The Overwhelming Racism Of COVID Coverage by Indi Samarajiva.
A look at some of the countries which are handling Coronavirus better than the UK (though tbh, that’s not difficult). Less Germany and New Zealand, more Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
The real story is that ‘developing’ nations have done remarkably better at fighting COVID-19 than the rich and white. The real story starts precisely where the western map ends. Here be dragons. We be dragons.
I understand you’re used to seeing us as disaster areas, but this has made us disaster masters. Poor nations have almost uniformly reacted quickly, decisively and survived. We have a lot to show you, if you could take the racist scales from your eyes.
This video showing a potential way of using video chat for short responses without having to come off of mute.
In video meetings it's a hassle to unmute just to say one word especially if someone else is speaking. I created a video lens that uses hand gestures to show comic-book style messages instead. So far it's been pretty fun! pic.twitter.com/wp6XO5QDQc
— Cameron Hunter (@cameronhunter) September 15, 2020
Like, an actual good use case for snap camera. I would appreciate something like this – although I’m not sure quit how well it would work when you’re one of 10+ people and are being shown in a tiny tiny box.
Can California’s tourism industry survive a year unlike any other?
Apparently some places were doing OK, despite everything, and that’s cool to see. But you only have to look at the news to see that it’s not going to be an easy winter.
Not everywhere in Big Sur is sailing through, however, and fire season is worsening an already dire situation for some local businesses. Road access into the area was shut off from the south due to fires, while some state parks and all the state’s national forests were also ordered to close.
Rick Aldinger, the general manager of the Big Sur River Inn, said occupancy had been down 10% to 20% throughout the summer – the busy season that usually gets local businesses through the rest of the year. And that was before the fires, Aldinger said. Now, things have slowed to a trickle.
I’m basing most of my first-hand knowledge off of the marketing emails I still get from the place I got married in Big Sur, and they’re currently shut down with no particular opening date… so, that’s got to be tough.
]]>
Inclusively Hiding & Styling Checkboxes and Radio Buttons by Sara Soueidan.
I may have mentioned this already before 🤔 but even so, I’m back on it. Currently spending some time at work sorting out some legacy checkboxes which are… interestingly done (divs. Lots of divs.) so this article has been helpful yet again.
So, in this article, I will cover the different techniques for hiding elements, how each of them affects the accessibility of the content, and how to properly hide checkboxes and radio buttons taking their own accessibility and usability considerations into account to make sure we aren’t leaving any users out.
This interview with Method Man by Jeff Weiss.
It’s focussed on his acting for the most part, but does open with a so deserved acknowledgment of Meth, the mc.
Has anyone ever been better at the actual art of rapping? His flow is effortless and heaven-sent, eternal in nature, waiting to be discovered like neon.
He’s always (probably) been my favourite Wu-Tang member, so I’m here for any and all Tical content. I love spotting him in acting roles (shout to the super short but pivotal moment in 187) and there’s tonnes of stuff mentioned in this interview that previously went under the radar for me but is now on the watchlist.
I think he’s got a lot of rapping still in him (as shown by this verse on a Conway track last month) but if he’s defaulting to being an actor now, so be it. More power to him.
Hiero Day 2020 virtual concert & film.
This lockdown offering from the Hieroglyphics crew is 3 hours of essential viewing for any hip hop fan. I’m not through it all yet, but so far the origin story of Souls of Mischief has had me hooked. I got sidetracked a little by dipping back into their discography, but that’s a very welcome distraction.
Open Mike Eagle Sits down with the legendary Prince Paul to discuss Prince Paul’s life, impact, and role in the world of Hip Hop.
I’ve been saving these 'til they’re all done, and have now whizzed through the first 5 episodes (of the 12 that have been put out) covering his work with Gravediggaz, De Le Soul (specifically 3ft High & Rising), A Prince Among Thieves, Chris Rock, and MF Doom. It really is a fantastic series; the conversation is slick, it’s inclusive (if you have no idea about any of his work), it’s in-depth, it’s funny, and it’s just dope.
Britain’s obsession with school uniform reinforces social divisions by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett.
As I’m currently experiencing the fun and joy of trying to sort uniform for both my kids, dealing with some ludicrous queues and stock issues from the one shop that provides clothes for their school, a lot of this article speaks to me.
It’s not only the availablity and cost thing though, it’s the weirdness in general. I’m not a fan.
Why is it that, as a nation, we are so faithful to the concept where other countries are not? Why are so few alarmed by the need of educators to strip a child of his or her individuality at so young an age? And why do proponents continue to hide behind the falsehood that they help poorer pupils?
Winamp skins.
“Infinite scroll through 65k Winamp skins with instant search and in-browser interactive preview” thanks to Jordan Eldredge. Like many other people of a certain vintage, I have fond memories of Winamp (and yes, it’s odd to have a special place in your heart for a bit of software). Probably spent more time changing skins on the player than I did playing MP3s on it, so it was a lot of fun browsing this archive and trying to decide which one I’d install today.
]]>
This short piece by Gary Younge, giving some context and insight about the state of America at the moment. BLM, domestic terrorism, protest, state sanctioned violence, COVID, Trump, etc… It’s a powerful watch.
Take time to listen to this short lecture by @garyyounge. He does a strong job of contextualizing the current moment. A primer on this week’s news for those who need. There are triggering images, so take care of yourself as needed. Overall, a strong watch. pic.twitter.com/4g0Dpy8te0
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) August 27, 2020
Call Out Culture: Def Jux vs Rawkus.
Not sure I’ve mentioned them here before, but Call Out Culture is a rap podcast with very long episodes talking about very specific area of rap. I love it. This week, it’s a 2 hour discussion about the relative highs and lows of these two record labels who dominated New York ‘indy’ rap from the late 90’s. I was heavy into both of them at that time (and still am), so this whole chat ticked all the boxes. It definitely works best if you have a bit of a familiarity with that era, but if not, there’s a ton of music mentioned that you should delve into. We’re talking Aesop Rock, Pharoahe Monch, Cannibal Ox, Black Star, El-P, and the rest of them…
For whatever it’s worth, for me, Def Jux overall take the win in terms of music that’s stood the test of time but Rawkus Presents: Soundbombing II almost single-handedly puts that entire label on top forever. Still gets play weekly.
99% Invisible Episode 392: The Weather Machine.
Some snippets from a book by Andrew Blum which explains the state of weather forecasting and how we got to the stage where people can actually predict accurately whether (👀) you’ll need an umbrella or not tomorrow.
]]>The very idea of forecasting weather across great distances was essentially a non-starter until information was able to travel faster than the weather itself. With faster-than-weather communication systems like telegraphs, the landscape of forecasting was transformed. Suddenly, in the mid-1800s, it became possible to map out phenomena like the paths of hurricanes by relaying data in realtime.
The Microsoft Inclusive Design toolkit available as a resource on the Microsoft Design page.
Designing for inclusivity not only opens up our products and experiences to more people with a wider range of abilities. It also reflects how people really are. All humans are growing, changing, and adapting to the world around them every day. We want our designs to reflect that diversity. Every decision we make can raise or lower barriers to participation in society. It’s our collective responsibility to lower these barriers though inclusive products, services, environments, and experiences.
Lot of useful things in there, including a selection of examples of situational disability (i.e. how pretty much everyone is only 1 or 2 slight steps away from being disabled).
As always, suddenly realising things affect lots of people shouldn’t be the drive to make things better for what you previously thought was a small group of people, but if it’s things like this that prompt people to change their approach, I’m all for it. Curb cut effect is real.
5 most annoying website features I face as a blind person every single day by Holly Tuke.
On a related note, a reminder of some things that really shouldn’t be things these days. Nothing groundbreaking here, but the fact that these ‘simple’ things still need attention is pretty damning tbh. Plenty of web developers out there running before they can walk.
For blind and visually impaired people like me, accessibility is the difference between us being able to use a website and clicking off it.
99% Invisible 407: The Dolphin that Roared.
A brief history of Anguilla via a memory of a flag with some dolphins on it. Tbh, 100% of the knowledge I currently have about Anguilla comes from this episode. Another sterling example of British fuckery.
Anguilla’s soil wasn’t fertile enough for large-scale agriculture, and according to Hodge, if the British couldn’t establish the same large slave plantations on Anguilla that were common in the rest of the Caribbean, then they didn’t have much use for it. So for decades, centuries even, the British basically ignored the island which meant Anguilla got very little funding for development.
It’s a tale of colonisation, revolution, graphic design, and has a somewhat happy ending. After listening to the episode, I did look up a little more about Anguilla and in a nutshell, it looks gorgeous. Well worth a trip; keeping all this complicated history in mind.
]]>This thread about a Jellyfish Sprite sighting in Texas.
This is probably the coolest image of one of these that I’ve ever seen. These things only last for a tenth of a second, and are super hard to see despite being MASSIVE; Stephen Hummel (who caught the image) thinks this particular one was “around 30 miles long and 30 miles tall” 🤯. They’re stunning. I also love that they were only ‘discovered’ in 1989, because what the fuck did people think they were before(?!) Can you imagine seeing that in medieval times and having to explain to the rest of your village about the colossal bright red jellyfish you just saw coming from space?
DMX, Woodstock '99: a landmark for rap and American realism.
Part of a series documenting “iconic festival sets”, this piece about DMX at perhaps his absolute peak is a great read, and a great prompt to watch the whole set again.
If you’ve not read about Woodstock '99 before, it doesn’t make pretty reading. The whole thing sounds horrific for all sorts of reasons, and yet, that DMX set has long been elevated to almost mythic proportions.
The festival is rightly looked back on as a chaotic disaster …
… DMX mostly rose above it, delivering a performance that cemented street rap’s place on the biggest festival stages. Backed only by a DJ, he rips through his first two records without backing vocals or gimmicks. Amid the abrasive guitars of Fuckin Wit D, his voice sounds capable of moving mountains. Get at Me Dog is even more thrilling – there’s so much bite to his vocals it’s as if teeth are sinking into your ears.
This piece comes at a good time, not long after the DMX vs Snoop Verzuz ‘battle’ which highlighted again just how big an artist he was[/is?]. I vividly remember picking up those first 2 albums in '98 (along with the literally millions and millions of other people worldwide) and playing them non stop. The man was a bonafide superstar. Deserves his props.
Street View of 1940s New York.
Between 1939 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration collaborated with the New York City Tax Department to collect photographs of every building in the five boroughs of New York City. In 2018, the NYC Municipal Archives completed the digitization and tagging of these photos. This website places them on a map.
Love it. You can see all the usual touristy places, but beyond that, there are thousands and thousands of images of ‘normal’ buildings; an amazing snapshot of an era.
]]>
The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times.
I can’t remember how I got onto this link (might’ve been off the back of something related to that awful explosion in Beirut this week) but it’s one that I also stumbled on a few months ago via The World’s loudest sound and promptly forgot about. All about how utterly inconceivable and loud the 1883 Krakatoa eruption was.
A barometer at the Batavia gasworks (100 miles away from Krakatoa) registered the ensuing spike in pressure at over 2.5 inches of mercury1,2. That converts to over 172 decibels of sound pressure, an unimaginably loud noise. To put that in context, if you were operating a jackhammer you’d be subject to about 100 decibels. The human threshold for pain is near 130 decibels, and if you had the misfortune of standing next to a jet engine, you’d experience a 150 decibel sound. (A 10 decibel increase is perceived by people as sounding roughly twice as loud.) The Krakatoa explosion registered 172 decibels at 100 miles from the source. This is so astonishingly loud, that it’s inching up against the limits of what we mean by “sound.”
and then
…you would be unable to breathe or likely see at all from the sound pressure, glass would shatter, fog would be generated as the water in the air dropped out of suspension in the pressure waves, your house at this distance would have a roughly 50% chance of being torn apart from sound pressure alone. Military stun grenades reach this volume for a split second… if they are placed up to your face. Survival chance from sound alone, minimal, you would certainly experience permanent deafness but probably also organ damage.
Nature huh(?) Wowsers. You hear (lol) about the potential of weaponising sound occasionally, and obviously it’s possible – but this is a level of sound that melts concrete. Makes the Brown Note pale in comparison.
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…: A 25th Anniversary Retrospective.
Aug 1st 1995 was the release date of this undeniable classic from Raekwon. It’s a masterpiece; an album that has influenced wave after wave of artists in the quarter of decade since it dropped. It gets a decent mention in my Wu-Tang talk but in case you haven’t caught that and you’re still not sure about why this album is so revered, this is a decent overview.
RZA churned out banger after banger like a mad scientist in his basement laboratory. And after several months of grinding and a collaborative effort between RZA, Raekwon, and Ghostface, they’d created a masterpiece with contributions from every Wu-Tang Clan member…
I’d recommend giving it a read and then listening to the album on repeat a few times. Or listening to it first and then reading. Either way, you should listen to the album. There are some songs on there that I literally listen to at least once a week (and have done for the last 20+ years) but this anniversary is the perfect excuse to sit back and give the whole thing a play.
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. As mentioned above. A lot.
99% Invisible 393: Map Quests: Political, Physical and Digital.
This is an ideal episode for me: a few little stories about maps. Exclaves and enclaves, pokemon affecting the real world, and triangulation stations. I’ve been aware of trig points for a while – it’s quite fun spotting them when out and about 🤓 – but I had no idea about the history behind them.
They were first built in the 1800’s, before being re-done between 1930s-60s, and there are thousands of them in the UK.
In low-lying or flat areas some trig points are only a few metres above sea level and one is even at −1 m. When all the trig points were in place, it was possible in clear weather to see at least two other trig points from any one trig point … Careful measurements of the angles between the lines-of-sight of the other trig points then allowed the construction of a system of triangles which could then be referenced back to a single baseline to construct a highly accurate measurement system that covered the entire country. Wikipedia
People who go out specifically to find them are called ‘trig-baggers’ and despite that name, I want to be one. I’ve started using https://trigbagging.co.uk/ to find local ones (there are some hidden ones near my house I had no idea about) and honestly, I’ll be all over that site next time I venture outside.
]]>If I had been posting regularly, I would’ve mentioned: Dominic Cummings is a twat, Black Lives Matter, lockdown or not lockdown? who knows?, “Glastonbury At Home” was fun, the UK government is despicable, Black Lives Matter, sending kids back to school was weird, Dorset & Devon are both wonderful places to explore seeing as global travel is off the cards, person-woman-man-camera-tv, I officially don’t have Covid-19 (or at least, didn’t on July 22), and most of all, Black Lives Matter.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
I was Tupac Shakur’s pen pal.
In the 90s, I was pen pal’s with Claire who lived in Uzel, while Nina Bhadreshwar was exchanging letters with actual 2Pac. No offence to Claire près de la gare, or her deux frères, but I feel like I missed out somehow. This is an amazing story; I love it!
I was back in Barnsley a few months later when the phone rang and I asked who it was. The voice said, “It’s Tupac. You sent me a copy of your fly-ass magazine.” He asked me to keep sending it, and we started corresponding by letter.
Grounded with Louis Theroux.
Previously, I’d listened to the first 2 episodes – now I’ve got through all 10. Particularly liked the Troy Deeney chat which was refreshingly open and candid for a footballer, and definitely changed my opinion of him for the better.
Troy describes how, just as his football career was taking off, he kicked someone in the face during a fight on a night out and was sentenced to jail: “I was embarrassed and ashamed of it, but it happened, and I can’t change it”. In prison, he says, “people just told me I was an idiot, and that’s what I needed.” He remembers them saying, “You’ve got to understand how big of an opportunity you’ve got. Not only for you, but to show young kids from around our area that they don’t have to be like us.” After that, he says, “I just decided that I was going to give it a real good go.”
The KSI interview was also pretty enlightening in terms of making him come across as an actual person, and then the chats with Gail Porter, and Rose McGowan were both powerful listens. I couldn’t pick a ‘favourite’ of the series – go listen to them all!
99% Invisible 399: Masking for a Friend.
Exploring why mask usage is accepted more in China and other countries in East Asia than in the West. Primarily thanks to Dr Wu Lien-teh deducing in the early 1900s that Manchurian Plague bacteria was in fact airborne and not spread by rats.
After the [flu] pandemic ended in 1920, wearing masks fell into obscurity in the US mostly because the country did not experience many deadly epidemics, but in China, there was never an opportunity to forget. As Lynteris explains, “In China, you have a continuity of the use of the mask. So the mask story does not end in 1911 or 1918. It continues through several other outbreaks in the 20s, in the 30s. And then in Mao’s China after 1949.” Not only that, but the medical mask also plays an important role in public health campaigns and in propaganda.
TOPICAL, amirite? For the record, hopefully it goes without saying but: wear a fucking mask when you need to wear a fucking mask. They don’t limit your oxygen, they’re not part of a government conspiracy, they’re not infringing on your human rights, it’s not tyranny.
Wearing a mask is an act of protecting yourself, but more importantly, protecting the people around you. It provides a sense of solidarity—that we’re all in this together.
Personally, I’ve gone for a fetching floral face covering, which I think everyone can agree is an undoubtedly stylish accessory. Already looking forward to experiencing the warming benefits when winter kicks in.
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What you’re looking at now are the fruits of that labour. If you were familiar with the old site, you probably wont notice much different; it’s the same basic design and structure, with only a few visual tweaks. Behind the scenes though, big tings.
All things considered, the whole process was pretty smooth, and I could definitely have been done much sooner if I’d given it more than my casual attention. I’ve enjoyed the excuse to learn something new and I’ve appreciated the comprehensive documentation which has helped me make sense of things. I’m also indebted to the people who’ve made their own 11ty work public on GitHub. I didn’t use any of the base builds that are floating around, but I did pick up all sorts of bits from all over the place (particularly Kristoff Michiels, Sarah Fossheim, Tatiana Mac, and James Doc). My own contribution is here: https://github.com/mattnortham/ma11northam though I’m certainly not presenting it as any sort of standard.
Likewise, here are a few notes on the process that are by no means a ‘guide’, but might help you if you’re getting to grips with 11ty (and will serve as a reminder to me when I next come to do this). They’re conveniently split into 11 points which I PROMISE was not intentional, but I’ll happily accept.
I used WP Gatsby Markdown Exporter to grab my existing content. It does a great job at converting posts into the correct format and packaging it up in manageable directories (as well as a copy of all uploaded media). That bit was quick. What took much longer though, was the tidying up. I had a lot of front matter that I didn’t want any more, and some of the content itself needed amending (image markup & media embeds were the main culprits). I still haven’t finished going through all those old posts yet (I’m back to 2018 so far) but though it’s tedious, it’s actually pretty useful in terms of prompting me to review and audit it all. I’ve sanitised tags, fixed broken links, and formatted posts with a bit more consistency. Well worth it.
It took me a while to get images behaving in a satsifactory way and I still haven’t really got it sorted. My main problem was in serving them up from the markdown files, and though it’s not entirely resolved (adding a class, anyone? <figure>
?), I do at least have them lazyloading (with a <noscript>
fallback) after rolling my own Markdown It plugin (more on that later).
I’ve also made use of a couple of shortcodes to render appropriately sized images in my liquid templates, which was uber important due to the number of images I’ve got in the photography section. It doesn’t go as far as responsive images yet, but does at least show small images where I want small images, and big ones where I want big ones. A little bit like this:
// Usage: {% smallImg "PATH-TO-IMAGE", "The alt", "align-left" %}
smallImg: (img, alt, className) => {
let i = img.lastIndexOf('.');
let imgPath = img.substring(0, i);
let ext = img.substring(i + 1);
let size = '-sm';
let theImage = `${imgPath}${size}.${ext}`;
if (className == "lazy-img")
return `<img data-src="${theImage}" alt="${alt}" class="lazy-img img-small ${className}">
<noscript><img src="${theImage}" alt="${alt}" class="img-small"></noscript>`
else
return `<img src="${theImage}" alt="${alt}" class="img-small ${className}">`
}
Speaking of Markdown It, setting the typographer
option is a must " " 👀.
const mdOptions = {
html: true,
breaks: true,
linkify: true,
typographer: true
};
The plugin I bodged together to wrap images (which you can see here) was inspired by markdown-it-plugin-data-src.
const imgDataSrc = require("./src/_11ty/[imgDataSrc.js");
...
eleventyConfig.setLibrary("md", markdownIt(mdOptions).use(imgDataSrc));
The reason I made my own was because I wanted to use a different lazyloading method, as well as the <noscript>
too. For the JS, I’m making use of vanilla-lazyload, as that’s what I had before and I’ve not got any reason to stop using it. (It’s now the only bit of JS that gets applied sitewide).
I made use of luxon to create a couple of date filters, for blog posts and the RSS feed.
readableDate: (dateObj) => {
return DateTime.fromJSDate(dateObj, {zone: 'gmt'}).toLocaleString(DateTime.DATE_FULL);
},
timeStamp: (dateObj) => {
return DateTime.fromJSDate(dateObj, {zone: 'gmt'}).toFormat('yyyy-LL-dd HH:mm:ss');
}
But the built in date filters are also pretty good, using the syntax from strftime like {{ post.date | date: "%B %Y" }}
(which outputs April 2020
). In fact, I can’t 100% remember why I created those filters when I could possibly have used those 🤔.
Still not found a simple way of adding the day suffix (st/nd/rd/th) for the readable date though.
Console log is a pretty recent addition. As a unashamed fan of debugging in this way, I appreciated that this is now built in. You can use it for any bit of data. I mostly found it useful to check what was making it into collections, but tbh it’s a bit of a messy way to work, as the log gets output alongside all the build notifications when running --serve
in the terminal.
{{ featuredImage | log }}
There’s a lot written about creating collections, and handling blog posts was pretty straightforward. I liked the approach I found in Kristoff’s code of having the main post collection, and then other collections where all posts are grouped by tag and/or category. It’s a little more legwork, but made more sense to me when it came to rendering archive pages.
Beyond blog posts, I did find it a little tricky to come up with a way of managing my image galleries. I wanted to have a collection of all my images that I could loop through by tag, without creating pages for them all (because I had hundreds and it was taking a while to build, not to mention I didn’t ever link to them) – that’s where permalink: false
in the frontmatter came in.
But then I wanted to have pages created only for photos with a particular tag (‘print’, indicating you can buy a copy of it). To do that, I needed to create pages from a subset of the main collection, by using ---js
instead of vanilla frontmatter, which allows me to apply a before callback. You can see it on my print.liquid file.
...
pagination: {
data: "collections.allPhotos",
size: 1,
alias: "photo",
before: function(data) {
return data.filter(function(item){
return item.tags.includes("print");
})
}
}
What I’ve ended up with does feel a little convoluted, with 5 collections on the go for my photography (as well as all the blog collections). But it works, and it’s quick to build, so that’ll do for now.
I’m not really using a CMS at the moment. Plenty of talk out there about using Netlify CMS but I haven’t made any move in that direction yet. What I am using is stackedit to assist with my markdown where needed (I’ve never relly gelled with it, though it’s growing on me), and handcoded blocks for my liquid pages such as about me.
I’ve also retained a fragment of my WordPress set up to manage my photos. All the details for them are curated in WP then made available as a json file which I manually copy across to the 11ty _data
directory as photos.json. That then gets picked up by front matter pagination to create the collections I mentioned before.
It’s fine. I don’t intend to change content much, but if it becomes unmanageable, I’ll look into a different approach.
Contrary to general concensus, I’m not using Netlify to host my site. I already have my hosting and domain and SSL configured and paid for, so I wanted to stick with it. Frustratingly, I couldn’t find much in the way of documentation to go along with how to deploy to anywhere other than Netlify (or GitHub Pages), but I got there in the end.
I’m making use of GitHub Actions, having created a workflow file to watch for any commits to the main
branch. It runs the 11ty build command then pushes it to a built
branch thanks to an action intended for use with GitHub pages, and that’s where I was stuck for a while. I’ve used a GitHub workflow making use of SFTP before, but couldn’t get it to work in this particular set up.
Eventually, I opted for a middleman (👋 Buddy) which fills the CI gap with a pipeline that watches my built
branch and then finally deploys via SFTP. It sounds more complicated than it is, and yes – it’s FTP 👴🏻, but I’m really pleased with how quick and seamless it actually is.
Everyone raves about the performance gains that can come from using a static site generator like 11ty, and rightly so. The improvements can be dramatic and they’re of course very welcome. #perfmatters.
But… I’d actually worked really hard to get my old site performing well. Yeah it was WordPress but that doesn’t automatically mean ‘slow’. So when it came to testing this new site, the improvements were so minimal – and the issues that existed were of course the same. I would hope that it goes without saying but “just using” 11ty isn’t going to immediately grant your Lighthouse wishes.
There are other benefits away from the digits at the top, but it’s those numbers that get you on the 11ty Leaderboards [I still don’t know how? I want to be on there!], and purely on those numbers, my WP site more than held its own.
Sidenote: on my old WP site, I made use of some randomly generated SVG wave transitions to slightly mask the minimal loading times between pages, and while I still love the effect, I thought it probably unnecessary with this new site so they’re gone (I may still bring them back 👀 they were pretty).
I used Liquid for my template files (primarily out of respect to Liquid Swords – word to GZA – and I’m loving how easy it is to use. But most people seem to use Nunjucks, so some of the syntax differences caught me out, such as…
🤔 set
in Nunjucks == capture
in Liquid (src).
🤔 In Liquid, elseif
is actually written elsif
because of course, why would it need that second ‘e’(?) 🙄 (src).
🤔 Within a forloop, to use a counter, I tried {{ assign i++ }}
but it didn’t do anything. The docs recommend using increment: {{ increment myVar }}
but spits it out on the page. So I ended up finding forloop.index and using {% assign num = forloop.index %}
in order to track the iteration.
🤔 or
doesn’t seem to work in liquid templates, despite it being referenced widely. Plenty of examples of 11ty code show things like: <title>{{title or metadata.title }}</title>
but I had to change it to messier looking if
statements to get it to work:
<title>{% if title %}{{title}}{% else %}{{metadata.title }}{%endif%}</title>
A few little things that made me pull my hair out before realising they were simple fixes.
👉 When using a 11ty.js data file (like I am to generate different image sizes), you need to add them to the templateFormats in the eleventy config or they don’t get picked up. This took me a LONG time to realise: templateFormats: ["md","html","liquid","11ty.js"]
👉 If you’ve got tags being set in Frontmatter and a directory data file, and want to merge them, use deep merge: eleventyConfig.setDataDeepMerge(true)
And that’s it.
If I’m honest, I didn’t really have anything against the old WordPress site other than the ongoing fear of losing everything whenever there was an update 😬. I managed to do pretty much anything I needed to do, and I was comfortable developing with it. But, I’d had that site for 14 years and when you add on and add on to something for that long… It felt right to change it up and start from fresh (albeit, with the same design and some of the same CSS). It’s good to get out of your comfort zone. 11ty ticks a lot of front-end developer boxes for me, and I’m looking forward to working with it some more 🎉.
Pop back soon to see the progress 👋
]]>❗️ The Age of (Not That) Innocence by Jeff Weiss.
Twenty years ago, Britney Spears did it again with her sophomore album, the final classic of the teen-pop era and a goodbye to the gilded years of the record industry. This is the story of how it was created—and its planetary impact.
Jeff Weiss is one of my favourite writers. Usually covering hip hop in a way that very few manage to do, he’s applied his usual elegance and passion to a slightly different topic this time – articulating the context around and the impact of Britney’s second album. It’s another piece of essential reading. You could say he’s… done it again. 😎
Towering above all pop culture totems was a 5-foot-4 ex-Mouseketeer turned teenaged Marilyn, who sold more first-week albums than any female artist ever had—1,319,000 copies—nearly triple that of the previous record-holder (Alanis Morissette). The eponymous lead single shattered ’NSync’s freshly set record for most radio station adds in a single week. In this never-ending prom of frosted-tip and puka-shell pop, Britney Spears was the queen, barely legal and the biggest star in the world. She was the vestal pseudo-virgin at the center of that neon helix between impeachment and implosion in a perfumed Abercrombie & Fitch nation, soundtracked by Swedish pop shamans and their sparkling American veneers.
Even if, like me, you not deep into the album tracks and only really know the singles, there is so much you can appreciate from that article (and of course, from Britney as a pop icon). I do have a soft spot for Oops… specifically. It’s a classic. Back in 2000 I used it as the background track for a rap battle I was in, which I remember none of the lyrics of other than “… even with this fucking beat, you know I’m going to win” (which in retrospect was a mistake, because it should probably have been “because of this beat…”; it’s an absolute banger).
https://twitter.com/BeardedGenius/status/1243853239889678336
🚛 An Oral History of Mad Max: Fury Road.
This has been doing the rounds this week, with contributions from all the main people that you’d want to hear from. In a nutshell, a slightly hectic and very fraught production, which led to the very hectic and slightly fraught film that came out in 2015.
MILLER A younger filmmaker who has done very well called me before his first feature and said, “Any tips?” I told him, “The day will come on the shoot when you think you’re completely crazy and what you’re doing makes no sense. Just keep going.” When he finished that film, he told me, “Remember what you said? What you didn’t tell me is that it’s going to happen every day.” And it’s true.
It’s one of those movies I wish I’d seen in the cinema, but I’ve no doubt there’ll be another chance at some point.
🏝 The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.
First the piece itself, and then the follow up with Sione Filipe Totau.
It’s an incredible story about a group of kids who get stranded on an island after stealing a boat to run away (“two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed”), then instead of descending into wild savagery à la Mad Max, worked together to survive over a year. People are generally kind and helpful(?) Apparently so.
]]>Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, 'Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.
🗺 Your Maps of Life Under Lockdown
A collection of maps created and submitted by readers of CityLab, from around the world. They were asked to represent their lockdown worlds, and I love this. Some of them are stunning, all of them are insightful.
I’ve become more aware of the geography of my neighborhood, both on a macro and micro scale. I’ve become cognizant of the layout of streets, locations of specific landmarks, and the tiny details in people’s yards that reveal things about their lives.
Aditi Shah, Berkeley, California
It’s ones like Champ Turner’s of his area in Austin, Texas that definitely resonate. A few different routes between the same start and end point; that’s pretty much my approach to lockdown exploration. Like him & most of the others, I’ve found myself noticing more about the streets around me due to the enforced reduction of travel (though unlike them, I can’t draw).
Gro Slotsvik, Bristol, UK
💬 Communication charts around the world
Some work by Richard D. Lewis revealing how people from different countries handle the art of negotiation.
Although cultural generalizations can be overly reductive, Lewis, who speaks ten languages, insists it can be done fairly, writing: “Determining national characteristics is treading a minefield of inaccurate assessment and surprising exception. There is, however, such a thing as a national norm.”
I don’t have anywhere near enough experience in conversing around the world to properly evaluate this, but it’s fascinating to consider. The flow charts are a work of art.
English tend to avoid confrontation in an understated, mannered, and humorous style that can be powerful or inefficient.
Germans rely on logic but “tend to amass more evidence and labor their points more than either the British or the French.”
Spanish and Italians “regard their languages as instruments of eloquence and they will go up and down the scale at will, pulling out every stop if need be to achieve greater expressiveness.”
Regular readers will have noted that I am a fan of Louis on podcasts, so this – his very own podcast – is a delight to have as an outcome of lockdown. The pair of episodes released so far have been with Jon Ronson and Boy George respectively, and both are of course recommended listening. The first in particular is an enjoyable chat between two people who are basically the same, and that in itself is entertaining.
As the BBC puts it:
]]>The two men have had oddly parallel careers, exploring lots of similar subjects. When they started out, Jon did think of Louis as a competitor: “I never saw it as destructive, though… because having a nemesis forces you to work harder.” But Louis says he feels more of a rivalry now that Jon is successful in America. In the interests of honesty, he admits that despite his warmth and admiration for Jon, “there’s some nastiness mixed in with it, which I don’t endorse… if I could weed it out, I would do it.”
🦖 Spinosaurus the first swimming dinosaur on National Geographic.
If your preconception of what a Spinosaurus might have looked like was anything like mine, it was this big thing with a giant sail on its back, walking pretty much upright on two legs. 'Til 2014, that was apparently the general consensus, and then that changed with a new discovery suggesting it walked on all-fours. But even that is old news, as even more bones have been found.
Now, with evidence from the newly analyzed tail, there’s a strong case that Spinosaurus didn’t merely flirt with the shore but was capable of full-fledged aquatic movement. Collectively, the findings published today suggest the giant Spinosaurus spent plenty of time underwater, perhaps hunting prey like a massive crocodile. “This tail is unambiguous,” says team member Samir Zouhri, a paleontologist at the Université Hassan II. “This dinosaur was swimming.”
What I love about this is that we still don’t actually know. That idea of Spinosaurus walking on two legs persisted for the best part of a century! There’s so much unknown about dinosaurs, just waiting to literally be unearthed. The number of 'complete’ dinosaur skeletons that have ever been discovered is something like 2000, which is ridiculous considering that we’re talking about species that covered the planet for millions and millions of years! (Equally though, it’s obviously not that ridiculous we haven’t found them considering the timescales involved 🤷♂️).
Looking forward to reading in 2068 about Spinosaurus actually being a levitating dinosaur. Yeah Science!
🗣 Featherstone & Friends: Designing & Developing Responsive Pages.
An hour of Derek Featherstone and Ethan Marcotte chatting about accessibility and responsive web design. I signed up for the live stream, but the video is now available to watch so you can catch up. There were no bombshells or grand pronouncements, but I’d happily listen to many many more hours of those two talking about their work.
Covered all sorts, from the perils of using pixels as a device indentifier, tab order with CSS grid, useful media-queries, and consideration for people browsing your site with no screen whatsoever.
One aside from Ethan particularly stuck with me though; he described the ethos behind responsive web design as “a conversation between the space, and the users of the space”. I love that.
🤖 The AI meme generator.
This is all over the place at the moment, and for good reason. Memes for days. I’ve spent much longer than I should have done hitting refresh and laughing to myself, and I will continue to do so. Such nonsense, so gold.
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So here are some things that took my mind off of *gestures wildly* it.
📺 LA Originals on Netflix.
I’ve had a long time “appreciation” of Estevan Oriol’s work, and at various points in the last 15 years I genuinely hoped to get a tattoo from Mr Cartoon. I love the aesthetic, the approach, the work ethic… Soul Assassins and the whole crew have had me rapping in broken Spanish for years.
This documentary feels like it crept out of nowhere, but it’s entirely justified, and was a great watch. If you’re not aware of those 2, give this 90 minutes of your life and get to respecting their work and their significance. If you are aware of who they are, this is even more enjoyable. Plenty of behind the scenes footage and stories from when they came up during a classic era of hip hop.
It’s Oriol’s photography that I’m mostly caught up in. Shooting on film, mostly in black and white, his photos are distinctively him, capturing a whole side to Los Angeles in a way that no-one else could. I love it. Absolute OG.
Photos by Estevan Oriol
🎤 Crate 808: Prince Paul Interview.
Covering everything from Gravediggaz to A Prince of Thieves, De La Soul to life on Long Island, this is a really enjoyable interview with one of the true greats. His production work is undeniable, and to top it off, he always seems like such a nice dude; really engaging to talk to (/ listen to).
🌍 About Sigiriya (or Lion Rock) in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka was on our shortlist of places to go last year before we decided on Cambodia, and it remains on the shortlist of places to go when we can. After being reminded of this, it might’ve bumped up one or two places (though, I’m not sure about the stairs to get up there 😬).
There is archaeological evidence of religious communities living in the area dating back to at least the third century BC. The ancient city of Sigiriya is a few centuries younger, having been built for King Kasyapa, the son of the previous king by a non-royal consort.
In 477 AD Kasyapa killed his father and seized the throne from his half brother and heir Moggallana. Fearing his brother’s revenge, Kasyapa left the capital city of Anuradhapura and built the heavily fortified city of Sigiriya – the thick walls and moats are still visible, and he placed his impregnable palace-fortress on top of the granite rock. That part of the city in which the aristocrats lived was embellished with canals and other water features, as well as beautifully landscaped gardens. In the 11 years of Kasyapa’s time at Sigiriya he built a capital city of exceptional splendour.
https://twitter.com/UrbanFoxxxx/status/1253336969502879744?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
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💥 DJ Premier vs RZA
Along with what seems like everybody who listens to hip hop, I caught up with this 3 hour Instagram live stream and was enthralled throughout. Some audio quality issues aside, this was so so great, and by far the best of the verzuz series so far. Plenty of decent [write-ups with the tracklist](https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip hop/9356624/rza-dj-premier-verzuz-recap) around if you give it a google, but honestly, it’s worth just making the time to sit and play this through as it was broadcast. Round by round, 20-odd times, they both showed why they’re considered in that upper echelon of producers (2 of the top 5 in my book) and practically every track brought a barrage of 🔥🔥🔥🔥 emojis.
Round 11 was the highlight for me – Verbal Intercourse vs Nas Is Like. Both godly.
Fwiw, this was billed as a 'battle’, but as plenty of people have said, the real winner was hip hop. Oh, and RZA. RZA was the winner. Wu-Tang Forever.
🗣 LeadDev Live
A free online conference from the good people at The Lead Developer. There are a few videos already available and the rest are coming. Lots of coronavirus lockdown inspired remote-working chat, things to help your team through awkward moments like this, and a range of other useful sessions.
The slack chat alongside the presentations was also a good place to be; plenty of gems dropped, including this particular link to Lara Hogan’s “Questions for our first 1:1”, which lists some things to chat about in catch-ups. Reminded me of this mega-list of conversation prompts that is well worth dipping into.
🔗 That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief
A conversation with David Kessler, “the world’s foremost expert on grief”, about human reactions to living through a pandemic. I found it pretty helpful insofar as it at least confirmed to me that I’m probably not alone in thinking whatever I’m thinking. I mean, obviously that was bound to be true, but still… a lot of this resonated.
Unhealthy anticipatory grief is really anxiety, and that’s the feeling you’re talking about. Our mind begins to show us images. My parents getting sick. We see the worst scenarios. That’s our minds being protective. Our goal is not to ignore those images or to try to make them go away — your mind won’t let you do that and it can be painful to try and force it. The goal is to find balance in the things you’re thinking. If you feel the worst image taking shape, make yourself think of the best image. We all get a little sick and the world continues. Not everyone I love dies. Maybe no one does because we’re all taking the right steps. Neither scenario should be ignored but neither should dominate either.
]]>If we can name it, perhaps we can manage it.
Sort of missed a week last week because what even is time any more(?)
These human constructs of “days” and “calendars” have been exposed as the sham that they are. Coronavirus is everything. (Sidenote, am I the only person that can’t read 'coronavirus’ without hearing Cardi B? Deadass.) Anyway… other things:
🔗 LCH colours in CSS by Lea Verou.
LCH is a color space that has several advantages over the RGB/HSL colors we’re familiar with in CSS. In fact, I’d go as far as to call it a game-changer, and here’s why…
You’ll have to go to her site to see why. I’ll be honest, I’d not heard of LCH colours until last week, and then I suddenly saw it mentioned by a few people on twitter (possibly because of this article?) and now I’m interested. The main thing for me (spoiler) is the potential access to a ton more CSS colours in browser. You might look at it and wonder what the real impact would actually be but there’s potential there for much richer gradients, and really vivid highlights. “Make it pop” is within our grasp.
🔗 About the re-opening of Drake’s Island.
Clearly there are issues currently with this but as an idea, I’m all for it. In fact, maybe it’s a good lockdown place. I grew up with Drake’s Island always lurking there in the background. Literally could see it on a daily basis right up to when I was 16 and I’ve wanted to visit it for as long as I remember. It’s good to see it finally opening up a little.
Robert Maltby, the head of communications and marketing at the hospice, said the island was important to the people of Plymouth. “It’s an intriguing place,” he said. “If you’re a Plymothian it is right there in front of you all the time. It’s a major piece of the city’s history and everyone wonders what it’s like.”
Pictures of places which used to have people. I’m a fan of taking photos without people in. My insta feed is living proof; only 4% of images there have a person in (and 67% of those people are my children). It’s very tempting to head outdoors to make the most of the streets being empty but a) I don’t live near enough anywhere that you’d notice the difference, and b) that wouldn’t constitute an essential journey, and I do not want to be responsible for putting more pressure on the NHS in any way shape or form. So instead, I’ve been admiring other people’s photos. Like:
These images are haunted and haunting, like stills from movies about plagues and the apocalypse, but in some ways they are hopeful.
This video too…
https://twitter.com/MichellCClark/status/1244622395920527361?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
🔗 Overcoming my panic towards accessibility by Zell Liew.
There’s no code in here, and it’s got specific examples of Zell’s dealings when considering accessibility, and yet I’d say it’s applicable to anybody writing any sort of code. Inferiority complex, imposter syndrome, a fear of being publicly shamed, angrily pushing back against all of those… whatever it is, plenty of people have it, and those feelings are only intensified when you’re encountering something new.
On one hand, I hope learning about my experiences would help you see yourself in a new light. That it’s okay to panic. And you can continue to learn and improve even if you’re panicking.
Salient advice. For coding, and for COVID. (Sorry, told you it would creep in everywhere).
🔗 Maintaining Performance by Dave Rupert.
Some small tips about improving page load time (by fixing how fonts were being loaded) but generally, this is another post about some principles that are worth adhering to as a developer.
I find that Web Performance isn’t particularly difficult once you understand the levers you can pull; reduce kilobytes, reduce requests, unblock rendering, defer scripts. But maintaining performance that’s a different story entirely…
You can learn about best practice and implement it in a project, but things are constantly evolving and different factors come into play all the time. It’s not possible to rest on your laurels and assume that it’ll all be good. That applies to all sorts of things: performance, accessibility, coronavirus 👀 … everything. Stay frosty.
⚽️ Happy Feet, a piece about the joy of Ronaldhino over on Mundial.
An ode to one of the greatest players ever to do it, this article set me off down a YouTube spiral which was a much welcome distraction and an utter delight.
You could sit there with a bucket of popcorn and watch him all day, and neither of you would get bored. Ronaldinho—a man whose imagination with a ball at his feet was like when you ask a child to do a crayon drawing of an animal—was there to remind us that football, above all else, is supposed to be fun.
You have to ignore his recent activities because it turns out he’s not as fun as it appears but still, on the pitch, utter legend.
]]>An impending lockdown? Self-isolation. Social distancing. Quarantine?? Still not really sure what to call it or how this whole COVID-19 thing is going to pan out in the UK but it’s clearly a thing and is increasingly concerning. Pretty sure the week just gone is the last one I’ll spend in the office… we’ve been sorting out what’s needed to work from home for a potentially extended period of time, and I’m grateful that’s even an option for me, doing the work that I do.
Clearly, there are plenty of people who aren’t in a position to be able to do that, and they’re entering some really uncertain times – not to mention those people who are even less able to prepare for getting through the next few months. Consider this your prompt to donate where you can.
📷 Nine Eyes of Google Street View by Jon Rafman.
Described as “travel photography for the age of self-isolation”, this is a tumblr of stills taken from street view which are pleasing to the eye in one way or another. As a long time fan of this particular service from Google, someone who takes photos, and as we enter a long period of not being able to get out of the house, this ticks a lot of boxes for me.
I do wish that more info was available for each one, as I’d love some context – any sort of context, even the co-ordinates would do – but then I suppose that the lack of detail does add to their allure. There’s some weird shit going on out there.
There are of course, other collections like this, of people capturing scenes from streetview. There are some good examples of places you might want to head to in that original twitter thread ☝️. Another particularly good one is A New American Picture by Doug Rickard. It brings up some good questions about the role of a 'photographer’ and whether this can really be considered as photography or not. Is the streetview car effectively 'just a camera’ in this instance, with the 'photo’ only being taken when someone takes a screenshot(?) It’s a grey area for sure.
Over a four-year period, Rickard took advantage of Google’s massive image archive to virtually explore the roads of America looking for forgotten, economically devastated, and largely abandoned places. After locating and composing scenes of urban and rural decay, Rickard re-photographed the images on his computer screen with a tripod- mounted camera, freeing the image from its technological origins and re-presenting them on a new documentary plane.
A whole bunch of things about coronavirus, because it feels completely unavoidable. That said, I don’t want to make a habit of binging on pandemic related media; I’m already trying to make sure I maintain a decent line there in terms of what I need to know and what just feeds into my anxiety. These few podcasts have been useful in terms of being informative / interesting while I’m still getting to grips with what this all means, but do take them as part of a varied diet.
The second one there was particularly helpful with regards to how I’m thinking about approaching home-schooling if/when my kids can no longer go about their usual daily routines. Tbh, I’m more concerned about that side of things than I am being able to wfh, because it’s not something I feel like I have any real understanding of. The bottom line seems to be: do what you can, and be compassionate (with your kids, and with yourself). It’s going to be tricky for everyone. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming…
]]>📺 This series on Modern Masculinity from Iman Amrani / The Guardian.
I’ve only watched the first episode so far, but I’ll be dipping into the rest imminently, as well as probably looking back through the first series. It’s an interesting set of topics, from MMA to porn, therapy to fitness. As a beta cuck, all this stuff and the impact it has on real MEN intrigues me, and they’re short episodes so that helps too.
🔗 Front-End Performance Checklist 2020 on Smashing Mag.
This is a long article, and I have far from fully absorbed it, but I 100% intend to.
Performance isn’t just a technical concern: it affects everything from accessibility to usability to search engine optimization, and when baking it into the workflow, design decisions have to be informed by their performance implications. Performance has to be measured, monitored and refined continually, and the growing complexity of the web poses new challenges that make it hard to keep track of metrics, because metrics will vary significantly depending on the device, browser, protocol, network type and latency (CDNs, ISPs, caches, proxies, firewalls, load balancers and servers all play a role in performance).
I am of course aware that #perfmatters, and I do some bits here and there toward ensuring the things I build are performant, but I definitely acknowledge there are plenty of other things I could be doing. This checklist feels like a solid thing to work through, hopefully to back up what I’m already doing, as well as to point to some new areas.
🎧 Crate 808 Episode 1.
This podcast has been going for a while now, but I’ve only just stumbled on it so I thought I’d start at the beginning with this episode that tries to decide which of these albums is the best: Mos Def’s 'Black on Both Sides’ (1999) / Big Pun’s 'Capital Punishment’ (1998) / Ice Cube’s 'The Predator’ (1992).
It’s a long episode (and they all look like they’re a similar length) so that was a bit off-putting on the face of it. But they’re chatting about an era of hip hop that I love, they’re a similar age to me, and they’re in the UK; it’s very relatable. I don’t know how I’d not heard of them sooner. Really looking forward to working my way through the archive.
For the record, despite my love of the Mos album, the answer is The Predator. Pun doesn’t get a look in, even with “dead in the middle of Little Italy…”.
]]>🔗 My Priority of Methods for Labeling a Control, by Adrian Roselli.
An explanation of the thought process to follow when assigning a name to a control and keeping it accessible. The short list is:
aria-labelledby
pointing at existing visible text,aria-label
.But the long list warrants further reading, so I recommend you do that over on his site, as there’s some additional considerations given to internationalisation which are well worth your time.
🔗 About a potential lost kingdom in ancient Turkey.
Essentially, a local farmer found a large stone in an irrigation canal and it turned out to be covered in ancient hieroglyphics which could point to the presence of a hitherto forgotten Bronze & Iron Age city.
Their translation revealed that the stele king was called Hartapu, and Türkmen-Karahöyük was probably his capital city. The stone tells the tale of King Hartapu’s conquest of the nearby kingdom of Muska, better known as Phrygia—home to King Midas. “The storm gods delivered the [opposing] kings to his majesty,” the stone read.
It’s amazing to me that a) there are still things like this out there to be found, b) that someone can translate them, and c) that someone saw this and didn’t just think 'oh, some scratches on a rock’.
🔗 What Colour Is Your Name? by Bernadette Sheridan.
Bernadette has a “a particular kind of Synesthesia called Grapheme-color synesthesia. This means my brain “sees” letters and numbers as very specific colors.” She’s put this mini site together where you can enter your name and see it how she hears it (and then buy a print if you’re so inclined).
My name is a tad dull, it turns out. But yours might be more visually appealing.
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Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective by Facundo Corradini.
It’s from April 2019 but the point very much still stands… making things accessible isn’t a thing you do just for 'other’ people – you do it for everyone. At any moment, someone might find themselves needing to approach or use something in a different way, and what we build and design should be mindful of that fact.
I’ve touched on vestibular triggers before, and this post covers some of that same ground around reduced-motion queries, as well as considering dark mode, parallax, font sizing, and the effect of a seemingly innocuous slanted angle.
I learned the hard way that there are plenty of “invisible conditions” that are just as important to take into consideration: vestibular disorders, cognitive differences, dyslexia, and color blindness, just to name a few. I was totally neglecting those most of the time, barely addressing the issues in order to pass automated tests, which means I was unintentionally annoying some users by making websites inaccessible to them.
Neumorphism the right way — A 2020 Design Trend by David Ofiare.
A look at what is allegedly a hot new trend of thinking that work shown on dribbble is work that should make it into real applications.
Neumorphism (or Neo-skeuomorphism) is a modern iteration of a style of designing web elements, frames, screens, etc. known as Skeuomorphism. SO, Neumorphism is a witty (right?) combo of the words “New” and “Skeuomorphism”.
I am decidedly not a fan of this style of design, not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also from a 'having to build it’ point of view, and an accessibility point of view. Nonetheless, the term is being bandied around a fair bit lately, so it’s probably worth getting familiar. Know your enemy. Not knocking David btw, he’s not advocating for a mass take-up of this style, and manages to provide a nuanced overview of it (a nua-neu-skeuomorphic overview? 🤔), but I have my reservations.
Ladhood on iPlayer.
I was a big fan of Pls Like (which I also highly recommend) and this has a lot in common, not least that it’s written by / stars Liam Williams.
Adapted from an original BBC Radio 4 series, Ladhood straddles two timelines as Liam explores the roots of modern-day masculinity, by delving into the memories of his own misspent adolescence in Garforth, (a Leeds suburb) during the early noughties.
Only 6 short episodes long (very bingeable), Ladhood manages to somehow capture a lot of my own teenage years despite me growing up a few years earlier, 300 miles away. Tbh, I’m sure that a lot of the things in it apply to a lot of people; those teenage situations and feelings are universal. But still, this really resonated. It’s like a slightly more realistic Inbetweeners.
The rap episode in particular – holy shit. Fond, fond, cringe-worthy memories of the first time I hosted a recording session in my bedroom. Good times.
]]>99% Invisible 387: The Worst Video Game Ever.
Technically, this is actually an episode of Sidedoor, guesting on 99pi, but either way it’s a good one. I’ve never actually played the E.T. game on Atari but I’ve heard the chat about how bad it is. This episode goes deeper into it than I’d ever cared to think about previously, touching on crunch culture, movie tie-ins, and waste disposal.
Long story short, if you try to do an 8 month project in 2 months, you’re going to have issues. The 10 Minutes / 1 Minute / 10 Seconds thing extends to all endeavours.
All of these are better than what I could do in an hour.
Seemingly arbitrary deadlines set by people who have little-to-no input in the actual production of things are a little pet peeve of mine. In the case of the E.T. game, the developer clearly didn’t help himself (which tbf, he readily acknowledges in retrospect) but he should never have been put in that position in the first place. Granted, most enforced pressure situations like that don’t tend to result in the collapse of a company and trips to a landfill site in the desert when they go wrong but still, it’s the same shit even when it’s done on a smaller level. Quality takes time.
Collectors Are Spending Thousands on Video Games They Will Never Play.
Keeping on the retro game tip, this is a story about something that’s so bizarre to me. Like sneakerheads. I don’t understand how something gets attributed a higher value if it specifically hasn’t been utilised in the way that it was intended (i.e. played, or worn, whatever).
One collector, Donald Brock Jr., who runs the website Columbia Comics, said he had spent about $50,000 buying vintage video games since his first purchase in March. One sealed N.E.S. game cost nearly $1,500. He had its condition graded, and then sold it for more than $12,000.
The article mentions a copy of Super Mario Bros. which went for $100,000 last year, and I’m adding 'tell yourself to never open the box’ to the list of things I would do if I had a time machine (though 8 year old me would’ve put up a fight and definitely ripped that packaging off).
Some people clearly have way way way too much money. You can play it in a browser for free, no SCART lead required, and just print out the box art or something 🤷♂️. Even as someone with a big soft spot for the NES, I do not endorse spending cash in that way. Besides, Super Mario 3 was much better.
Coronavirus brings China’s surveillance state out of the shadows.
I would say this is some future dystopia scary techno shit, but that’d be wrong because it’s clearly now dystopia scary techno shit.
Chinese have long been aware that they are tracked by the world’s most sophisticated system of electronic surveillance. The coronavirus emergency has brought some of that technology out of the shadows, providing the authorities with a justification for sweeping methods of high tech social control.
Artificial intelligence and security camera companies boast that their systems can scan the streets for people with even low-grade fevers, recognize their faces even if they are wearing masks and report them to the authorities.
On the one hand: good stuff – nice to try to stop the spread of a disease and wow, that’s amazing that the technology and networks exist to support that. But on the other hand: just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. I’ve seen Enemy of The State; this ends badly with lots of explosions.
]]>How to Actually Personally Fight Climate Change. Regular readers will have noted my ongoing melancholy when faced with the prospect of a scorched Earth before I get to retire. It’s a real thing. I try to do my bit – though it’s probably not enough. (Sidenote, check out an estimate of your environmental footprint according to the WWF… mine is embarrassingly high, largely because of international flights, but I’m taking steps to lessen that). So I appreciated this article outlining some other actions that I, you, we, can take to try to make a difference while we just about still can.
Mitigating the climate crisis is top of mind for many people. But it’s such a complex issue that it can be hard to distinguish between data-backed improvements and feel-good distractions. This is your action list with lots of context along the way on why not just how so you can soon be an emissions-fighting climate superhero.
It’s a big old list, and it’ll take a while to properly digest so I definitely recommend revisiting it a few times. The headlines for me are:
There’s also plenty about making the system fight for us, not against us, talking about activism, lobbying, voting, etc. At a glance it’s harder to make inroads there, but it’s there where this is probably the most important, so I’m planning on picking up some of those points and doing what I can.
How to set off a plague of locusts. This is a fairly short but nicely presented piece about how these insects manage to transform from solitary creatures into gregarious monsters. I find them really creepy, and bizarrely fascinating. The sheer scale of a swarm is baffling; literally on some biblical shit.
Visualize a swarm of 70 billion flying insects, covering 460 square miles—about 1.5 times the size of New York City—and devouring more than 300 million pounds of crops in one day. That’s how big a single swarm can get.
99% Invisible 381: The Infantorium. The story of how incubators made it over to America, via amusement parks and originally via France, where…
… doctors stole an idea from the poultry industry, which used incubators to hatch chicken eggs. They designed a human incubator. Basically, it was a warm box, heated by a hot water tank below.
As an incubator baby myself 👋👶 I thought this episode was really interesting. Though you probably don’t have to have been born prematurely to also enjoy it. It touches on eugenics, Coney Island, and fake doctors who turn out to be good(?) doctors. It’s changed the way I think about that little warm glass box that kept me alive for a few weeks.
Infant Incubators … With Living Infants
Some small tweaks and updates to this site, mostly around font sizes and alignment, but also rolling out an implementation of CSS grid finally. I’ve had these changes readied for a while with no particular reason for delaying getting them live, so I thought I’d revisit that branch and pull it into master.
I needed to make a few updates and adjustments to accommodate a few self-inflicted constraints, and I found it useful to head back to Grid by example and the MDN docs. But the main thing that helped was being able to view my grid with Firefox devtools. In. Valuable.
Random selections from the Bodleian Digital Library at the University of Oxford, via this tool that serves you up a manuscript based on a couple of quick questions to filter down what you’re after.
There are some amazing pieces in that collection, and I for one welcome any tool that enables any sort of browsing of them. My favourite thing I’ve been served up so far is this Codex Mendoza, showing amongst other things, some Aztec fashion goals.
https://twitter.com/BDLSS/status/1219930203184451584
As I’m writing this, news is trickling out about the death of Kobe Bryant, and I’ve not got much to say other than it’s awful. There’ll be plenty of better tributes to him that properly capture why he’ll be remembered as a legend (and of course a fair few pieces properly explaining the implications of the sexual assault accusations that he basically brushed off with no consequences), but all I know is that I stanned for more than probably makes sense given the circumstances.
As a teenager, I only played basketball on occasion, and I barely watched it (aside from the games on Channel 4 in the mid-late-90s), but I knew that Kobe was the man, and I wore the shit out of that Lakers #8 Bryant jersey (in XXL). In fact, I was wearing that top when I rapped on stage for the very first time. Combined with a pair of Timbs, a hoodie (under the Lakers jersey) and some ludicrously sized Ecko jeans, it’s fair to say I was styling that night, and for most of the early ’00s.
But anyway, that whole time – catching glimpses here and there, seeing highlights online – I rated Kobe. Obviously. Who didn’t(?) And though I can’t say I’ve been avidly following his career ever since then, I’ve definitely been aware, and I mean, he’s Kobe Bryant. He’s had a huge impact on the world and it’s a really sad loss. All the moreso if it’s true that his daughter was on board, and of course it’s terrible for the other people and families affected… RIP.
]]>People’s Party with Talib Kweli 29: Supernatural. In case you weren’t following the freestyle scene in the late 90’s/00’s, Supernat’ was the man. The battles vs Craig G, and Juice, the record breaking 9 hour freestyle, the rapping about random items from the audience stuff, the feature in Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme… the man is a legend. Unfortunately that legend never really translated to written material, but I think his place in hip hop lore is cemented regardless of that.
This is a really great interview which covers pretty much his entire career, with some nice detail about those standout moments which came to define him. I can’t lie, I’m not particularly checking for new Supernatural music in 2020, but he’s a solid dude and it’s good to know that he’s still out there.
99% Invisible 383: Mini-Stories Volume 7. All of these are great. The story about Jack Purcell who didn’t play badminton in Canada, the prospect of a funicular up to the Hollywood sign, the outbreak of racoons in Japan, and looking at witch windows… they’re all short and intriguing.
It’s the first one that I enjoyed the most. The sad and funny tale of Ottawa’s attempt to honour a local man which went a little wrong thanks to… Google(?) The search engine optimisation struggle is real. Apparently there’s talk of rectifying it, but it’s an odd mistake to have made in the first place.
This Is Your Life on Climate Change. Using the backdrop of the lifespan of a generic person born in 1981, this is pretty much my life.
The 2010s were the hottest decade ever measured on Earth, and 2019 was the second-hottest year ever measured, scientists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today.
After a year of flash droughts, rampant wildfires, and searing heat waves that set all-time records across Europe and turned parts of Greenland’s ice sheet into slush, the finding was not a surprise to researchers, or likely anyone else. But it capped an anxious decade that saw human-caused climate change transform from a far-off threat into an everyday fact of life.
To be honest, I feel like I need to stop reading things like this, as it’s not doing great things for my mental state. Genuinely not even sure what’s possible at the point to make a difference. There’s a line on the last Atmosphere album which goes “we might be the last generation of grandparents” and honestly, that stays playing in my head. “This is fine” is too true.
]]>How Microsoft’s cultural shift is leading to new product development. It’s a slightly old article (Feb ’19) but still, well worth a read.
Starting off with Swetha Machanavajhala’s story which led to MS Teams & Skype implementing background blurring on video calls (which is btw, a fantastic curb-cut effect), and including bits about Soundscape and Seeing AI, it’s a really good piece to get you thinking more about empathy and innovation.
“People with disabilities are the ultimate early adopters and in many ways are ahead of the curve in terms of tech,” said Saqib Shaikh, a software engineer in London who leads Microsoft’s Seeing AI research project. “They have a lot more to gain so are willing to try things out a lot earlier on, when things aren’t quite ready yet, and then they help that technology mature into something for mainstream use.”
This explanation of why saying 'kids these days’ is a thing: Why the youth of today seem lacking.
We assess people’s tendency to believe “kids these days” are deficient relative to those of previous generations. … American adults believe today’s youth are in decline; however, these perceptions are associated with people’s standing on those traits.
When observing current children, we compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears. This may explain why the kids these days effect has been happening for millennia.
I’m a big advocate that 'kids today’ being much better than some people give them credit for (I even did a talk on it) so it’s nice to have this article which gives actual science and stuff to back it up. (I must confess, I have not ready the whole thing yet – it’s long – but it’s bookmarked and I’ll definitely be coming back to it!)
The worship of billionaires has become our shittiest religion. There’s been a lot of talk about billionaires lately, serving to re-emphasise how absolutely ludicrous the idea of being a billionaire actually is.
Indeed: One billion dollars is such a huge amount of money, that there has recently emerged a whole sub-genre of images specifically designed to help us get our heads around how huge it is. If you, for instance, had earned a million a year, every year since the Battle of Hastings (that’s 1066, for non-Brits), and not spent any of it, you still wouldn’t (interest notwithstanding) be a billionaire. If you earned an annual salary of $43,000, you might eventually become a billionaire (again, not accounting for expenses or accumulated interest) — if you waited over 23,000 years.
It’s baffling to me that 'normal’ people (i.e. those of us who don’t 'earn’ millions a year) see hoarding cash in unfathomable quantities as a viable option, something that we can all aspire to. It’s not about not letting people be rich; being a billionaire is not being rich.
One billion dollars is far, far more money than anyone could realistically spend, on their needs, within the span of a human lifetime. If you have one billion dollars, you are completely shielded from all ordinary human concerns.
Ban them all.
Vote Labour.
]]>The Mississippi River’s hidden history, uncovered by lasers. Love these images from Daniel Coe.
The article is about his work to put a contemporary slant on the Mississippi River meander maps made by Harold Fisk in the 1940s, which I’ve long been a fan of (I actually have one up on a wall at home; they’re stunning pieces of technical art, and a great reminder of an epic trip).
Fisk had to make use of whatever tools were around at the time – mostly aerial photos – yet when you compare his with the modern versions, they’re unerringly accurate.
The lasers detect the river’s shape along with everything around it—every house, tree, and road. Strip away these layers of vegetation and human add-ons, and Coe’s maps show the river’s bare-ground geomorphology: once lazy bends replaced by direct flow, old floodplains cut off by levees and dikes.
This presentation about Responsive Typography by Mandy Michael (via JAMstack Conf). I’ve yet to try variable fonts myself, but that video (and the various examples she’s put together on codepen) make me want to give it a go. Note to self: https://v-fonts.com/
Variable Fonts allow typography on the web to adapt to the flexible nature of screens, environments and devices. We can use variable fonts with pre-existing technologies to improve the performance, design, accessibility and usability of our websites. We can start to design our typography to adjust to various inputs, situations or events using Media Queries, JS events and the Sensor or Audio Apis.
The latest edition of net magazine, with a bit of blurb about what excites me about the web today (* spoiler, it’s “personal sites”). Due to space and whatnot, they did cut a couple of sentences about IndieWeb, but the gist is still there. Second time in netmag this year; living the dream.
The myths of colour contrast accessibility. A handful of points which, as the title implies, cover some misconceptions about colour contrast.
There’s a growing demand for designers to make their interfaces accessible to all users. It’s important to accommodate users with disabilities, but there are many myths to color contrast accessibility being perpetuated by misinformed people
…
This article debunks common color contrast accessibility myths and sets the record straight.
There’s bits about grey text, using colour to convey information, and the requirements of AAA, but the one that jumped out to me was about the contrast ratio requirements of interface components.
Interface components have a contrast ratio of 3:1, while text is 4.5:1. Text requires a higher contrast because users need to read it. Interface components don’t require reading and have a lower standard (source).
I don’t know about you but I had no idea this was the case. While it’s probably not going to make a huge difference to the stuff I make, it’s really helpful to know that in some situations (buttons for instance), there’s actually a different threshold for sufficient contrast.
Moving beyond console.log(). 8 Console Methods You Should Use When Debugging JavaScript and Node. Saw a tweet by Addy Osmani that got a bit of traction:
https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/1191049744962842624
… and that reminded me of this article that I’ve had sat in a tab for a few months.
I’m an unashamed fan of console.log()
– my only source of embarrassment around it is that I don’t make more of the other methods. group()
is always a good one, but I also like assert()
and table()
. They’re things that every time I remember them, I think “oh yeah, I should use that in x situation” but then I forget again and revert to a ton of logs. This is my self-prompt to not forget.
About the re-opening of this piece of history…
An ancient Roman house has reopened to the public in the archaeological park of Herculaneum, the town near Naples buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.
Considered the site’s most noble Roman villa, the House of the Bicentenary had been under restoration for 35 years. The three-storey, 600 sq metre domus, which contains stunning frescoes and mosaic floors, was discovered in 1938, 200 years after excavations at the site began, but closed to the public in 1983 after falling into disrepair.
35 years of restoration! I can’t say I particularly remember this building from my visit to Herculaneum nearly a decade ago but it’s one I’d look out for on the next visit. In fact, the main thing I remember from that trip is the walk from the train station down to the site. Blazing sun, no map, winding streets and a couple of wrong turns… that was an experience in itself.
I find it fascinating that there’s still so much yet to be excavated there (and at Pompeii). I mean, yes they’re very large areas and obviously it’s not something that you can rush into with a digger, but nonetheless, there’s so much left to find!
]]>6 things I check on every website I build by Manuel Matozovic. A nice overview of the type of things you should run through after using something like Lighthouse to check the accessibility 'score’ of your site. Some quick wins in there that are worth adding to your workflow – things that I’m aware of / have done in the past but this is a good prompt to do them more consistently.
For instance, I haven’t used a the W3C Markup Validation Service for a looooong time (and I’m not 100% convinced that it’s entirely necessary tbh) but that complacency probably puts me on shaky ground and seeing as it only takes a few seconds to run it, it’d be silly not to.
Responsive Design for Motion. This is an old post (from 2017) but it’s a good one because of the multiple examples of how to use the prefers-reduced-motion
query effectively. Why should you look at reducing motion sometimes you ask?
The simplest answer is, “We’re not all the same.” Preference is subjective, and many power users like to reduce UI overhead even further once they’ve learned how the interface works.
The more important, objective answer is, “It’s a medical necessity for some.” In particular, this change is required for a portion of the population with conditions commonly referred to as vestibular disorders.
The article covers some common vestibular triggers and shows examples of how they might be affected by all those fancy animations, along with potential fixes for each of them. It’s definitely an interesting read, and well worth the nudge it gives to thinking more about why things like reduced-motion are important for some people. There are a lot of ways that vestibular disorders can manifest themselves.
(I should add – a while ago I did actually implement some of this stuff on this site, to provide an alternative to the page transitions that exist. If you browse with 'prefers reduced motion’ on in your OS, you ought to see a normal page load instead of the liquid transition. It’s not difficult, but the impact can be pretty big.)
Tangentially Speaking #157: Graham Hancock. This episode of Christopher Ryan’s podcast is from 2015, around the time that Graham’s book Magicians of The Gods was released – it’s taken me a while to find the time to give it a listen. I haven’t read the book yet, but as I really enjoyed Fingerprints of The Gods (which this is a sequel of sorts to), I do intend to get to it.
The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. But there were survivors – known to later cultures by names such as 'the Sages’, 'the Magicians’, 'the Shining Ones’, and 'the Mystery Teachers of Heaven’. They travelled the world in their great ships doing all in their power to keep the spark of civilization burning. They settled at key locations – Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, Baalbek in the Lebanon, Giza in Egypt, ancient Sumer, Mexico, Peru and across the Pacific where a huge pyramid has recently been discovered in Indonesia. Everywhere they went these 'Magicians of the Gods’ brought with them the memory of a time when mankind had fallen out of harmony with the universe and paid a heavy price. A memory and a warning to the future…
The chat covers bits about the book, as well as tackling the 'pseudo-science’ tag that has often been thrown at him, and some other bits around ayahuasca and modern civilisations and so on… It’s a really interesting conversation, and one that is full of ideas that are well worth entertaining (if not entirely subscribing to).
]]>Flash Is Responsible for the Internet’s Most Creative Era. A nod to a new book which …
… praises the use of Flash as a creative tool, rather than a bloated malware vessel, and laments the ways that visual convention, technical shifts, and walled gardens have started to rein in much of this unvarnished creativity.
I’m definitely interested in taking a look at that book; I do miss those glory days of Flash. As someone who actively chose to commit to Flash / ActionScript instead of Unity / C# (back in the very early days of Unity, when it was Unity3D, and me and Will Goldstone were tasked with teaching one or the other at Bournemouth Uni) I’m still upset by the whole demise of something that I was making a career out of, but c’est la vie. It put me in good stead for a range of other things, and it was fun while it lasted.
This thread on the dark pattern of trying to pressure users into making a booking by implying that there’s a scarcity of resources. You know, like you see on booking.com and all those other places that highlight that somehow there are 20 other people all just about to take that last hotel room in that obscure location on a random Tuesday date. It’s a con.
https://twitter.com/OphirHarpaz/status/1184486445039411201
About the end of Season 10 of Fortnite. I must confess a near complete ignorance about Fortnite (beyond knowing it has some dances or something in it?) so I didn’t know about The End happening last week, but it’s been interesting catching up.
There is no conventional “narrative” to Fortnite Battle Royale – Epic doesn’t provide an origin story for its endless 100-player wars, it doesn’t give us long cinematic scenes with characters explaining the world, the factions and the plot. Instead, Fortnite is split into a series of three-month-long seasons, each with a climactic event that suggests some kind of interdimensional struggle taking place over the future of the game’s isolated island locale.
The way the finale has been built up to and then handled sounds fascinating, and while I’m not going to start playing it (my reaction times are far too slow for multiplayer these days) my interest has certainly been piqued.
This short video on the design of the Juvenile – 400 Degreez album cover.
https://twitter.com/fakeshoredrive/status/1183948492701650949
The work is by the legendary and inimitable Pen & Pixel who are responsible for all sorts of classics for labels like No Limit, Cash Money, and Hypnotize Minds. You might also know them from their work with Louis Theroux but if you’re not familiar, it’s worth taking a look at their archive – there are plenty of places extolling their virtues.
]]>
A dark mode style for this site. I’ve been meaning to for a while (since this post many months ago) but only just got around to it after reading Jeremy Keith’s post about dark mode which has plenty of useful snippets in. Most of which are now in place here. I particularly like the filter applied to images to help them integrate into the darker surrounds. It’s the little things that make a difference, right(?) If you’ve got thing that supports switching to dark mode, give it a go, watch the seamless transition and marvel at the work I’ve done to enhance your browsing experience.
Parenting Teens 26: Jamy Bechler. This is an interview with Jamy about his book The Leadership Playbook and while it’s mostly geared toward sports, with a little nod to parenting, I think there’s plenty in there that anyone could appreciate. There’s things about teamwork, leadership, living by core principles, and performance, amongst other stuff.
It’s essentially a vehicle for motivational quotes which can be risky, but he’s earnest enough so that they don’t come across as overly trite. There’s a nice section on outworking talent which made me regret giving up basketball, and I liked the quote which apparently definitely wasn’t by C.S. Lewis:
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.
Futility Closet 265: The Great Hedge of India. I wasn’t sure how this ended up in my podcast library, having never listened to an episode of Futility Closet before, but then I remembered it was because of Jon Ginn who has an email read out during it. Anyway, I’m glad I gave it a listen, because it’s a fascinating episode.
In the 19th century, an enormous hedge ran for more than a thousand miles across India, installed by the British to enforce a tax on salt. Though it took a Herculean effort to build, today it’s been almost completely forgotten.
Never mind forgotten, this is the first time I’d even heard of such a thing. I find it amazing that something that clearly took such a substantial amount of effort can be lost to history within such a short space of time. Well worth a listen. Or a read about… turns out there are plenty of places that had heard of it before, such as Atlas Obscura, where this 100% accurate illustration is from.
Lifted from Atlas Obscura / NIGEL SUSSMAN
How Cambodia’s backpacker haven became a Chinese casino mecca. I got sent this link by someone who also went to Cambodia this year, as we’d be talking about how weird it was visiting Sihanoukville.
Once a quiet seaside haven for backpackers, Sihanoukville has morphed into a giant construction site in the past three years. Cranes dot the skyline, roads have become muddy potholed lanes and jackhammers resonate late into the night. Many of the new buildings are casinos.
The journey we took from the airport to Otres Beach was on the worst road I’ve ever been on (and I’ve driven over lava), largely because of the construction traffic, and turning up to find our hotel dwarfed by these ludicrously massive building sites was a bit of a shock. Didn’t look like that on booking.com. We only stayed for a night so didn’t get the full experience, but it wasn’t hard to see the impact of all of these casinos.
I’m not saying that the place should’ve stayed as a secluded out of the way resort with $0.50 beers and hammocks on the bea – wait. I am definitely saying that. If you read that article, it doesn’t seem like these new developments are really benefiting anyone. The zero-dollar tourism, the poor working conditions, the pricing out of locals. It’s a mess, but with no real solution in sight.
]]>Veerle Pieters write-up of her process when creating the Cover Design for Smashing Magazine Print. I’m a huge fan of Veerle’s work: her blog was one of the first sites I stumbled on when trying to get to grips with Adobe Illustrator, and for what feels like at least the past 15-20 years, I’ve been visiting her site on a regular basis to learn and to be wowed.
Her latest post is about the work that went into this piece for Smashing Magazine (another longterm crush) and it’s a great look at the approach and thinking behind it, along with a few tips along the way. Basically, it’s what you’d come to expect from Veerle. Every post makes me want to get back into Illustrator.
The hashtag for Fronteers conference: #fronteers, and being jealous of the talks (and the being in Amsterdam). Even when only managing to keep an eye on it from afar, it looked like a great event. One of those ones that it seemed like my entire Twitter feed was at or talking about, so I’m definitely keen to watch the videos once they’re out. Having already met my ‘go to a web conference in Amsterdam’ quota for this year, I can’t really complain too much about missing this one, but next year(?) It’s on my list.
A modern CSS reset by Andy Bell.
In this modern era of web development, we don’t really need a heavy-handed reset, or even a reset at all, because CSS browser compatibility issues are much less likely than they were in the old IE 6 days. That era was when resets such as normalize.css came about and saved us all heaps of hell. Those days are gone now and we can trust our browsers to behave more, so I think resets like that are probably mostly redundant.
Reading this got me thinking about how many sites I’ve worked on that still have a hefty block of resetting CSS and might actually benefit from revisiting. I’m a little guilty of re-using the same base stuff frequently for a new build and it’s definitely a prompt to make sure that it’s all still necessary.
Bethel, Alaska. Photo by alaska_ 432 (CC BY 2.0)
99% Invisible 371: Dead Cars. In a week in which I bought a new car, this episode about what to do with old (scrapped) cars felt pretty topical. I mean, the situation talked about is not quite the same as mine… it’s focussed on Bethal, a city in the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska.
A tundra river delta is a unique environment. It’s a wetland, with ponds scattered in every direction, and streams and tributaries braiding and weaving between them. From an airplane, it’s hard to tell if there’s more water or land below. The hub of this region is the city of Bethel, population 6,500. … The only way in or out of any of the communities in the region, including Bethel, is by plane or boat. In winter, when the rivers and lakes freeze over, you can also snowmobile or drive a truck along the frozen river.
Getting rid of old cars when there’s no roads out of the city is understandably problematic, and pretty unique. But the general principle of what happens to waste is clearly one that everyone should be thinking about more. Out of sight, out of mind is not helpful for anyone in the long term.
]]>Screen Reader User Survey #8. I’ve been doing a fair bit of work toward improving a site for screen readers at the moment and it’s been an interesting ride. It’s interesting looking at the range of options and devices, the diversity of reasons people use them, and the often simple fixes that can effectively make or break an experience. I say 'interesting’ and I mean 'interesting’ but I should also add, 'occasionally challenging’. I am not a user of screen readers other than for testing, so my judgement about what works and what doesn’t certainly isn’t always right. (Thankfully there are people with much more experience who have been willing to put up with my questions and I’m definitely coming out of this block of work with much more knowledge).
Anyway, these survey results came out at a good time. Some interesting stuff to think about in here…
Plenty of other bits too. You should go and read and look at charts.
The Controversial Use of Rap Lyrics as Evidence. A piece about the fact that some people have difficulty distinguishing art and reality.
This week … the Brooklyn rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, took the stand to testify against alleged members of the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, the gang with which he associated himself. … At one point, prosecutors asked him about the lyrics for his hit song “GUMMO,” and whether the words included any threats against rivals. “It’s a song towards, like, somebody who I didn’t get along with,” the rapper said. “I don’t know. I thought it was cool at the time.”
This isn’t new, and 6ix9ine probably deserves to have any and everything used against him, but still, it’s frequently ridiculous. You can see it lately with drill, form 696, Drakeo The Ruler and so on and so on.
“We have searched widely, and, based on our research, rap is the only fictional art form treated this way,” she said. “No other musical genre and no other art is used in the same way or to the same extent.”
The Adam Buxton podcast Ep. 101 – Book Club: 'The Catcher in the Rye’. I wanted to listen to this a) because Adam Buxton, Sara Pascoe, and Richard Ayoade are fun people to listen to, and b) because I wanted to see if they could change my mind about that book. I read it once, quite a few years ago, and really disliked it for reasons that I could never fully articulate. The constant 'phonies’ was one thing for sure though.
Hearing them talk about it didn’t make me want to rush out to get it again, but it did make me think that maybe I just didn’t really get it first time around. So… I’ll probably give it another chance at some point. I mean, they’re all great people, and they seem to like it, so it must have some redeeming features, right(?) Stay tuned.
]]>On a course somewhere in West Sussex, for Tough Mudder again. After sort of stumbling into it last year, I had intentions of not doing it again unless I was a bit more prepared. That’d didn’t quite pan out as planned, and I was probably even less ready this year but still – did it, survived, got the x2 headband. It’s a lot of fun, even the electric shocks and the barbed wire and the squeezing through tiny gaps covered in mud, but I don’t feel the need to do it again next year. ?
The myth of “making things pretty” by Mandy Michael. I’ve definitely fallen into the trap of referring to my job as “making things pretty” before. I’m not sure I ever really believed that was an adequate description but it was an easy and succinct catch-all for those times when going into a lot of detail felt unnecessary. I’ve probably done it recently too; I won’t be doing it again anytime soon – this post has made sure of that.
CSS by it’s very nature is about how something looks, how it’s presented, it’s tightly coupled to design and it’s because of this that we can often underestimate the impact that it has on making our projects functional.
It’s important to remember that Design and CSS helps make things usable and accessible. This combined with all the additional coding is what makes something functional, you need both pieces of the puzzle to get there.
This article on the Badwater Ultramarathon, which is, in summary: “a 135-mile non-stop race over three mountain ranges in sweltering mid-summer desert heat with a vertical ascent of 13,000 feet”.
Yes, in preparation for the 10 mile Tough Mudder course, I have been doing some research, but the Badwater marathon is one I’ve been keeping an eye on for years. I first heard of it when planning our own trip to Death Valley (2007) and even after all these years it still sounds like the most ridiculous thing ever. Just walking around Badwater Basin in July was hard enough, let alone something like this. I’m in awe. Clearly, it’s not something I ever plan to do, but it’s good to know that if I did want to, I’ve still got a fair few years to get to peak condition…
This is also one reason runners in Badwater are, on average, older. The average age for Badwater 135 participants is 47 years old, with the oldest at 72. There are a few other reasons Bearden points to: as we age, we develop more of slow-twitch muscles that help on long runs. Psychological maturity comes with age. “Older people have a better understanding that the sun will come up tomorrow,” Bearden said. And it takes years for people to develop what he calls “craft”: the skills of ultrarunning and understanding the limits and needs of one’s body.
99% Invisible 369: Wait wait… Tell me! Predominantly about the City of Detroit Neighbourhood Improvement Tracker, via some great stuff about the psychology of waiting and the perception of progress. While the stuff in the episode focuses on the impact of rethinking things when it comes to demolishing buildings, it’s stuff that is applicable to so many other things.
I’m conscious that a lot of the time when I’m deep into a piece of work, I might not be as transparent as I perhaps could be in terms of sharing what I’m working on. I’ve been the type of person that is happy to share at the end, but doesn’t want the distractions half way through, and I feel like I’m not the only person in this industry like that. While there’s a benefit to that in terms of being able to focus on getting something done (and I wouldn’t want to lose that), there’s also a clear benefit to not being too insular.
A lot of it seems obvious when you say it out loud, but thinking about the impact you can have by simply being more open about progress, and what it means to accurately manage expectations, is fascinating to me.
Some of it worked its way into a talk I also did this week at work, partly about teamwork, partly about time transparency. Safe to say it made an impression.
]]>It’s a FED takeover for our monthly agency meeting.@nmsdvid shared how @pixelpioneers had inspired him to experiment with AR and VR. @mattnortham explained what we can learn from the @WuTangClan about teamwork.#FridayThoughts #AR #VR pic.twitter.com/DKPh5NaLfy
— Redweb (@Redweb) September 20, 2019
At ProductTank Exeter. Huge thanks to them for extending the invitation to head down to do a version of my Wu-Tang Team Lessons talk (that I first did almost a year ago at re:develop 2018). The whole night was hip hop themed, with Marc Abraham doing a Jay-Z inspired product management talk, and Tony Edwards showcasing his efforts toward getting the WebSpeech API to play nicely with rap lyrics.
It was a ton of fun to be part of, and I 100% sincerely think there should be more events which merge boom-bap with dot-com. If you know of anywhere thats looking for speakers (or if you know of any other similar themed talks), get at me! :D
It was an amazing talk!
— Ben Christine ??? ?? (@Benjieboo) September 13, 2019
The release notes of the latest version of Firefox beta, specifically this:
An information icon is displayed next to CSS properties that don’t have an effect on the current element in the Rules pane of the Page Inspector.
How cool is that(?) I’ve seen a lot of people moving to Firefox from Chrome lately, for a range of reasons, and the privacy stuff is very valid, but it’s the stuff like this that makes me want to move back to it.
I mean, obviously I’d have little need for this exact thing, because I don’t write superfluous CSS. My code is succinct and free of mess or distractions. But for some people, I can see why this’d be useful. Not me though. No no.
(Brb. Just downloading it now.)
This huge thread of things that women have invented. Starting with paper bags, and including ALL sorts of stuff from Monopoly to circular saws; if you ever needed proof of the (what should be painfully obvious) fact that women can y’know… DO stuff too… here’s a start. Tbh, it’s fucking depressing that threads like this need to exist to 'prove’ that creating amazing things isn’t just the purview of men, but we live in stupid stupid times and Twitter, of all places, definitely benefits from having this spelt out.
Things women have invented
In 1868, cotton mill worker Margaret Knight invented a machine make paper bags with a flat square bottom
A man named Charles Annan saw her design and tried to patent the idea first.
Knight filed a lawsuit and won the patent fair and square in 1871 pic.twitter.com/YdwEFGKfeG
— Antonia (@Flaminhaystack) September 7, 2019
This article about the science behind 'Astroturfing’. Via Mike Hind on Twitter who sums it up like:
We are naturally influenced by the 'popularity’ of things. Astroturf makes certain ideas seem popular. In this scientific study, people were influenced to like some songs more than others – just by faking download statistics. We are herd animals.
I’d not heard of the term 'astroturfing’ before, but it’s a fascinating premise which you can definitely see some truth in without having to look too far. As Mike suggests, reviews on Amazon are a potential example of this. You’re more likely to buy something with a 5 star average than a 3 star, which means that there’s a lot of motivation for sellers to artificially boost those 5 star ratings. It seems obvious, but it’s always better when there’s DATA to support it.
The scary part is when you start applying it to politics and voting. Create enough noise talking about something – promoting a particular stance – and soon it feels like everyone’s talking about that, so there must be some value in it, which leads to more people talking about it, etc, etc. Those bot farms are dangerous.
]]>A glimpse behind the scenes of Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum. After several delays and a ton of cash, this 500,000m² museum is due to open in 2020. It sounds (and potentially looks) pretty awesome…
… expected to house 100,000 objects, many of which will be displayed for the first time, as well as a 250-seat 3D cinema and children’s museum. It will also have a panoramic view of the Great Pyramids of Giza.
I can’t actually remember much about the whistle-stop visit I had to the pyramids, way back in 1992, but I’m sure there was(/is) a museum already with plenty of things in. I know I’ve seen the mask of Tutankhamun, and I’m 99% sure that was in Cairo. This new museum looks like it’s intended to live in the memory a little longer than your normal housing of ancient artefacts. I do want to go back to Egypt again – it’s been over 10 years since my last trip there – so maybe this opening will be the perfect excuse to get back to Giza.
There’s some stuff about how much the museum is costing, and there are suggestions of ulterior motives behind getting it built, but I do think it’s a good thing that it’ll exist. Not only to encourage tourism to what is a fantastic part of the world, but also because I think those Egyptian treasures should be in Egypt. As much as I like seeing them close by in London (or wherever they’ve been stashed after we stole them), they’re not ours to hold. Borrowing them would be fine – I think all sorts of museum pieces should go on tours more often – but the Rosetta Stone, and Ramesses II probably shouldn’t live in Bloomsbury.
The Anthropocene Is a Joke. Thoroughly debunking the notion that human civilisation matters in the context of the Earth’s history. We’re very much a blip.
The idea of the Anthropocene is an interesting thought experiment. For those invested in the stratigraphic arcana of this infinitesimal moment in time, it serves as a useful catalog of our junk. But it can also serve to inflate humanity’s legacy on an ever-churning planet that will quickly destroy—or conceal forever—even our most awesome creations.
Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.
The whole article is quotable, on account of how it describes the utterly incomprehensible spans of time that we’re dealing with when we talk about epochs and ages.
It reminds me of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman; in fact, lots of things make me think of that book – it’s stayed simmering in my mind since I first read it. All the amazing things that humans have done EVER, including all the things that’ll end up in the Grand Egyptian Museum, would vanish SO quickly (relatively speaking) if we just stopped tomorrow. It’s a more than a little depressing, and very humbling, but also (if you’re in the right mindset) potentially inspiring(?) I dunno, I’m trying to see the positives here. Yes, the world currently feels like a massive clusterfuck in a lot of regards, but in the grand scheme of things, there’s still plenty of time to get past it. Maybe we’ll be fine.
This American Life 680: The Weight of Words. There’s a good story about how Little Women basically saved someone’s life, but the highlight of this episode was the bit called Daddy Lessons:
Parents try to shape who we are in their own image. Producer Neil Drumming spoke to Adam Mansbach, who tried to make his daughter fall in love with hip hop.
I felt like it was talking TO ME. I wont spoil the story in case you want to listen yourself (it’s only 20 minutes long) but suffice to say I came away from it feeling good about the fact that I play a lot of hip hop to my daughter (and son for that matter, but mostly daughter because she’s older). I feel like they appreciate it on a certain level… I mean, there are some songs she can sing along to and that is a lot of fun to hear. But I’m very aware that Taylor Swift & Moana & all sorts of non boom-bap are what she’s really into, and obviously I’m not going to force her to listen to what I want to listen to. Nonetheless, as this story explains, it’s not really the type of music that matters, it’s the whole schtick around it…
]]>I mean, I did have a few trips away in the interim – Cambodia, Singapore, Bristol, & London, all in varying lengths – but I’d already got out of the routine by then, so that’s not really to blame. (More about those trips to come btw…)
Anyway, regardless of all that, we go again.
Into The Personal Website-Verse by Matthias Ott. Credit this with my decision to get back at it. I’ve long been a fan of having a personal site… it’s how I got into web dev in the first place and it’s still my goto place to try out and new things. There’s plenty of quotes in that piece from people who have similar experiences, so it’s definitely not just me, and it’s great to read a passionate defence of personal sites. (Is it a defence(?) Not sure they’re being attacked… maybe a panegyric on the joys of having a personal place on the web).
This bit stuck:
Also, don’t hesitate to write about little ideas and observations that might seem too small or unimportant to share. We all have our unique perspectives and even the smallest experience is worth sharing. Someone else might be in a similar situation as you or also in a completely different situation. They both might learn something new from reading about your experiences. Each contribution to the community, even the smallest one, is useful and will make a change. So just write. By the way: If you are struggling to find something to write about and feel blocked, remember that there is no such thing as writer’s block. The more you write and create, the easier it will get.
Social Media Could Make It Impossible to Grow Up, an excerpt from Kate Eichhorn’s book The End of Forgetting. I quite often find myself having this conversation about being happy that I was a teenager before mobiles and social media really existed; although a part of me is sad that I don’t have much of a record of that time, that’s superseded by how great it is that so much of the ridiculousness that I got into isn’t documented.
I’m increasingly conscious of what parts of my kids lives are digitised and as they get older, the nerves about the impact of all that ONLINE-NESS are fast merging with and consuming the excitement I have for the possibilities of future tech.
For the first time in history, children and adolescents have widespread access to the technologies needed to represent their lives, circulate these representations, and forge networks with each other, often with little or no adult supervision. The potential danger is no longer childhood’s disappearance, but rather the possibility of a perpetual childhood. The real crisis of the digital age is not the disappearance of childhood, but the specter of a childhood that can never be forgotten.
99% Invisible 337: Atomic Tattoos. Operation Tat-Type. Never heard of it. Bunch of teenagers in Indiana in the 1950s getting tattoos of their blood type.
In 1952, the Cold War was in full swing and the government was busy developing civil defense strategies — things ordinary citizens could to do to help protect the homefront. In this case, the thinking was that if Russia attacked, the tattoos would make for quicker transfusions. They called it a “walking blood bank” — no need for cold storage.
Also stuff about the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) and the origins of “Duck & Cover”. Basically, in the event of a Nuclear attack, swim underwater or hide behind a tree. You’ll be fine.
]]>
Chernobyl. I thought I knew the story about what happened at this nuclear power plant in 1986 but I didn’t really. I’ve no doubt that there’s a little bit of artistic license in this but if even half of it is true, then I learnt a lot (and really enjoyed doing so).
It’s a fantastic mini series that’ll likely get you binging through all 5 episodes before you realise what you’ve done. Gorgeously put together, genuinely gripping, and completely compelling – it’s probably my favourite thing I’ve watched all year.
The actual events are of course terrifying and awful. Back in my early teens I spent a bit of time with some Ukranian children visiting England, who had been affected by Chernobyl, and the impact of the disaster (and how far-reaching it was) has always stuck with me. Horrible stuff; yet it’s portrayed with respect and (dare I say) beauty, in this series. Amazing TV.
This piece about being fined for taking your kids out of school. Topical, because I will be taking my daughter out of school next month to go on holiday (albeit only for half a day on the last day of term). Like the author, I think that the time we’ll spend on holiday is at least as important as the time they’ll be 'missing’ school – not just educationally but also the whole experience. And also like the author, I’m all too aware that even if we did get fined, I’m not really a victim when it comes to a policy like this.
When schools levy fines for non-attendance it is pretty obvious who this will impact. Those 120,000 families whose children are more likely to truant are some of the poorest in the country. And whatever I think of the system as it is currently formulated, it does make sense to encourage children to go to school. But financially punishing poor parents is a step in the wrong direction. Worshipping at the altar of attendance can also have the unintended consequence that sick children and those with special additional needs are less able to achieve the rewards schools hand out to those who always make it to class.
Truancy is one thing (though, I still don’t think fines are the answer) but holidays? I’ve always thought that it’s really important for kids to get to have family breaks away – not necessarily abroad or whatever, but time off together. Having those experiences and having that time is such an important part of childhood, and once they’re at a school age, it gets harder to make it happen. The summer holidays tax is too real, so if the only way to realistically get a holiday is to do it during term time, that shouldn’t result in a black mark against your name.
Bradshaw’s Guide… “a digital revival of George Bradshaw’s eponymous guide to Britain and Ireland’s nascent railway network as it existed in 1866.” It’s a personal project from Paul Robert Lloyd, and I love it – particularly the bits about Plymouth.
> The view from the Hoe, or cliffy height on which the Citadel is planted, commands a magnificent prospect of the sound or outer anchorage, Mounts Batten and Edgecumbe hedging it in on both sides, and the breakwater which protects the main entrance. Two rivers run into the sound, the Plym on the east side, and the Tamar on the west, or Devonport.
I’ll be honest, I do sometimes miss living on the Hoe. But, at least there are things like this which can evoke the best parts of it, without the *ahem* less enjoyable elements.
]]>99% Invisible 327: A Year in the Dark. The podcast version of this fantastic article on Wired by Daniel Alarcón, it’s about hurricane Maria hitting Puerto Rico in 2017 and the efforts by Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority to get the island back to some sort of normality.
Somewhere under there is Puerto Rico (via climate.gov)Obviously, there’s been a lot of coverage about the effects of Maria, and the response by the US government. It’s not just the immediate aid, it’s the weeks and months after which are so important. I remember this piece from NatGeo which dipped into what it’s like for people in the long term:
Even after power and water are restored across the island, people will still be dealing with the storm’s effects. “The storm takes away the foundations of society. Everything you thought gave you certainty is gone,” says psychologist Domingo Marqués, 39, an associate professor at Albizu University in San Juan. “You see people anxious, depressed, scared.” Marqués estimates that 30 to 50 percent of the population is experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or anxiety.
The whole thing is sad and scary, which is why small stories like these (on the podcast, about Jorge Bracero) are brilliant to have because they remind you that amongst all that, there are people managing to make hugely positive contributions. Nice to know that there’s still some humanity out there.
This American Life 673: Left Behind. “People figuring out how to move through a world in which something important has disappeared.” The part I liked the most was the part about a group of friends who banded together to try to fight the wildfires that hit California in 2018. Specifically, they were striving to protect Helltown (this is the same fire that destroyed most of Paradise… what’s with these names?) and by all accounts, they did an amazing job in horrendous conditions. Some of the descriptions of what they saw are tough to hear – and obviously would’ve been tougher to see. Not sure I would’ve stuck around to protect my neighbours houses, and I’m not sure that what they did was the most sensible thing ever but hey, credit due. When the shit went down, they stood up.
Fukishima 8 Years On. Continuing the 'disasters’ theme that seems to have inadvertently staked a claim on this weeks update, I enjoyed this collection of photos showing the damage and contaminated areas around the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant.
The efforts of thousands of workers and billions of dollars spent on decontaminating the contaminated areas are beginning to bear fruit. In the cleaned areas … decontamination works have been completed and the evacuation order lifted. As a result, most of the residents of Tomioka and Namie, two of the largest cities around the damaged power plant may return to their homes. Yet intensive cleaning and demolition works are still being carried out.
I would not go back there if I was a resident, fyi.
]]>99% Invisible 354: Weeding is Fundamental. All about a very specific consequence of the 1989 Lomo Prieta earthquake – how it affected the San Francisco library, where shelves and filing systems were thrown into disarray, leading to half a million books scattered across the floors. Off the back of that, they needed to prioritise which books were re-shelved [in the reduced space available] and which were discarded.
Libraries get rid of books all the time. There are so many new books coming in every day and only a finite amount of library space. The practice of freeing up library space is called weeding. “It’s like, you have to weed your garden for […] the flowers to grow,” says Sharon McKellar who supervises Teen Services at the Oakland Public Library.
This is one of those episodes that I truly love; it’s a fascinating look at something that I’d never really put much thought into, but now won’t be able to stop thinking about. There are Guerrilla librarians, the advent of the Internet, coding systems, and MUSTY guidelines.
It’s made me want to go straight to the library to start appreciating things more.
Weeding isn’t just about what to cut. It’s also about what to keep. It’s about what the public wants to read. And so every time you check out a book from the library, you are casting a vote, to your local librarian out there in the weeds, to keep this title in circulation.
The secrets of London’s hidden rivers revealed. I love stuff like this. It’s one of the reasons I’m sad about living somewhere which only has a couple hundred years of history – there’s very little chance of stumbling onto a Roman bridge or hearing a river flowing somewhere under the pavement.
Jacob’s Island, Bermondsey, depicted in watercolour by James Lawson Stewart, 1887. > Ignored, abused, diverted to turn mills or feed boating and skating ponds for the leisured classes, choked with rubbish, entombed in pipes and culverts, some of the rivers survive only as a soggy stain in the clay, but others still flow unseen beneath Londoners’ feet.
I quite like the idea of one of these tours, or at the very least getting a book and looking out for signs of these rivers next time I’m in London. I still want to do a LookUpLondon tour though, so that might come first.
How Quorn makes the filling for Greggs’ vegan sausage rolls. I’ve still not had a vegan sausage roll (I don’t think I’ve ever had anything from a Greggs come to think of it) and I had no idea they were actually Quorn. As someone who has Quorn for roughly 75% of my evening meals, and as someone who loves sausage rolls, I should be all over Greggs. Not to mention the fact that it seems to offend Piers Morgan so much, so it’s got to be a good thing. Next time I pass one, it’s on!
Now a familiar household name, Quorn is benefiting from the soaring popularity of flexitarian’ diets – where a largely vegetable-based diet is supplemented occasionally with meat – and the growing trend for consuming meat alternatives and plant-based eating.
That’s me that is. I’ve always thought that the explanation behind Quorn sounds weird – “a dried seed culture derived from a fungus found in soil” – but surely no more weird than “a slab of flesh derived from an animal found in a large metal room without light or fresh air” ¯\_(?)_/¯. I don’t know if Quorn specifically is the future, but for now it’s pretty good (Quorn nuggets >>>> chicken nuggets, don’t @ me), and I’m definitely sure that meat is not the future. It can’t be.
The Society on Netflix. Teen drama / dystopian thriller / sci fi Lord of the Flies(?) I quite liked it. Interesting to think about what you’d do if your civilisation basically got reset, and then how you’d behave if you were given power over people.
]]>About these plans for an international airport near Machu Picchu. Topical, off the back of the things I was chatting about last week around the impact of tourism; this feels like it’s taking it to another level.
Bulldozers are already scraping clear millions of tonnes of earth in Chinchero, a picturesque Inca town about 3,800 metres above sea level that is the gateway to the Sacred Valley. This area was once was the heartland of a civilisation that stretched from modern-day Colombia to Argentina, and in the 15th century was the world’s largest empire.
I would LOVE to go Machu Picchu, as obviously many many other people would, but this ain’t it, Chief. Peru is more than Machi Picchu, and I think that an idea like this which is set up to effectively channel visitors to one specific thing, minimising the likelihood that they’ll encounter anything else the country has to offer, is awful. Surely it wont go ahead(?)
Mapping the Tongva villages of L.A.’s past. This interactive article/map covers the original inhabitants of Los Angeles, the Tongva. Back when they called it Tovaangar. I’ll be honest, this is the first time I’d heard of the Tongva, and that’s a shame because it’s fascinating. Would’ve given me a different view about exploring L.A… Like, who knew there was an ancient spring (that still flows) just off Wilshire Blvd in West L.A.(?) Similarly, I’d never really considered the specific origin of place names like Topanga or Cahuenga but there you go – Tongva heritage.
This map of Tovaangar draws upon the work of a number of scholars, including Steven Hackel, Stephen O’Neil, Nat Zappia and Jeanette Zerneke, whose Early California Cultural Atlas, a spatial-history project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Early California Population Project, developed by the Huntington Library, are essential resources.
And as it was Global Accessibility Awareness Day last week, here’s a selection of related articles that I enjoyed… some are old, some are new.
There were so so so many more – if you take a look at the #gaad tag on Twitter, you’ll find plenty. Even if you’re already aware, there’s always something to learn and something new to look into.
This American Life 674: Get a Spine. There’s a thing about that time Dan Harmon was a massive prick and eventually apologised for being one, and there’s a thing about the attitude of the scientific community towards invertebrates. It’s the second part which is more interesting. This dude looked at the number of publications in Animal Behaviour, a journal about animal behaviour, in order to work out if 'bird papers got published more than spider papers’. Long story short, they do.
He discovered that just 10 species of animals represented a shockingly high proportion of papers published– 15% of all papers. That means one in seven papers is dedicated to just 10 species out of millions.
“You know, we talk about the natural world and all the animals in it and all the things they do. But if you think you know the world because you’ve studied hundreds and hundreds of birds and mammals, maybe you don’t know the world. Like, maybe it isn’t that bad but maybe the whole world is different than we thought because we just haven’t been focusing our attention on the bulk of things. Yeah, like we’ve been only looking at just a tiny sliver and we thought it was the whole world.”
There are valid reasons for the imbalance, but generally, it still seems a bit unfair. He makes a valiant attempt to shift that balance, and I’ll leave you to work out if it was successful or not.
]]>A little WebSockets car racer thing. It’s the return of code-off challenges at work, and this month I dabbled with WebSockets (specifically socket.io) for the first time (after meaning to for ages now) to make this thing that lets you control a car from your phone.
If you go to the site on a desktop, and at the same time go to the site on your phone (https://rw-cars.glitch.me/) you should be able to press 'OK’ simultaneously and then as the car is 'driving’, start tilting your phone left and right (in portrait orientation) to see the car on your desktop turns in sync.
It’s very much just a proof of concept, but I’d like to develop it a little to get in some multiplayer action, and make it much smoother. But for what it is, it was pretty fun to make.
The Inuit don’t shout at their children – so why do we? Because they can be annoying(?)
“We do know anger is much more prevalent in some cultures than others,” says Prof Batja Gomes De Mesquita, the director of the Centre for Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of Leuven in Belgium. "The western belief is that we have these authentic emotions that should have room to be expressed and that beyond the odd situation you really you shouldn’t have to suppress it.
“But this idea of an internal emotion that should be free to come out in any circumstance is not shared as much elsewhere.”
I must admit, I do catch myself raising my voice with my kids sometimes over the most ultimately inconsequential things, and I often regret it because really, who’s it helping? But it’s easier said than done to stay cool-headed. Not to self, be more Inuit.
Nature crisis: Humans 'threaten 1m species with extinction’. This report has made it around a lot of places this week – take your pick where you read about it from – but the message is just as disturbing wherever you get your news.
According to the global assessment, an average of around 25% of animals and plants are now threatened.
Global trends in insect populations are not known but rapid declines in some locations have also been well documented.
All this suggests around a million species now face extinction within decades, a rate of destruction tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years.
Well, that’s great. Plastics, solvents, toxic materials, intensive farming, overfishing, deforestation, etc etc… It’s not just climate change that causes biodiversity decline – we are directly fucking things up by being awful humans. It’s ridiculous.
“We know that the way people eat today is often unhealthy for them and for the planet,” said Dr Kate Brauman, one of the report’s authors.
“We can become healthier as individuals by eating more diverse diets, with more vegetables, and we can also make the planet healthier by growing that food in more sustainable ways.”
As well as consumer and lifestyle choices, other authors believe people can make a difference through politics. … "So how do you that? Through individual behaviour, through the polling booth.
“Rather than just conserving energy by turning my lights off, some other less obvious means might be through political action.”
Bitpicking 19 – What the UX with Laura Yarrow. To be honest, I don’t listen to many things related to my work. Bit of a busman’s holiday. But I am partial to some Bitpicking, and not just because I’ve been a guest on it, though clearly that helps ;).
In this episode, Laura talks about her user experience experience, and it’s an interesting chat about an area of web work which is still oddly a little misunderstood. I did particularly like the mention of the anthropological side of UX, which I don’t feel gets enough attention. Sure, the psychology of user behaviour is fun but it’s the societal, human behaviour type stuff that floats my boat.
Also, I would’ve pronounced Axure as 'Az-your’ instead of 'AXE-sure’, so I learnt something there.
]]>Sinking city: how Venice is managing Europe’s worst tourism crisis. I’ve been lucky enough to visit there a couple of times – oddly within the space of about 6 months – and I’d love to go back… but equally, I’m not sure I could cope with the crowds again. Certainly not now that I’ve got a couple of kids to drag along too. Granted, one of those trips was for a particularly busy event so isn’t wholly representative of tourism throughout the rest of the year, but even on a random June day, it was difficult finding a quiet spot.
Those quiet spots do exist though… I found this one.Currently, about 25 million people visit Venice every year, and if you’ve ever been, you’ll have noticed that the streets and canals there probably aren’t cut out for handling that many people. It’s tricky, because it’s one of those places that I think people should visit, on account of how gorgeous it is, but then if people keep on going there in droves, it’ll obviously get less and less gorgeous. It’s definitely food for thought if you’re planning a trip, but in addition to that, it’s increasingly looking like these sort of decisions might end up out of your tourist hands…
Across Europe, other grassroots groups are also fighting to preserve local cultures. In 2017, the social movement Morar em Lisboa, in conjunction with 30 local associations, wrote an open letter denouncing Lisbon’s excessive dependency on tourism and real estate speculation. And last May, 14 cities and islands – 10 of them Spanish, alongside Venice, Lisbon and Malta – joined forces to form the Network of Southern European Cities against Touristification, arguing that mass tourism causes high rents, pollution, the loss of local shops and the proliferation of low-wage jobs.
Completely coincidentally, this exact dilemma of whether it’s right to overwhelm holiday hotspots in the name of tourism came up on a podcast I caught up with this week whilst…
Moral Maze – The Morality of Holidays. It’s an episode from 2017 but it’s still clearly very relevant. So many viewpoints and things to consider around booking holidays, there’s a risk that you’ll listen to this and come away never wanting to go abroad again.
Does that make the decision about where to go on holiday a moral one? Even if we are aware that tourism can have negative impacts, and that our money may not end up in the pockets of the poorest, it’s easy not to think about it. Can’t we just rely on the tour operators to behave ethically? Does it really matter if tourism is trashing the planet as long as we’re spreading prosperity and everyone (or almost everyone) is having a good time? Or do we have a moral duty to think carefully before we book our all-inclusive package holidays? Is it ethically defensible to live it up in a country with a lousy record on human rights? And what about the environmental damage caused by all those air miles?
Personally, I’ll still be travelling when I can, because y’know… it’s fun. And there’s such huge value in it. Only, I do think I’ll endeavour to perhaps travel a little more responsibly where at all possible. I mean, I like to think that I’ve always been mindful of the places I visit and the impact that me going there might have, so I don’t feel like I need to change tact too much there… but there’s definitely something around the amount of flights we – in general – take which you really have to ask, do they need to happen?
Ask me again after I get back from Cambodia this year.
99% Invisible 325: The Worst Way to Start a City. All about the founding of Oklahoma City, which happened basically on 1 single day – April 22nd 1889. There was this huge swathe of land that had been stolen from indigenous peoples – Indian Territory – which became a sort of first come, first served literal actual land grab.
Anyone who wanted to claim land could line up at the border of the Unassigned Lands, which was around 300 miles in circumference. Then, at noon on April 22, 1889, a signal would be given initiating the land grab. Settlers could rush in and hammer down wooden stakes to claim land — up to 160 acres out in the country and smaller patches in designated town sites.
Picture 100,000 people from all over the world rushing over rough ground, vying with each other (and with many, many nefarious cheats) for the best spot. It sounds ridiculous, and you can see why this episode is so named.
But, it all worked out OK in the end for reasons that you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out (citizens committees, street 'jogs’, and a some way down the line, a relocated basketball team). It’s a good one.
]]>99% Invisible 349: Froebel’s Gifts. Looking at the slightly surprising link between kindergarten and modernism. I’m one of those people who believed that 'kindergarten’ was just a catch-all term for pre-school but it turns out there was a very specific thing that made kindergartens kindergartens.
Friedrich Froebel, who first conceived of them, also came up with a collection of educational toys that were an essential part of the play-learning that takes place in kindergartens. Known as Froebelgaben,
Froebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way.
Knitted balls, wooden cubes, cylinders, strings, various combinations of those, then finally clay; these are the the literal building blocks of play, and they went on to inspire a whole host of designers architects who continued experimenting with those shapes and objects in their adult lives. It’s a fascinating listen, and one that definitely made me think a little bit more about the things I encourage my kids to play with.
In some ways, all modern toy building systems reflect the influence of Froebel. Tinker Toys, Lego, Kinex — they’re all about understanding shape and form and making connections.
The Cipher 252: Shawn and Josh with Jay Smooth. Ostensibly the last ever episode of The Cipher, this is a biographical look at the show, with Jay Smooth handling the questions. Lots of interesting facts get unearthed, but it mostly just made me sad for the fact that this is the last episode. I’ve still got a far few in the archive that I’ve not listened to, so I’ll be OK for a while yet, but still – it’s such a great podcast. I really hope they bring it back one day.
Redrawing the world’s coasts. I say 'reading’, I mean 'mostly watching’, as there’s a video on there which talks about the impact rising sea levels will have – with a focus on New York.
In a week where Greta Thunberg’s speech at the Houses of Parliament has got a lot of attention, and Extinction Rebellion have been doing their thing, it feels topical to watch videos like that. In fact, it’s always going to be topical from now on isn’t it(?) Can’t help but feel increasingly frustrated and concerned that we’re basically fucked. :/
You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.
Greta Thunberg, 2019
Special on Netflix. Based on creator/star Ryan O’Connell’s memoir, “I’m Special: And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves”, this is a really short and fun series that I found myself getting through in a few nights. I enjoyed it. Not least because Eggwoke (the lifestyle site that he ends up writing for) has a big hint of Nathan Barley SugarApe to it.
]]>Unlocking the mysteries of Gothic cathedrals. Off the back of the terrible fire at Notre Dame, stumbled on this old article about using lasers to scan, measure, and map Gothic architecture. Having an archive of so much data is of course really useful in the aftermath of a disaster in terms of being able to help with the rebuild process, but it also goes a long way toward revealing more about the history of the build.
The laser scans have led to surprising new information about Notre Dame’s builders. For one thing, they sometimes took shortcuts. Even though medieval builders strove to create perfect dwelling places for the spirit of God, Tallon’s scans reveal that the western end of the cathedral is “a total mess … a train wreck.” The interior columns don’t line up and neither do some of the aisles. Rather than removing the remains of existing structures from the site, the workers appear to have built around them.
I’ve been to Notre Dame a few times, though regrettably never got round to going inside. Thankfully, there are projects like this which managed to capture an amazing amount of detail, so I can at least pretend to explore.
About the Libro de los Epítomes, a 16th-century catalogue of books which have long since been lost the world.
The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century. Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels. Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552.
It’s utterly fascinating to me that things like this exist (and are still only just being discovered??). Could Hernando ever have envisioned that his efforts to document his collection would end up being one of the only ways to even find out that those books even existed(?) The thought of losing books – or entire libraries – has long irked me. It’s insanely frustrating that so much history has been lost for largely senseless reasons, so it’s great to get things like this which at least go a little way to restoring that loss.
Looking forward to the digitised version in 2020 – digital stuff will never disappear.
99% Invisible 335: Gathering The Magic. At some point in my early days at secondary school, Magic cards were highly prized amongst a certain group of people. I tried to get into them – bought a binder with plastic sleeves for the cards, spent all my pocket money for a month on cards, attempted to understand the difference between enchantments and sorcery… but most of the cards I ended up with were a bit shit. I base that purely on how cool they looked, rather than any other value. I never actually played a game of it (not sure I even realised it was a game tbh) but I was interested in having cards that looked cool – legendary dragons or zombie lords or stuff like that. When I didn’t get many of those cards, I lost interest quickly and that was that. Never thought about Magic again. Until this episode.
This is taken from Imaginary Worlds, a podcast about sci-fi and fantasy stuff which I’d ordinarily say wasn’t my thing, but off the back of this episode, maybe it’s worth a further look. It’s a genuinely interesting look at what goes into creating an entire mythology under the guise of a card game, and even if you’ve never dabbled with Magic before, it’s definitely worth a listen.
]]>
Twoj Vincent. A film about the life (or rather, last few days of the life) of Vincent Van Gogh, which sounds fairly mundane but wait!
Each of the film’s 65,000 frames is an oil painting on canvas, using the same technique as Van Gogh, created by a team of over 100 painters.
I’m not entirely sure how much I actually liked it, but it’s undeniably a hugely impressive endeavour. The likeness of the actors is astounding – even more so for the fact that it’s the result of consistently producing hundreds and hundreds of paintings of each person which each on their own is a literal work of art. I was particularly impressed with the representation of Jerome Flynn who I haven’t thought about for at least 20 years but who I recognised instantly. I did also learn much more about Van Gogh than I ever knew before (which was admittedly not a lot). Interesting bloke that. Keep an eye out for him.
The Adam Buxton podcast Ep. 83: Simon Pegg. Some solid ramblechat here. I went and rewatched a few episodes of Big Train after listening to this – I think that’s still my favourite thing that Simon Pegg has been involved with (though that’s clearly quite a claim, what with Spaced and Shaun of the Dead and Gerard Chote, but I stand by it).
Hip-hop Saved My Life Ep. 43: Tiernan Douieb. Because of my distant, very very vague association with The Last Skeptik (I did a website for him about 15 years ago), I’ve always felt a even more vague connection with Tiernan (they’re brothers). So, what I’m trying to say, is I enjoyed listening to this. He’s a funny dude, and he likes hip hop, which ticks 2 of the most important boxes for me.
About the Dyatlov Pass incident. I can’t actually remember why this came up, but wtaf. I’ll just point to the Wikipedia page for starters.
The Dyatlov Pass incident (??? ??? ???) refers to the deaths of nine skiers/hikers in the northern Ural Mountains, in the former Soviet Union, between the 1st and 2nd of February, 1959, due to unclear circumstances … During the night, something caused them to tear their way out of their tents and flee the campsite, all while inadequately dressed for the heavy snowfall and sub-zero temperatures.
One victim had a fractured skull; two others had major chest fractures. Additionally, the body of another team member was missing its tongue and eyes. The investigation concluded that an “unknown compelling force” had caused the deaths.
There are all sorts of theories about what happened but it’s still a mystery. 14 year old X-Files watching me would’ve been enthralled by something like this. Current me still finds it intriguing.
]]>99% Invisible 332: The Accidental Room. There a little bit of history about the origins of malls which is, in itself, really interesting. This whole concept of a mixed-use ‘town square’ hasn’t entirely come to fruition, but you can understand and appreciate the best intentions of malls even if you dislike them in practice.
The bulk of the episode is dedicated to Michael Townsend who ended up living inside a mall. Like, not just in a shop in the mall, but actually hidden away within the structure of the building. It sounds ridiculous that they pulled it off, but he and a small group of friends managed to create a proper living area in this small section of the complex which had been unattended (and unintended?) entirely.
Anything that they could buy from the mall to decorate, they would, with a few exceptions — they brought in their own couch and China hutch in broad daylight. “We avoided the night,” explained Townsend, “and we worked with the ebb and flow of the mall. We were just part of the living organism of its daily activities.”
I particularly liked this story as I’ve been to the mall it’s about, in Providence, Rhode Island. I wish I’d known about this before going – not because the mall-house is still around, but because it would’ve added an interesting story to an otherwise mostly forgetful visit to a Cheesecake Factory and a vibrating massage chair. (Though actually, that cheesecake was ludicrous). It’s a big building, but it’s still baffling to think that someone could live in it for years before getting caught.
Dad Bod Rap Pod 62: Hard to Earn retrospective. It’s simply a chat about the Gang Starr album “Hard to Earn”, my second favourite Gang Starr album, and while there’s nothing revelatory in the chat, I do enjoy hearing people talk passionately about great music that I also enjoy, so this is a solid episode for me. If nothing else, it gave me the impetus to listen to the album in full for the first time in a long time, and I can confirm that it still knocks (obviously).
This ode to Dennis Bergkamp. I’d struggle to articulate exactly why I love Dennis Bergkamp, so thankfully this piece does it for me. It’s more than the first touches, the flicks and turns. It’s the aura of Bergkamp that is so satisfying to watch. Though also, the flicks and turns. I’ve spent years trying to recreate that goal against Newcastle in some form or another, but of course it’s utterly impossible for mere mortals.
OTD in 2002, Dennis Bergkamp with one of the greatest first touches ever.pic.twitter.com/sTXUaLge9a
— MUNDIAL (@MundialMag) March 2, 2019
See also that goal against Argentina. And all the others, come to think of it. Pure class.
Dutch football, and indeed, Dutch culture, has a preoccupation with the concept of space, partly down to the fact that they don’t have a great deal of it to go about. Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Modern Art Museum in Amsterdam, notes: “[The Dutch] measure space very quietly, very precisely, and then order it in detail. That is the Dutch way of seeing, the Dutch approach to space: selective detail. It’s a natural, instinctive thing for us to do. You see it in our paintings, our architecture, and our football too.”
Dev perception by Jeremy Keith. A typically Jeremy Keith kind of Jeremy Keith piece, which I found myself vigorously nodding along to. All about the (mis)perception of what other developers are using in their day-to-day on account of constantly seeing articles about exciting new technologies…
The result is that what’s being written about is not a reflection of what’s being widely used. And that’s okay …as long as you know that’s the case. But I worry that theres’s a perception problem. Because of the outsize weighting of new and exciting technologies, a typical developer could feel that their skills are out of date and the technologies they’re using are passé …even if those technologies are actually in wide use.
I feel it. I also feel this:
]]>Ultimately what matters is building something—a website, a web app, whatever—that best serves end users. If that requires a new and exciting technology, that’s great. But if it requires an old and boring technology, that’s also great. What matters here is appropriateness.
The urban explorers recording vanishing Hong Kong. There’s a big shortage of land in Hong Kong, so things like sentiment and history don’t really stand a chance against the push for profits. Heritage sites get re-developed beyond recognition, or demolished completely, leaving no trace of what made them so interesting to begin with. So, this group of dudes go round breaking into abandoned places, taking photos and videos… not just for instagram likes (though I’m sure they get their fair share of them) but to actually create artifacts of what these places were like before 'progress’ steamrolled through.
“We wish we had the money to buy sites and preserve them as they are, but we don’t,” says Ghost, who does not reveal his real name. “So we do what we can to document them and try to preserve their memory. These places are part of our culture, part of our history … they shouldn’t just be wiped away.”
The long since abandoned Central Market in Hong KongI’m a fan of this style of urban exploring. Not so much taking selfies on top of stupidly high buildings, but more finding art and substance amidst the decay and neglect. I’m a sucker for a symmetrical shot of an abandoned corridor, so these photos really do it for me.
99% Invisible 341: National Sword answering the question “where does your recycling go?”. Turns out, it’s increasingly going nowhere – or at least, nowhere useful. Can’t say I’d really considered specifically what happens to those yoghurt pots after they end up in the recycle bin (and btw, they should definitely be rinsed out properly. Don’t try to recycle dirty stuff!), so this was an eye-opener. Essentially, there are huge facilities which process the materials, but the route to get things to them isn’t entirely straightforward.
I’m on board with recycling in principle – who isn’t(?) – but I do think that the contribution I’m making is just a drop in the ocean (no metaphorical pun intended) compared to what we as humans should be doing. Is it really enough to merely ask households to filter out their paper and plastics from general waste? Probably not. Which is why I appreciated the switch-up at the end of the episode to consider the bigger picture.
Countries, states and cities need to press producers to design more sustainable products and packaging, and develop more recycling infrastructure. People create pollution and people can stop it, but it has to be done at all levels and steps of the process, starting with better design.
WTF 1,004: Rob Lowe. Marc Maron chatting to my favourite Brat Pack member (Molly Ringwald is a close second) about all sorts of stuff. Bits about sobriety, about acting, and also saying “100%” as frequently as he says “literally” in Parks & Recreation. It’s what you’d expect from a Rob Lowe interview. There’s a bit of ego but generally, he seems very likeable. And I like him because of that.
]]>ParentLand: Speaking in many tongues? Chats about raising multilingual children, with some interesting stuff about the benefits of introducing a new language early on. Specifically, that even though they might not learn the language at that early age (because for whatever reason they stop having lessons / being exposed to it), there are studies that show they’re more likely (or at least, more open) to learn a language in later life. There’s also plenty of discussion about how to support children in their language learning, which also applies to adults too.
I’m consistently annoyed at myself for not knowing any other language – I feel really lazy and ignorant when in other countries – but it’s too late for me. I’m beyond redemption. My children however… packing them off to as many after-school clubs as possible. French, Spanish, Mandarin, isiZulu, whatever. Hopefully some of it sticks.
Fall of Civilisations 3: The Mayan Collapse. I love this podcast – and particularly this episode. So much to digest though, that I’m definitely going to need to re-listen. One thing I’d not really considered before when thinking about the Maya is the complexity of Mayan cities and their relationships with each other. Tikal, Calakmul, Uaxactún, etc etc, there were dozens of places each home to tens of thousands of people, and their interactions with each other helped to create this vast awesome empire but also eventually contributed to its downfall.
It’s an utterly fascinating episode; my favourite of the series so far. As with the other episodes, it’s hard not to draw the parallels with where we are as a civilisation today. Fuckin’, climate change man. Y’know? It’s going to end us all.
99% Invisible 346: Palaces for the People. Libraries. Without them, what do we have(?) No past and no future. (word to Ray Bradbury). Big fan of libraries in general, and this episode covers a lot of the why. The stuff they offer, way beyond the scope of books on shelves… Their essential role as social infrastructure. Stuff that can’t be replaced by simply digitising all of those words and creating 'social’ websites.
It’s an episode off the back of a book of the same name by Eric Klinenberg, and next time I’m in a library, I’ll be looking for it.
On one hand, Klinenberg wants to see the philanthropists of our time spend more money on things like libraries, but he also knows that philanthropic dollars are ultimately inadequate and randomly distributed to the places where the philanthropists spend their own time. If we’re ever really going to make this work, it’s going to have to be through a public commitment such as a major public works program.
The web we broke by Ethan Marcotte. On the plus side, this is a really well written call to action to do better when it comes to accessibility, and that’s something I can wholeheartedly get on board with.
Basically, aim to do one thing this week to broaden your understanding of how people use the web, and adapt your design or development practice to incorporate what you’ve learned.
But on the downside, this is very similar to an article I’ve written (even referencing the same WebAIM study) that I haven’t put out yet. I’ve been holding off posting it here because I’m hoping it gets published somewhere else first, and that’s a little frustrating, but hey, at least I’m not alone in thinking what I think. Good to have people like Ethan making the case for accessibility and getting the message out to the masses. And of course, it is well written. He’s good with the words. Come back soon to check for my piece repeating most of what he’s said, in a slightly different way!
]]>My disabled son’s amazing gaming life in the World of Warcraft. This story about Mats Steen (aka Ibelin, a nobleman by birth, a philanderer and a detective) is a wonderful testament to video games and being online and all that.
Robert and Trude mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life for their disabled son. But when Mats died, they discovered that people all over Europe lit candles in his memory.
It’s a really awesome story, and just goes to emphasise again why it’s so, so important to make these technologies accessible to all. Not only that, but why there’s still so much value to online communities for people who might not necessarily be able to engage with or find them locally. Anne Hamill (aka Chit) summed it up nicely:
Online play is a fantastic arena for meeting people and building friendships. We discover each other without stereotypes in the way. It provides the chance to find out if we like someone – and only then reveal our age, gender, disability or skin colour if we feel like it.
I think Mats was lucky to belong to our time, technologically. In Starlight he was a key member. If he had been born 15 years earlier, he wouldn’t have found a community like that.
Weirs and aerial walkways: the Bristol that might have been. Everyone likes the Clifton Suspension Bridge – I mean, who wouldn’t? it’s a classic – but, no diss to Brunel, this from William Bridges would definitely have been better.
Bridges proposed a multi-storey arch, starting from the ground upwards, that would contain granaries, a corn exchange, a chapel and a nautical school.
The rest of the ideas aren’t as grand, but I still love seeing things like this about plans and visions for cities that ultimately went nowhere. All that could’ve been.
99% Invisible 345: Classic Cartoon Sound Effects! Boings and whistles and clangs and doinks – the unmistakable noises of cartoons. This is a look at some of the history and craft behind the sounds that you just now take for granted as meaning 'falling from a long height’ or 'tip-toeing’. I’ve long appreciated foley, since sharing an office with a couple of radio nerds, so this was a really enjoyable listen.
BBC Moral Maze – The Morality of the Artist and the Art. Off the back of the recent Michael Jackson documentary, this is a discussion about whether it’s possible to separate art from its creator. Can you really still enjoy listening to Thriller without feeling guilty? It’s a debate I’ve been having with myself for a while now… not just about Michael Jackson; there’s a chunk of music that I listen to which is made by people who are pretty much definitely awful for one reason or another. I loved the Usual Suspects and American Beauty but… Kevin Spacey?? Unlike Evil Genius, there’s no Russell Kane here to force a definitive answer, and tbh, I still don’t know what a definitive answer would be. But this podcast did provide a lot of things to consider for both sides of the argument.
]]>Gender equality is not a 'women’s issue’ – it’s good for men too. It was International Women’s Day last week, and in amongst the tweets from Richard Herring, and me posing for a slightly awkward photo to support something I genuinely believe in (see below), there were plenty of articles about why equality is needed. I thought this take was quite interesting, focussed as it is on the male benefits of gender equality. I appreciate that by me choosing to highlight an article which makes IWD about men, this could look bad, but I do think that it’d be great if more men could appreciate that equality doesn’t mean taking away “men’s rights” and in fact, we (dudes) might actually get something out of a society that doesn’t see things like childcare as something women do. Imagine!
This draft paper by The CSS Working Group for CSS Nesting.
This module introduces the ability to nest one style rule inside another, with the selector of the child rule relative to the selector of the parent rule. This increases the modularity and maintainability of CSS stylesheets.
SCSS is still the default for me on pretty much every project, and there are plenty of things in it that make it worthwhile, but it’s great to see things like this make their way into pure CSS… how long before we ditch SCSS entirely(?)
99% Invisible 338: Crude Habitat. Topical, as my view out to sea is currently blemished by an oil rig, this episode talks about the impact of offshore drilling. It’s bad. Oil companies are awful and rigs are bad bad bad. Or are they(?)
Oil platforms are particularly popular structures with fish in part because of these surfaces and niches, but also because they extend hundreds of feet through the water column like a marine skyscraper. So they provide homes for fish living at different depths — younger fish tend to live higher up the platform, for instance.
It seems obvious in retrospect, but I can’t say I ever considered the habitat argument for keeping oil platforms in place. I mean, they shouldn’t be there in the first place but once they’re in, is it worth leaving them in?
Parentland – Getting Them to Listen. This is a new podcast from BBC World Service and off the back of this first episode, I think I’m willing to subscribe. Interesting chats about behaviour and discipline, with some differing international perspectives (good old World Service). For the record, I won’t be smacking my children anytime soon.
A ton of clips from various The Prodigy shows. Like this one from Reading Festival 2009 which remains one of my favourite nights ever.
I was going to say that this is because of the horrible news about Keith Flint this week but tbh, I watch these clips most weeks anyway. Absolutely unreal live show that never ceases to get me amped. I found myself getting incredibly sad when I heard the news, and I’m gutted that I wont ever get to see that live show again, but then I’m really happy that I’ve got amazing memories of those nights when they completely – almost literally – blew me away. So, so SO good. Even watching on YouTube, I still get goosebumps when Out of Space starts.
]]>Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the 'pencil towers’ of New York’s super-rich.
Any visitor to New York over the past few years will have witnessed this curious new breed of pencil-thin tower. Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense.
Having been there during the construction of 432 Park Avenue with its $95m penthouse, I can confirm that yes, visitors do witness those towers. What I wasn’t aware of though, were the logistics and ground work (lol #BuildingPun) underpinning all those developments. Zoning laws, 'air rights’, tuned mass dampers, the behind the scenes deals… Obviously these skyscrapers aren’t built on a whim, but the details are more interesting than you’d perhaps think.
Then there’s the gawp factor. I’ll never go into one of those penthouses, and tbh, I think it’s a little disgusting that they exist. (See that one that went for $238m earlier in the year? Absolutely ludicrous). But, I can’t deny that I like looking through the promo photos and imagining what it’d be like to live there. New York is great, but I’d probably want a bit more space for my money.
Tangentially Speaking 338: ROMA 28. This is the first time I’ve listened to Christopher Ryan’s podcast… I can’t actually remember where I got this recommendation from (and it was for this specific episode) but thanks to whoever it was. I wasn’t sure if I’d like a whole hour of just one dude talking, but he’s definitely got a way with words, and there’s a decent range of topics covered.
If we don’t grieve for the dead, are we necessarily cold-hearted? What’s behind the collapse of the American empire? How to deal with the chaos and uncertainty of being young? How did disabled people fare among hunter-gatherers?
The bits about the collapse of empire are pretty interesting, especially as I’m also really into the Fall of Civilisations podcast at the moment. I swear, give it another hundred years or so and all those NY penthouses will be steel husks populated by radioactive pigeon/rat hybrids. It’s inevitable.
Still no idea why it’s called 'ROMA 28’ though.
This American Life 317: Unconditional Love. Actually quite a tough listen, as it goes through the story of a Romanian orphan adopted into an American family, and another with a couple who have an autistic son. Sort of teaching someone how to love, or how to appreciate the value of love, sounds like an impossible task at the best of times because it’s such a nebulous concept. But it’s even more difficult in situations like the ones talked about here.
Parenting can be hard, but even through those moments when my kids are furiously refusing to engage, I’m still 99% sure that they love me really. I can’t imagine how tough it might be if I got nothing back from them; I think these parents (in these stories) have handled / are handling things admirably.
]]>Supporting macOS Mojave’s Dark Mode on the web. There’s been a bit of chat around this since Mojave dropped, but as I don’t personally use Mojave, it’s not something I’ve been able to play around with yet. I’m also not sure how many people it would actually be necessary for – like, what’s the uptake on using Dark Mode? – but it does look pretty simple to do, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep pressing 'Try again tomorrow’ on those OS update prompts, so I’ll probably be giving this a go soon.
HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points by Rachel Andrew. One of those pieces I found myself wanting to quote in full here… you should just go and read it.
This constant wheel reinvention is something we seem to be wired to do. We can be optimistic and hope that good things fall out of it, but so often what is left is a mess. Teams find themselves with projects that no-one has the skills to fix, due to them being based on a toolchain that only a few people understand how to use. Businesses are handed websites by external agencies, using a technology that quickly falls out of favour, and when they want an update the next contractor looks at it, and suggests a rebuild.
… those [new] tools output HTML and CSS in the end. It is the bedrock of everything that we do, which makes the devaluing of those with real deep skills in those areas so much more baffling.
Preach! I’ve always been the type of FED who actively wants to learn new things and I think it’s totally necessary (and unavoidable) to utilise new technologies where you can on projects, but definitely not at the expense of forgetting (or worse – not even learning) the basics. I say 'basics’ but there’s nothing basic about it – I suppose I mean 'essentials’. There’s still so much value in working with those core technologies and it’d be such a shame if the route in gets obscured by [insert generic build process]. Notepad and the <marquee> tag is how I ended up doing what I do.
Whether front or backend, many of us without a computer science background are here because of the ease of starting to write HTML and CSS. The magic of seeing our code do stuff on a real live webpage! We have already lost many of the entry points that we had.
99% Invisible 342: Beneath the Ballpark. It’s really weird to me that it’s even considered possible to just move a team from one place to another – like here, with the L.A. Dodgers formally being known as the Brooklyn Dodgers. It’s one thing getting a new stadium a few miles away, but that’s about as far as physically possible. Just start a new team, surely(?) But hey, it happens, and how it happened is quite interesting – with knock on effects on the local community that would resonate for decades to come.
O’Malley [the team owner] thought he saw a vast empty stretch of land from the helicopter, but what he was really seeing were the last bits of a community that had existed there since the early 1900s.
For a long time, it was a neighborhood full of life. “It was very colorful … the ladies had colorful birds,” remembers former Chavez Ravine resident, Carol Jacques. “That’s what would wake us up — canaries in the morning, singing. It was just a very colorful community”
Killing Eve & Russian Doll. Found myself binging through both of those series and enjoying them both thoroughly.
Some crime. I did a CluedUpp event at the weekend, which turned out to be the perfect excuse to skulk around Bournemouth in the sun. Think of it as an escape room but out in the open, and not as difficult, but lasting longer. There was a Peaky Blinders theme which is ultimately inconsequential but did mean that I was decked out in authentic Peaky Blinder clobber. That’s the last time I’ll ever wear that hat. It was definitely fun – I’d be up for doing another but in a town that I’m not familiar with… as a prompt to explore, it’s great.
]]>Swiss Cat Ladders. Who knew this was a thing?
The trend in Switzerland for building ladders for cats throws up many questions. For example, why are they particularly popular in the country’s capital?
The CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild. Pretty pleased that my (this) site mostly works as you’d expect on the first ever browser, but then surely all sites should, right(?)
In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the rather humble origins of this transformative technology.
Big fan of the perpetual nature of HTML. Backwards compatibility ftw. I love that this works in a browser from 30 years ago, while I’ve also got some Flash sites laying around that are lost to eternity.
How long was it before images came into play though(?) As much as I appreciate formatted text, it’s so hard to imagine the web without images – or rather, without colour. JavaScript, I could take it or leave it, but CSS to spruce up some semantic tags, yes please.
About the last days of Opportunity, 55 million km away on Mars. It’s an awesome story, with a bittersweet ending.
https://twitter.com/PonchoRebound/status/1096186753617149952
Fall of Civilisations episode’s 1 & 2: Roman Britain & The Bronze Age Collapse (around the Mediterranean). Both episodes are brilliant. This is the new podcast by that Paul Cooper from Twitter who I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, and it’s a glorious expansion of some of his Tweet threads. Just after those first 2 episodes, I’ve got dozens of tabs open with things I want to carry on reading about. There’s a ton of stuff about the history of Britain (which I feel like I should’ve known about), and the bits about the Sea People in ep 2 are fascinating. Looking forward to this podcast continuing!
You can’t help but wonder what it’d take for our current civilisation to collapse. These comparatively highly advanced and established societies ended up in literal ruins, with huge chunks of their existence lost to time. Living through it, you’d imagine that no-one thought it could happen, and yet, it did. One of the themes of the Roman Britain episode is people not learning from their past… awks.
Distraction Pieces 253: Joe Cornish. There’s a lot of Joe about at the moment, what with his new film coming out, so it’s a great time to fuel my imaginary friendship with him. I had no idea he went to college in Bournemouth – literally only meters from my old office! That’s it. We’re basically mates for real now. It’s a good chat.
]]>The Wasted Workday. I hadn’t noticed when I read it, but this is from way back (2014) so potentially out of date, but the general gist still stands…
A new survey from AtTask conducted by Harris Poll found that U.S. employees at large-sized companies (1000 employees or more) only spend 45 percent of their time on primary job duties.
One survey reported that the average time spend doing private activities is 1.5 to three hours a day.
Where are these jobs and how do I get one? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big advocate of taking necessary breaks – I think it’s crazy to expect someone to be 100% ON IT for 8 hours in a day without having the chance to step away now and then – but up to 3 hours a day doing 'private’ things(?) How?! The same piece mentions that spending on Cyber Monday is at it’s peak between 9-5, when people are 'at work’, and while I can admit to taking a look at some PS4 offers last year, it didn’t take any more than 15 minutes. Clearly this stuff totally depends on the type of role you have but generally, if I had a job that afforded me multiple hours of downtime during the day, I’d be looking for a less boring job.
Why Angular Made Me Quit Web Dev. I’m coming off the back of a fairly large Angular application (and I’m about to start picking up some new work on an old AngularJS thing) so there’s plenty in there that I totally sympathise with. I should say that I wouldn’t ever consider myself an Angular Developer, so a lot of my own problems with it come from within, but it’s nice to see that someone with more experience also feels the same (even if it is mostly tongue-in-cheek).
ANGULAR WEB DEVELOPERS typically settle for learning one or two design patterns that they know will not explode, and building an entire application out of them. Like a submarine built out of increasingly large doctor’s office inflatable gloves. It could probably work, given an endless supply of gloves and toddlers. Your only other option is to immerse yourself in the nonsensical, arbitrary madness that awaits the developer who attempts to learn how ANGULAR “works”.
A triangle web cam capture image thing. For our latest code challenge at work, the theme was 'triangles’, so I built a little thing which generates various triangles from your webcam. It’s been a short while since I played with canvas or mediaDevices.getUserMedia, so it was nice to get acquainted again, if only for a little bit.
Adam Buxton podcast 88 – Adam & Joe. Christmas special again provides a lot of laughs and again makes me wish they were my friends in real actual life.
Take It Personal 38 – 2018 Year In Review. At 6 hours long, it’s taken me a while to get through this episode but on the plus side, it put me on to a lot of music that I missed last year… 2018 was a pretty good year for the rap musics. There’s also an interview with Pharoahe Monch during the episode, so worth listening just for that if you don’t want to wade through the other 5 hours of music.
]]>Moving an Arctic city. The world’s biggest iron ore tunnel mine is about to swallow the Swedish city of Kiruna. The company’s answer? Move the city. I’ve seen similar things to this before; moving temples in China and Egypt for instance, or the few buildings I saw in Bucharest last year which had been moved to accommodate the whims of Ceau?escu. I also grew up a stones throw from Smeaton’s Tower in Plymouth which, as everyone surely knows, had been moved brick by brick from Eddystone in the 1880’s. So, this type of thing isn’t too shocking – but moving an entire city is. Plenty of considerations around land ownership, cost, and what it means when you move a city (is it actually the same city?) but from a purely engineering point of view, it’s pretty amazing that moving house like that is even an option.
About these gorgeous retro futuristic sci-fi modernist beasts around Paris.
These modernist buildings, known as grands ensembles, were France’s response to a severe post-war housing shortage. Between 1954 and 1973, the country erected public housing in the suburbs surrounding the City of Light. These towering structures, which included some six million units, embodied the prevailing idea that modernist architecture could help foster a utopian state by improving people’s lives.
It didn’t work, and like other modernist utopian plans (remember Ponte City or Bijlmermeer) they’re not actually that great to live in… but they’re pretty cool to look at.
99% Invisible 339: The Tunnel. An episode that fits perfectly with the fact that I’ve just finished watching Narcos: Mexico, about a specific tunnel between Agua Prieta and Douglas, across (or rather under) the border. At the behest of El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel, this tunnel provided a conduit for millions of dollars worth of cocaine until it was discovered in 1990.
Here’s photos of the tunnel.
It had a secret entrance hidden beneath a pool table. Turning that little water faucet knob triggered a hydraulic lift that revealed the entrance.
It ran for about 50 yards between a house in Agua Prieta, Mexico and a warehouse in Douglas, Arizona. pic.twitter.com/HEEZkvOAsQ
— Keegan Hamilton (@keegan_hamilton) November 15, 2018
Obviously, drugs are bad, etc. But, those tunnels have some great hidden entrances. The people behind them would be a great at designing escape rooms; I’d be all over a DEA / Narco themed game ?.
Wu-Tang Tiny Desk concert. I missed out on tickets to the Gods of Rap tour this summer (though tbh, £100 for a seat at Wembley Arena can do one), so watching clips of Wu live will have to do for another year.
]]>Back at it though… Expect a lot of throwbacks while I catch up.
Building boom turning to bust as Turkey’s economy slows about these lavish 'luxury’ houses which have been left unfinished. In fact, the article is about all sorts of houses in Turkey which aren’t being filled, but it’s these houses in particular that catch your eye.
Deep in a provincial region of northwestern Turkey, it looks like a mirage — hundreds of luxury houses built in neat rows, their pointed towers somewhere between French chateau and Disney castle.
Apparently they’re worth between $400,000 and $500,000 each but why anyone would want to pay half a million to live in a copy-paste castle RIGHT next door to another one, I have no idea. They’re not even that nice as standalone mock citadels, and there are over 700 of them in this development. It’s loco.
Groom of the Stool. For some reason, it’s a little bit odd thinking about the Royal Family having a poo. (I mean, have you ever seen a lizard defecate? I haven’t. But they must do; what goes in must come out). Picture being the person sat next to Henry VIII sat on his special poo throne, waiting to wipe. That’s a specific job.
This is not the glamorous job you normally would imagine in a palace, but being Groom of the Stool—named for the close stool, the king’s 16th-century toilet—was actually a highly coveted position in the royal house. Every day, as the king sat on his padded, velvet-covered close stool, he revealed secrets.
Fwiw, I don’t imagine many jobs in a palace are 'glamorous’… Especially in medieval times, I imagine they were mostly awful – albeit probably better than a lot of other jobs at the time, granted. Either way, if you’d never considered Groom of the Stool as a career before, you might after reading this.
London, city of lost hospitals. Before the amazingness of the NHS, the health landscape was completely different. In London alone, there were more than 500 hospitals, many of which are long gone. This story is about the legacy that they’ve left behind.
Much healthcare in the capital served specific groups or afflictions, a conceptually flawed system that saved the few at the expense of the many. Many hospitals were one-offs, set up by those who could raise the money, surviving on regular appeals for funds. This resulted in an eccentric range of institutions, a scenario that is now almost impossible to imagine but is marked all around us.
The Hospital for Diseases of the Skin in Soho – now a Slug & Lettuce.
Old hospitals and street signs; I know what I’m looking out for next time I’m in London.
Various episodes of Evil Genius with Russell Kane, asking that age old question of whether you can separate art from the artist. It’s been an eye opener about several people – the Frank Sinatra & Marie Stopes episodes were memorable – and it’s a welcome addition to my listening habits.
The Cipher 240: Kalyn Heffernan of Wheelchair Sports Camp. I only had a cursory knowledge of WSC because of their association with Strange Famous and I can’t really say I’m a fan of the music, but it’s a great interview with an amazing person. On that note, over Christmas they announced that there’ll be no new The Cipher episodes, which sucks hugely. I’ve still got a fair few episodes that I skipped out on before, so I’ll be listening for a while yet but still, bad news.
https://twitter.com/mattnortham/status/1080798247415894016
99% Invisible 329: Orphan Drugs. The unlikely relationship between drug companies, rare conditions, and Quincy, M.E… In a nutshell, there wasn’t a lot of money in developing treatments for conditions that didn’t affect many people, so companies didn’t bother, leading to a lack of availability of certain drugs. Then Quincy got involved and everything is now great.
Sort of. I don’t want to spoil it for you – it’s a fantastic story. Particularly good because of the Quincy link, but well worth a listen even if you’re not familiar with one of the leading names in forensic pathology.
]]>
by Larry Racioppo
Whose Brooklyn Is It Anyway? off the back of What Brooklyn Really Looked Like in the 70s and 80s. A combo of pieces about history, gentrification, and authenticity – specifically concerning BK.
Every city is simultaneously a seedbed of novelty and a hothouse of nostalgia, and modern New York presents a daily dialectic of progress and loss. As Colson Whitehead notes in “The Colossus of New York,” you become a New Yorker — or perhaps a true resident of any place, whether you were born there or not — when you register the disappearance of a familiar spot.
The photos (and the stories with them) are particularly good, but it’s the combo of them with the article that really gets you thinking about the impact of Columbus syndrome and what it does to the communities that were already there. I can’t lie, if I had the chance to move to NY, I’d probably be considered part of the problem – I’d love to live in Brooklyn – but I like to think I’d be aware of it & would at least try to not be such middleclass dick. Who knows. Never going to happen. But if it happens to you, check yourself.
99% Invisible 319: It’s Chinatown. You probably know about Chinatown in San Francisco being considered the oldest (and therefore first) such enclave in America, and you might also be aware that as far as accurate representations of China go, it’s questionable… but it’s still nice to have a story which looks into exactly why they’re architecturally like they are.
Tourists loved the new Chinatown. This was exactly the westerner-friendly version of China they wanted: vaguely exotic, but safe enough for middle-class white America.
As a tourist, it’s easy to get caught up in the kitschy pagodas and golden dragons – I remember the first time I walked around Chinatown in SF, doing just that – and you sometimes forget that people actually live and work there. Listen to this episode and forget no more! Also, nice tidbit on fortune cookies, which aren’t eaten in China fyi.
RHLSTP 96: Scroobius Pip. I’ve been avoiding Distraction Pieces episodes for a while (after having overdosed on them a bit a few years ago) but the calibre of guest Pip frequently has on is too much to ignore, so I went for an easy reintroduction to his world via Richard Herring. I do like Scroobius Pip a lot so it’s not like this was an ordeal, but still, good to have him as a guest not a host for once.
Ancient Invisible Cities on the BBC. A really interesting series shedding some awesome light on Cairo, Athens, and Istanbul. Making want to go back to the first two, and to actually go to Istanbul. On a similar tip to the article about Athens from last month, this is all about the hidden layers of bygone times, which now (literally) form the foundations of those current cities. Some of the stuff they showed from Istanbul – palaces, docks, insanely elaborate aqueducts – is jaw-dropping, and I love that this series exists. Only 3 episodes long, but I feel like they could and should make some more.
]]>re:develop 2018. Actual speaking, out loud, in front of 150+ people, about Wu-Tang. Living the dream.
Not often you attend at developer conference and someone does a presentation on team management, drawing parallels to the Wu-Tang Clan… brilliant though! #redev18 pic.twitter.com/bbSx13ijeK
— (@YappyYapps) October 12, 2018
There were 8 other talks too; plenty of takeaways and food for thought, which I’ll try to return to at some point. Apparently there’ll be videos of the talks soonish, and there’s a bit of chat on #redev18 twitter that you can catch up with, but until then, trust me that it was a really enjoyable day.
I’d love to take my talk on the road, so if you’re seeing this and wondering “what can you learn about teamwork from the Wu-Tang Clan?” then say hello and/or tell your friendly local conference organisers that there’s a presentation which talks about literally that.
99% Invisible 321: Double Standards. I’d never heard of blepharoplasty before. “Double eyelid surgery”.
In 2017 alone over 12,500 Asian Americans had double eyelid surgery, and given the racist history behind the procedure, it makes sense that some people in the U.S. are vocally critical about it … but it’s more complicated than that.
There’s a whole thing about plastic surgery in South Korea, and some history of Japan and the Meiji Restoration, as well as a detour to chat about anaplastology and portrait masks after the First World War. It’s a typical great 99PI episode.
Dad Bod Rap Pod 13: White Guilt / Rappers We Love to Hate. I’ve been dipping into this podcast occasionally, but I’m now fairly sure I’m a fan. This, and the Black Star episode, are the ones that have eventually won me over after not being too fussed to begin with, and they’re up to episode 40 I think now, so plenty to catch up on. The 3 hosts are pretty much my age, and came up listening to pretty much the same stuff I did, so the chat is uber relatable to me. If you’re after a podcast that sprinkles in all sorts of references from the 90’s / 2000’s hip hop world, this is it.
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Mi Vida Local by Atmosphere. It’s still very early days (only came out on Friday) but I’m fairly sure I love this. Tbf, it’d take a lot to put me off an Atmosphere album after having invested the best part of 20 years listening to them, but I’m genuinely enjoying this one a lot. It’s been on rotation solidly for the last couple of days, and I’m sure it will be for a long time yet. I’m really appreciating the shift in content that’s happened over the last few years; dadrap couldn’t be any more appropriate for me these days. If you’d told me 20 years ago that the same people who made Overcast would be making music about mommy jeans, I would’ve said something along the lines of “no they wont be, they don’t make music about mommy jeans”. But here they are. Amazing.
The Breakdown with Jamali Maddix: People Just Do Nothing. First time I’ve listened to his podcast but not the first thing I’ve caught from Jamali, after Hate Thy Neighbour last summer. He’s a funny dude, and so are Grindah & Beats from People Just Do Nothing (which is btw, a top 5 sitcom). So this is a solid conversation that is definitely recommended listening.
Banksy auction stunt leaves art world in shreds. That thing where a canvas self shredded itself just after being auctioned for £1m. It’s pretty funny, but there’s no way that Sotheby’s didn’t know it was going to happen, surely. For a start, someone inside the room had to trigger it, right? Either way, I’ve got a lot of time for Banksy, so it’s nice to see him back at it.
]]>99% Invisible #323: The House That Came in the Mail. This story about Sears mail-order houses in the early 1900’s is pretty amazing.
Customers could select from dozens of different models in Sears Modern Homes Catalog, order blueprints, send in a check, and a few weeks later everything they needed would arrive in a train car, its door secured with a small red wax seal (just like the seal on the back of a letter).
Everything. All the pieces. You think flatpack ikea rage is a thing(?) Whoa. The latter part about trying to track down kit houses that are still around is pretty cool too. I had no idea this was such a popular thing – 75,000 of them were sold – but I know that I’ll be looking out for them if I’m ever in Elgin, Illinois.
Ear Hustle, the rest of S2. I hadn’t realised I was so far behind, and there’s a S3 now, so I bombed through the last few episodes. The last one, ‘So Long’ was probably the highlight, all about having an exit strategy for getting out of prison. As you might imagine, preparing for life outside isn’t the most easy thing in the world, and the amount of people that end up going back to prison after getting out is a testament to the fact that a lot of people don’t get it right. As always with Ear Hustle, they do a great job of highlighting that while they’re prisoners, they’re also people. Fingers crossed for Choy.
The BOMO launch event. BOMO is the catch-all for a range of events happening over the next month in and around Bournemouth, and I was there to represent Digital Wave (which is organised by Redweb).
Digital Wave is an event aimed at teenagers, so my talk was about why teenagers are actually pretty great and important to work with. Might work it up into a post at some point, but essentially, it’s because they’re young and we’re not. Teenagers can catch a bit flak for various reasons but they’re generally not as lazy, annoying, or criminal as you might think.
There are plenty of events happening, so if you’re around, do take a look. I’ll also be speaking at re:develop in a couple of weeks so if you want to hear about Wu-Tang, grab a ticket!
How Jimmy Chin Filmed Alex Honnold’s Death-Defying Free Solo. This NatGeo piece about their upcoming film genuinely makes my palms sweat just reading it.
Some veteran climbers say there is no if a free soloist falls—only when. You can think of many who have fallen to their deaths, some you knew personally. And suddenly there it is: the vividly horrifying image of your friend flailing into the void.
I remember reading about this when the climb was taking place, and though it’s been months, I still can’t actually comprehend it. Utterly, utterly terrifying – and amazing. The trailer is out too if words aren’t enough to fill you with fear.
]]>Tough Mudder. A week after being told that doing something like this is a sign of a midlife crisis, I embraced my mid-30s and completed one. Considering I’d not done any training or preparation whatsoever, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it’d be… but it was definitely tough. And muddy – though actually more wet than muddy.
Definitely couldn’t have managed some of the obstacles without my team (GO TEAM! WOO! etc) but tbh, most of the challenges are more mentally hard (as in, I needed to psych myself up to do them), and the running in between everything was more tiring than any of the obstacles – and that’s purely on you. 10 miles of cross country in the rain is more than I’ve ever run before, and my knee was protesting for most of the last few miles but it just about held out (I’m feeling it now though). I didn’t do Arctic Enema (a skip full of ice) and I have no shame in having skipped it. It was cold enough in the normal water; I don’t have enough body fat to cope with ice too.
To anyone that stumbles on this post searching for “Do the electric shocks in Tough Mudder hurt?” then please be assured that yes, they hurt. Or rather, you feel them, but it’s a weird sensation. Not really pain but definitely uncomfortable. I got zapped 3 times and not only am I still alive, but I didn’t fall over while it was happening. You’ll be fine.
Sword and Scale 50: Jonestown. I can’t remember where from, but this particular episode was a recommendation and if the rest of Sword and Scale is anything like it, then I’m not sure I’m down for such a depressing podcast. It’s well put together and informative etc but ughh… horrible story. I only really knew about Jim Jones before because of the rapper (which btw, is a stupid rap name) and from the phrase 'drinking the Kool-Aid’, but this episode with it’s recordings of those last hours in Jonestown really goes into how fucked up the whole thing was.
On November 18, 1978, in a remote settlement of northwestern Guyana, 909 Americans lost their lives in what is considered to be the largest mass suicide of the twentieth century. This compound, informally known as Jonestown, was established by a charismatic preacher named Jim Jones who led his People’s Temple to their ultimate demise.
99% Invisible 322: The First Straw. About those plastic drinking devices that’ll soon be banned everywhere except for those people that actually need them. Tbh, I think I was distracted by something during this because I can’t remember a thing about it.
'Hiding in plain sight’: How London street signs reveal more than just names. About the instagram account London Street Name Plates which “… has been sharing shots of London’s “most significant, most beautiful, most curious” street nameplates with details of their histories, as unearthed through research and interviews.” It’s gorgeous, and a instant follow.
]]>Extreme Athleticism Is the New Midlife Crisis. Sort of topical, because I might have committed to doing a Tough Mudder next weekend (still tbc), but not quite because I’m still just about in my mid-30’s which surely doesn’t count as midlife(?) Either way, it’s a nicely written piece that touches on age, mental health, fitness, and all sorts.
There’s much debate over whether the phenomenon actually exists as a matter of science, but the idea makes intuitive sense. Getting older can trigger a kind of introspection, and often that introspection focuses on how much time has passed, how much is left, and what to do with it. That can create anxiety, and that anxiety can be multiplied by depression, stress, or good old-fashioned existential ennui.
City with a past: why classical and modern Athens are at war. That tricky balance between preserving a city’s past, and allowing it to grow as a place where people actually live today.
Behind every mixed landscape of past and present is a series of decisions about what to prioritise. Given that most of the time the modern lies over the top of the ancient, to uncover the ancient usually requires the destruction of the modern. And leaving, or building afresh, the modern demands the ancient be subsumed within, or under, it.
As someone who doesn’t live in Athens, I totally think that they should demolish all modern houses and make it like an sort of real life Athenian theme park, exactly as it was in 5BC. Though, I accept that might be tricky to achieve.
Really though, it’s a tough one… I actually quite like the conflict you get when you visit. It’s been a while since I visited (in 2003) but I still remember getting off the Metro at Monastiraki and being surrounded by a clash (that’s the only word for it) of time and culture. Flea markets, the eponymous little monastery, modernist office buildings, a library built by Hadrian, the Tzistaraki mosque, all with the glorious backdrop of the Acropolis in the distance. It’s amazing and overwhelming and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
A Very Fatal Murder. All of it. A true crime podcast from The Onion, about the stabbing-drowning-shooting-strangling of an unfortunate teenager in Nebraska. As a fan of Serial, I loved this. So much so that after tentatively giving the first episode ago, I found I’d somehow listened to all 6 (7 really) episodes and laughed a lot – out loud, no less.
The Wu-Tang Podcast. Only the first two episodes though, on GZA – Words from the Genius, and RZA – Ooh, I Love You Rakeem. This podcast is supposed to do a walkthrough of every Wu-Tang album and while that sounds like a great idea for a series, I don’t think I’m going to make it through. There’s nothing in there of interest for anybody that has even a vague knowledge of those albums, let alone someone who actually owns them. Not to mention that these dudes presenting it talk soo sloowly. I literally played the episodes on 2x speed and it almost sounded normal. I dunno… maybe it was down to the fact that the first two albums aren’t really great themselves… I’ll probably give it another chance because the next episode is on 36 Chambers and it’s surely impossible to make that sound bad.
Ozark season 2. It’s so grey and blue. Big fan of this, and already looking forward to where it could go for S3.
]]>A lot of photography. I’m in the midst of trying to finish off some sort of portfolio of my own, but I keep getting distracted by other people’s work. Such as Dark Stores, Ghostboxes & Dead Malls 2008 – 2012 by Brian Ulrich – images of abandoned malls across the US. Ha Aretz by Roger Grasas – photos of formally biblical places (Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, etc). Paradise Lost by Georg Gerster – a birds-eye view of Persia.
This interview with Santi Cazorla which goes someway toward conveying how hard it can be for footballers to deal with (and come back from) serious injury. I’m glad he’s managed to get back on the pitch – even if it’s not for Arsenal.
… for 636 days he did not play. Most thought he never would. There were nights where, lying alone a long way from home, he gave up. “I’d talk to my family and say: 'It’s over. Tomorrow I’ll tell Juancar, the physio: I can’t go on, pal.’” But here he is, just finished training. He has started all three of Villarreal’s games this season.
Continuing the football chats, there’s also this interview with Peter Crouch which is behind a registration page but worth giving your email address for. Add it to the collection of good things that have been said recently about his upcoming book, which I’ll never read, but if I read footballers life stories, I’d read this one first.
This American Life 504: How I Got Into College. A couple of stories about the admissions process, the main one being about Emir Kamenica …
… whose path to college started with fleeing the war in Bosnia and becoming a refugee in the United States. Then he had a stroke of luck: a student teacher read an essay he’d plagiarized from a book he’d stolen from a library back in Bosnia, and was so impressed that she got him out of a bad high school and into a much better one. He went on to Harvard and great success. Years later, he tracks down the student teacher to thank her, only to find that she remembers the story differently.
It’s a great story – both parts are, in fact – and it got me thinking a lot about my own route through higher education. In my head, I still basically attribute it to one person who got me to stop being a lazy teenager living at home, 'forced’ me to fill out application forms, and convinced me it was all worthwhile. I still credit him for all of it, and who knows what would’ve happened if I didn’t get that intervention. BUT. Listening to Emir’s story, and seeing the perils of memory and writing your own history, now I’m not so sure about any of it. Maybe it was totally different. I’ll never know. I need a popular podcast to research my life history for me please, thanks.
This Eminem impression. I’ve genuinely listened to this more times than any song on Em’s new album. Using way too many napkins.
]]>This funniest shit I’ve seen all day g. He say this how Eminem raps. pic.twitter.com/9lc8cWA5yd
— Larry Legend (@larryislegend) September 2, 2018
99% Invisible 318: Fire and Rain. A follow on from the last episode about wildfires in California, this one has more chat about building houses to make them less prone to catching fire; defensible space, controlled fires, firebreaks, etc. On top of the fires, this episode introduces the follow on of mud flows and flooding that can happen when wildfires have destroyed the natural elements which would ordinarily deal with rainfall.
In this landscape, flood is essentially the second stage of fire. Rain came rushing down the hills into the town. As it flowed, the water carried mud, trees, and rocks off the steep hills. Boulders the size of small houses floated down several dense rivers of mud more than 15 feet deep. Some of the debris flows reached speeds up to 30 miles per hour.
Basically, there are some places where people would be better off not living, yet people stay determined to build houses where they’re going to be destroyed on average every 50 years or so. *this is fine*.
This American Life 654: The Feather Heist. A deep dive into the murky world of Victorian salmon flies (those ornate feathery things people use to go fishing) which has all the drama and intrigue of a whole run of Serial. No spoilers, but it’s fair to say that considering the nature of the items that were stolen (and the value of them), I’m amazed that I’d never heard of this before, or that more wasn’t made of it at the time.
It’s a bizarre story, all the moreso for me because earlier this year I actually went to the museum which was robbed of its birds: the branch of the Natural History Museum in Tring. Had I known about this thievery at the time, I would’ve paid more attention to the bird collection and to the bars on the windows – but even without that knowledge, it’s a fantastic place.
The future of extreme fire. Yes, more about wildfires. Honestly, I don’t just spend time obsessing over wildfires, but they do seem to come up a lot. It’s largely more of the same – you should know what to expect from stories like these nowadays – but still, worth paying attention to.
“Climate change is continuing to unfold,” said Anthony LeRoy Westerling, a professor of management of complex systems at the University of California, Merced. “The impacts from it will probably accelerate. There won’t be a new normal in our lifetimes.”
10x10km City Squares. Mapping the urban fabric of various British cities, by Alasdair Rae.
Epic Beard Men (Sage Francis & B. Dolan) live in Southampton. Been a while since I’ve ventured outside in the name of hip hop (and even longer since I last caught Sage / Dolan), but I couldn’t let them roll so close to home without seeing them.
]]>DIYMFS ? these two bringing the raps on a school night and making me feel young again. Ludicrously, it’s getting on for 20 years I’ve been listening to Sage – hoping for another 20 of EBM! pic.twitter.com/aOKyynVH3x
— matt northam ?? (@mattnortham) August 30, 2018
In Romania for the last couple of weeks, which should explain why I’ve skipped some of these weekly entries. I didn’t really know much about Romania before I went – and I’m obviously far from an expert after a fortnight there – but suffice to say it’s an interesting country to go to, and there are some really beautiful places to visit. We pretty much kept within Transylvania (central Romania); mountains, castles, medieval towns, and a big Hungarian & German influence. It’s nothing like what you’d think from reading Dracula. Plenty of photos and a write up to come… there’s a stack on my instagram if you can’t wait ’til then.
Spent one day by the pool and managed to get through Ablutions by Patrick deWitt. Another really enjoyable read from a dude who I can probably safely say is my favourite author these days (albeit based on a relatively small oeuvre). I could potentially have spent some time actually in the pool but I didn’t want to put the book down, and it’s short enough to read in a day so it felt rude not to finish it.
I Fell 70ft Into a Crevasse. Written by John All, a man who (as the title suggests) fell 70ft into a crevasse. Clearly, he survived, but the experience sounds nightmarish and is exactly why I’m scared of crevasses. Granted, I’ve not ever been in the vicinity of a crevasse and nor is that likely to change anytime soon but still, terrifying.
Suddenly, the snow gave way beneath me and I was plunged into darkness. I was inside the glacier, tumbling into a crevasse. My face smashed against ice as I ricocheted between the frozen walls. I thought I was about to die, but instinctively tried to use an axe to stop my fall. I felt bones snap and my arm was pulled clean out of its socket. I landed hard on my side, crushing my shoulder, the impact forcing all the air out of my lungs.
The brutal world of sheep fighting. Yes, I had some downtime on holiday and somehow this came up. It sounds ridiculous, but is a genuinely fascinating look at sheep to sheep combat in Algeria.
The sheep are given names that inspire fear, like Rambo, Jaws or Lawyer. In the third round of one recent match, Hitler delivered a brutal defeat to Saddam.
To be honest, it’s as disturbing to me as dog or cockfighting… just because the thought of sheep going horn to horn has a little more comedy to it, doesn’t excuse that it’s a barbaric blood sport. And yet, as a window into life in Algeria, this piece makes the whole story very compelling. It’s gorgeously written by Hannah Rae Armstrong.
These days, although the Algerian capital pulses at a low intensity, beguiled by a weary calm, currents of violence still wash through it. The authorities have managed to co-opt or eliminate all major pockets of dissent, yet scarcely a week goes by without protests – localised, spontaneous micro-riots usually sparked by government policies to redistribute oil profits that favour some at the cost of others. Another common trigger for unrest is the publication of housing grant lists, since the government routinely gives out free apartments to relatives of local officials rather than low-income families who have been waiting for years. These protests purge, at least briefly, the shame of being dependent on a repressive state, enabling people to reclaim some form of agency.
The Algerian government’s toleration of sheep fighting is a tacit acknowledgement that outlets for male aggression are needed.
'Never assume anything’: The golden rules for inclusive design. Another reminder that designing/building with accessibility in mind should be the base level, not something that’s added on at the end.
]]>Inclusive design is also future-proofing technology for everyone. Swan noted that many more developers and designers are considering accessibility issues as they age and encounter poor eyesight or other impairments. “Nobody is exempt from accessibility.”
Some disabilities are temporary, such as repetitive strain injury, while others develop over many years. Even trying to use your mobile phone in the blazing sun can be classed as a situational disability.
99% Invisible 317: Built to Burn. Topical, because of the terrifying wildfires in California (and Greece, and Sweden) at the moment, this episode is about trying to shift the focus from firefighting in order to save homes to stopping the homes from catching fire in the first place. That sounds stupidly obvious when I write it like that, but it’s much more involved and this is a fascinating episode.
Once he started to focus on the home as the problem, not the wildfire, he wanted to know what made some houses more susceptible than others. “What I’m trying to do is to establish a relationship between wildfire and home destruction. I want to know what that linkage is. How does this happen?”
Creating a buffer zone around a house can be much more effective in saving that home than trying to douse approaching flames with gallons of water. But getting people to buy into that is not so straightforward.
This is clearly a problem that’s going keep on occurring year after year – in more and more places – and I know that if I lived in an area susceptible to combustion, I’d definitely be looking at alternative solutions.
Dairy is scary: the darkest part of farming. I’ve been questioning my consumption of milk for a while (spurred on by that Simon Amstell film, Carnage) and pieces like this really make me question just how much it’s worth to me. I do love it… I have a lot of dairy things, and though I’ve tried lots of the alternatives, my forays have never lasted long and I keep going back to the white stuff. But fuck it is weird when you think about it. And beyond that, it’s absolutely horrific in same instances. The milking process (taking it from another animal for us to drink) isn’t natural is it(?) I can’t see myself giving it up, but I’m more than up for cutting down on it like I have with meat.
Gigantic rocks in New York. Can’t say this had ever crossed my mind but New York has a lot of rocks in it. Big rocks.
This city was built on and around what is now referred to as Manhattan Schist, a tough old rock that has essentially become the backbone of the island.
Interesting to think about (and see) how the city built around these boulders and what it would’ve been like before the skyscrapers.
]]>Mad Men. All of it. Not just in the last week – it’s actually taken me about a year – but I’ve finally seen the last episode and it was a very enjoyable ride. So much to unpack from the 91 episodes that fell before it, I couldn’t even start to do it justice, but I can unequivocally say that holy shit they smoke a lot. Good television.
Season 2 of Ear Hustle. I hadn’t noticed that the new series had started, much less finished, but it’s nice to have a selection of episodes to binge on. As before, it’s putting an engaging and informative light on life inside San Quentin. But while the inmates interviewed are pretty likeable and undoubtedly interesting, prison still sounds horrific. The first episode of the new season has small part about turning up at prison for your first night and meeting your celly and (spoilers) while this particular situation turns out fine, I can’t envision any way where that’d go down without me being reduced to a snivelling heap.
About the packaging of this Xbox adaptive controller. It’s a controller they announced a few months ago – for gamers with limited mobility – and while that was impressive enough, the packaging is also very nicely considered.
Microsoft has created packaging that includes loops, multiple access points, hinges, levers, and ribbons to make it as easy as possible to unbox this new controller. Even the outside of the packaging that the main box will ship in has a loop that can be peeled away to reveal the main box. The main box includes a ribbon that can be pulled to activate a flap that lays flat to cushion the controller once a user pulls on the loop to remove it from the box.
Even as somebody who doesn’t have any specific reasons to necessitate packaging like this, I’d welcome more boxes taking this approach. Tired of having to get scissors or screwdrivers or whatever to rip apart overly sealed plastic monstrosities. This is a definite curb-cut effect.
Also this week, took a few hours to go and win the annual Meetball Beach Football tournament for the 2nd year running. Lots of fun.
Redweb… reigning beach football champions
99% Invisible 314: Interrobang. All about punctuation – specifically, end marks! Really specifically, about this end mark: The Interrobang? ? I hadn’t realised it was an actual legitimate (it’s in the dictionary) way of ending a sentence, but consider me enlightened and forevermore looking for a way to squeeze in nonchalantly into some unremarkable writing. It’s a great episode. I love this type of stuff. Another thing I’d not realised (or thought about) before is that Classical Greek and Latin used scripto continua for thousands of years, that is, writing without any spaces or punctuation. How people read it, I have no idea. Kudos to this dude:
In the 3rd century BCE, a librarian in Alexandria named Aristophanes introduced the idea of putting in dots to indicate pauses, like stage directions for people performing texts out loud. Dots of ink at the bottom, middle, or top of a given line served as subordinate, intermediate and full points, corresponding to pauses of increasing length.
Aristophanes’ system became the basis for Western punctuation. A partial thought — followed by the shortest pause — was called a comma. A fuller thought was called a kolon. And a complete thought — followed by the longest pause — was called a periodos. These rhetorical units eventually lent their names to the comma, colon and period we know today.
Wu-Tang Clan: Portraits of the young emcees. A chat with Eddie Otchere about his time spent photographing Wu members in the glory days of 1994-99. So dope.
How the psychology of the England team could change your life, all about the impact of having a team psychologist (Pippa Grange) in the camp. Bit late getting around to reading this, and obviously the World Cup is over without England winning so pfft, FAT LOT OF GOOD THAT DID. However, away from the pressures of international tournament football, there are still plenty of nuggets there that are worth keeping. Routines, mentally rehearsing, accepting nerves, and not dwelling negatively on perceived failures.
]]>Every day in our general lives and our sporting lives we will win some and lose some; it’s just part of the way life should be. It could be missing out on a promotion, being pipped at the line in a running race or bombing out in an exam – it doesn’t matter – the important lesson is to learn from our failures, reassess, rethink, move forward (sometimes in a different direction) and keep those dreams and goals alive.
The Cipher 241 & 242: Soundset. Catching up with a range of artists at Soundset; Sa-Roc, Prof, Murs, Evidence, etc… the interviews are nowhere near as in depth as a normal Cipher episode but I appreciate the shorter format for putting me onto some new listens. Nikki Jean, OG Grip and Rapsody to be specific, none of which I’d heard before and all of which I’d happily listen to again.
99% Invisible 309: The Vault. I’ve read about this place before – a storage area in Norway which contains seeds for every edible plant on earth. But I’d not heard about the similar project in Syria that this episode talks about. It’s nice getting another part of the picture of what already sounds like an amazing place. There’s a lot more background in this Time piece on it, as well as details on why you should care about seeds being kept in a cold place in the middle of nowhere. > The seeds lying in the deep freeze of the vault include wild and old varieties, many of which are not in general use anymore. And many don’t exist outside of the seed collections they came from. But the genetic diversity contained in the vault could provide the DNA traits needed to develop new strains for whatever challenges the world or a particular region will face in the future.
17/f/Cali: A Love Letter To The Internet by Anna Dorn. Some of the details are different, but this rejoinder to someone deriding the internet hugely resonated with me. It’s been right there on the homepage of this site for years – I like the internet – and I hope that’ll remain true for a while yet.
I’ve read the articles. The internet causes depression and fosters isolation. It’s a breeding ground for harassment and encourages detachment from reality. It got Trump elected. But political corruption, depression, bullying, and escapism all existed before the internet. Let’s not project the full blame for human failures onto the technology we created.
Chat rooms, Napster, MySpace, twitter… they’ve all been great for her, and they’ve all been pretty great for me. Less so Tinder, but that’s fine, I don’t need to experience everything.
A day in the life of… Head of Frontend Development at Octopus Energy. Granted, that’s quite a specific day-in-the-life to read, but I enjoyed it because I knew Ashley back when he was a student and it’s awesome to see him take big strides in his professional life. It’s also nice to see a big company talk the talk about improving accessibility.
]]>My Dad Wrote a Porno, book 3. Had a bit of a respite after the last binge, and I’m saving some episodes for later, but managed to get through a few more this week. Once you pop, you can’t stop. Very funny.
Invisibilia S04E03: What Was Not Said. After the really interesting episode last week, this was a huge let down. About a mysterious man that ingratiates himself into a family in Taiwan. Just… not one that caught my interest. At. All. But that’s fine, would be odd if I liked everything. What I did like here though, was a throwaway line in the intro:
I think the barrier to deeper understanding in a lot of our relationships is that we sort of believe that we understand this person already, and so we don’t need to ask these questions. We don’t need to talk deeper. We don’t ask the things that sometimes we even ask of strangers.
Apply that to web design (or web Design) and you’ve got a nice summary of why it’s so important to talk to your audience. Making up personas and building for them is wildly insufficient… has to be real, actual, people.
Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity. I’ve read this a couple of times and still don’t really understand it. Tiny spiders can use the planetary electric field (which is constant) to propel themselves across oceans and continents. It’s called electrostatic repulsion – presumably because a) it uses electricity and b) the thought of flying spiders is repulsive – and the set of studies that prove it are pretty amazing.
40 Lessons (from a 40 year old). I actually stumbled on this a few months ago but had the tab still open last week, so got around to finishing it. A list of quite specific things that Will Mydellton has learnt in the 40 years he’s been around, it still has plenty of truths for me (though granted, I’m 36 and also ‘white, male, middle class, straight, tall, able-bodied, and young(ish) … and WEIRD – western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic’ so there’s a solid base level of similitude there from the start). I imagine if I went to write a list like this in a few years time, it’d be very similar; in fact, there are similarities from the list I wrote a couple of years ago. Lots in there for people of any age.
]]>#18. Self care isn’t some new age bullshit. Ten years ago I laughed at self-help books. Then someone close to me revealed they had helped him. I read some. They helped me too. I meditate and write morning pages. I work four days a week to balance work with life. Life is a long road and I need all the help I can get.
The Unnecessary Fragmentation of Design Jobs by Jonas Downey. He writes about how the process of research > wireframes > high fidelity designs > front-end code > research – with different people at each of those steps – is pretty loco. I appreciate this is slightly at odds with one of the links I posted last week about the difficulty of combining distinct skills into 1 role, but I do agree with what he’s saying. What we (what I) do should encompass all those things, and it can totally work. It’s much more inline with what I used to do in my last job, and to be honest, I do miss elements of it. It also reminds me of way back when I started making web things, and I was more than happy labelling myself as a web designer. (Are people web designers any more(?) They should be). The UX, the UI, the visuals, the build, that was all me and it was all “Design” for the web. And it was fun.
It Was All a Dream; one of those Players Tribune pieces, this one by Raheem Sterling. The targeting of Sterling by The S*n and the rest is vile, so I’m more than happy to try to give numbers to a piece about him which is actually worthwhile. What really strikes you after reading these interviews is just how much of an impact being good at football has had on their lives. So much work and background and struggle to get to the point of playing at an elite level and having lots of money… yes, sometimes it sounds like crazy money, but after reading these you couldn’t begrudge them getting what they get.
99% Invisible 311: The Barney Design. The mid 90s was when my interest in the NBA peaked (thanks to Channel 4 getting the rights to show games) so this episode on the shirts prevalent in that era made me happy. The focus is on the Toronto Raptors shirt with a dribbling velociraptor (awesome) but also generally about the shift in design styles of NBA shirts from classic to gaudy (and quite quickly back to classic). It was a perfect storm of the 90’s + new printing methods + a booming market for replica shirts, and the outcome was glorious. I always liked the Supersonics and Rockets ones personally… though in retrospect, I’m glad I never owned one.
]]>I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering by Robin Rendle. A bit of a (self described) rant about why you can’t really do good front-end development unless your whole thing is about doing good front-end development. It’s a skillset and a role that stands alone and justifiably so. I’m biased, obviously, but I agree.
Engineering the Wu-Tang Clan – An oral history of what happened behind the console during the making of one of the most important debut albums in hip hop. It’s a very tech heavy piece, with references to specific keyboards and microphones, but it’s a side of the early Wu-Tang story that I’ve not heard before and I’m always happy to dip back into that album at any available opportunity.
I got the impression they were dealing with a much larger plan than just making this record. They were planning many records, so if something didn’t work for this, it could be part of another record or another track. RZA seemed to work very fluidly but always had a very focused eye on the big picture.
Death, Sex & Money: Manhood, Now. An episode of short chats with a range of men about their views on masculinity an how it’s shaped their lives and behaviours. I think it’s great that there’s more of these types of discussions popping up – plenty of bits in here worth looking at. There’s a part about being a stay-at-home dad which rang true with me. I’m not a stay-at-home dad, though I sort of wish I could be, and I do do as much parenting as I can… it’s an odd world to be in sometimes, which it totally shouldn’t be in this day and age, but it is. More on that at some point possibly, but for now, it’s good to hear other people having the same concerns. Sharing is caring.
Invisibilia S04E02: The Other Real World. Trying to stop war and promote democracy through the medium of reality tv. Sounds ridiculous, but I loved this piece about the X Factor style show Inspire Somalia which, as it turns out, had a big positive impact. More than just details about getting a programme like that together (which it has), this delves into the ethics of foreign governments actively trying to impact the politics of other countries, the Somali civil war, and what winning hearts and minds in the 21st century looks like. It’s really a fascinating listen.
]]>Football! It’s the World Cup! Football football football!
It’s the World Cup! Reading about football! The Players Tribune are posting some in depth pieces on various footballers, and whether you like football or not, they’re great reads. This one with Romelu Lukaku is quite something. As is this one with Gabriel Jesus. Such a fantastic insight into what they’ve been through to go from almost nothing to the absolute top of their profession. Football!
The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy. I realise how this could come across; sharing an article from The Guardian about going vegetarian. But, I’m so on board with encouraging people to eat less meat. I’m down to 1 or 2 meat based meals a week – the rest being substitutes or vegetables – and consequently I think everyone should do the same as me. Really though, it’s much easier than you might think and it’s surely not sustainable for humans to carry on as they are…
… while some kinds of meat and dairy production are more damaging than others, all are more harmful to the living world than growing plant protein. It shows that animal farming takes up 83% of the world’s agricultural land, but delivers only 18% of our calories. A plant-based diet cuts the use of land by 76% and halves the greenhouse gases and other pollution that are caused by food production.
99% Invisible 312: Post-Narco Urbanism. All about how the Medellin in Colombia went from the most dangerous city in the world to one that’s safer than a lot of US ones. I, and many many other people have this distorted view of Medellin because of Pablo Escobar (and recently, via Narcos), but common sense tells you there’s so much more to it than what you read about or watch on Netflix. It looks like a really interesting place to visit – away from the 'Narco-Tourism’ – and this story explains some of the lengths city officials have gone to in order to make it a more welcoming place. Public transport, libraries, health clinics… they’ve changed the way people live, and it’s great to see.
]]>Becoming a team lead: a survival guide – a lengthy piece by Joseph Wynn about his experience falling into a lead role in a BBC dev team. I’ve been a team lead of sorts for a while now, in a few different places/roles, and I’ve read a lot about managing and all that jazz. I’ve done courses on it, been to talks on it, but I do think this is one of the most useful posts I’ve read about the whole thing, certainly one of the best I’ve read which is specifically about being a lead developer. Plenty of takeaways, like ‘always be honest … unless you’re ahead of schedule’, ‘nobody is allowed to work on a task by themselves for more than one day’, and 'ask for help’ –
It’s as if there’s a bizarre sense of achievement or credibility in struggling through a problem for days when it could have been trivially solved by someone else in minutes.
Stuff about the Intersection Observer API.
Implementing intersection detection in the past involved event handlers and loops calling methods like
Element.getBoundingClientRect()
to build up the needed information for every element affected. … The Intersection Observer API lets code register a callback function that is executed whenever an element they wish to monitor enters or exits another element (or the viewport), or when the amount by which the two intersect changes by a requested amount.
There are dozens and dozens of plugins and snippets that manage this functionality, it’s a very common trope, but I’d not stumbled on this particular method before. This lazyload example by David Bushell is what put me onto it, and there’s plenty of other examples around on codepen. May well have to go back and refactor some things…
Duncan Trussell Family Hour: Graham Hancock. I do love a bit of Graham Hancock; since way back when Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven’s Mirror got me hooked as a teenager, I’ve been partial to suspending disbelief and running with some of the fantastical theories he writes.
In all that time though, I don’t think I’d heard him speak, so this was a nice opportunity. He sounds like I’d always imagined tbh. This chat covers the kinds of things you’d pretty much expect it to cover: gnosticism, the tree of knowledge, psychedelics within religion, the internet, the Aztecs and the conquistadors. The bit about using mushrooms to get religious visions is what piqued my interest the most – it makes much more sense to think of Jesus and his followers being on hallucinogenics. Explains a lot.
The Jurassic Coast. I spent most of today (over 8 hours) walking a chunk (26.2 miles) of the South West Coast Path to raise money for Julia’s House, a local hospice that provides respite care for children and their families. They do great things. You should donate a couple of quid https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/redweb just because they’re amazing, but also because I did that walk and am now completely shattered. On the plus side, I got to experience a part of coastline that I’ve only dabbled with before, and it really is stunning. Well worth doing, for all sorts of reasons.
Relive 'Julia’s House Jurassic Coast Trek’
]]>
Unfiltered with James O’Brien 32: Akala. Pretty sure every time I listen to Akala talk (or rhyme for that matter), it’s an education – and this is no different. The sub title for this episode is ‘race and class in the ruins of Empire’, and it covers a lot. Go listen.
99% Invisible 310: 77 Steps. The title refers to the 77 step process of making an Emeco Navy chair. It’s a chair you’ve definitely seen before even if you’re not familiar with the name. The episode is an interesting piece on design / mass production / fakes and copyright, and provides some food for thought about the market for [affordable] replicas of [expensive] designer items. It’s an odd one, because part of me thinks ‘they’re just chairs – who cares if they’re fake or not’, but then I do own a few legit Philippe Starck chairs so I’ve clearly bought into the hype at some level at least. They are nice chairs.
About this 1963 Bollmann map of New York City. There’s a bit of over-egging in the write up for this map, but it’s undeniably glorious to look at; all the more so when you consider the technicalities behind producing it. > [Herman Bollman] and his team designed and built special cameras to take 67,000 photos, 17,000 from the air. Using these photos as a base, they then began to hand draw the entire city. Using then-secret cartographic techniques, Bollmann and team managed to depict the smallest details while simultaneously conveying the city’s soaring, vertiginous beauty.
Grab’s Front End Guide. By their own description, it’s aimed at newcomers and is opinionated, but it’s nonetheless well written and provides some really good links out to other resources that I’ll definitely be using. React, webpack, ES6, deployment processes – it covers a lot.
Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland. There are a lot of hillforts in Britain and Ireland, some possibly closer to your house than you ever knew. Go explore.
]]>99% Invisible 308: Curb Cuts. Genuinely one of my favourite episodes of 99pi… ever. Who knew that an episode about those little slopes you can roll down at crossings would be so great(?) I had no idea about the history of them, and just sort of assumed they were a default part of building curbs but turns out that they didn’t get built until the 60’s when activists like Ed Roberts – a disabled student at Berkeley – really raised the profile of why they’re needed.
“If you’re trying to get across the street and there are no curb cuts, six inches might as well be Mount Everest,” says Lawrence Carter Long. “Six inches makes all the difference in the world if you can’t get over that curb.”
It’s a fantastic episode. The epilogue is great too, and one I want to come back to when I’ve got time… Curb-cut effects. Watch this space.
The Joe Rogan Experience #1080 – David Goggins. The first comment on the reddit thread for this episode is “Had no idea who he was. After 10 minutes I was completely drawn in. This dude is awesome.” which sums it up nicely. Essentially, he’s an ex Navy SEAL who became an ultra-marathon runner and also broke the world record for pull-ups (4,025 in 17 hours)… all of that after having a torrid childhood, being hugely overweight and having a heart defect. I’m not usually into 'motivational’ talks and that type of thing, but I listened to this during a 17 mile walk and I swear, I could’ve carried on walking all day. The man is a beast and for 2 hours I really wanted to be a beast too. It wore off though, and I’m back to my slovenly ways. But really though, ridiculous physical exertion aside, there’s a lot to take from his attitude and I for one definitely intend to DO something soon.
This American Life 339: Break-Up. It’s a really old episode (from 2007) which bizarrely has actual Phil Collins giving advice to someone who is trying to write a break-up song. Mildly interesting, but it’s the brief bit about a child trying to understand her parents divorce that made this episode worth listening to.
Diamonds are Bullshit. A great breakdown on why diamonds on engagement rings is a massive con. In a nutshell: “Diamonds are not actually scarce, make a terrible investment, and are purely valuable as a status symbol.”
]]>The Joe Rogan Experience #1021 – Russell Brand. I’m still not on board with Joe Rogan, but I totally fuck with Russell Brand, so more than happy to listen to 2 hours of him talking his talks. I like his talks and his talking. There’s a LOT covered in this but it’s all loosely tied to his book Recovery: Freedom From our Addictions (if there’s not an audiobook version available, they’ve missed a trick) Edit – there is. Of course there is. I’m tempted to buy it, even though I wouldn’t consider myself an addict in any way OR MAYBE I AM AND I DON’T KNOW IT, but I’ve already got too many unread books on the pile I’m trying to work my way through OHMYGOD I AM AN ADDICT. Anyway, well worth a listen. Oh, except for Joe’s attempt at talking about Nas. Joe Rogan does not have the sufficient background knowledge of a rapper like Nas to be able talk about Nas.
My Dad Wrote a Porno S3. It’s been a while since I’ve had this in rotation, but I’m back on board and it’s as ridiculous as ever. Got through the first few episodes in a binge and I’m sure I’ll reach the climax (lols sex pun lols) soon enough.
99% Invisible 307: Immobile Homes. Trailer parks – or mobile home parks if you want to give them their less pejorative term – are all over America; this episode is about 1 of them in Utah. It’s one that has come with its share of troubles for the people that live there, the primary one being that while they owned their houses, they didn’t own the land beneath them.
“Part of the paradox at the heart of manufactured housing,” explains Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver “is that it’s precisely the thing that makes it so affordable that also makes this a highly insecure form of housing.”
The South West Coast Path, during a 17 mile walk I did as a warm up for the 26 miles I’m doing to raise money for Julia’s House. You can sponsor me if you like, that’d be great.
This Bojan Krkic interview with Sid Lowe, in which he talks about the extreme anxiety he used to suffer, largely as a result of being so good at football. It’s that scenario that comes up frequently of someone who on the surface has it all, but things are never as easy as they seem. FWIW, he’s a great player, and this is an enlightening interview which hopefully goes a little way toward making it more acceptable to talk about things like this.
Getting Comfortable with WCAG. A deep dive into web accessibility and utilising the guidance provided by WCAG.
]]>Digital Photocopiers Loaded with Secrets. A piece where the author finds all sorts of material on second-hand photocopiers. I had no idea this was a thing:
Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive – like the one on your personal computer – storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.
I have been stung by 150 species of insect. This man has a strange job, where getting stung by a range of arthropods is apparently normal. What I liked about it though, was his glorious descriptions of the pain, which makes it sound like a wine tasting session.
The Oral History of DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell is Hot. I’ll be honest, GQ magazine is not a place I thought a piece like this would appear, but they do a great job (even without being able to get DMX himself). I loved this album when it came out, it’s an absolute monster of a debut, and I’ll happily accept any prompt to re-visit it. Apologies to my neighbours this week, but X is coming.
This fantastic thread on twitter about the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion.
One of the world’s most remarkable ruined places is the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion.
Once a thriving hub of the ancient world, the city was devastated by a series of environmental disasters, & now lies 6.5km off the coast in the blue waters of the Egyptian sea. pic.twitter.com/okeCmXtCiv
— Paul ?? Cooper (@PaulMMCooper) May 11, 2018
I’ve read about Thonis before, but this is a great series of posts which really brings it to life. As I said when I RT’d it, it’s insane to me that a major city can vanish (& people forget where it even *was*) within a couple of centuries. Babylon, Muziris, Mohenjo-daro, Cahokia, Merv, Xanadu… The amount of MEGA cities that were left with little trace is amazing. It’s inconceivable that it could happen again right(?) Imagine London or NY being consigned to myth and lore. Loco. But it *will* happen. Steel and glass won’t stand the test of time.
I think I’ve posted about another thing Paul Cooper posted before… expect more, he’s one of my favourite people on twitter.
99% Invisible 306: Breaking Bad News. Dr Rob Buckman (who I’d not heard of before) did doctor stuff at the same time as hanging out with Monty Python and doing tv comedy, then he got ill, and eventually wrote a book which drew from all those experiences called I Don’t Know What To Say: How to Help and Support Someone Who is Dying. This is a fascinating episode which covers the detail to those things, and while it’s a sad story, it’s ultimately positive and always interesting. Quite a coup getting John Cleese on the show too.
]]>99% Invisible 304: Gander International Airport. I’d never heard of Gander, but now I love the idea of it. Or at least, what it was. A tiny town in Newfoundland that became a hub for all sorts of aviation activity. It played a crucial role in World War II and the aftermath of 9/11, as well as playing host to countless high profile VIPS from Castro to The Beatles. It’s a pretty amazing story, with a bittersweet ending due to the fact that planes have moved on (literally). Great listen though.
The Cipher 111: Vinnie Paz](http://theciphershow.com/episode/111/). This is a few years old now, but seeing as I haven’t checked for any Vinnie Paz material in years, it was all new to me. I was semi into Jedi Mind Tricks when I was younger; quite liked the Army Of The Pharoahs stuff too, but I sort of grew out of it. I’ve jumped back into it since this episode, and Violent By Design still very much bangs. In fact, this episode gave me a whole different view of Vinnie Paz than the one I’d always had. He’s much more… I don’t know… normal(?) than the music might suggest.
Ridiculous History: The Wild Elephants of Pablo Escobar. About Escobar’s zoo and the hippos that ended up as wild animals in Colombia after his death. Could be interesting right(?) Thought I’d give it a go because of a review I saw on something else I like but no. I don’t think I’ll be listening to any Ridiculous History again. They don’t really do it for me.
Joe Rogan 835: Louis Theroux. I’ve just started delving into the Joe Rogan back catalogue (holy shit there’s a lot there) and I couldn’t think of a better place to start than with Louis. Should’ve probably chosen the other chat they’ve done though because apparently that’s more wide ranging; this one was basically only about scientology on account of My Scientology Movie. Don’t get me wrong, it has its moments, and Louis is great talking about anything. But, what else is there to really say about scientology? Also, I know this is sacrilege, but I didn’t like Louis’ scientology movie – I think it’s the only thing he’s made that I actively didn’t enjoy. Regardless, it’s a good chat and worth listening if only for Louis’ Tom Cruise impression.
Mudeford beach huts
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Hip Hop Saved My Life 49: Mr B. The Gentleman Rhymer. I’ll be honest, the thought of listening to a chat with Mr B. The Gentleman Rhymer made me cringe a little. He had a show in Bournemouth not that long ago and I knew some people who went, so I berated them for a bit because ugghh, Mr B. The Gentleman Rhymer is awful. I may have unfairly judged him on the basis of… pretty much nothing(?) I think it’s maybe the term 'chap hop’. Or his music. I don’t know. Either way, I’m willing to put that all behind me and admit that having heard him talk, it’s clear that he’s not the person I thought he was. I mean, he’s got pedigree! Will I start listening to chap hop? No. But I’ll stop berating friends for deigning to see him. (That Professor Elemental though? Pfft. Fuck that guy).
This American Life 643: Damned If You Do. There’s an awful story about refugees from Somalia in a camp in Kenya who have to voluntarily return to Somalia in order to pay off debt they’ve accrued while in the refugee camp. There’s also larger write up on the Washington Post, but be warned, it’s depressing. Ever so slightly less lachrymose is the other feature story about legally disowning your children in order to secure external funding for their medical issues. There’s no joy in this podcast this week, but they are really well put together stories that are important to listen to.
The Cipher 216: Rock. I’m not sure it’s possible to like hip hop and not like Heltah Skeltah, Boot Camp Clik, or the whole Duck Down movement. If you don’t, please listen to this episode, then familiarise yourself with the music. If you do, then listen to the episode and enjoy as much as I did. I’ve always found it hard not to compare Rock with Ruck (even more so now the latter is gone) but the man definitely stands alone.
This interview with Dan Lish. That man can draw. Reminds me a little of the Wu-Massacre stuff by Chris Bachalo. It’s great.
A Quiet Place. Had a rare trip to the cinema this week, and this was the only thing that looked worth watching… (and it was worth watching).
]]>Mom and Dad Are Fighting. Various episodes. I can’t remember how I stumbled on this but I’m glad I did; parenting chat in an engaging and not annoying way. Peep the convo about ‘should you let your child get a fascist haircut’ for instance (no you shouldn’t). I can see myself listening to this podcast a lot more; it’s the best one on parenting that I’ve found. Not that I’ve been looking tbh, but I am looking now – open to recommendations!
99% Invisible 301: Making it Rain. I’ve heard of cloud seeding before, but I didn’t really know the extent that some people (i.e. the US military) had gone toward trying to control the weather. Trying to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh trail with rain was apparently a thing. Surely though, any sane person knows that doing something like controlling clouds is fantastical and reserved for people like Storm… It’s not something that should have millions of dollars and many years chucked at it. Or is it?? Who knows? Ask the scientists. I did like this though:
Humans — especially military humans — have wanted to control the weather for a long time. Some rainmaking ceremonies have ancient roots. “It goes back to traditional rainmaking ceremonies,” explains historian Jim Fleming. “Turns out that if you do a rain dance for up to two weeks it’ll probably rain and then you can take credit for that.”
Distraction Pieces 177: Jean Grae. I’ve slightly veered away from listening to Distraction Pieces for a while now, but had to dive back in for this episode. Way back since How To Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’ve been a fan of the music, and more recently I’ve been a fan of the person (via twitter). Despite the disclaimer from Pip at the start of this chat, it’s a great listen.
Why The Last Snow On Earth May be Red. Apparently “watermelon snow was known to Aristotle, two thousand years ago, and its biological origins became apparent in the early nineteenth century” but this article is the first time I’ve heard of it. See also: ice worms (also mentioned in the article). It’s a short piece about snow algae and climate change, but I wanted to share it because of the pink snow.
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Front-End Developer Handbook 2018. So good and so so so thorough. There’s plenty of imposter syndrome that sneaks in while reading some of the sections, and definitely some 'wait, they earn WHAT?’ when looking at the salary section, but that aside, it’s a great summary of everything front-end. The parts on learning new things are already proving particularly helpful and I can see myself dipping back into this many times.
Do I really need to learn React though? I’ve toyed with the idea for years now and still have no interest in doing so. I’m hoping that if I continue to leave it long enough, it’ll stop being a thing.
99% Invisible 302: Lessons from Las Vegas. A chat with architect Denise Scott Brown about Modernism and the *anti-*Modernism of Vegas in the 60’s.
…Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took all the maps and notes and observations that they and the students had collected, then, together with their teaching assistant and co-author, Steven Izenour, they put it all in a book. Published in 1972, it was called Learning from Las Vegas, and it would go on to be hugely influential.
It’s a short episode, but when it finished I felt like I’d been listening for hours – in a good way! Really compelling, with plenty of little tidbits that sparked off deep dive googling. I really liked the idea of ducks vs decorated sheds (and there’s another article on 99PI which sums it up), and I’m sure there’s something in there that can be applied to web design.
The Cipher 104: Scarface. Another one of those people that I admire and respect but if I’m honest, I don’t actually listen to. I rate a few singles, but I don’t think own a Geto Boys or Scarface release. He’s a don though, so I do acknowledge that should probably change. Plenty of good chat in this episode, and really interesting to hear him talk about having the name 'Scarface’ and the knock on effect that’s had. Think about the pseudonym you pick – it’ll define you!
Fargo Season 3. Bingeworthy. Another season I’ve loved. That V. M. Varga. Eww.
]]>The Cipher 98 & 99: Prince Paul. What a legend. Tbh, the extent of my personal forays into Prince Paul’s music never really got much deeper than Gravediggaz and Handsome Boy Modelling School which is ample as it is, and while I’ve always been aware that there’s so so much more, I hadn’t quite twigged exactly how much more there was. There are 2 episodes of chat. 2 full episodes! That’s how much more. Stories for days.
99% Invisible 300: Airships and the Future that Never Was. There’s plenty more in the history of airships than the word 'Hindenburg’, as you’ll find out if you give this a listen. I don’t think that I would’ve had the bottle to actually travel on one, but they do hold an air of allure. The other thing they hold, that I never realised, is STUFF. Like, they’re not just full of the gases needed to keep them in the sky – they can actually contain things. I alway thought that people went in those little boxes on the underside (and yes, I thought that was a hugely disproportionate ratio of travellers to transporter but still), but hey, I was wrong.
Everything You Know About Web Design Just Changed by Jen Simmons (via Jeremy Keith). A write up of her talk at An Event Apart last week. There’s a lot to try to extract from this, and I’m waiting (hoping) there’ll be a video of the actual presentation but until then, there’s plenty of write ups cropping up, and I’ve got a growing set of bookmarks to find time for.
Responsive web design has flexible images. Intrinsic web design has flexible images …or fixed images. Whichever you want.
Responsive web design has a fluid columns. Intrinsic web design has fluid columns and rows.
Responsive web design uses media queries. Intrinsic web design doesn’t necessarily need them.
The name comes from words that have been floating in the ether. In Rachel’s talk, the words “sizing” and “intrinsic” came up a lot. This is about the nature of the web.
I’m still not overly convinced with css grid as an ongoing viable solution for layout but that’s possibly because I’ve yet to really see an example which is more than a single page. Only a matter of time I’m sure!
Stuff in Norfolk. Reason this week is short is because I’m in Norfolk, in a tent. It’s delightful here.
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99% Invisible 299: Gerrymandering. It’s something that seems like less of an issue over here in the UK (though, does exist; there was a kerfuffle over redrawing constituencies a couple of years ago… though tbh, I don’t actually know what came of that), but America seems ripe for gerrymandering fun. On the surface, it’s easy to say 'gerrymandering is bad, don’t do it’, but this episode does a good job at covering off why it’s problematic to resort to reductionism. There’s a whole series dedicated to the detail which has been added to my listen list – The Gerrymandering Project.
The Cipher 234: Epic Beard Men. Ostensibly a track-by-track of their new album, this interview goes well beyond that. Always a fan of Sage and b.dolan talking with words, so this was a great listen.
The Defiant Ones (Netflix). I only really knew about Interscope and Jimmy Iovine through the hip hop side of it all, so there was plenty of new and interesting stuff in here for me, from Springsteen to NIN… but, it’s the hip hop side of it all that I really enjoyed. You also get a fair whack of Beats marketing which I could do without, but I binged on all 4 episodes and have no regrets. The stories from early NWA, Snoop, Eminem, Death Row, all of that… LOVED it. It’s also a gorgeous watch, really nicely put together.
Compressive Images Revisited by Tim Kadlec. I won’t repeat here but for tagging purposes: images, responsive, srcset, performance.
]]>Holloways of Dorset. It’s a short article, but I love these lanes and the idea that they’ve been there for thousands of years, gradually getting more and more worn down. Never knew they actually had a name.
The recessed thoroughfares of Dorset cross from the coast heading to the north, inland toward North Chideock and Symondsbury villages in west Bridport. They were likely used to transport goods to and from the ships in the harbors.
Pharaohs, Samurais and the Dark Side of the Force: The Golden Age of Marseille Rap. This is a GREAT piece on a whole section of rap that I’ve been listening to for years but have never ever understood. Off the back of watching La Haine for the first time when I was at college, I picked up some IAM and Akhenaton albums and wished I could speak French. I still do. It’s an amazing language for rap. L’Ecole du Micro d’Argent is a fantastic album regardless of whether you understand anything they’re rapping about (though obviously, a translation helps). With this article though, Pierre Nicolas has done an amazing job at covering the great music that came out of Marseille in the mid to late 90’s… it filled in so many of the gaps that have lingered for years as well as reminding me to break out those albums again. It’s a must read.
Adam Buxton 65: Diane Morgan. (aka Philomena Cunk from those Charlie Brooker things). Such a great ramble chat; she’s hilarious.
The Cipher 107: Murs. This is from a few years back, but that’s neither here nor there, it’s another great interview on The Cipher. I used to rock Living Legends stuff hard back in the Napster days, and his solo albums and the Felt stuff with Slug have all been on rotation, so I really enjoyed this listen. He’s an interesting man, with a lot to say.
This sunset on Bournemouth beach
]]>This American Life 241: 20 Acts in 60 Minutes. Turns out this show is from way back in 2003, but that was long before I dabbled with podcasts so I’m only just listening. Anyway, it was haphazard. Highlight for me was Act 14 (Call in Colonel Mustard For Questioning) which is about the apparently intangible stuff that goes into making an end product what it is – specifically about the environmental factors that make hot dogs taste nice. I’ve summed that up oddly but it’s like 2 minutes long, go listen.
Criminal 86: Willie Bosket. There’s a lot to take from of this story, but it’s essentially about the boy who led to the creation of the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978 (where children between the ages of 10 and 17 could be charged and punished as adults). There’s more about it here, but you don’t have to read all the details to know it’s probably not the jolliest story. One worth hearing though.
The Cipher 151: Allah B of the Nation of Gods and Earths. Knowledge god.
If you’ve ever listened to Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, or the Wu-Tang Clan, said “Peace” or “word,” or stood in a b-boy stance, you owe a huge debt to the Gods and Earths, whether you realize it or not.
I have listened to those people, and a lot lot more who talk that 5%, so this was a really interesting episode. I mean, there’s a lot I don’t get down with but there’s also a lot of that supreme wisdom that has rubbed off on me over the decades of listening. It’s an interesting conversation.
Snow on Bournemouth beach
]]>An Ode To Geocities. As a resident of geocities back in the day (SunsetStrip represent), this was a great read.
Geocities has a fascinating history. A roaring beginning, a dramatic climax, the most tragic of endings, and just a sprinkle of hope right at the end … I think its impact is hard to understate.
I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson. Twins, art, loss, love, trauma, all that stuff. I really enjoyed this book and would wholeheartedly recommend it. As an only child, having a sibling has always been a weird idea to me and though I obviously can’t say whether this depiction of it is true, it did get me thinking a lot about how the relationship between my children will unfold. Also, it’s a gorgeously well written book and a great story that had me hooked. Hooked I tell you.
This American Life 542: Wait – Do You Have The Map? Continuing the sibling theme from the novel above, there’s a story on this episode about two brothers on a road trip. It’s good. There’s also an odd story about a couple who got married when one of them was serving life in prison, only for him to get unexpectedly released. It’s endearing.
The Longest Shortest Time 140: Zombies… It’s not about Zombies, but it is about scary things like realising your children are like you were as a child. I don’t actually have that many memories of being a small person, but talking to my wife’s parents, they definitely notice things that our kids do that my wife apparently did at a similar age. We’re moulding them in our own likeness. That is scary.
The Cipher 105: RJD2. One from the archives, but still worth a listen. I used to love me some RJ; that whole MHz collective were so dope around the turn of the millennium, I picked up pretty much anything that they dropped. But then, I stopped checking for no particular reason (ironically, the last RJD2 album I bought was Since We Last Spoke) and now listening to this interview, I feel bad that I stopped because it sounds like he went through it a little with the 3rd album. Regardless, this is a solid listen. He’s very candid about all sorts of stuff, and while I wish they’d talked more about that Columbus scene, the chat about his production approach is second to none.
99% Invisible 295: Making a Mark. An interview with Tom Geismar, the graphic designer behind all sorts of logos you’ve definitely seen before.
As someone who has always struggled with logo design whenever I’ve been asked to do it, I’m always in awe of people who make it look so effortless. That NatGeo one for instance, I’m sure loads of people would say it’s just a rectangle and some text – because, it is just a rectangle and some text – but it’s such a nice and considered rectangle and some text, I challenge anyone to have done something better. Anyway, the whole interview is great, I loved getting an insight into his process.
]]>Criminal 85: The Manual. This story reminded me of my early days on the internet when it was fairly normal to share things like the Anarchist Cookbook, and being at school sharing floppy disks of highly questionable material which apparently told you how to get high off of innocuous fruit and nuts… Except, more serious. It’s a story about a book which details how to be a hitman, and how it was actually used in a real murder. Grim, but it makes an interesting listen.
RHLSTP 165: Kathy Burke. She’s great. It’s a very good episode. The more I hear her speak, the more my appreciation of her grows. It started off about 20 years ago, liking Perry but it’s much more than that now.
99% Invisible 297: Blood, Sweat and Tears (City of the Future, Part 2). The concluding episode to last weeks start on the Bijlmermeer, it’s more about the migration of Surinamese Dutch to the area (and less about the architecture) and is equally fascinating. The whole ideal about what it could’ve been completely fell apart for all sorts of reasons, and ultimately it was a failure. This quote in particular hit home…
The Bijlmermeer, and maybe a lot of Modernism, was architecture for architects. It was a top-down, paternalistic approach to city planning.
I can’t help but think of the parallels with a web work… if you don’t involve people at the right stages, if you try to impose a grand design without engaging with and listening to the people who are going to work with it and use it, then it might look pretty, but it’s not going to be fit for purpose.
The Cipher 233: Erick Sermon. To be honest, I’m only a casual Erick fan… EPMD are undeniable, and I loved React and Music back in the day, but beyond that, I was totally ignorant to just how much he’s had his hand in. Stellar episode with a hip hop great. The music for this show is so good (I mean, it always is on The Cipher, but this in particular).
]]>99% Invisible: Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1). Already looking forward to Part 2. In particular this is about the post-war development of a suburb outside Amsterdam (the Bijlmermeer) but beyond that, it’s about all modernist egalitarian utopias that people like Le Corbusier imagined – but never actually attained.
Turns out that actually dealing with people and politics and the real world results in these grand ideas largely falling flat. I’d never actually heard of the Bijlmermeer, but growing up in Plymouth with its massive concrete post-war monstrosities (check out A Plan for Plymouth), I am sort of familiar with the legacy of trying to build a city around these grand gestures. I’m totally on board with the idea of getting stuff like this to work, and always interesting to look at why it never seems to take off.
This American Life: Rom-Com. Bit late for valentines day but still good. Ignore the bit with Daniel Radcliffe at the start, and you’ve got a solid episode about some relationship things. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but suffice to say there’s romance and comedy.
The Cipher: Evidence. Though I’m not checking for Ev as much as I used to, I’ll always have a soft spot for him. Big fan of Dilated Peoples back in the day. In fact, they were the first 'big’ American rap group I ever saw – 2002, I think… at The Thekla in Bristol, after a ludicrous drive up crammed into a Nissan Micra. That was fun. Anyway, as often happens with these Cipher interviews, I’ve got a newfound appreciation for him and I need to give the new album a listen.
]]>The Cipher: DJ Head. This interview with Detroit stalwart DJ Head is more than just a series of Eminem & J Dilla anecdotes, but it’s the Eminem & J Dilla anecdotes that I came for and it’s Eminem & J Dilla anecdotes that I got. Really though, some top chat about that era of hip hop in Detroit – I’m a fan, and this interview led to me digging out a few albums I haven’t played for a while.
Adam Buxton: Paul Thomas Anderson. The Daniel Day Lewis impression is gold. Also, the ramble chat. Not enough about Boogie Nights for me (though tbf, it’s very clearly not a 'film’ chat), but the parenting chat is plentiful and good.
[The Story of Combat Jack, hip hop’s Flagship Podcaster](http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/the-story-of-combat-jack-hip hops-flagship-podcaster.html). Briefly touched on Combat Jack before christmas, and there was a great Cipher episode about him last month, but if you prefer a longread, this is the place to find it.
Everything Sucks! on Netflix. It’s not amazing but it’s good (and short) enough to quick watch for a fix of 90’s nostalgia. I’d prefer a UK version, but there’s plenty in this that made me go 'I did that!’ with embarrassment and glee.
]]>This American Life: Words You Can’t Say. Couple of stories on people saying the 'wrong’ thing, though in both cases, there’s nothing wrong with what they said. First is about Laci Green who does that YouTube vlogging stuff that the kids love but who managed to upset all sorts of people when she called herself a feminist. Second is about Dodie Horton, a republican gun advocate who dared to suggest that incredibly realistic toy guns might not be a great thing for kids to have. In both instances, the stories are really about people who cant seem to cope with the idea that someone doesn’t 100% share their world view. It’s a frustrating listen.
The Longest Shortest Time: The Secret Life of a Deaf Superhero](https://longestshortesttime.com/episode-86-the-secret-life-of-a-deaf-superhero/). An interview with author/illustrator Cece Bell, primarily about her graphic novel El Deafo. I’d never come across her (or the book) before but it’s on my reading list now. She’s got such a great story, and it’s one that resonates a lot; my mum also lost her hearing to meningitis as a toddler and went through a lot of the same experiences that Cece talks about. Cece’s parents opted to go for a hearing aid and go down the 'hearing’ route where my grandparents decided to go the other way and get my mum into a deaf school. It’s always interesting for me to get the different perspective on it – away from what specifically happened with my mum – and this is a particularly insightful discussion.
After listening, I found this piece on The Guardian called ‘how I made El Deafo – in pictures’ which is a great accompaniment to the interview.
99% Invisible: Border Wall. Another Trump type episode to get angry about, this time about building that wall.
In 2006, President Bush signed a law to begin building an eighteen-foot-high fence along key parts of the border between the United States and Mexico. Today, sections of that fence cover about a third of the border. The idea is simple — putting a physical barrier along an invisible line — but the reality is a bit more complex.
Trumpness aside, well worth a listen as always… Some interesting facts about Mexico/US border relations.
6 Music Loves NYC: The Wu-Tang Clan Radio Show. 2 hours of RZA and Mathematics playing solid GOLD. Plenty of hip hop, plenty of the original samples from plenty of hip hop, and a bit of chat. It’s easily my favourite radio show of the year so far. 25 days left to listen!
The Front End Interview Handbook. I’m not currently looking for interviews, but always good to keep one toe in right(?) It’s a collection of questions to test FED knowledge (with some suggested answers) and I’ve got no shame in admitting there’s a few there which tripped me up. Note to self: need to brush up your JS.
This thread by @ApertureAwesome about how the game Firewatch changed his life.
1. Apparently this is the two-year anniversary of Firewatch, a video game made by the great people from @camposanto. It sounds dumb but the game honestly changed my life. I kinda want to talk about it, cause it’s pretty important to me at this point.
— Jack (@ApertureAwesome) February 10, 2018
An svg generative art thing. Quick foray into using Snap.svg to manipulate svg’s, to make this piece which randomly produces art that you can then save.
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Few episodes of Stuff You Should Know, because it gets recommended a lot and I’ve not actually listened to it before; How Going Over Niagra Works, How the Hells Angels Work, How Agent Orange Works and How Narco States Work. Sort of a mixed bag there. I’m not entirely sure what I feel about the style of it, but it’s mostly a good listen. Maybe you get used to it. Either way, the highlight of those 4 was the Agent Orange one, primarily because it’s the only one I knew nothing about other than it was something bad from the Vietnam war.
99% Invisible: Managed Retreat. A nice little episode ostensibly about moving a lighthouse but also timely because CLIMATE CHANGE etc.
… back in the 1970s, it looked like Buxton might lose their beloved lighthouse. The sea was getting closer and threatening to swallow it up. And people were torn over what to do about it — they could move the lighthouse, or leave it in place and try to defend it against the forces of nature. For the next 30 years, the people of Buxton fought an intense political battle over this decision. It’s the kind of battle we can expect to see a lot more of as sea levels rise and threaten coastal communities around the world.
Having grown up down the road from Smeaton’s Tower – another lighthouse which was moved brick by brick to a new location, albeit a century earlier, in 1882 – I felt a certain affinity with this story. I’d never heard of Cape Hatteras before, but having checked on a map, I now know it’s a crazy looking piece of land. And there’s this lighthouse. Those are the only 2 things I know about it. Next time I’m in North Carolina, I’ll see if I can swing by.
WTF Episode 613: President Barack Obama. Clearly, this is an oldie, but I’d never heard it before and whilst going through the Marc Maron archives, I thought it seemed like a good place to stop off. Obviously, Obama comes off as being pretty cool, but I think the main thing that hits home listening to him today, is holy shit he’s not Donald Trump. The difference in how they hold themselves is so so so so massive, it’s unbelievable.
This American Life: The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar. Another oldie (think it was first broadcast a decade ago), this is an odd story of a boy kidnapped in 1912 and eventually reunited with his family only to find out that it wasn’t his family. It’s horrible when you actually think about it, but does make a pretty good story.
The Cipher: Ice-T. This is a wiiiidde ranging interview that really captures why you should respect Ice-T. Like, I’ve never been the biggest fan of his music – couldn’t really name more than a handful of songs off the top of my head – but listening to this interview made me want to go back and listen to more Ice-T. Despite currently only owning Power, I have been a longtime fan of Ice-T the man, and that’s solidified after this. Go listen.
About that massive new dinosaur found in Egypt and the team behind it, specifically that the women who helped unearth it had never been away from home before… That’s quite a first excursion.
[Dr. Hisham] Salam added that all the members of his research team where women. The research conditions necessitate traveling to a barren and dangerous area and staying there for at least a month. He said that he made a great effort convincing the families of his colleagues to travel and stay in that dangerous area.
He stated that these girls never left the city of Mansoura throughout their lives and this trip was a first for them, after a painstaking effort persuading their families, they agreed to let them travel and set up for 21 days in a dangerous area until the dinosaur structure was found.
My daughter is very excited about the prospect of a dinosaur bigger than Argentinosaurus (her long-standing favourite of all the dinosaurs). Still hoping she’ll have a dinosaur named after her one day.
This post about Artwork Personalization at Netflix, about how they decide which thumbnail from a show to display to a user, based on previous viewing habits. (Which, apparently they’ve been doing for a while now). It’s a very detailed explanation of something that had never really occurred to me before but makes perfect sense now that I know about it. Really interesting to consider the impact of this level of personalisation and guiding users down a path.
This hefty read on NYT – The Follower Factory – a fascinating deep dive into twitter bots, buying followers, all that mess. Also, it’s very well put together; a delight of an internet page, with all sorts of scrolly treats.
The day a non-league defender marked Aubameyang … after running a 10k. Catchy title. Sort of does what it says on the tin.
This advert for Lost from 2005 (via @gray on twitter). Reminding me why it seemed like such a good idea at the time to start watching it.
Beasts of The Southern Wild – a film sort of about Katrina, but sort of not really, but sort of really nice to watch. I liked it.
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99% Invisible Mini-Stories: Volume 4. Another nice little collection of short pieces, featuring alchemy, alarm design, and Trump coinage… as well as an amazing story about the backward index which I LOVED. Basically it’s the physical collection of every word in the dictionary, only written out backward then filed alphabetically. Sounds absolutely ridiculous, but I love that it exists. Can you even imagine what looking up words (or word endings) was like before digital? Sort of reminds me of when I was a lot lot younger and I used to collect that Tree of Knowledge encyclopedia every week until I had these massive binders full of stuff that was almost impossible to actually use – they had index cards that you had to manually keep updated whenever new content was added, it was so unwieldy but so great. God knows how much my parents spent on that. Anyway, backward index is great.
I also loved the story on the Seattle Underground which talks about when the street level in Seattle was physically raised to the first floor, leaving this huge gap underground. Again, sounds ludicrous, but so cool. I’ve been to Pioneer Square in Seattle, and I wish I knew about this then; adds a whole different level to things (:eyes emoji:).
Couple of similar episodes of The Cipher; Kendrick Lamar on GKMC and Nas on Illmatic. 2 classic albums, 2 interviews with the MC’s behind them. The Nas one is more enlightening, but honestly, I love both those albums so more than happy to hear anyone talk about them for extended periods of time.
On a different tact, the other Cipher episode I listened to was the Tribute to Combat Jack. It’s a really worthwhile listen – if you’ve not heard of Combat before, this manages to capture so much of why he was great at what he did.
This reworked tracklist and discussion on Tical 2000 by Method Man. Despite it getting near constant play in my teens, it’s been a long time since I listened to that album and this discussion both sums up why (it’s way too long) and solves it (by proposing an alternative pruned tracklist). You listen to the shortened version, it’s like it’s been given a new breath. Any excuse really to bring out old Wu.
This throwaway tweet by Dan Lockton:
Of course, all this thinking about the clipboard is reminding me of one of the most resonant ideasthesia-like images I’ve ever seen, on @postsecret, many years ago: pic.twitter.com/WG0JgJly3Y
— Dan Lockton (@danlockton) January 11, 2018
got me reading all sorts about ideasthesia, and I promise you I will work it into a conversation or presentation coming soon.
Chris Rock. The actual real life Chris Rock, who was in Bournemouth on his Total Blackout tour. So bizarre to me that he was in Bournemouth. Been a fan since I first saw CB4 some 20-odd years ago, and love pretty much every thing he’s done since, so to finally catch him live was a definite highlight. Great show too – sure it’ll be on Netflix soon enough, well worth it.
another sunset
The Adam Buxton podcast Ep.62 – Adam & Joe. This is the Christmas special, and if I’m honest, is the one I look forward to every year. They’re just funny, nice, talented people. I want to be their friend. As that seems unlikely, I’ll content myself with listening to them jabber on. Particular liked the bit in here about the 'correct’ pronunciation of words – as per some old BBC guidelines – mostly because it’s funny, but also because it’s legit interesting.
Tech N9ne on Combat Jack. Bittersweet this one, as it’s the first Combat Jack show I’ve listened to since he sadly passed just before Christmas. It’s an old episode, but I’ve been working my way through the archive lately… Not much I can really say about Reggie Ossé that hasn’t been said by plenty of others, but it’s sad knowing that when I get the end of catching up with these CJ shows, that’s it for them. He was a great podcast host with great guests, and it’s a huge loss that he’s gone. This particular episode is pretty great (as per). I haven’t checked for Tech N9ne in a LONG time, but I want to again after this conversation; much more interesting than I ever gave him credit for.
Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast Episode 152 – Armando Iannucci. Note to self: try to see Death of Stalin in the cinema. Armando has been cropping up all over the place on the promo tour of his film (not that this is a typical promo piece) and we’re all better for it. I’d like to be his friend also.
This insane synchronised marbles, magnets and music video (via Colossal). Love it.
The last couple of episodes of Mindhunter over on Netflix. I liked it a lot. It’s a slow burner, and Holden is a bit annoying as a lead but all in all, quality viewing. Until the next series, I’m going to miss those oh-it’s-David-Fincher-let’s-do-the-same-opening-credits-as-Se7en-but-it’s-fine-because-they’re-great opening credits.
boscombe pier at sunset
]]>I’ve been doing ‘web things’ for about 15 years now; it’s become an integral part of how I define and present myself. “What do you do?” – “I make websites”. “What’s your role?” – “Front-end developer”. “Do you internet?” – “Yes I do”. These things used to roll off the tongue as a matter of course in all sorts of daily conversations and I’ve been comfortable with that. The last few years however, have conspired in such a way that I’ve been forced to assume another guise – one which has largely superseded the ‘web dude’ one…
I’m now a Dad. In fact, I have been for over 4 years, but it still feels odd writing it down.
Becoming a parent initially in late 2012, then doubling down last year, has changed my life in all sorts of ways that I neither have the time nor the aptitude to fully articulate. But one way I feel particularly strong about, is how it’s helped me to be a better developer.
There’s a quote from Umberto Eco that I’ve always liked:
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
There’s rarely a big dramatic reveal when it comes to being who you are; it’s a culmination of small things – small changes – that alter you gradually until you’re noticeably different.
I’ve had loads of those changes since being a dad, to the point where I’m almost unrecognisable from who I was in 2012. More than the grey hairs and bags under my eyes, those changes have fundamentally altered my approach to life and consequently to work, and I’d like to share some of those things. 10 of them, in fact, because listicles are a thing.
You don’t have to have your own children to benefit from techniques to parenting, and you don’t have to write code to appreciate how raising a person is akin to development.
In case you’re doubting the parallels between parenthood and programming, briefly consider this tweet from Julia Evans:
If you swap out ‘programmer’ for ‘child’ – there’s no difference to the steps that come after. Particularly the ‘ask questions’ thing! Kids become amazing adults the same way that code-types become ‘wizard programmers’, so why shouldn’t we learn from the experience of being a child / guiding children to adulthood(?). (We should. So let’s.)
As a parent, it’s so easy to obsess over making sure you’re doing the right thing. There’s no pressure quite like the pressure of looking after an actual human being who needs you for literally everything. It’s natural to worry about whether they’ll turn out OK, that the choices you’ve made for them are the correct ones. Not only have you got your own crippling doubt, but a plethora of contradictory opinions from anybody else that’s ever had a child, or has ever even seen a child.
(https://twitter.com/McElaney/status/736659052428681216)
Some things just work and you go with them even though you know they’re not ‘right’. But it soon becomes clear that there really isn’t a right or wrong way – there’s just whatever gets you through. If it does the job and doesn’t hurt anyone, then that’s probably enough.
For the most part, other people wont notice there’s anything wrong. What matters is the result, not the technique you used to get there. Often, you don’t even have to release a fully polished thing; Minimum Viable Product isn’t a new concept, but it’s something my daughter is definitely on board with, to the point where I have a newfound appreciation for it.
MVP is the smallest thing you can build to deliver the value of your solution to your customers, or in child terms, it’s the big circle with a few lines coming out of it that is clearly a dinosaur.
Putting something out there (getting something done and showing it), demonstrates that you’re getting somewhere.
Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.
– Seth Godin *
My daughter didn’t wait until she knew how to run before she started walking, and she didn’t perfect her gait before she started toddling around. It’s a process. Granted, during that process she fell over a lot, and you might fall too, but…
All through school, I was taught that mistakes are inherently wrong. The very etymology of the word comes from ‘taken in error’. They’re bad! But really, they’re not. You should try to see them as evidence of exploring an avenue that turned out not to be the one you wanted.
Kids embrace mistakes. They practically live mistakes! It’s an inevitable consequence of learning new things. Obviously you don’t want to make too many mistakes as that’s not a great use of your time, and there are things you can do to mitigate the effect of any errors, like ensuring you’re in an appropriate environment.
Start with a development environment where you can do pretty much whatever you want without fear of any serious repercussions.
When you’re ready, move into testing (get QA involved if that’s what you do). That’s still local and private, but with some of the safety net removed.
Next is user acceptance… i.e. sort of public, out in the open where people can see, but if things go wrong there’s enough padding so that you can try again.
Then when you’re confident, go to production and let the world see the fruits of your labour. By this point, you’ll probably have ironed out all the creases.
This workflow probably isn’t new to you, but it’s good to remember that there are plenty of places where ‘failure’ is OK. My daughter is into the testing environment for most things in life, though she’s verging on UAT by now, whereas my son is transitioning from dev to QA. Cushions everywhere.
Every stage you go through is a learning opportunity, and as long as you’re not making the same mistake over and over, you’re doing fine.
learn ? experiment ? fail ?
learn ? experiment ? fail ?
learn ? experiment ? win! ?
A by-product of establishing safe areas to experiment and fail without fear is that you’ve got room to play. It’s crucial to grant time and space where playing is allowed – and encouraged.
When you’re at school, lessons are broken up a couple of times a day by playtime / recess (whatever you want to call it) and it’s often seen as a break from learning. But that’s unfair, because ‘playing’ shouldn’t ever be viewed as an alternative to ‘learning’.
An ideal office
For my kids, it’s where they practice and hone skills that will help them in their adult lives. Socialising, imagination, physical fitness; there are so many reasons why it’s important. How else would my daughter refine her dinosaur tracking skills, if not during play time? I mean, it’s hard to teach that in a lesson format.
With your code, there are plenty of places to play: in the dev environment, places like codepen, your personal projects… Sometimes you might get lucky and your play turns into work, or sometimes you’ll get lucky and it’ll stay fun. The point is: experimenting, trying new things for fun, and stretching your legs a little is important, regardless of where it leads to. It is, in and of itself, worthwhile.
That said, it can be useful to set some boundaries on that playtime. The amount of time it takes, for one, but also it can help to define a structure. If you let your kids out in the playground with no guidelines at all, it can descend into chaos fairly quickly.
Playworks, a US company that organises play in schools reckon that “without structure, there are fewer opportunities for kids to be successful in directing their own play” and that it’s better to introduce some rules to frame the playtime. An example could be as simple as giving the child a couple of bean bags and a hoop, then letting them use those as props in their playtime. For devs, that could be defining a topic, or a framework to use, then encouraging free reign to use it however you like.
There’s a lot to be said for acquiring new skills and I’m in no way trying to say that’s not important. But I know that when my daughter wants to do something, she doesn’t worry about what she might need to get it done, she’ll use whatever she’s already got and make it work. Want to have a cape to look like Queen Elsa? Grab a tea-towel and a peg. Building a castle to stop your little brother stealing your jewels? Lay the sofa cushions around the pile of buttons you’ve got. Need to colour in an apple but don’t have a red pen? Get the purple pen, now it’s a plum which is fine because it’s still a fruit.
A lack of time leads to less creativity, but a lack of resources leads to creative thinking. If you don’t know about Vue or React or node or whatever, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using jQuery if it means you’ll get the job done (there’s also nothing wrong with using jQuery in general, but that’s a different discussion).
It’s not a case of always sticking to the stuff you know (word to High School Musical) – it’s merely that what you know is usually quicker to work with, and is probably absolutely fine.
Picking up new skills comes with time and often out of necessity, but too often it creates a self-imposed barrier to just getting on with it.
You’ve probably heard the word ‘disruptive’ thrown about in relation to technology before. It’s always cool to be disruptive. Disrupt stuff! Yeah! Tech! 🤘 Smartphones disrupted the PC market, Netflix disrupted video rentals, Uber disrupted the taxi business, etc etc… but to remind you of the original definition, outlined by Clayton M. Christensen, in his 1995 article Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,
disruptive innovations [are] technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components …often simpler than prior approaches.
i.e. using what you know, but to a better effect.
With my children, we’ve tried to maintain a log of big things they’ve done. First words, first steps, funny moments; they’re documented with a date and description in a notepad.
Looking back through the list, it’s great to be reminded of the good times, and it also helps to inform future decisions. Knowing exactly when my daughter had her first swimming lesson for instance, meant we could aim to start my sons’ lessons at around the same age.
On a more serious level, there’s the red book that every child in the UK is given at birth, which is used to track medical things like height and weight, or the dates of vaccinations. Having a record of those is obviously useful.
When it comes to code, the same principle applies. If you’ve learnt something, or written something, document it. It’s been said that Hell is other people’s code, but Hell is also your own code from 3 years ago. Either way, if it’s not been documented, it can be harder to decipher than Rongorongo. Properly commented code should point you in the right direction and help you understand what the thinking was at the time.
Same goes for commit messages: ‘did a code update, merged a feature’ is not a sufficient message. Be specific, be helpful!
This particularly applies if you do something successful, because it’s very easy to caught up in the moment and forget it later. Write things down so that you and other people can build on what you’ve done in the future. Even if your commit message consists of ‘refactored js to get the carousel working on every device’, that’s fine, because it’s good to…
It’s really important to talk about stuff you’ve done well. Milestones deserve celebration, no matter how big or small. First steps, first day at nursery without crying, first time using a spoon – those all got a cheer and an acknowledgement of how proud I was of their achievement. A little positive affirmation goes a long way, and it’s perfectly valid to give them to yourself.
Take the tree falling in the forest thought experiment… does it make a sound? I.e. does something exist unless it’s actually perceived? (It’s why Brad should never have looked in the box at the end of Se7en). To put that into a work context: if you produce quality work but no-one knows about it, was that effort futile? If nobody saw it happen, did it really happen?
For a lot of people, the idea of blowing your own trumpet is embarrassing and potentially awkward, and that’s understandable. It’d be strange if you went around extolling every git commit as if it were solving world hunger, but that’s not what I mean. If ‘celebrate your success’ is anathema to you, then let’s call it ‘communicate your efforts‘.
Sharing your process is good. I love hearing ‘Daddy, look!’ for every individual pen mark on a page – it lets me see how things are coming together – what’s going right or wrong – and it makes all the more special when the final drawing is unveiled. It’s not like every doodle needs to get put up on the fridge, but it’s nice to see (and acknowledge) progress.
Oprah puts it quite pleasantly when she says that people should celebrate:
(I can’t remember where I found that list, but it still sounds like something Oprah would say).
This is sort of related to point 5 above, but more than that, it’s about sharing your findings with the wider world. The quote is from Maya Angelou, but the concept is something I’ve tried to instil in my kids from day one.
If they have a surplus of toys, they should share with their sibling. If my daughter has learnt something new that day, then I want her to tell me about it. In the best case scenario, I’ll learn something new too – but at the very least, the act of sharing that learning helps to enrich her own understanding of it.
Einstein apparently once said “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough“, and there’s nothing quite like being tasked with ‘teaching’ a topic to get you researching it more.
I’m guilty of not doing this in my professional life enough. It can sometimes feel like there’s no appropriate outlet, or imposter syndrome kicks in and you question if anyone would gain anything from hearing your viewpoint, but there are plenty of ways to do this at a micro level. Blog posts, conference talks, volunteering at things like Code Club or codebar. Or answering stackoverflow questions, contributing to public projects, even replying to #webdev queries on twitter. More than likely, you know something that someone else doesn’t. Or at the very least, you have a different take on something. Either way, sharing is caring.
An unavoidable consequence of sharing your views is that people will question them. As soon as you start giving back, you should be prepared for feedback. And that’s a good thing – great, in fact! Sharing your own knowledge is all well and good, but it’s only your perspective. Allowing yourself to be open to alternate (sometimes conflicting) views can only be a good thing; having that dialogue will either reshape or reaffirm your own view.
Realising that ideas and plans are flexible is one of the most important things that having children has made me do. I used to plan excursions to the nth degree – timings and activities mapped out long in advance. Trying that with 2 kids in tow is beyond laughable. Not only do things take longer, but they’ve both got their own ideas as to what a ‘fun’ day entails and it wouldn’t be fair to say mine is the right way. The whole thing works best when it’s an interchange of ideas where (hopefully) everyone ends up having fun.
The crucial thing when you’re trying to be open to other ideas is to actually take on board other peoples viewpoints. Actively listen: remove any distractions, hear what they’re saying, and give feedback that you’ve understood. My daughter rightfully gets upset if she’s telling me something and I’m clearly not paying attention. It gives the impression that I don’t value what she’s saying, and it means that I don’t really hear her viewpoint, so no-one wins.
It might help to remember that listen is an anagram of silent. Mind blowing, right(?) There’s no excuse now.
One way of getting on board with this is by peer review. Encouraging critical thinking within your team is a perfect way to open yourself up to new ideas. It shouldn’t ever be a case of judging or being judged, as it’s not about being right or wrong. Be like Cicero:
i criticise by creation,
not by finding fault
It’s easy to default to ‘no’ when something isn’t exactly how you would’ve wanted it. The amount of times per day I find myself saying ‘no we can’t’ or ‘no, stop doing that’ is embarrassing. It’s (by definition) a negative word, and all it does it shut down the other persons viewpoint. Saying ‘no’ is the best way to dim a relationship, and if it’s a relationship you’re trying to nurture (e.g. parent/child) then that’s a horrible thing to realise.
It’s a basic step, but starting with ‘yes’ and framing your response as a positive is much better for everyone. It immediately validates and accepts the other person, rather than rejecting them. Following up with ‘and’ augments their opinion, rather than ‘but’ with dismisses it.
By saying ‘yes, and’, you give an idea a chance to be acted upon. The problem with using ‘no’ as a starting place is that it polarizes, prompts defensiveness, and shuts down connection and collaboration. No-one wants to hear ‘no’ about something they suggest – there’s a basic human need for pride, and that takes a big knock if you shrug off their viewpoint.
All this isn’t to say there isn’t a role for ‘no’. It’s definitely appropriate sometimes, just know when to use it. If you don’t resort to it all of the time, it’ll have more impact when you do. ‘No! Don’t touch the BBQ!’ is a good time to save ‘no’ for.
Finally, if you’re struggling with something that no-one in your immediate surroundings can help with, go external. Remember: it takes a village to raise a child; same applies to raising a developer.
It’s insanely rare that you’ll find yourself in an entirely unique predicament. There are people who have done it all before. Not sure how to start potty training? Ask other parents. Need a different approach to baby-led weaning? See what the grandparents did. The key is to learn from them, use them for help if you need to, but ultimately forge your own path as what worked for them probably wont exactly work for you.
Other developers you work with are usually the first port of call, but if you don’t have access to people irl, that’s what the internet is for. So so so so many places to look for help and advice, whatever your problem is. I like to think that for every mumsnet post, there’s a direct stackoverflow equivalent.
You can try podcasts, books (remember books?), local meet ups, conferences, medium posts… whatever wherever. You’re not alone.
See what I did there(?) You thought there’d be 10 items, and now there’s an extra one. How happy are you right now?! This approach works incredibly well with children. It’s much better to say you’ll try to bring home a toy and then come back with armfuls of plastic animals, than it is to promise you’ll get something only to find the shops are out of stock and nowhere else is open.
A study at the University of Columbia by Patricia Brosseau-Liard, Tracy Cassels, and Susan Birch found that
By age 5, children were less trusting of someone who sounded confident but had been wrong before, than someone who was tentative but had been right.
The same will apply to your colleagues (or clients).
The planning fallacy means that you’re very likely over optimistic about how long it’ll take you to do something, despite any past evidence to the contrary. If you’re aware of it when planning work, you can at least negate some of the effects. Be the person that unexpectedly comes through with the goods quicker than expected, instead of failing to do what you said you’d do.
Having children is by far the most amazing thing that’s happened to me. Meeting my wife is up there too, but for the purposes of this – learning how to code was also a pretty big deal. They’re the things that define me, so it’s only sensible for me to see where the two roles overlap and can support each other. They’re both full of responsibilities and hidden bugs. They can be the best thing one day and incredibly stressful another.
Being a parent or being a developer is a very lucky position to be in; we create things that go off into the world and which will ideally have a positive impact on it. There’s no one true way of handling either situation, but there are ways of making things easier and more enjoyable while you’re doing it. Hopefully, you’ve picked up a couple here. Come back in a decade for ’Little Scraps of Wisdom: The Teenage Years’ 😬
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