onfocus

I've been enjoying some time away from the Web for the holidays. Hope your year is off to a good start. Here are some recent URLs I enjoyed:

• Quartz: Simone de Beauvoir's daring response to imposter syndrome (existentialism vs. stoicism)
• Wikipedia: Narcissism of small differences (one reason why groups with more similarities than differences fight. cut this out!)
• NiemanLab: Headlines Matter
• The Atlantic: How Marketers Get You to Buy New Stuff
• Hackernoon: 10 things I learned making the fastest site in the world (web performance techniques)
• GitHub: GoogleChrome/lighthouse: Auditing, performance metrics, and best practices for Progressive Web Apps
• Aeon: Sugar is a toxic agent that creates conditions for disease (happy new year! )
• Kevin Rose: Introducing "Zero", a new app to help you fast
• Micro.blog (distributed & aggregated tweet-style weblog system)
• Anil Dash: A billion dollar gift for Twitter
• The Guardian: Joseph Goebbels' 105-year-old secretary: 'No one believes me now, but I knew nothing'

More links from the link mill. We're past the solstice which means the days get lighter from here—literally at least if not metaphorically. If you only have time for one link, read the New Statesman article about mass false memories and the communites that have sprung up around them: The movie that doesn't exist and the Redditors who think it does.

Corruption

• Center for Public Integrity: Donald Trump's sons behind nonprofit selling access to president-elect
• Politico: Gingrich: Congress should change ethics laws for Trump
• Teen Vogue: Donald Trump's National Security Advisor Met with 'Alt-Right' Freedom Party Leader
• USA Today: Lawyer: 'Appalled' by FBI warrant that shook Clinton

Action

• Resigning from Oracle
• EFF: Your threat model just changed.
• Schneier on Security: My Priorities for the Next Four Years

Online Community

• Fast Company: Internet Comments Are Awful. Could They Be Awesome?
• The Conversation: How news sites' online comments helped build our hateful electorate
• Jeff Jarvis: Facebook Steps Up

Neat Tech

• Google Web Designer
• GoAccess - Visual Web Log Analyzer
• Oxford Dictionaries API

Misc.

• Audio Engineering Society: The Effects of MP3 Compression on Perceived Emotional Characteristics in Musical Instruments
• Bloomberg: The Pessimist's Guide to 2017 (it me!)
• Against The Wicked City: On romantic fantasy and OSR D&D (D&D play style alternative via mefi)
• The Conversation: A sacred light in the darkness: Winter solstice illuminations at Spanish missions (architecture aligned with nature via @somebitsLinks)
• New Statesman: The movie that doesn't exist and the Redditors who think it does (see also: berenstein retcon. fascinating that more than one or two of these mass false memories exist.)