Spark Hunting and Candle Clocks
Hey friends,
Why is glue bad at math?
It always gets stuck on the problems.
(It's back-to-school season here!)
Thinking Too Hard 🤔
How tightly do we hold onto our own ideas?
I was listening to an interview with Amy Henning, an influential writer/director/designer who produced Soul Reaver and 1-3 of the Uncharted series, and I was struck by how she talked about the process of making the Uncharted games. There wasn't a 'script' in the traditional sense. They knew the structure and some of the key points, but due to logistics and budget, they were often filming sections with the motion-capture actors at various points that occurred much later in the process. The story was FLUID and constantly changing.
A part of me squirms at the thought of working on something that might be thrown away; it feels inefficient! But Amy talks about the magic of collaboration, more like improv, where an actor or a level designer takes things in a slightly different direction. If EVERYONE is riffing, it's pure chaos, but occasionally someone has a spark of an idea, and Amy talks about being humble enough to recognize that spark and let go of the first idea.
This made me think of our work on the web— I've seen similar collaborative sparks, but it takes nurturing and observation to make that happen. So, when we're threading the needle on a deadline and budget, are we still creating space for those moments of creative collaboration? Are WE willing to move to make room for something better?
Interesting Web Bits 🍜
Web Stuff
- The NNGroup says search habits are changing, but traditional search isn't entirely gone. It seems it's more of a BOTH rather than an EITHER OR.
- So... Gábor Nyéki is running a website off nine Neovim buffers on his old ThinkPad! 😲😲 That's some creative coding.
- HMPL is a new template language that sits "somewhere between HTMX and EJS". I am both intrigued and confused by their approach.
- AADAM reminds us there is no spoon (I guess that's an old reference now...) and no CSS Reset... also Cascade Layers are great.
- David Bushell had a cynical-but-humorous take on AI and the Web of Tomorrow.
- Hyperclay is a neat experiment that attempts to create a quine-like self-replicating web app and editing experience.
- Nadia Makarevich gives a well-thought out answer to the question, "Why can't we just use localStorage?"
- DEMO: Rubber Banding
Other Stuff
- Bit of a scary precedence, someone got dinged for image licensing fees by hosting an archive of tweets that pulled the open graph image from a news source. 😱
- A neat space invader generator and a post that explains how it works 👾
- Using a candle as a clock? 🕯️🤷⏱️
- Ah yes, my plans on building my own medieval castle just got that much closer! 🤴🏰
- "Have you ever wondered how to move objects along a spherical helix path?" An answer to a common question I'm absolutely sure we've all thought of at some point.