My Life in Weeks by Gina Trapani
This is one way of putting things into perspective.
Link tags: time
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The Tyranny of Now — The New Atlantis
I’m not a fan of Nicholas Carr and his moral panics, but this is an excellent dive into some historical media theory.
What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble. Its message can remain legible for centuries, but only those who visit the cemetery are able to read it. Space-biased media tend to be lightweight and portable. They’re easy to carry, but they decay or degrade quickly. Think of a newspaper printed on cheap, thin stock. It can be distributed in the morning to a large, widely dispersed readership, but by evening it’s in the trash.
Here Come the Lionfish – James Bridle
A terrific article by James.
Durable products | Brad Frost
Wherein Brad says some kind words about The Session. And slippers.
Slippers are cool.
2004 was the first year of the future
I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…
Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!
Wibble-y-Wobble-y, Pace-y-Wace-y – Petafloptimism
Pondering pace layers.
The Unraveling of Space-Time | Quanta Magazine
This special in-depth edition of Quanta is fascinating and very nicely put together.
The mainstreaming of ‘AI’ scepticism – Baldur Bjarnason
- Tech is dominated by “true believers” and those who tag along to make money.
- Politicians seem to be forever gullible to the promises of tech.
- Management loves promises of automation and profitable layoffs.
But it seems that the sentiment might be shifting, even among those predisposed to believe in “AI”, at least in part.
Web Components from early 2024 · Chris Burnell
Some lovely HTML web components—perfect for progressive enhancement!
The Snowdrop: Lost In the Arctic
If you liked David Grann’s book The Wager, here’s another shipwreck tale, this time from the other side of the world.
It’s OK to Say if You Went Back in Time and Killed Baby Hitler — Big Echo
Primer was a film about a start-up …and time travel. This is a short story about big tech …and time travel.
Muscular imagination
Robin Sloan on The Culture:
The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently articulate and defend their values. (Their enthusiasm for their own politics is considered annoying by most other civilizations.)
Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.
I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.
Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.
a view source web
As a self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s map.
This ability to “observe” software makes HTML special to work with.
SpeedCurve | The psychology of site speed and human happiness
Tammy takes a deep dive into our brains to examine the psychology of web performance. It opens with this:
If you don’t consider time a crucial usability factor, you’re missing a fundamental aspect of the user experience.
I wish that more UX designers understood that!
The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn’t Exist | jakelazaroff.com
If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.
Jeremy Keith – Of Time And The Web – border:none 2023 - YouTube
Here’s the video of the talk I gave in Nuremberg recently.
Lunar Codex
Time capsules on the moon, using NanoFiche as the storage medium.
TimeGuessr
Where and when were these photographs taken?
It’s like that Chronophoto game I linked to with an added dimension of location.
A very simple rule
I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime.