onfocus

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)