onfocus

Fellow Corvallians, this is a nice stroll through downtown. John M. Burt points out some bits of Corvallis history that we can still see today.

Need some design inspiration? This is a great collection of comic book covers from 2018. I added quite a few to my list of comics to find. It also reminded me that I loved the disorienting Why Art? from earlier this year and I don't think I mentioned it here.

Good evening Newsletter Wednesday fans! :crickets: If you’re reading this you’re probably already familiar with kottke.org, one of the last surviving general interest weblogs (or “blogs” for short). It survives because Jason finds amazing things and describes them in ways that make us amazed with him. What you might not know is that he teamed up with frequent kottke guest-blogger Tim Carmody to produce a weekly newsletter recap called Noticing. Even though I keep up with the site in near real-time, I appreciate the way the weekly version ties posts together into themes. The newsletter has been going for a year now and it’s always a must-read.

I would like Scott Andrew to turn them all into scarols.

Dinah Sanders has some great tips for incorporating 3D terrain into D&D games. She also has some good accessory resources at the end. We’ve come a long way from graph paper.

See also: My 2016 post about Modern D&D Tools.

Nothing, to me, says end-of-the-year like a numeric list. And no one lists things like David Rees. Join him for the 10th year of rounding up the best of the year(s). Who can forget the most unforgettable things of 2018? (Not David Rees.)

I'm a habitual iPhone settings-changer and I still found settings to tweak in this article. The central premise of this article is that your phone should be a tool that helps you not a director that tells you how to spend your time and attention. It's a good companion piece to Cal Newport's Deep Work—a book-length why behind changing your relationship with your phone.

I feel seen. And mocked. The only cure for this burn is more bokeh.

Good morning newsletter Wednesday fans! :tumbleweed: This is my favorite weekly newsletter from O'Reilly with industry news about all things data: storage, visualization, and machine learning. I feel like it has a slice of news that I don't see from other sources. I also enjoy their web platform newsletter I just happen to already subscribe to many, many web news sources. While I have you here, check out their Product Manager and Design humble bundle happening for the next 12 days. You can get a virtual stack of great books about design for under $15. It includes Articulating Design Decisions which I've always been curious about.

This is a good summary of the twists and turns in the Facebook saga. What makes this article interesting to me is that Mother Jones discusses their own relationship with Facebook over the years. Facebook sent them lots of traffic at the height of "Facebook as news feed" and they profited from it. This kind of symbiotic media relationship is a big part of the Facebook story but most media outlets don't want to discuss it. For example see: CBC's longstanding tech columnist condemns the broadcaster's cozy relationship with Facebook. Companies are still driving traffic to Facebook every day by encouraging their users to connect and subscribe via Facebook. Those solicitations are an endorsement of Facebook. We should discuss this part of the system.

This is a fun article aimed at aspiring visual artists but I think there's good advice here for anyone who makes things. I especially appreciated Embed thought in material and Learn the Difference Between Subject Matter and Content.

Visit the ghost of Christmas past.