« Oatmeal

Just saying, ‘Everyone should stop driving and eat plants instead of beef’—that isn’t storytelling. That’s advertising, which doesn’t work any longer.

I got older last weekend so took a week off from assembling the link log. Gonna do a bit of ketchup here between playing levels of Baba is You.

Brace yourself!

Academics: it’s time to get behind decolonising the curriculum

Many advocates of decolonisation don’t want to abolish the canon; they want to interrogate its assumptions and broaden our intellectual vision to include a wider range of perspectives. While decolonising the curriculum can mean different things, it includes a fundamental reconsideration of who is teaching, what the subject matter is and how it’s being taught.

Elsewhere in the article,

When we offer white male-dominated reading lists we also teach students the wrong lessons about who is an intellectual authority and deserves our attention.

Privacy’s not an abstraction

Privacy for marginalized populations has never been, and will never be an abstract. Being surveilled, whether by private actors, or the state, is often the gateway to very tangible harms–violence in the form of police brutality, incarceration, or deportation. And there can be more subliminal, insidious impacts, too.

Continuing later,

…there is a valuable lesson here–just not the one that was intended. The idea that surveillance would be used as an assignment on those with no options for consent speaks to how broken our ideas about consent have become, trivializing what to many people is a life and death matter of their lived existence.

To loop back to decolonizing for a moment: this is why I think that “decolonization” isn’t enough — I think we need to go the step further and queer the curriculum (well, I think we need to queer a lot of things, tbh). Queer thought is powerful for a plethora of reasons, none of which I’m qualified to talk about, but I do know that it offers am appropriate framework for including consent, even prioritizing it. So, yes decolonization. Yes queering.

Dream Askew/Dream Apart

Dream Askew

Queer strife amid the collapse. Collaboratively generate an apocalyptic setting. For 3-6 players across 3-4 hours. By Avery Alder

Dream Apart

Jewish fantasy of the shtetl. Immerse yourself in a fantastical version of history. For 3-6 players across 3-4 hours. By Benjamin Rosenbaum

Dream Askew and Dream Apart are two games of belonging outside belonging.

They run on the same system: no dice, no masters, a structured freeform game with shared worldbuilding.

(See also: These Games Prove That Not Every Tabletop RPG Needs a 300 Page Manual, Jack de Quidt writing for Waypoint)

How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger

The power of kindness and patience for a parent. I’ve been trying to take this to heart. And to slow down…remind myself that the “schedule” usually, rarely, really doesn’t matter that much.

You Should Organize a Study Group/Book Club/Online Group/Event! Tips on How to Do It

I’ve tried to start many groups, and have failed most times. This blog post is a good reference for starting something. (Anyone wanna start a thing? Do a thing?)

Tilde.Town : The Hidden e-Village

I’ve been a resident of tilde.town for a while, and since then have explored a couple other tilde servers. I am smitten.

Making books to build communities, building communities to make books.

The power of the web (for better or worse!) might be distilled into two fundamental characteristics:

1. the ability to transmit and receive information instantaneously and cheaply
2. the ability to gather and harness communities (loosely joined ones like Facebook friends with shared cultural interests, and tightly joined ones like work colleagues collaborating on a project)

(…very tangentially related: iOS “versus” JavaScript: How to Learn From Other Programming Communities)

And some game dev resources

• Game Programming Patterns
• PICO-ATE; ALTRUISTIC TEMPLATE ENCYCLOPEDIA FOR PICO-8

This metal is powering today’s technology—at what price?

The “renewable” future — replacing one sort of extraction with another.

Life Without the Everything Store

Kottke’s digestion (always primo) or go straight to the source: I Tried to Block Amazon From My Life. It Was Impossible.

tl;dr? Amazon. It is everywhere. It is hard to avoid. Really, really hard to avoid, most especially if you do pretty much nearly anything online. Amazon is legion.

WebSockets the UNIX way; Full duplex messaging between web browsers and servers

PIPES!

Five-minute Explainer: What Is Gravity?

What even is gravity? Learn in (about) five minutes! I very much enjoy Emily St’s science writing.

Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS

The medium is the message…and sometimes we use the wrong medium to communicate a message.

…regression is lurking, because the industry is making it too hard to work directly with the web. The towering demands inherent in certain ways of working with JavaScript are rightfully scaring some designers off from implementing their ideas at all. That’s a travesty.

Follow up! Paying tribute to the web with View Source

Make Your ARIA Labels Sing on Key

This article does a great job contextualizing aria-labels, and how best to implement them. The audio examples provided are perfect — I think it is interesting that I’ve never actually seen anyone else bother to create examples like this before. The audio examples bring aria-labels from an abstract concept, to a concrete interface element.

When To Buy Your Own ISBNs

Sharing this because I had no clue one could purchase ISBN numbers, let alone their power!

Twitter aliens

A story told on Twitter, in the first person, featuring aliens, a smart phone, and bananas.