Blogging Again, Again

Back to the Blog, from Dan Cohen:

There has been a recent movement to “re-decentralize” the web, returning our activities to sites like this one. I am unsurprisingly sympathetic to this as an idealist, and this post is my commitment to renew that ideal. I plan to write more here from now on. However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature.

I’ve already mentioned the relative ease and short amount of time it takes to express oneself on centralized services. People are chronically stretched, and building and maintaining a site, and writing at greater length than one or two sentences seems like real work. When I started this site, I didn’t have two kids and two dogs and a rather busy administrative job. Overestimating the time regular people have to futz with technology was the downfall of desktop linux, and a key reason many people use Facebook as their main outlet for expression rather a personal site.

Two problems here which do need solving. One, it’s still far too difficult to publish a post on a self-hosted website. And two, there is a lack of innovative tools which could better connect all of these decentralized websites.

The first problem is actually hundreds of problems at once; a different set of problems for every single CMS. The second problem only needs some love and attention. I believe the answer is in newsreaders and new creative ways of using RSS. Self-owned data and content, but new ways to read blogs in centralized locations.

Arial China

A beautiful set of arial photos of China from Alan Taylor at the Atlantic.

RSS Revived

Wired.com, It’s Time For an RSS Revival:

For many of you, that means finding a replacement for Digg Reader, which went the way of the ghost this month. Or maybe you haven’t used RSS since five years ago, when Google Reader, the beloved firehose of news headlines got the axe. For others, it means figuring out what the heck an RSS feed is in the first place—we’ll get to that in just a minute. And some of you have already moved on to the next article in your Feedly queue. No matter what your current disposition, though, in this age of algorithmic overreach there’s something deeply satisfying about finding stories beyond what your loudest Twitter follows shared, or that Facebook’s News Feed optimized into your life. And lots of tools that can get you there.”

So many posts these days calling for a big return of RSS. I’m here for it.

No guns for domestic abusers

New York to deny gun ownership to those convicted of domestic abuse:

Convicted domestic abusers in New York are now required by law to turn in all firearms, expanding a state law banning them from owning handguns. New York passed the original legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre.

This is fantastic news. 

Eat Real Food

So, for our health, the “best” diet is a theme: an emphasis on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, and plain water for thirst. That can be with or without seafood; with or without dairy; with or without eggs; with or without some meat; high or low in total fat.

The best foods don’t even have labels, because they are just one ingredient: avocado, lentils, blueberries, broccoli, almonds, etc.

From The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right, a conversation with Mark Bittman.

I have a poor diet. Out of laziness, mostly. It helps to read articles like this occasionally to remind myself to be better.

Millennials and Capitalism

Michelle Goldberg is not the first nor the only person to make clear why my generation is so quick to balk at capitalism, but I particularly liked this quote:

After the fall of Communism, capitalism came to seem like the modern world’s natural state, like the absence of ideology rather than an ideology itself. The Trump era is radicalizing because it makes the rotten morality behind our inequalities so manifest. It’s not just the occult magic of the market that’s enriching Ivanka Trump’s children while health insurance premiums soar and public school budgets wither. It’s the raw exercise of power by a tiny unaccountable minority that believes in its own superiority. You don’t have to want to abolish capitalism to understand why the prospect is tempting to a generation that’s being robbed.

When you put out a survey to my generation asking in blunt terms, “Capitalism: yay or nay”, you’re going to get a lot of Nays. But I’d argue that nearly all of those Nays are a middle finger to the greedy people currently running things in America. Very few of us are truly anti-capitalist. Very few of us are honestly interested in socialism. Every single article I’ve read arguing that Millennials are killing capitalism comes off as fear-mongering. They read blatantly disingenuous. What we want is simple to understand: We want the Baby Boomer generation to stop stealing from our generation.

Doing More of Less

This quote from Robin Rendle struck a chord with me.

In fact, it takes a lot of time to design robust systems that can scale across every part of a UI/product and doing all that work weirdly enough doesn’t feel like work, instead it’s more akin to unnecessary hassle and stress. But I can’t help think that this is what should differentiate the work of product designers from the work of graphic or print designers—and orgs should really incentivize simple and perhaps even boring additions to a system or a product.

At the Journal, I’ve been feeling this acutely. So much of my work is just being focused on not unnecessarily doing anything new, as apposed to designing new stuff. We have a growing UI kit and our goal is to keep it tight. This means I’m constantly pumping the breaks on my designs. Is a new component too unique? Is there another UI element I should be reusing? Does this new component expand the UI kit in a way which opens us up to potential off-brand visuals? It takes a good deal of time to think this stuff through. At some point, it becomes clear that doing less is actually doing more, if that “less” is paired with extra thought.

Imaginary Voices

Fascinating article about people who hear voices. It corroborates what I've long believed; these people are experiencing real things in their mind and body, but they're misattributing physical and chemical reactions to metaphysical causes. A psychic's talent isn't speaking with spirits. It's being highly sensitive to microemotions and moods and feeling their way through a conversation kind of like a psychosis sherpa.

I hear voices all the time, but it's not like someone talking to me. I hear dialogue, like a play happening in my mind. Imaginary conversations as a form of thinking. I suspect this is extremely common, especially among writers and heavy readers. I can easily imagine a person who takes this one step further, and hears these voices as breaking the fourth wall. A non-religious person would hear them for exactly what they were. A spiritual or unstable person might think it was ghosts or god.

Path of Atomic Design

Josh Clark clarifies a misconception about Atomic Design, which helps explain exactly why its so useful. He explains:

Right from the start, when Brad was first developing his tools and methodologies in our designs of TechCrunch and Entertainment Weekly, our process constantly zoomed back and forth between page level and atomic level. It’s never a linear path from small to large; it’s a constant roundtrip between the two scales.

Atomic Design prescribes a small-first process, but, like Josh says, it's a cycle. Sometimes, it's pretty chaotic, with design play often driving the car. But the structure of Atomic Design means you're always going back to defining and redefining the smallest elements (atoms), which are then used to construct larger ones (molecules, organisms, etc.). By the time you have your sights on the finish line, you'll have a highly structured design and front-end code architecture for building out nearly anything else in the future.

I've seen this play out a half-dozen times or more now on large projects. If you pay close attention to the detail (the atoms), and maintain control over the depth and breadth of your style guide, what you build will be highly efficient and easy to work with going forward.

Humanz Plus

Albarn revealed today that he has around 40 to 45 Gorillaz tracks in various states of completion, tracks which aren’t on Humanz. And also that he hopes to continue releasing these songs over the next 18 months or so. To this Albarn fan, the idea of a new Gorillaz track nearly every week is amazing. Please let this happen. Gorillaz, more than most any other project out there, is perfectly suitable for this kind of release cycle.