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All Posts, page 4

  1. Tenet ★★★☆☆

    2020 film

    Watched 26 August 2020

    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.

  2. The UX of LEGO Interface Panels
    designedbycave.co.uk

    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.

  3. Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google
    themarkup.org

    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.

  4. 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.

  5. Rick and Morty, Season 4 ★★★☆☆

    2020 TV show

    Watched 11 November 2019 – 2 June 2020

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

  6. Underwater ★★★☆☆

    2020 film

    Watched 11 May 2020

    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?

  7. Lumines Remastered ★★★☆☆

    2018 video game

    Played 23 December 2019 – 15 January 2020 on Nintendo Switch

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

  8. Don’t forget: disasters and crises bring out the best in people
    thecorrespondent.com

    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.

  10. The Outsider, Season 1 ★★★☆☆

    2020 TV show

    Watched 13 January – 9 March 2020

    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.

  11. Picross S ★★★☆☆

    2017 video game

    Played 12 January – 11 March 2020 on Nintendo Switch

    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.

  12. Celeste: Farewell ★★★★★

    2019 video game

    Played 9 September – 23 December 2019 on Nintendo Switch

    The Progress screen in Celeste, showing full game completion, at a cost of over 23 thousand deaths and 66 hours of gameplay.

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

  13. Wonder Woman ★★☆☆☆

    2017 film

    Watched 8 March 2020

    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.

  15. Casino Royale — How Action Reveals Character
    youtube.com

    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.