onfocus

Thanks for joining me as I clear out my saved links. It is time for week-old links to enter the carousel...

Recommend Me A Book is a fun site. It shows the text from the first page of a book and you can reveal the title and author after you read. I had fun trying to guess the book as I read.

I also had fun this week playing with random text engine Perchance. You give it some base text, a few simple rules, and you get a random text generator. I made one that predicts what's coming next in technology: next gen. (e.g. "hyperlocal ocelot conferencing" is the sort of thing this would generate.) Looking at the generators community page I see there are lot of people using it for D&D so I predict that I will be back in the future to make more.

I'm still on my mechanical keyboard bs. Massdrop is a site that organizes group buys of keyboards and keycaps. They have a good overview of why some people get into them: Mechanical Keyboards 101. I don't buy keyboards anymore though, I just read Massdrop for the articles.

The worst aspects of web culture were on display this week in Kathy Griffen's Standing up to Trump and Erin Biba's What It’s Like When Elon Musk’s Twitter Mob Comes After You. These are a good lesson in punching up/down and a reminder that this behavior isn't inevitable. The people who own and control the spaces where we interact online (hi, Twitter!) can stop this.

Zeldman on modern web development: The Cult of the Complex. I was nodding along with this, especially: "The question for web designers should never be how complex can we make it. But that’s what it has become." I don't think people consciously try to make development processes complex, but they end up that way through decisions by folks who aren't thinking about projects past their next deadline. Sean Kelly posted a thread on Twitter about what he looks for in a software engineer that seems related to me.

One of the reasons I went with a Logan's Run reference up top is because I just finished watching the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. I'm pretty sure the Logan's Run designers were inspired by 70s commune fashion. This documentary uses a lot of TV video footage from the time paired with beautiful modern cinematography. It gave me a lot to think about—I'm going to be processing this one for a while.

Also processing: this Twitter thread by Erynn Brook on mansplaining and different conversational styles. (Continuing wish: less Twitter as a platform for these kinds of conversations and more personal blogs.)

We don't deserve it, but there's a new Neko Case album!

Renew, renew!

The big links tend to eat the smaller links, but new links are born every day to replace them. Here now are a few links gathered from their natural habitat and presented for exhibition.

Remember TV? They still make shows for it and some of them are enjoyable. If you're a fan of Ernest Shackleton or the Age of Discovery you should check out The Terror. It's not Shackleton's story unfortunately, but it is speculative fiction about Franklin's lost expedtion with some supernatural horror elements thrown in for—I don't know—fun? It's very well done and you could follow it up with a recent NOVA episode called Arctic Ghost Ship to ground the story in reality again.

I've also been enjoying Legion which is the least Marvel-y of all the Marvel shows and has some stellar acting. You really need start with the first season on this one to get up to speed and it helped me to watch along with the fine folks of MeFi.

Check out these early data visualizations from 1953 by Herbert Bayer: The World Geo-Graphical Atlas. I found this via a great profile of Field Notes: Why Field Notes Have Remained Curiously Addictive for a Decade. That also lead me to their collection of promotional memo books. There are still lessons to learn from this almost forgotten, functional design.

I use Stack Overflow just about every day and they recently launched a neat new way for teams to use their knowledge-gathering tools privately: Stack Overflow for Teams. And by 'they' I specifically mean my friend Geoff at SO who worked on this project, congrats on the launch!

The Tarot Cards of Tech will help you think about the future of something you're making. These cards have questions that don't come up when you're focused on the next to-do item and they seem like a fun way to step back and think about the big picture.

I haven't used The Greatest Keyboard of All Time (IBM Model M) and I'm skeptical of that title since we all agree that Realforce Topre keyboards are the GOAT.

I've been thinking about shift vs. support conversation since I read The Mistake I Made With My Grieving Friend.

If you haven't seen Childish Gambino's This is America you must have been offline for the past seven days. Welcome back and you have to see this!

Let us now fade into the background having examined links outside of their natural environment. Perhaps we will better understand them next time we ecounter: The Cycle of Link. [music swells, credits]

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.

My dad has an encyclopedic knowledge of classic rock and he just started a classic rock blog called On the Records. He's writing brief but dense artist summaries that are easier to digest than a wikipedia entry. He's also adding personal stories about his relationship with music. His post From Records to Playlists reminded me just how far music technology has progressed in a short period of time. Blogs! They're still neat. If you like music that was mostly delivered via vinyl you should meet my dad.