A 2016 version of the 1914 Isochronic London/World travel times map
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Kind: Reposts
Forza Horizon 4 is really very British
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There is a phenomenon of culture that I’m not convinced has a name. Living in the UK, the vast, vast majority of the media I consume is from the US. And nearly always has been. While television was more localised, all my life the films and games (and indeed an awful lot of the TV) I’ve watched and played has not only come from America, but been set there, or created by people whose perception of life is based there. And, while we may share a decent proportion of a common language, we really are very different countries and indeed continents. The result of this being, the media I watch that comes from the US is in many senses alien, to the point where a film set in an American high school might as well be set on a spaceship for all the familiarity it will have to my own lived experiences.
Which makes playing Forza Horizon 4 a really bloody weird thing. It’s… it’s British. Which is causing my double-takes to do double-takes.
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I’m not usually a fan of driving games, but this review of Forza Horizon 4 on Rock Paper Shotgun makes me want to give it a try. It sounds like the designers have worked incredibly hard to make the game feel genuinely-British without falling back on tired old tropes.
It’s time to winterize your vagina
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Breakout your plug-in vibrator and don’t forget the snow stud sheath. No battery-powered device can plow through vaginal snow pack. You need alternating current to warm that shit up after a long day of sitting naked outside filling your vagina with snow and ice. Don’t get clitoral anti freeze though, that crap stings like a motherfucker.
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I don’t know whether I should describe this as being hilarious despite not having a vagina, or because of not having a vagina, but honestly it was side-splitting however you look at it. Gynaecologist/author/blogger/educator/blogger Dr. Jen Gunter points and laughs at a Daily Mirror tweet discussing “winter vagina”, and provides her own tips for dealing with the phenomenon. Warm up the mulled wine, ladies!
Escape from Spiderhead
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“Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.
“What’s in it?” I said.
“Hilarious,” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak™ whirred. Soon the Interior Garden looked really nice. Everything seemed super-clear.
I said out loud, as I was supposed to, what I was feeling.
“Garden looks nice,” I said. “Super-clear.”
Abnesti said, “Jeff, how about we pep up those language centers?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Drip on?” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness. It was as if I could suddenly discern, in this contemporary vignette, the ancient corollary through which Plato and some of his contemporaries might have strolled; to wit, I was sensing the eternal in the ephemeral.
I sat, pleasantly engaged in these thoughts, until the Verbaluce™ began to wane. At which point the garden just looked nice again. It was something about the bushes and whatnot? It made you just want to lay out there and catch rays and think your happy thoughts. If you get what I mean.
Then whatever else was in the drip wore off, and I didn’t feel much about the garden one way or the other. My mouth was dry, though, and my gut had that post-Verbaluce™ feel to it.
“What’s going to be cool about that one?” Abnesti said. “Is, say a guy has to stay up late guarding a perimeter. Or is at school waiting for his kid and gets bored. But there’s some nature nearby? Or say a park ranger has to work a double shift?”
“That will be cool,” I said.
“That’s ED763,” he said. “We’re thinking of calling it NatuGlide. Or maybe ErthAdmire.”
“Those are both good,” I said.
“Thanks for your help, Jeff,” he said.
Which was what he always said.
“Only a million years to go,” I said.
Which was what I always said.
Then he said, “Exit the Interior Garden now, Jeff, head over to Small Workroom 2.”
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This reads like what would have happened if Harlan Ellison had lived long enough to be asked to guest-write for the next season of Black Mirror. Go read the entire beautiful, creepy, thing.
SQLite Code Of Ethics (formerly Code of Conduct)
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- Attribute to God, and not to self, whatever good you see in yourself.
- Recognize always that evil is your own doing, and to impute it to yourself.
- Fear the Day of Judgment.
- Be in dread of hell.
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In an age when more and more open-source projects are adopting codes of conduct that reflect the values of a tolerant, modern, liberal society, SQLite – probably the most widely-used database system in the world, appearing in everything from web browsers to games consoles – went… in a different direction. Interesting to see that, briefly, you could be in violation of their code of conduct by failing to love everything else in the world less than you love Jesus. (!)
After the Internet collectively went “WTF?”, they’ve changed their tune and said that this guidance, which is based upon the Rule of St. Benedict, is now their Code of Ethics, and their Code of Conduct is a little more… conventional.
Rehabilitating Google AMP: My failed attempt
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This article is a follow-up to my article “Why Google AMP is a threat to the Open Web”. In the comments of that article I promised I’d soon provide a follow-up, and for reasons I’ll get into, that has not been possible until now – but now I’m finally providing it.
Back in February I wrote an article saying how I believed Google AMP has been imposed on the web by Google as a ‘standard’ for developing fast webpages, and my dismay about that. Google apparently developed this as an internal project without any open collaboration, and avoiding the W3C standardization processes. Google made implementation of Google AMP a requirement to show at the top of the search results for common news searches.
To many of us open web folk, Google’s AMP violated the widely held principle of search engines not putting bias into search results, and/or the principle of web standards (take your pick – it would not be bias if it was a standardized approach that the wider web community had agreed upon).
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You know how I feel about AMP. I’m not alone, and others are doing a pretty good job of talking to Google about our concerns. Unfortunately, Google aren’t listening.
#youbroketheinternet So We Got Tracked Anyway
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Did you install EFF’s brilliant Privacy Badger or any other smart HTTP Cookie management tool? Or did you simply pick the privacy preference in your browser that ignores all third-party cookies? Did many websites you visit annoy you with permission-to-use-cookies pop-ups because of European legislation?
Guess what, it’s all been useless.
Hamburg university researchers have examined closely how web browsers implement so-called TLS session resumption and how the top million popular websites make use of that feature. They found that 80% of websites make a correct use, unsuitable for tracking repeat visitors — just resuming an existing session within the last ten minutes.
Unfortunately though, Google is present on 80% of these websites in form of Analytics, Fonts or other third-party inclusions. And among 10% of sites that do not respect reasonable resumption times, Google sticks out as one of the most greedy ones — it allows for a web browser to stay offline for over a day, and still be recognized as the same web browser the next day. Considering that it is nearly impossible to surf the web without accessing some Google content, this means that Google can track all your surfing habits without any need for HTTP Cookies!
As Facebook isn’t as pervasively present in all of the web, it went even further. It is enough for you to visit any website bearing a Like button every second day to allow Facebook to profile you, even if you never dreamt of logging into that service. Could it be our researchers just caught these companies with their hands deep in the cookie jar (pun intended)? For how long have they been collecting user data this way?
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Somewhat conspiracy-theory-like take on an actual, real privacy issue: the fact that TLS makes tracking pretty easy even without cookies. If you thought my 301-based cookieless tracking was clever, this is cleverer. And harder to detect, to boot.
SHE BON : Sensing the Sensual
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I don’t know if this is genius or insanity, but either way it’s pretty remarkable. Lost my shit at “pop girl”. Lost it again at “I can poke the nipple”.
It takes a true engineer to think to themselves, “Hey, I wonder if I could use technology to tell me when I’m feeling aroused? That sounds like a useful project.” I love it.
CSS Border-Radius Can Do That? | IO 9elements
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TL/DR: When you use eight values specifying border-radius in CSS, you can create organic looking shapes. WOW. No time to read it all ?— we made a visual tool for you. Find it here.
Introduction
During this year’s Frontend Conference Zurich Rachel Andrew talked about Unlocking the Power of CSS Grid Layout. At the end of her talk, she mentioned something about an old CSS property that got stuck in my head:
“The Image is set round just by using the well-supported border-radius. Don’t forget that old CSS still exists and is useful. You don’t need to use something fancy for every effect.” — Rachel Andrew
Shortly after I heard this talk, I thought that you certainly could create more than just circles and started to dig deeper into what can be done using border-radius.
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That’s really cool. I had a quick play and made this gold ‘shield’ award:
You Win A Prize!
JACOB PRETENDS TO BE STRAIGHT… | The Trueman Show! Ep 13
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The Fratocrats at their funniest.
Letter of Recommendation: Escape Rooms
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Think of all the ways you already insert pleasurable, circumscribed bursts of risk into your life. Maybe you watch horror movies, consume hot sauce, jaywalk. Maybe you pursue casual sex or steal Splenda packets from Starbucks or treat the speed limit as a cute suggestion. An escape game is like stacking these things atop one another and rounding out the itinerary with a medium-scary roller coaster. The panic is real even if the pressure is an illusion. You won’t die or get stuck in the 1980s if you fail to escape; an employee will simply unlatch the door and let you out with a “Better luck next time.”
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As a big fan of escape rooms and the gaming experience they represent, I really enjoyed this NYT piece.
Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry…
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Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.
I’m still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I’d be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of shit on day one.
This will be a super slow burn that goes back many years. I’ll continue to add to over the next couple of days. I’ll preface it with a bunch of backstory and explain what I had left behind, which made me more unhappy about the culture I had come into.
I spent most of my early career working for two radical sister non-profit orgs. I was the only designer working on anywhere from 4-5 different products at the same time. All centered around activism and used by millions of people.
It’s how I cut my teeth. Learned to be the designer that I am today. Most importantly, the people I worked for are imho some of the greatest people on the planet. Highly intelligent, empathetic, caring, and true role models for a young me. I adore them.
You might not know who they are, but if you’re reading this then you have definitely seen their work. Maybe OpenCongress, or Miro, or maybe Amara which is Vimeo’s partner transcription service. Definitely Fight for the Future, our internet defenders, which was shortly after me.
I married the love of my life in 2008, started a family, and at some point realized that I simply needed to make a better living. No matter how prolific, non-profits usually can’t provide the type of income that you need for a growing family with huge ambitions.
So as I gained visibility – via @dribbble – I started to field recruiters and consider new opportunities. Mostly little startups. I interviewed at one (Rockmelt) and they passed on me (hi, @iamxande ?).
Got an email from Kickstarter (hi, @amotion ?). Schlepped to New York and wasted days of time to be passed on by their founders. Then they unfollowed me on twitter. At least I ate some deli. ?
Then Google reached out. I remember that ”holy shit” moment. “Me!? Are they kidding?? The schmuck who tested out of high school and dropped out of college??” They told me I’d interview to work on Chrome. I was over the moon. I remember Manda tearing up. God I love her.
They gave me a little bit of time for a design exercise. You can see it here in all it’s dated glory: morganallanknutson.com/google/ Click and hold for the overlay. More schlepping from LA and an interview at their silly college-like campus. I was a nervous wreck.
The process felt very haphazard. At one point a front-end dev with a bow-tie grilled me on CSS and asked some super dumb questions. My advocate (a sweetheart named Peter) seemed to be rushing people through, quelling their fears. I still appreciate his belief in me to this day.
I felt like I had done ok. The last two interviews that I failed at were real shots to the heart. I took this one incredibly seriously. I wanted this job so badly. I wanted to prove I was worthy.
Weeks went by and I heard nothing. I accepted the inevitable and started responding to other recruiters. It was ok. I wasn’t joining the big leagues. I could play triple-A ball for longer. As long as I got up to SF where the opportunities were.
I took a gig with a failing news startup (lol) called Ongo (hi, @bethdean ?). They got me up here. I guess it was a bit of a Hail Mary for them. In a couple of months I knocked out more work than they could have built in a year with their eng team. Then…
Google got back in touch almost 3-4 months after the interview (who does this??).
I got the job.
To be continued…
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If you ever thought that Google+, despite its laudable aims, was rolled out like a shitstorm… image what it must have been like behind the scenes. Actually, image no more – read this thread for a taste of the full horror.
The peculiar history of the Ordnance Survey
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The history of the organisation known as OS is not merely that of a group of earnest blokes with a penchant for triangulation and an ever-present soundtrack of rustling cagoules.
From its roots in military strategy to its current incarnation as producer of the rambler’s navigational aid, the government-owned company has been checking and rechecking all 243,241 sq km (93,916 sq miles) of Great Britain for 227 years. Here are some of the more peculiar elements in the past of the famous map-makers.
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The Ruby Story
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By 2005, Ruby had become more popular, but it was still not a mainstream programming language. That changed with the release of Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails was the “killer app” for Ruby, and it did more than any other project to popularize Ruby. After the release of Ruby on Rails, interest in Ruby shot up across the board, as measured by the TIOBE language index:
It’s sometimes joked that the only programs anybody writes in Ruby are Ruby-on-Rails web applications. That makes it sound as if Ruby on Rails completely took over the Ruby community, which is only partly true. While Ruby has certainly come to be known as that language people write Rails apps in, Rails owes as much to Ruby as Ruby owes to Rails.
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As an early adopter of Ruby (and Rails, when it later came along) I’ve always found that it brings me a level of joy I’ve experienced in very few other languages (and never as much). Every time I write Ruby, it takes me back to being six years old and hacking BASIC on my family’s microcomputer. Ruby, more than any other language I’ve come across, achieves the combination of instant satisfaction, minimal surprises, and solid-but-flexible object orientation. There’s so much to love about Ruby from a technical perspective, but for me: my love of it is emotional.
Matreon: The Patreon Platform for Emotional Labor
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Dear Guy Who Can’t Read The Room:
Hello and thank you for attempting to engage in an unsolicited conversation with me! In order to ensure our interaction is productive and enriching for both parties, I invite you to join my Matreon. For just a few dollars a month, you can continue to approach me with whatever the hell is on your mind regardless of context or appropriateness, and I will continue to do the emotional labor required to respond without calling you a privileged, myopic dipshit.
Since you’re obviously the most important person in the universe and everything should cater to your needs, I’ve created a number of exciting options that you can take advantage of. You know, like you take advantage of the way that women are culturally trained to be sweet and helpful when you fart words in their direction.
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You know what: there are probably guys who’d pay for this and would then use their doing so as an illustration that women “need men to (financially) support them”.