onfocus

So many links, friends. Don't read them all in one sitting. Check the videos at the bottom for a mental chaser or just skip ahead to that.

• Anil Dash: 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech
• Data & Society: The Promises, Challenges, and Futures of Media Literacy
• danah boyd: You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You? - "I’m not convinced that we know how to educate people who do not share our epistemological frame."
• John Maeda: Design in Tech Report
• Erika Hall: The 9 Rules of Design Research

• The Guardian: ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower
• New York Times: How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions
• Facebook: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
• The Intercept: Facebook Quietly Hid Webpages Bragging of Ability to Influence Elections

• New York Review of Books: Disarming the Weapons of Mass Distraction
• Democracy Journal: The Future of Leisure
• The Atlantic: Huge MIT Study of ‘Fake News’: Falsehoods Win on Twitter
• New York Times: YouTube, the Great Radicalizer
• Seth Radley: The Broccoli Tree: A Parable - I'm conflicted about this one. Sharing a tragedy together isn't necessary better than avoiding the tragedy in the first place?

• umair haque: Why America Should Have Had the World’s Best Social Contract (Instead of Settling For the Worst)
• Paul Ford: Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous - This had me empathizing with the blockchain folks?
• PetaPixel: How Two Photographers Unknowingly Shot the Same Millisecond in Time - Some nice photographic forensics here.
• Dictionary.com: Emoji Archives - Writing down how we use emoji takes some of the fun out of it.
• Panic: The Mystery of the Slow Downloads - So great to see Panic clean up a corner of the Internet that seems untouchable.
• Hurry boys it's waiting there for you: Toto- Africa (playing in an empty shopping centre) via New Yorker via Lia.

The best thing from last week was this Travel Oregon video in the style of Studio Ghibli:

After that, watch actual Studio Ghibli background artist Kazuo Oga paint:

Some weekend reads culled from soc meeds:

• Mike Monteiro: This Design Generation Has Failed - Brace yourself for this one.
• Rachel Nabors: A Counterintuitive Way to Increase Diversity in Tech - Become a manager?!
• Wired: How Liberals Amped Up a Parkland Shooting Conspiracy Theory - So frustrating, this happens constantly. (I'm even hesitant to share this article.) We all need to become better filters and only share frames that are consistent with our values. And we should all read more George Lakoff.
• Wired: How Trump Conquered Facebook—without Russian Ads
• Om Malik: The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change
• Tim Kadlec: The Two Faces of AMP
• 30 Seconds of CSS - Neat snippets.
• Tom Critchlow: Small b blogging
• NYT: The Tyranny of Convenience
• Aeon: Against guilty pleasures: Adorno on the crimes of pop culture - I'm entertaining myself wrong.
• NPR: Back Pain May Be The Result Of Bending Over At The Waist Instead Of The Hips - I'm bending over wrong.
• HBR: Cold Showers Lead to Fewer Sick Days - I'm showering wrong.
• Quartzy: The Forgotten Art of Squatting is a Revelation for Bodies Ruined by Sitting - I'm sitting wrong.
• Best thing last week: Weird Al Yankovic's The Hamilton Polka - Nothing wrong here, flawless.

I have a whole series of enlightening yet depressing news stories to share with you this week, but I'm going to try not to share them. Instead:

• Pema Chödrön: How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked - Explaining the Buddhist concept of shenpa. I really enjoyed her Getting Unstuck audiobook on this topic.
• Josh S. Rose: How To Photograph Your Son - This article reminded me why I love taking pictures. Sharing pictures online turned into a not-very-fun game for me and this is a good reminder to get back to basics.
• Wathan & Schoger: 7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design
• keavy: Who I want to work for - As I read this I was thinking it could be also be called, How I want to work.
• Lots of cool D&D stuff happening on Kickstarter lately: Strongholds & Streaming rules supplement, Eye of the Beholder documentary, and mini dice boxes to name a few.
• Also really enjoying these short videos about D&D lore that lead game designer Mike Mearls is doing for D&D Beyond: Dwarves, Tieflings, Elves, and Warlocks.
• Best thing last week: Janelle Monáe channeling Prince in her new nsfw song Make Me Feel.

• Dan Hon: No one’s coming. It’s up to us. - There aren't enough across Medium to properly like/star/favorite this.

• Frank Chimero: Everything Easy is Hard Again - This about keeping our work legible.
• meowni.ca: Automatic visual diffing with Puppeteer - Promising method for finding layout bugs.
• caire - Content aware image resizing.

• Derek Powazek: Somewhere In Between - Derek is writing here again and it's great. (I really enjoy personal newsletters!)
• Vulture: In Conversation: Quincy Jones - 1.) Is this real life? 2.) How do I subscribe to QJ?
• Donald Borenstein: A style guide for writing about the rich - Ad in space was neat but we also need the big picture.
• Gizmodo: The House that Spied on Me - all IoT.

• NYT: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form Coalition to Fight What They Built - It's called Center for Humane Technology.
• The Guardian: 'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth
• The Verge: Facebook hired a full-time pollster to monitor Zuckerberg’s approval ratings - Long story short, he quit because: ethics!
• Splitsider: How Facebook Is Killing Comedy
• Weaponising the Search Box, with James Bond and Friends - Social media leads to lazy journalism?

Merlin linked to this Behind the Music (?) segment about 10cc's Not in Love and it's great. They did this before digital music editing!

They're the best:



There are a few more videos and an interview at WFUV: David Rawlings: 2018. West Coasters, see them live now. I've seen them several times and it's always an amazing show.

Lots of dystopian links for some light weekend reading!

• Boston Review: Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans - Maybe PKD was more right than Orwell or Huxley.
• Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries Into Fake Accounts
• The Follower Factory
• TechCrunch: Social media is giving us trypophobia - trypophobia isn't really a thing though?
• Vanity Fair: “This Is Serious”: Facebook Begins Its Downward Spiral
• The Guardian: ‘Never get high on your own supply’ – why social media bosses don’t use social media

• The Conversation: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there's a likely culprit - smartphones. (saved you a click.) Seriously alarming though.
• Business Insider: Woebot is a therapy chatbot and app for depression and anxiety
• danah boyd: Panicked about Kids’ Addiction to Tech?
• Paul Ford: Know Your Ecosystems! - Yeah, but ugh.

• Cullum Smith: How To Run Your Own Mail Server
• zwischenzugs: How (and Why) I Run My Own DNS Servers
• Motherboard: More Than 750 American Communities Have Built Their Own Internet Networks
• W3C: ActivityPub - decentralized social networking protocol specification.
• iwantmyname: I miss blogrolls - me too.

• Andreas Larson: Easing Gradients - Some new tools to help put together better web gradients, hooray!
• CSS Tricks: Aspect Ratio Boxes - Using SVGs to maintain aspect ratio, neat!
• Supertrain (paging Roderick on the Line, this is in your wheelhouse)

Some links for your consideration:

• NYT: The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English - I'm 40% through her translation (thanks Kindle) and it is accessible and entertaining. The introduction alone is fascinating.
• JS things I never knew existed - same.
• Onym - Tools and resources for naming things.
• Laws of UX
• How to Deal With Bad Design Suggestions
• NYT: BlackRock’s Message: Contribute to Society, or Risk Losing Our Support
• NYT: In Some Countries, Facebook’s Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News
• Wired: It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech
• naked capitalism: Social Media, the 'Dopamine Loop,' and the Role of the Software Engineer

It was just about a year ago that I posted about a new job at Oregon State Unversity Ecampus. It's a good time to stop and reflect on where I'm at. Apparently Ecampus thought so too because they did a a quick "getting to know you" interview with me: Getting to know Paul Bausch.



The interview was a nice opportunity to think about my first year and taking photos for the article with the transparent whiteboard (clearboard?) was fun. I'm enjoying my work at Oregon State and I feel like my employer is making positive contributions to society. You can't ask for more than that.

I'm on day 17 of my Twitter fast and I do feel like I'm missing things. I'd like to be able to see what's happening with friends and co-workers without feeling like I'm walking into a kaleidoscope at a circus in the middle of a casino. At one time tweets were just text. Now tweets have embedded video gifs with talismanic viral numbers attached to commentary from dozens of people I don't want to hear from. I feel like I have to wade through 85% garbage to get that 15% I'm missing.

I think I can solve the circus-casino problem™ by removing the tweets from their toxic native environment and displaying them as text-only in my archaic feed reader. And that's what I've done.

Here is tweet-skimmer. It's a node.js script I'm using that gets a user's tweets from the Twitter API and creates an RSS feed without retweets or replies. By the time the tweets hit my feed reader, they are plain text with no media embeds, no images, no kaleidoscopic bears riding tricycles, no favorite counts, and no surrounding Twitter UI.

After testing for two full days I think this will allow me to batch tweet-reading into something I can skim every so often. That way I'll feel like I'm staying up to date with specific people without picking up the daily Twitter habit again.

The metaphor I've been using lately to describe this is that my Twitter habit is like having junk food in the house. I'm sure it would be no problem to have unlimited Doritos™ if I only ever ate 15% of each bag. It just never works out that way. So I'm hoping this new bit of scripting is like only buying 15% in the first place. It's digital portion control. Fun sized tweets.

If I was still on Twitter I'd link to this article by Joel Spolsky with the text, "This." Instead, I'll say that Joel describes the Twitter and Facebook addiction problem better than I've been able to: Birdcage liners.

For a look at the mechanics behind intermittent reinforcement that Joel describes there's a book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. It's as gross as it sounds. However, it does help you look at the products you use in a new, harsher light. I'd use the book as a digital literacy exercise rather than a how-to manual as it's intended.

Here are some links to check out:

• Cory Doctorow: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention
• Los Angeles Review of Books: The Great Attention Heist
• Globe and Mail: Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down?
• Washington Monthly: How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us
• John Battelle: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed. and Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here?
• NYT: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share - PR stunt or meaningful change?
• Lauren Hallden: Towards a Bra-free Instagram Experience
• You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech - tl;dr: banning hate speech on Reddit actually reduced hate speech
• David Gilbertson: I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how. - a cautionary tale about relying on the trustworthiness of Node.js packages.
• Zero-Width Characters - fingerprinting text with control characters
• Slava Akhmechet: Mental models - A handy list of mental models organized by category
• Vox Media design team’s top 19 books to read this year
• There’s a reason using a period in a text message makes you sound angry - I do this. I have resting angry text syndrome. [via karigee.com]