Tags: fun

In 1979, two books shaped my formative years • Supernatural Detective’s Field Guide

This is such a great project from Jon—a mashup of two books from his childhood!

Put that RSS feed in your feed reader.

Why “AI” projects fail

“AI” is heralded (by those who claim it to replace workers as well as those that argue for it as a mere tool) as a thing to drop into your workflows to create whatever gains promised. It’s magic in the literal sense. You learn a few spells/prompts and your problems go poof. But that was already bullshit when we talked about introducing other digital tools into our workflows.

And we’ve been doing this for decades now, with every new technology we spend a lot of money to get a lot of bloody noses for way too little outcome. Because we keep not looking at actual, real problems in front of us – that the people affected by them probably can tell you at least a significant part of the solution to. No we want a magic tool to make the problem disappear. Which is a significantly different thing than solving it.

The Frontend Treadmill - These Yaks Ain’t Gonna Shave Themselves

Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.

Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting this is strictly better and the answer to all of your problems. I’m suggesting this as an intentional business tradeoff that I think provides more value and is less costly in the long run.

IndieWeb principles · Paul Robert Lloyd

I really, really like Paul’s idea of splitting up the indie web principles into one opinionated nerdy list of dev principles, and a separate shorter list of core principles for everyone:

1. Own your identity An independent web presence starts with an online identity you own and control. The most reliable way to do this today is by having your own domain name.
2. Own your content You should retain control of the things you make, and not be subject to third-parties preventing access to it, deleting it or disappearing entirely. The best way to do this is by publishing content on your own website.
3. Have fun! When the web took off in the 90’s people began designing personal sites with garish backgrounds and animated GIFs. It may have been ugly but it was fun. Let’s keep the web weird and interesting.

Antidepressants or Tolkien

This is harder than it sounds. I got 19 out of 24.

Why We’ll Never Live in Space - Scientific American

In space travel, “Why?” is perhaps the most important ethical question. “What’s the purpose here? What are we accomplishing?” Green asks. His own answer goes something like this: “It serves the value of knowing that we can do things—if we try really hard, we can actually accomplish our goals. It brings people together.” But those somewhat philosophical benefits must be weighed against much more concrete costs, such as which other projects—Earth science research, robotic missions to other planets or, you know, outfitting this planet with affordable housing—aren’t happening because money is going to the moon or Mars or Alpha Centauri.

Future-first design thinking

If we’re serious about creating a sustainable future, perhaps we should change this common phrase from “Form follows Function” to “Form – Function – Future”. While form and function are essential considerations, the future, represented by sustainability, should be at the forefront of our design thinking. And actually, if sustainability is truly at the forefront of the way we create new products, then maybe we should revise the phrase even further to “Future – Function – Form.” This revised approach would place our future, represented by sustainability, at the forefront of our design thinking. It would encourage us to first ask ourselves, “What is the most sustainable way to design X?” and then consider how the function of X can be met while ensuring it remains non-harmful to people and the planet.

TimeGuessr

Where and when were these photographs taken?

It’s like that Chronophoto game I linked to with an added dimension of location.

The most cartoonish misrepresentation of progressive enhancement is that it means making everything work without JavaScript.

No. Progressive enhancement means making sure your core functionality works without JavaScript.

In my book Resilient Web Design, I quoted Wilto:

Lots of cool features on the Boston Globe don’t work when JS breaks; “reading the news” is not one of them.

That’s an example where the core functionality is readily identifiable. It’s a newspaper. The core functionality is reading the news.

It isn’t always so straightforward though. A lot of services that self-identify as “apps” will claim that even their core functionality requires JavaScript.

Surely I don’t expect Gmail or Google Docs to provide core functionality without JavaScript?

In those particular cases, I actually do. I believe that a textarea in a form would do the job nicely. But I get it. That might take a lot of re-engineering.

So how about this compromise…

Your app should work in a read-only mode without JavaScript.

Without JavaScript I should still be able to read my email in Gmail, even if you don’t let me compose, reply, or organise my messages.

Without JavaScript I should still be able to view a document in Google Docs, even if you don’t let me comment or edit the document.

Even with something as interactive as Figma or Photoshop, I think I should still be able to view a design file without JavaScript.

Making this distinction between read-only mode and read/write mode could be very useful, especially at the start of a project.

Begin by creating the read-only mode that doesn’t require JavaScript. That alone will make for a solid foundation to build upon. Now you’ve built a fallback for any unexpected failures.

Now start adding the read/write functionally. You’re enhancing what’s already there. Progressively.

Heck, you might even find some opportunities to provide some read/write functionality that doesn’t require JavaScript. But if JavaScript is needed, that’s absolutely fine.

So if you’re about to build a web app and you’re pretty sure it requires JavaScript, why not pause and consider whether you can provide a read-only version.

Fujichia: Sayable Space

This game is hard:

Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying “Space” out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or actually that’s just half of the game. The second half is saying “Space”, and the first half is remembering that you are playing this game.

Chronophoto - The Photographical History Game

This is a fun game—with the same kind of appeal as that Wiki History Game I linked to—where you have to locate photographs in time.

A post by Clearleft on LinkedIn

This is design engineering.

A year of new avenues

All along, from the frothy 1990s to the per­co­lat­ing 2000s to the frozen 2010s to today, the web has been the sure thing. All along, it’s been grow­ing and maturing, sprout­ing new capabilities. From my van­tage point, that growth has seemed to accel­er­ate in the past five years; CSS, in par­tic­u­lar, has become incred­i­bly flex­i­ble and expressive. Maybe even a bit overstuffed — but I’ll take it.

For peo­ple who care about cre­at­ing worlds together, rather than get­ting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What luck, that this decentralized, per­mis­sion­less sys­tem claimed a posi­tion at the heart of the inter­net, and stuck there. It’s limited, of course; frustrating; some­times maddening. But that’s every cre­ative medium. That’s life.

You don’t need HTML!

View source on this bit of tongue-in-cheek fun from Terence.

Fundamentals matter | Go Make Things

I really enjoyed Laurie’s talk in Berlin a few weeks back. I must blog my thoughts on it.

But I must admit that something didn’t sit quite right about the mocking tone he took on the matter of “the fundamentals” (whatever that may mean). Chris shares my misgivings:

Those websites that don’t load on slow connections, or break completely when a JS file fails to load, or don’t work for people with visual or physical impairments?

That’s not an issue of time. It’s an issue of fundamentals.

I think I agree with Laurie that there’s basically no such thing as fundamental technologies (and if there is such a thing, the goalposts are constantly moving). But I agree with Chris with that there is such a thing as fundamental concepts. On the web, for example, accessibility is a core principle of its design that should, in my opinion, be fundamental.

This, basically:

Do I wanna see teenagers building frivolous websites? Absolutely. But when people are getting paid well to build our digital world, they have a responsibility to ensure the right to engage with that world for everyone.

The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website

It me:

Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.

This rings sadly true to me:

Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.

Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:

Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.

Is HTML A Programming Language? (Webbed Briefs)

I’m glad that Heydon has answered this question once and for all.

I’m sure that’ll be the end of it now.

Functions and the future of design systems || Matthew Ström, designer-leader

Despite their name, most design systems aren’t all that much like systems. Granted, they are designed according to a system, and there’s a logical consistency to how their components and tokens are defined, but really, most design systems work like a dictionary: look up a component, get the instructions for using that component.

Mathew goes on to advocate moving towards a more function-centred approach to systematic design. It makes a lot of sense.

By the way, this isn’t directly related—other than metaphor being used—but I wrote about web standards, dictionaries, and design systems a while back.

Globle

Like Wordle, but for geography instead of words.

Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.

At the end of every Thursday afternoon at Clearleft, we wrap up the working week with an all-hands (video) meeting. Yes, I know that the week finishes on Friday, but Fridays have been declared the no-meetings day at Clearleft: a chance to concentrate on heads-down work without interruption. Besides, some of us don’t work on Fridays. So Thursday really is the new Friday.

At this Thursday afternoon meeting we give and get updates on what’s been happening with project work, new business, events, marketing. We also highlighted any shout-outs that have posted in the #beingsplendid Slack channel during the week. Once that’s all taken care of, the Thursday afternoon meeting often finishes with a fun activity.

The hosting of the Thursday afternoon meeting is decided by fate. Two weeks ago, Rebecca and Chris hosted an excellent end-of-week meeting that finished with an activity around food—everyone had submitted their dream meal and we had to match up the meal to the person. Lorenzo, however, couldn’t help commenting on the typography in the slide deck. “Lorenzo”, I said, “What are you more judgmental about—fonts or food?”

The words were barely out of my mouth when I realised I had the perfect activity for the next Thursday afternoon meeting, which fate had decreed I was to host. I put together a quiz called …fonts or food!

It’s quite straightforward. There are 25 words. All you have to do is say whether it’s the name of a font or the name of a food.

It was good fun! So I thought I’d share it with you if you fancy a go.

Ready?

Here we go…

1. Arrowroot font food
2. Ensete font food
3. Tahu font food
4. Tako font food
5. Lato font food
6. Fira font food
7. Adzuki font food
8. Roselle font food
9. Poke font food
10. Plantin font food
11. Dabberlocks font food
12. Estampa font food
13. Amaranth font food
14. Gentium font food
15. Challum font food
16. Mayhaw font food
17. Pawpaw font food
18. Nopal font food
19. Raksana font food
20. Daylily font food
21. Bilanthy font food
22. Laver font food
23. Orache font food
24. Broadley font food
25. Cardoon font food

Total:

0

/25