« Oatmeal

You all. A week! Maybe a few. They’ve been something else, for good and ill, fun and “waaaha!?” A doozy. So, here is a doozy of a link log!

aerc; The world’s best email client

I haven’t given this a go, yet, but it looks pretty solid, and like a great/easier to use alternative to mutt or alpine.

Why I’m still using jQuery in 2019

I use jQuery just about every day, and, you know what…I really like it. 😬

Why You Should Buy Into the Emacs Platform

The title of this post is a we bit deceive-ious, it is more of a list of awesome emacs resources than a manifesto/proclamation on why you “should” use emacs.

Welcome to Linux From Scratch!

Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own custom Linux system, entirely from source code.

Why Don’t Americans Use Their Parks At Night?

However cities want to encourage more park use at night, he stresses that they need to consult the “community anchors” to ensure that it meets the needs of the entire neighborhood.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons will have skin tone customization, gender-neutral hairstyles for Villagers

This piece serves as a great follow up to this previously linked post from Austin Walker, Me, On The Screen: Race in Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Instant Pot Baked Potatoes Recipe

How to cook potatoes in an instant pot.

Is Robert’s Rules too Restrictive? Consider Martha’s Rules of Order for Meetings

See also, Martha’s Rules

Borough mayor is knitting to prove men speak too much at meetings

Montgomery said she is unfazed by criticism and will continue knitting until Christmas.

Knitting as both protest, and social signal.

Don’t slow that bus down, we’ve got places to be

But there’s a clear difference between Die Hard and Speed, […] Die Hard is about the individual — the lone wolf John McClaine, shooting his way through the terrorists — but Speed isn’t really about Reeves. It’s about the collective. It’s not just one of Keanu’s best movies; it’s one of the best movies about public transportation. Speed refutes one of the most pervasive myths about metropolitan transit systems in the U.S. — that no one rides the bus in Los Angeles — with its economically and racially diverse ensemble of riders, who must work together and with Jack Traven to keep the bus going until the bomb is dismantled.

Help For Werewolf

Werewolf! is a free-form social roleplaying game (kinda):

Link: Archive of Our Own

Be your own curator. Archivist.

Question: what is to be done with the stuff after it has been cataloged and stored? Are we pinning butterflies for the sake of pinning them, or is there a moment of beholding, and re-use/re-mix down the line?

Save and make? Transform?

I like to think of what I do with these link logs as part curation, part compost.

IBM and the Holocaust — why wasn’t this on my radar?

Juxtaposed: Wayfair workers plan walkout in protest of company’s bed sales to migrant camps.

Slight correction to CNN’s title, though — “migration camps” should be “concentration camps.”

Atlanta’s Food Forest Will Provide Fresh Fruit, Nuts, and Herbs to Forage

Most of the trees in the forest are still too young to bear fruit. But once they become productive, about five years from now, McCord expects “literal tons of fruit.”

Before you were here

[…] Needing to build your own website, setting up your own webservers, and using non-user friendly applications to transfer data not only meant that most early users had a better core understanding of the technology and what its future might bring, it also meant that users had a sense of ownership. They were shaping the medium they were consuming.

screenshots of despair

A catalog of little despair.

Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online

The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. I, as exemplified by this very post, have a tagging problem.

Interesting also in the context of “digital minimalism,” see Walking Alone: On “Digital Minimalism”.

on dat://

@kicks offering the most cogent explanation of what the heck date:// actually is that I’ve found!

Ok, so how does Dat work exactly? It is simply a unique address attached to a folder of files (kind of like a ZIP file.) You then share that folder on the network and others can sync it to their system when they visit the unique address.

SwiftUI, Privacy, macOS, and the Web

A long, but worthwhile read.

The Future of Interaction, Part II

The most important part of this announcement is the abstraction they’re working with, not the view surface being used for rendering.

Wherein the abstraction becomes a tool for focusing on interaction, rather than specific implementation.

Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies

What made iWork a success—and helped re-launch Apple—was the fact that Pages could open and save most Word files […]

[…] Apple didn’t just make an “interoperable” product that worked with an existing product in the market: they made an adversarially interoperable product whose compatibility was wrested from the incumbent, through diligent reverse-engineering and reimplementation.

The New Wilderness

The need to regulate online privacy is a truth so universally acknowledged that even Facebook and Google have joined the chorus of voices crying for change […] No two companies have done more to drag private life into the algorithmic eye than Google and Facebook.

So why have the gravediggers of online privacy suddenly grown so worried about the health of the patient?

Part of the answer is a defect in the language we use to talk about privacy. That language, especially as it is codified in law, is not adequate for the new reality of ubiquitous, mechanized surveillance.

Continuing later,

The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.

That Web Dev Thing Where Everybody Says Something Clever Involving Toast

Twitter is designed to escalate responses and keep people engaged. This has the effect of polarising discussions online which in turn has, in my mind, made it completely useless as a venue for discussing web development issues.

airtext

A decentralized blogging…thing…platform…service?

Last week I released A Dark Room to the Nintendo Switch. Within the game, I also shipped a Ruby interpreter and a code editor as an Easter Egg.

SuperTuxKart, a game that I played in…middle school!?…just hit 1.0!

Bulletin Butter and Jelly

If I set up a BBS would you want in? What would you want to BBS “about?”

Texting Means Never Having to Say Goodbye

I thought about the last time I’d actually typed ttfn. I imagine it was at least 18 years ago, on my family’s Gateway desktop during the era of dial-up AOL. And then I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I said “g2g,” or even “bye,” in an online conversation.

The medium is the message, and the message is nearly always deliverable. So easy to be alone when you can’t ever be apart. Never say “good bye,” but are you then always alone?

Go! Make a game — play a game.

• Phaser is a fun, free and fast 2D game framework for making HTML5 games for desktop and mobile web browsers, supporting Canvas and WebGL rendering
• PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs

Report on Anthem’s development woes draws terse response from BioWare

Also see Jack de Quidt on this.

here’s the wild thing that it feels almost impossible to say in the games industry: the game doesn’t mean shit! it’s lights and colours! it’s nice to play one and it’s nice to make a good one, sure

but — and i mean this very sincerely — if the production of the object ruins the lives and health of the people making it, the object doesn’t mean shit! what — you shipped a fun mech game? or a good cowboy game? great. who’s taking medical leave?

All games are a mess

I love that strange homemade games like The Frogs Of War and Legacy Of The Golden Hammer exist, these unpolished mishmashes of ideas and design as a form of creative expression. Enjoying these games is a way to enjoy all games, to accept that everything is from the same cloth, a different flawed piece of creativity, a different glimpse into what can be created.

On Flooding: Drowning the Culture in Sameness

And how much discovery can there be, really, with the same critics occupying the same space?

Hard left turn to allow me to insert a different conversation/question at this point on algorithmic curation.

Does algorithmic curation cutout the human element in what would elsewise be an artistic effort of mixing, or does it simply push the person a little further away — algorithm programmer as space builder, and us the “viewing audience” as participant in a shared effort of consumptive curation…

So, you know, Derrida?

\_(ツ)_/

The Roundups of SHACKLESHOTGUN

Also see @kicks on roundups. (Thanks for the link-love, btw! (I enjoy collecting things, and this exercise is a good way of scratching that itch. My favorite part of collecting is making the collage at the end — by putting disparate things in proximity to one another making a new thing. These posts are my trying to do that. If you are interested in the unfiltered stream oh-links that are eventually paired down to become this, check out my profile on reading.am))

Why there is so little left of the early internet

Sometimes the sites that are lost echo even more seismic changes; the deaths and births of nations themselves. “It happened with Yugoslavia; .yu was the top-level domain for Yugoslavia, and that ended when it collapsed. There’s a researcher who is trying to rebuild what was there before the break-up,” she says.

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Parameters are dead last on my list of powerful interventions. Diddling with the details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably 90, no 95, no 99 percent of our attention goes to parameters, but there’s not a lot of leverage in them.

Can we truly think about climate change at all?

Object Oriented Ontology says no. Enter the “Hyperobjects.”

Make it hard to screw up driven development

This is the request web dev resources link.

ttfn