Facebook’s retreat from the news has painful for publishers—including Slate. »
Slate is sharing some information regarding their Facebook traffic since the 2017, when Facebook decided it no longer wanted to be a ’news’ site. One interesting thing to note is that while most news organisations are seeing a dip in their engagement numbers, Fox News’s numbers are actually up. There’s a joke to be made here about real news vs news entertainment, but I’m not sure even I can be bothered to make it.
# Jun 27, 2018Your Next Dining Destination (Really): Warsaw »
I do a lot of complaining about Warsaw but the one thing I can’t complain about is the quality of the food coming out of the restaurants here. When we first arrived, I would give out about how there’s not much of a food culture here. Boy, was I wrong. (Also, not really mentioned in the article is how cheap the food is here. Blows my mind every time.)
# May 23, 2018Subscription Hell »
I’ve drafted a lot of blog posts about the subscription model (and binned them all because I couldn’t figure out a way of saying “not everyone is entitled to make a living from the one piece of software they wrote” without sounding like a complete asshole), but this article from Danny Crichton says pretty much everything I wanted to – subscriptions are probably the new norm, but developers and marketers need to be smarter about the pricing to avoid shooting themselves in the foot.
# May 8, 2018MVP Soundsystem »
Frank Chimero has a really great way of organising his Spotify playlists, which allows him to tie a song into a place in time. Sometimes Spotify (other streaming services are available) can be a little like drinking from the firehose, so it’s great to see how other people handle it.
# Apr 16, 2018Excerpts from My Upcoming Novel, Ready Player Two: Girl Stuff »
“Wow, Felicity,” he said. My Internet name was Felicity, after the coolest American girl doll. “I never met someone who knew so much about Harry/Draco before.”
I laughed. “Thanks, Sasuke420, I guess not everyone is as serious as I am about the Classic Ships.” Then I turned on the best song, “Spice World,” by the Spice Girls. I saw his eyes go wide as he got my musical reference. He was a keeper.
“In a while, Totodile,” I said, which is a Pokémon.
If you’d told me these were real, I would have believed you.
# Apr 2, 2018The Flight of the Zuckerberg »
Dave Pell:
Facebook is constantly urging you to share your immediate thoughts and reactions to every life event. We were a couple days into the company’s biggest challenge before Facebook’s creator shared any of his thoughts on the matter. There’s probably a lesson in that.
This is the best reaction to the CA/Facebook story that I’ve read.
# Mar 26, 2018Sex Workers Say Porn on Google Drive Is Suddenly Disappearing »
If this is true, this is an ugly precedent to set as we move more and more to entirely cloud-based storage. You don’t own your data even if you pay someone else to store it for you.
# Mar 25, 2018How I Wrote Arrival »
Eric Heisserer describes how he adapted Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life for the screen. What I love about this is that his method for deconstructing the story actually became part of the screenplay.
# Mar 1, 2018What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser »
The films, in addition to having diminishing returns, were causing a physical toll: He was a big man doing stunts, running around in front of green screens, going from set to set. His body began to fall apart. “By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China,” which was 2008, “I was put together with tape and ice”
This is the rawest interview I’ve read in a long time.
# Feb 23, 2018Add View Image to Google Images »
Related to the Frank Chimero piece, removing the ‘view image’ button makes the internet harder to use. This pulls it back slightly but for how long?
# Feb 21, 2018