Hello! It’s Victor! Happy Sunday! Here are links that kept me busy this month.

Mundanely interesting

• It’s raining newsletters (allelujah). Short of a looming “newsletter fatigue” mentioned by the article which hasn’t happened yet, the engagement in readership and feedback feels really different than social media. Chatting with friends after they’ve read my newsletter sometimes feels like the resurgence of an Internet Club, the link-sharing equivalent of a book club. It may be time to bring webrings back!
• Sexualisation is in the eye of the beholder: Amber Thomas made an excellent analysis of dress codes in US school handbooks. To the surprise of no one, they are disproportionately targeted at girls rather than boys, put the onus on them at the detriment of their education, and are truly the ones that sexualise students before most think of it.
• The CIA have developed a template list of questions to think about a problem from new angles. It’s been turned into a generic brainstorming techniques sheet, which is actually very versatile and worth printing next to your desk for helping you think about any kind of problem. It’s varied, and sometimes more efficient than to keep asking why.
• One of the perks for full-time employees at my other job is unlimited holidays. In results-oriented workplaces, the reasoning is that “if we don’t track the time you spend working, then why would we track the time you don’t?”. It’s a common perk for tech startups, but also at larger companies (chiefly Netflix, Evernote and Virgin America). And it's not just by charity to attract hires, but also to encourage creativity and prevent burnout: “By the time you need a vacation, it’s too late,” says the CEO of Buffer. “In the western world, we go to the doctor when we’re ill. Eastern medicine promotes the idea of going to the doctor when you’re healthy, to talk about preventative care, things we can keep improving. That’s the method I’ve started to think about for vacation. I want to plan ahead so I don’t ever want to fully deplete myself.”
  • But does it work? Buffer in fact found out that this holiday policy (or rather, the lack of one) meant that people took less time off than they would have otherwise. The complete lack of guidance meant people were afraid to take more holidays and be perceived as slacking off more than peers, and there is an untold expectation behind “unlimited”. Nobody thinks taking 75% of your year off would be reasonable, but what is actually reasonable and expected is actually a range which varies by person and culturally (Americans take significantly less holidays than in France or Sweden for example, which can be an issue in remote global teams).
    They ended up solving this by replacing it with a minimum holidays policy, and after a year worked out the numbers and how to make it work.
  • FullContact even ran the experiment of actually paying employees $7,500 once a year to go on holidays somewhere, under the condition you actually go on holiday and log off from work. One of the benefits, they claim, is an incentive to reduce the “hero syndrome” from constant presence and encourage constant documentation.
• Gaze at this sentence for just about sixty seconds and then explain what makes it quite different from the average sentence.
  • hint: watch Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek's fun TV quiz game.
• The YouTube series Borders by Johnny Harris/Vox is excellent, covering displacement, cultures, fences, heartbreaks, odd stories from different places.
  • Great episodes: Venezuelians entering Columbia, the division between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a bubble of North Korean culture within Japan, and why does Japan they have so many vending machines. The whole season about Hong Kong is great too.
• It’s Brexit month! With opinions over how to reach the optimum “satisfied populists/low fuckup” ratio dividing parties a little bit more every day, now is a good time to remake the case against “sensible” politics.

Wikipedia is the best website

• A list of redundant place names, with favourites like Mississippi River (big river river), Soviet Union (union union), River Avon (river river), Sahara desert (desert desert). Scottish readers will know the Dundee Law Hill (hill hill) and Eas Fors Waterfall (waterfall waterfall waterfall).
  • See also: naan bread, chai tea, queso cheese.
  • If other pleonasms like “a free gift” leave most people indifferent, nothing truly annoys pedantic people more than using things like “PIN number”, “ATM machine”, “DC comics” or “LCD display”. I’ve learned that this is, very aptly, named the RAS syndrome.
  • Talking of names, Hurricane Bawbag has perhaps one of the best short “Naming” sections in Wikipedia history.
• Spreuerhofstraße claims to be the world’s narrowest street, varying between 31 and 50 centimetres. The “See Also” section has many contenders however. La Avenida 9 de Julio, in Buenos Aires, claims to be the widest — with 16 car lanes and over 3 minutes to cross, which sounds like hell.
• Hot Runnings: bobsleigh is over everyone, we’re watching wok racing. (It’s intense.)
• I have heard before of F. D. C. Willard, a Siamese cat known for being the co-author of a physics paper in 1973. Last week I was delighted to find out that Wikipedia also has a very well furnished list of animal with fraudulent diplomas.
  • Talking about animals, we may soon have a Dermophis donaldtrumpi in biology textbooks, a newly discovered but soon-to-be-extinct amphibian species that sees the world in black and white. EnviroBuild, a company that won the auction to name the new species, chose the name in protest of Trump’s environmental policies and views that deny climate change.
  • Hold on, you think it’s absurd that we name a species after political things? According to the list of things named after Donald Trump (!), it’s actually the third species named after him. It notably follows Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, a species of micro-moth “with small genitalia and distinctive yellowish-white scales covering the head”. No, it won’t stop Trump, but yes, the scientific community is petty.
• Category:LGBT linguistics.
• The story of Benjaman Kyle is one hell of a read. The man was found unconscious in 2004 behind a Burger King dumpster, sunburnt, naked and beaten out; having left no identity documents behind, the emergency services named him as “Burger King Doe” on documnts. He woke up with dissociative amnesia, initially unable to remember his name until recalling his first name is Benjaman (two ‘a’s), and picked a last name based on the placeholder initials. He, the authorities and media spent the next 11 years in search of his identity and past, leaving him partially homeless and unable to work without a social security number.
  The New Republic published an excellent longread article about the case in 2016, a year after his real identity was found again using DNA matching.

Architecture and signs

• Developers are building a neighbourhood of luxury homes that look like tiny Disney castles in Turkey and, especially in its current abandoned state following the economic collapse of the project, it looks Extremely Dystopian™ and surrealist.
• Potemkin Village refers to “fake” villages built of mounted façades and one-sided buildings and houses, designed to deceive monarchs passing through it into thinking the town was modern and thriving (when the beautiful houses never existed, or were decaying). Although the original story is likely to be a myth, the term has remained to describe similar concepts of illusory architecture to hide reality from high-ranking political figures, from photographs in storefronts at G8 summits to redoing an entire region for the Olympic Games.
  • The demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea has two “peace villages”, each one belonging to each country. Kijŏngdong, belonging to North Korea, is largely thought to be actually uninhabited. Built in the 1950s as a propaganda space to attract Southern Koreans to defect to the North, its modern (at the time) features were largely oriented to be visible from the South, but telescopic observations now suggest that the windows have no glasses, lights turn on and off at set times, and streets are maintained by a minimal crew for illusion.
  • The term is also used for training camps. In Britain, a 300 square metres fake town exists in Gravesend, Kent, developed by the Metropolitan police in the early 2000s to let young police officers practice riot situations. It contains a mixture of film sets façades and more realistic buildings, where officers practice containing fake mobs played attacking with petrol bombs. It was documented in Architecture of Conflict by James Rawlings, and by Chris Clarke’s photos.
  • More artificial towns in the form of Swedish racing tracks, US military training camps, European city replicas in China in the photographs of Gregor Sailer.
• The Wellcome Collection in London had a great exhibition called Living with buildings examining how the built environment influences our health.
• Making spaces better for deaf people goes from rethinking acoustics in large open spaces and the use of bright light to allow lip reading, down to seemingly small details like having light and armless chairs and wider pavements. (via notoriousbigre)
  • Unrelated side note going back on Wikipedia again: like spoken language, sign language have numerous dialects, often amplified because of the smaller communities of signers and a history of insulation of segregation with hearing people.
    • Black American Sign Language, rooted in the racial segregation of schools — which included schools for the Deaf, has some differences with “standard” ASL that remain in use today. Black signers use a different phonology (use of space, use of two hands) and vocabulary, sometimes loaned from spoken African-American vernacular English (“Other loan words modified existing signs, such as STOP TRIPPING, which took the bent-v handshape of TRIP and moved it up to the head to indicate a new meaning of "stop imagining things”).
    • In Flemish-signing Belgium, the gender segregation in schools until the 1970s meant that some signs were “girl’s signs” and others were “boy’s signs”.
    • Signers in Manchester use a different system for numbers, compared to the rest of the UK. This site highlight variations in many other signs based on geography.
    • Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the US coast, was known as “a Deaf utopia” for several centuries. An unusually high proportion of the population was Deaf and caused its own village sign language to thrive, with everyone hearing and non-hearing able to sign — until the population and economy largely changed in the early 20th century.

In my ears

• Júníus Meyvant - Across the Borders (folk rock / iceland / 2019)
• Planningtorock - Transome (pop house / germany / 2018)
• El Ten Eleven - You Are Enough (post-rock / US / 2018)
• MOUTHS - I Don't Know Why I Hate You (But I Do) (chamber pop / france / 2018)
  • This is the new project of Lenparrot, which you should check out because his music and voice are incredible and everybody’s been sleeping on it
• Perfume Genius/Empress Of/Jim-E Stack - When I’m With Him (pop / US / 2019)
• Cub Sport - Hawaiian Party (indie queer pop / australia / 2019)
• The Mountain Goats - Younger (alternative rock / US / 2019)
  • Their new album is produced by Owen Pallett!! Who is releasing a new album later this year which I’m v excited about!!!

Anyway, here’s a 2 week-old lemming

(No, not these)

Design! Tech! Work!

• Drawing almost-invisible letters using some colours and the properties of LED subpixel rendering on your screen.
  • Who needs SVG when you can draw pictures with variable fonts?
• How do you spell Jake Gyllenhaal? You’re not the only one to struggle, and someone visualised common misspellings with Sankey diagrams. There’s an accompanying fun game that’s harder than it looks.
• An insider view of the working conditions for Facebook moderators, leaving people with trauma and gullible to conspiracy theories after seeing so many.
• Generation Z loves closed captions. I for one don’t have any diagnosed hearing loss or ADHD but I do struggle to keep engaged with videos without them.
• If you had doubts: no, you probably don’t need blockchain.

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)

hello! it's victor! you subscribed to this newsletter last week and probably forgot about it already! this is the first issue!

it’s called NESTED because there’s nested bullet point lists! so that you can easily skip the stuff that sound boring to you! there's soooo many links! I'm sorry!!!

personal ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

• for the first year ever I have new years resolutions. I’ve sort of "decided" them drunkenly during New Years’ Eve, but really they’ve all been sitting in my head for all of 2018. and I thought if I don’t even give it a go now, will I ever get a chance to fail at doing them?
  • so I’ve cut off almost all social media since the beginning of the year. I've added it up and on average I spent 3 hours a day scrolling a bit mindlessly on Twitter, Instagram and other slot machines. It’s that automatic thing you do when you’re vaguely bored for a second: you just get your phone out and your finger just automatically goes there, in the same way some people light up cigarettes to fill time, and you think it's just for a bit each time but it really adds up in a day! so I've gone cold turkey and ~* logged out *~.
    • also trying to look at your phone less? I'd recommend going 100% silent (no ringer, no vibrate, these notifications can wait). making your screen greyscale is kinda working too, I was a bit dubious at first but now my eyes are less drawn to my phone.
    • when using my phone in idle time I now try to do some Duolingo sessions instead of going on social media. It’s actually a productive pastime and by the end of the year I may understand Spanish and Dutch?
  • I’m also trying to work out a little. I’m one of these people traumatised by PE at school. I’ve never experienced sport as something that could be enjoyable. Until I started trampolining in my second year at uni which is lots of fun when it's not forced on you! Anyway I’m now trying to get a daily stretch, to get the blood going and gain a bit more strength.
    I had no idea how to go about it and I found stuff on YouTube a bit too overwhelming for beginners. My friend Alice recommended me the Nike Fitness Club app which is actually super super good! It has clear videos and explanations of what to do, has pre-planned workouts for different goals, and counts everything for you. (it’s free so they probably mine your data, but you can give a fake email and not sync your contacts).
• today I've started a new part-time job as a UX/product designer at Feeld, a dating app! I'm v excited about it. I'm still working part-time as an accessibility consultant the rest of the week, which I still enjoy and I think juggling between two different roles will keep my brain stimulated.
• I tried to watch an episode of that Marie Kondo show (mostly to keep up with the memes) and I found it boring and very cliché. But the next day I donated a whole bin bag of clothes and folded the rest in thirds, so I guess she wins.
  • however I really want to see her do an episode with those who practice maximalism at home, the opposite of minimalism. That’d be entertaining.
  • that remarkable article about millennials and burnout by Anne Helen Petersen gently reminds us that this joy coming from tidying or workout or planning breaks should not come at the cost of being extra items on our permanent to-do lists: "The media that surrounds us — both social and mainstream, from Marie Kondo’s new Netflix show to the lifestyle influencer economy — tells us that our personal spaces should be optimised just as much as one’s self and career. The end result isn’t just fatigue, but enveloping burnout that follows us to home and back. The most common prescription is ‘self-care.’ Give yourself a face mask! Go to yoga! Use your meditation app! But much of self-care isn’t care at all: It’s an $11 billion industry whose end goal isn’t to alleviate the burnout cycle, but to provide further means of self-optimisation. At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isn’t a solution; it’s exhausting." Sounds depressing to be reminded that capitalism looms over everything but it’s a great read, promised.

a book to make you smarter

• last month I read How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg, which is a sort of pop science intro to mathematics and statistics for people who didn't really get math in high school. It's full of stories, history, real-life examples and practical applications for things that can sound really abstract in theory; as well as advice for suppressing biases and using better models in your daily reasoning. (A bit like the fascinating Thinking Fast and Slow). There's almost no equations with weird symbols in it: it's all about the logic, in clear writing. It's funny, it's engaging, it's well-written, and sometimes a bit mind-blowing.

wikipedia is the best website

• this list of unusual units of measurements will tell you exactly how much is a jiffy, how the kilogramme was almost called a grave, to see you in a microfortnight, that you can check the Mother Cow Index for buying land, and how many Bibles can you fit on a CD.
  • by the way, do you know how much the Internet weigh? It sounds like an absurd question but the answer is actually more absurd because it was only 50 grams in 2011, so perhaps double or triple that now.
  • it’s significantly less than the 25 million tonnes of spiders inhabiting our planet.
  • sorry there was a web joke to put here but I didn't know how
• you ever spend a few minutes contemplating just how incredible it is that computers and smartphones work at all? The more I learn about how computers work, the more I think about that line in this xkcd comic: “all computers are just carefully organised sand. Everything is hard until someone makes it easy”. To a lot of people like me who have a shallow but functional understanding of computer science, but very little in electrical engineering, understanding how computers work at the physical level is always a bit mind-blowing. Even simple microcontrollers seem to have some sort of magic powering them. 
Anyway, the other day I was reading about logical fallacies used in political discourse and a Wikipedia spiral later I found out that there is, in fact, something magic that makes electronics work.
• talking about magic, I’ve been re-reading Disney’s 12 principles of animation recently, which I found fascinating the first time I read them, because I knew nothing about animation. They break down the magic and write down the abstraction, the exaggeration, the tricks and illusions you have to use to make something look credible to the eyes and brain. 
I’m drawn by how transferable these principles could be to other creative areas that may seem removed from cartoon animation like writing, theatre, architecture and many forms of product design.
  In Designing for Interaction, Dan Saffer writes that “objects that don’t move don’t interact. An interaction is some sort of communication, and communication is about movement: our vocal cords vibrating as we speak, our hands and arms writing or typing as we send email or instant messages, sound and data moving between two entities.” It's a kind of poetic definition of interaction, and I think that with some abstraction, many principles can purposefully resurface in "crafted" interactions.

a picture of some otters

mundanely interesting

• I never knew I was a grocery store tourist until I saw the term described in this article, but I can relate. Let’s be honest, visiting supermarkets are one of my highlights when I travel to other countries.
• would you just look at this model of the Tokyo subway?
  • also about subways, Eye Magazine has a really cool history of the new Moscow subway typeface
• unsurprising news to all my researcher friends: the solution to all of the world's problems have probably been solved, but are buried in PDFs that nobody reads.
• you do not have to be good

in my ears

• Angèle & Elvis Romeo - J’ai vu (hip-pop / belgium / 2018 / they’re siblings omg)
• Angèle - Jalousie (pop / belgium / 2018 / this music video made me fall in love with dance again)
  • bonus cool dance performance: Celui qui tombe
• Julius Eastman - Evil N**r (minimal classical / US / 1979)
• Miel de Montagne - Permis B Bébé (electro pop / france / 2018)
• Yelle - OMG! (Safetalk Remix) (dance-pop / france / 2018)
• Молчат Дома - На Дне (lo-fi new wave / belarus / 2018)
• Sferics - Kronprinzenkoog (ambient drone / germany / 2015)

design! tech! work!

• have you tried to dab some coconut oil on your spine? A great talk/read about accessibility and disability in culture and what you can do to help change attitudes.
• reader mode, the button to beat. This article reminded me that this button exists and how amazing it is. But more importantly, that it’s what we should aim for in UX.
• the elements of UI engineering is a short but great theoretical summary of what is (or should be) valuable for people in UI design and development, and those working with them.
• the Mailchimp content style guide is public and has great rationales and examples on how to do copywriting, tone and microcopy.
• consistency in design is the wrong approach: don’t focus on being consistent, focus on what your users know.
• let’s chat about professional etiquette and not wasting everyone’s time in boring meetings.
• how Apple has made the Watch work for wheelchair users is a fascinating insight in the sort of research you can make when you’ve got the budget and the vision of Apple. I still think smart watches are expensive toys, but that’s still an interesting process.

and now for some architecture

• I really like this renovation of the Saint Francis Convent Church, both in and out.
  • in fact I like everything in this thread of reconverted churches. I’m going to the Garden Museum next week in Lambeth and I am: excited.
• Rendering vs Reality: The Improbable Rise of Tree-Covered Skyscrapers, from the always excellent 99% Invisible.

thank you for reading! have a good weekend! see you next month!