onfocus

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]

I save links in Safari's Reading List on my iPhone so I can reference them later. Sharing them here on my blog is their final resting place. Once posted here, I remove the links from my reading list and the cycle of cruft can begin again. It's a similar process to—and as exciting as—defragmenting your hard drive. How many hours did I spend watching the defrag visualization colors rearrange themselves in Windows Disk Defragmenter? That's rhetorical, but many. Many hours. Of watching. Now you too can watch the metaphorical defrag colors along with me:

First, go listen to the latest episode of Matt Haughey's podcast Hobby Horse where he interviews people about their side projects. In Episode 4 he talks with Erica Baker about ancestry and geneology and it absolutely changed the way I look at family trees. We’re all connected in ways I hadn’t thought about before. So great—go listen!

While I'm talking podcasts, Gimlet has a new one out called The Habitat that I'm hooked on after one episode. It's about a NASA study to determine how six humans live together for a year in a confined space. They're trying to simulate the conditions that people would live in on a mission to Mars. You can binge the whole thing.

Last week I posted about the SmugMug/Flickr exchange and I've been enjoying the takes: Tom Coates, Ben Cerveny, Jim Ray, and for context this 2012 article (cold take?) by Mat Honan: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.

Did you know you can look up at least some of the interests Twitter has assigned to you for personalized advertising? I was surprised at how accurate some of the more obscure interests were but I shouldn't be. We need more privacy and dumber phones.

Google set up a new way to query information in books called Talk to Books. As an introvert I feel like Google really gets me with this project, you know? I'll just be over here talking to books.

@lhl found a tumblr dedicated to gathering depictions of floppy disks in anime. It's even better than it sounds.

ok, off to delete my reading list. Defrag complete!

Aaron Draplin at the OSU Brand Symposium showing the inspiration for his DDC Hardware typeface. The onfocus title up there is DDC Hardware.

So the big news in my corner of the Internet on Friday was indie photo site SmugMug buying Flickr from corporate bohemeth Yahoo/Oauth (or whatever). You can probably tell by my framing how I feel about it. I'm hopeful!

I posted my first photo to Flickr on August 18, 2004: luna in her office bed. (This was back when the founders would comment on new photos!) I wrote little hacks for Flickr like Add Camera Images to Flickr. And a year after that first photo I was co-writing a book about Flickr that was released a few months later. I was all-in on Flickr and it was central to my online life.

But all was not well in the Flickrverse and I became more and more disappointed with what Yahoo! was doing with the service. A year after Flickr Hacks came out I started writing here about ways to move off of Flickr and back to hosting my own images: Going Off the Flickr Grid. My personal photo site/Flickr clone lived from 2007-2010 or so at photos.onfocus.com. (I posted what I thought would be my final photo to Flickr, here on March 14, 2007: 301_moved.)

After that initial burst of off-the-grid activity, my personal photo blog features couldn't compare with the upload, album, and sharing features available at Flickr. I didn't have time to scale up my site so I continued posting to Flickr—especially when I wanted to share a collection of photos. I was disappointed with myself for not living up to my online ideals. (This is a constant life theme!)

Anyway, all of this is just to say that my relationship with Flickr is complicated. I know my mixed feelings are nothing compared with the folks who were inside building Flickr and I hope their story gets told. I'd love to know why Flickr missed the mobile revolution and today we have Instagram influencers instead of Flickr luminaries (or whatever). I think this acquisition (is it? More details please!) is a great chance to revive the good parts of Flickr—especially its sense of community where Flickr started.

I stumbled on this great podcast about philosophy that you should check out if you also like things such as philosophy and podcasts. (I didn't so much stumble on it as Spotify's recommendation algorithm put it in my path and then I stumbled on it.)

Each episode is about 20 minutes of host Stephen West walking us through some problems that philosophers have tackled through years. For example, are we condemned to be free as Sartre thought or are we limited by the structure of our cultural mythologies as Barthes thought? If you need a place to start, you can't go wrong with his look at Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity. West has a real knack for making dense, often technical philosophical ideas accessible.

When the prescription for fixing our dystopian techno-hellscape is often adding more humanity, I think it's worthwhile to take some time to think about what it means to be human. Philosophize This is an entertaining way to see how that question has been answered in many radically different ways.

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!

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.