Chronophoto is a game where you have to examine a series of 5 photos and guess when each was taken. I love this kind of stuff.
(via Kottke)
Here’s an excellent take on the current round of tech layoffs which categorizes the psychological toll in two groups: Corporate and Worker. Corporate minimizes layoffs, usually because the people in that strata can land a similar job relatively easily through their networks.
Then there’s Corporate Layoff Brain. This Layoff Brain mistakes their own experience of layoffs (good! generative!) as everyone else’s, regardless of their field or position. It casualizes layoffs, categorizes it as a “management tool,” and underlines employees’ status as disposable, disempowered widgets — instead of humans with rights and responsibilities to others outside of the work environment.
While Worker is a whole different way of thinking: it’s a culture of intimidation designed to keep those of us with jobs cowed and productive:
This is the second iteration of Layoff Brain. The first is the Layoff Brain I have, the one I share with millions of other millennials and Gen-Xers. It’s a defensive crouch masquerading as “smart saving habits.” It’s a thrum of fear and student debt default and medical bankruptcy rebranded as “hustle culture.”
Technically I’m management, but having been laid off twice, I will always think and plan and worry like a worker.
Here’s a great recap of how Netscape begat Mozilla and Shepard Fairey created a dinosaur logo based on Russian Futurism with roots in the 1987 movie They Live. I look back on those wild days of the web with fondness.
So apparently, LastPass, the password manager I’ve been using for 5+ years, got hacked for the second time; they’re now saying that encrypted user databases were stolen from company servers. LastPass has been declining in usefulness since Apple changed Safari’s extension architecture a couple of years ago—one of the best features was password autofill, and that was disabled with those changes. So I’m looking at updating and then moving 470+ passwords to Keychain, which has no easy import function; apparently I have to go from a CSV file -> import into Chrome -> import to Safari, which then adds everything to Keychain. The benefit here is that it’ll all be shared across my Apple devices the way God intended. I’ve resisted Keychain for decades because the interface blows and the sharing features were janky; we’ll see how this goes. In the meantime, I just updated the master password.
Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service are playing a 20th anniversary tour for the albums Transatlaticism and Give Up. They’ll be at Merriwether Post Pavilion (10 miles from here) in September. I am very much considering going to see this show.
Update: the presale was this morning; I just spent ten minutes waiting for Ticketmaster to send me a fucking code to “verify” my account; when I got in I was able to add three lawn tickets, get to the checkout, and enter my credit card information only for their system to bonk and make me do it again. In the 2 minutes it took to re-order the tickets, they “sold out”. FUCK TICKETMASTER
The Patterson Bowling Center, a duckpin bowling center near my old neighborhood, is in danger of being shut down to make way for a condo.
An unpretentious community fixture where bowlers of all ages came to play a traditional Baltimore game, Patterson Bowling Center opened in 1927.
“I loved what it stood for and I love what it brought to that neighborhood,” Drayton said. “It stood for everything Baltimore.”
Duckpin bowling began around the start of the 20th century, but its geographic origins are muddy. Popular legend in Baltimore says that 1890s Orioles John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson invented duckpin at their alley The Diamond.
There’s a chance it may stay open, in a diminished size, but that’s currently up in the air.
In today’s day and age, it’s nice to see rich white crooks going to jail. Elizebeth Holmes, the crook who swindled millions from other rich people, was sentenced to 11 years in the slammer.
Her partner Billy Evans, in his sentencing memo to the court, told the judge that he fears for “a future in which my son grows up with a relationship with his mother on the other side of glass armed by guards”.
Yup, nobody wants that, but it happens every day to non-white people in America who don’t have the casual ability to just drop out of Stanford to start a company and defraud investors.
In this article, Stephan Ango writes about the strategy of hybridizing vs. specializing: focus on being a generalist and bringing multiple pursuits together to find unexpected connections vs. focusing completely on one career path.
Having a wide base of skills with one or two specialties gives you more tools in your toolbox — more ways to solve problems.
As an unintentional hybridist (illustrator, designer, game designer, coder, front end developer, videographer, photographer, carpenter, teacher and contractor) I can now maybe claim I had this brilliant strategy mapped out for my whole life, or I can admit that I have the attention span of a moth. Whatever the case, I do see how this mixture of pursuits has helped me think beyond just that of an illustrator (which is what it says on my diploma).
Polygon is reporting that Bungie may be considering a reboot of Marathon, the seminal mid ’90’s shooter exclusive to the Mac that destroyed my productivity for about five solid years. I have no idea what shape this would take or how they’d design it, but it would be awesome to revisit that world thirty years later.
Look at what popped up on Barnfinds.com this morning: a 1966 Chrysler 300 convertible the same color as Bob’s. From what the commentariat says, it’s in rough shape (it’s in Louisiana) and probably worth nothing more than parts. This one is red over white with a white top, and features a 383 with air conditioning. I’d prefer having A/C, but the white upholstery and top look pretty lousy to me.