last few years. It’s a shame they’re not getting wider recognition.