onfocus

I have about 30 articles related to the Facebook Trainwreck bookmarked but I'm going to skip them this week. (I don't have to tell you things are bad — everybody knows things are bad.) Instead, here are some other links:

• Wired: It's Time for an RSS Revival - You can't...
• Dan Cohen: Back to the Blog - ...go home again...
• Anil Dash: The Missing Building Blocks of the Web - ...but we should try!
• Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links - What an incredible journey, etc.
• Perspective-aware Manipulation of Portrait Photos - This one made my brain hurt in a good way. They're making wide lenses look like long lenses with 3D awareness.
• The Last Conversation You’ll Need to Have About Eating Right - Because it's so long and you won't want to talk about eating anymore.
• Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web - A study of inter-community conflict at Reddit. 1% of communities initiate 74% of all conflicts.
• Jeff Simmermon: This Is A Boring Shark Attack: 8 Rules for Fascinating Storytelling

I have watched this video about aluminum cans a few times over the last week or so and I keep sharing it with people in person. It has five million views on YouTube so I'm not alone. I think it's so fascinating because we are alienated from many of the things around us and this video undoes a small piece of that:

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!