NESTED! Déjà vu, crayons that smell good, postcards to save people, the heart eyes emoji

Hello! It’s Victor! Thank you for reading me last month! Here’s more links to keep you busy!

Updates from last month

• I don’t miss social networks at all
• I still exercise a bit every day and it’s still killing me but I do feel a bit better
• I still do Duolingo every day and I now understand some Spanish memes, so there’s that
• So turns out having new year’s resolutions can actually work (but I’ll revisit that at the end of the year) (it’s never too late to make yours)
• The new part-time design job is great so far! The work culture is refreshing, and it's good to go back to some exploration in my work. Simultaneously, I've been promoted to senior in my other part-time consultancy job last month! There's a mix of exciting novelty and reassuring stability in my week now, and it's a great balance to have.

Wikipedia is the best website

• De Hogeweyk is a village in the Netherlands where all residents have dementia. Described as something between a closed nursing home and the hyperreality of The Truman Show, the residents can live and roam freely around the village but not leave it, and carers act as if they were regular neighbours, never wearing medical white gowns. CNN has a great documentary on it.
• The full standard of the Interplanetary Internet.
• Are you ever doing something and suddenly it feels like you’ve seen this exact scene already in the past, or in your dreams? I’m afraid you don’t have prophetic abilities, the déjà vu effect is just your memory malfunctioning sometimes, like two thirds of healthy people.
  • It’s not the same as a false memory, where you’re remembering something that has never actually happened. This is a super interesting page, purely for explaining how malleable memory can be under certain conditions; and how this has happened in multiple documented (and probably many undocumented) legal cases. Common biases in question wordings have dramatic effects: if you ask someone about “the” stop sign on the scene rather than “a” stop sign, they are more likely to recall (even falsely) that there was one.
  • Talking about biases, choice-supportive bias is a hell of a choice-supportive drug.
• List of lists:
  • List of inventors killed by their own inventions (my personal bravo to Franz Reichelt)
  • List of all Crayola crayon colours including rare releases like metallic and scented crayons (“In 1995, Crayola changed some of the scents because of complaints received from parents that some of the crayons smelled good enough to eat”.)
  • List of places where it is illegal to die, ranging from the absurdly political to the oddly sacred.
  • List of varieties of scorched rice around the world.
• This summary of The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks gives the key to cocktails that should be drunk before dinner: less sweet, more alcoholic.
• Sure, you shouldn’t trust everything on Wikipedia, and not treat it as a scientific source. But then… why is it still so accurate? Easy: Cunningham’s Law.

Long reads, sad stories

• Some Clinics in Canada, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands give heroin to people suffering from addiction, and it works. Much like the argument for other monitored drug-taking, the effects on public health and local safety remain largely positive. (The rest of that Vox series on the opioids epidemic is really good.)
• In the last two decades, Japan has started to see an unusual crime wave coming from the elderly. The state pension is so hard to live on that many are committing petty theft and assault attempts to go to jail, because jail means free food, accommodation, and less solitude. The phenomenon is becoming so widespread (and so costly to society) that officials are considering reworking the entire elderly care system.
• How to help someone who is suicidal? The answer could be postcards and text messages.
• Iceland knows how to stop teen substance abuse, but the rest of the world isn’t listening. Give teenagers things to do (sports, music, activities) and actually fund it, set rules like curfews so you can prevent “but the others can do it!”, and the abuse stops rather dramatically.
  • This shift in national culture and policy may be one of the more rational explanations for the unusually high rate of creative Icelanders, with so many residents writing books, being in bands, or in high-ranking sports teams, often juggling it with another job.
  • The first time I went there in 2014, someone told me that some of the most internationally famous pop and rock bands of Iceland grew up around the Reykjanes peninsula (25 miles south of the capital, where the main airport is). I found it vaguely surprising, considering that the area looks a bit like an industrial, sad desert with nothing particularly creative in there. But up until 2006 the region hosted an US military base next to the airport. The base broadcasted a radio station with contemporary American music for the soldiers off base, and that station could be picked up by the local residents; who for a long time, discovered music that was quite different from what was available in the rest of Iceland. This is where local kids got their musical inspiration, and ended up making some waves.
    How’s that, for a narrative of people just inspired by the nature around them?

Slap Slap Slap

In my ears

• Lizzo - Cuz I Love You (soul hip-hop / US / 2019)
  • “It’s Just a Matter of Time Till Everybody Loves Lizzo”: if you don’t love her yet, add this fantastic, hilarious interview to your reading list.
• Girls in Hawaii - Indifference (indie pop / belgium / 2017)
• Jim Coulter - Dune Sync (minimal techno / scotland / 2017)
• Pure Bathing Culture - Palest Pearl (indie pop / US / 2015)
• Moses Hightower - Sjáum Hvað Setur (jazz-funk / iceland / 2012)
• Molly Nilsson - Hey Moon (leftfield lo-fi / sweden / 2008)
• Prins Póló - Er of seint að fá sér kaffi núna? (indie pop ballad / iceland / 2018)

Tech! Design! Work!

• A car allergic to vanilla ice cream, a script that only crashes on Wednesdays, the emails that won’t travel further than 500 miles, the login screen where you have to sit down, and other black magic bugs and computing lore.
• No to NoUI is a 2013 article that’s really worth re-reading today. As computing becomes more complex, our job as designers is never to hide the complexity or to make everything seamless, but instead to make this complexity more legible and sometimes make the seams more obvious.
• How do huge open source projects succeed? There's some answers in a book called The Cathedral and the Bazaar observing two strategies, and the Wikipedia article lists great takeaways that are valid for many projects, and not just for developers. (“If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.”)
  • 🇫🇷 For my French readers: un article passionnant qui fait le lien entre les Communs et les frigos collectifs, et nous rappelle que les communs, ce n’est pas une utopie limitée à l’immatériel et au numérique.
• For UX practitioners: I’ve recently started using Whimsical and it’s the tool for wireframes & flowcharts I feel like I’ve spent forever searching for.
• Emoji 12.0 was announced a couple of weeks ago. There is incredible works that goes behind choosing and standardising emojis, and it’s been taking a toll on the other efforts from the Unicode Consortium to standardise the world’s alphabets.
  • Intercom dropped stars and use a scale of 5 emojis to rate a customer service interaction, going from 😠 (terrible) to 😍 (amazing). They found out the hard way that emojis can be interpreted differently, and that many people will only use the heart eyes emoji in a romantic context. In fact, they could also measurably tell that some people (men) were not comfortable sending the heart eyes emoji to another man.
    Masculinity so fragile that when they replaced the “amazing” emoji to starry eyed face 🤩, instead of hearts, men customer support representatives saw their “amazing” ratings grow by 17% instead of receiving “great” 😃 reviews, closing the average gap with their women counterparts.
  • Unrelated, but do you know the history of the heart symbol to represent love? Surprisingly but not disappointingly, it might come from the leaf shape of a plant used as an aphrodisiac and contraceptive.
  • Anyway, hope you had a good Valentime’s day.
• A thread of some of the things that are wrong with the Windows 10 UI. Rant: I have to use Windows and Office every day at work and I’m still amazed at how terrible the entire user experience is — even with the most basic features, not just superuser things. 
I’m not a Microsoft hater and I genuinely think their Design department is doing a lot of great things in various exciting projects, but in 2019, their two most widely used products still haven’t grasped fundamental principles of interaction design and information architecture.
  It's nice to read people that can articulate why that is. They have complexity and legacy problems that others don't, but that feels less and less like an excuse. Nobody wants to be “delighted” by an experience if you can't even start by making it not frustrating.

Good TV shows

• I haven’t read books last month and took comfort in the long dark nights for watching Netflix top shows instead. I haven’t really binged TV shows for a while, but in the last few months there’s been excellent stuff coming out:
• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: everything is related, but it feels like nothing is… until you reach the next episode. Funny, original, engaging, excellent for people with short attention spans (like me).
• Russian Doll: “a time-loop of constant death” is maybe the best way to describe it, but that doesn’t really make it sound like it’s also a great comedy. Great plot, not too obvious resolution, amazing acting and writing. The ending feels vaguely disappointing and leaves some critical questions unanswered, but hopefully future seasons will resolve that.
• The Umbrella Academy, that just came out. The story of supernatural siblings that have been broken and split by family drama, but rejoined by bad news. It looks like it has some traces of typical American comic book superhero stories on the surface, but overall it actually manages to stay imaginative and intriguing.
  • It has some storyline links with the excellent Haunting of Hill House from last Halloween, another Netflix original, which I also heavily recommend as a drama/horror show.
• Maniac was one of the stranger shows I’ve seen lately. Participants for a futuristic pharmaceutical trial are promised to get help with all their problems with three successive pills, but the experience is somewhat stronger than your average Adderall. I think I enjoyed it? It’s a very original idea and execution, goes far, far beyond what you might think in the first couple of episodes, and has amazing aesthetics. But much like Russian Doll I was too hungry for more answers by the end.
• The Good Place, which I feel like everybody on the Internet has seen, but then it turns out too few of my friends know about it so I recommend it here again. One of the best comedies of the past few years, at the level of Parks & Rec (by no coincidence it is actually written by the same person) but with added original supernatural drama. The tempo has dropped a bit in the end of the third season, but as a whole, definitely worth watching.

Goodbye!

(Sorry I’ve dropped the aesthetic of writing everything in lowercase, turns out I’m not Ariana Grande)