Resilient Web Design »

Jeremy Keith has written a terrific primer on the importance of embracing the web we have and designing with open standards (“material honesty”) and, more importantly, content in mind. It’s a great read, even (especially?) for non-designers.

Coincidentally, over the last week or so, I’ve been making some changes to my personal websites (here and johnke.wtf) to make them more responsive and behave nicely on different devices. So this has come along at just the right time for me.

Indie Microblogging: owning your short-form writing »

Manton Reece wants to make a microblogging site for the open web and he’s running a Kickstarter to help fund that. I don’t know if another microblog can actually take on or even compete with Twitter (has anyone checked to see if app.net is still breathing?) but I’m supporting this because I refuse to lose hope in the idea of the open web.

Films I Watched in 2016

For the last few years, I’ve been using Letterboxd to keep a track of every film I watch. According to my Letterboxd profile, I watched a total of 92 films in 2016. Which is the same number of films as I watched in 2015, which isn’t bad, considering my wife and I had a child in early January, which severely limited our trips to the cinema.

I also scored each film I watched, with a maximum score of five. Which lets me pull out some statistics1!

My year in film

The average score across all films was 3.1 / 5, which is pretty good2! The lowest score I gave a film was 1 / 5 (actually, I gave it to two films: Camino and Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse). The highest score this year was 4.5 / 5. The films I rated the highest this year were Rogue One (which I saw twice), Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Green Room and Steve Jobs.

92 films averages to 1.8 films a week. The graph of when these films were watched tells a bit of a story of the year. First week of the year, when my wife was heavily pregnant and ready to pop, we watched five films. Then, the entire month of April, when my baby was waking four or five times a night? One film.

I only reviewed 43 of the 92 films I watched in 2016, which is a shame, because my little reviews are more helpful to me in remembering why I gave a film a particular score. I could barely remember watching Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, but my review – my little note to amuse no-one but myself – reminded me why I gave it 1 / 5.


  1. For context on the scoring, I have given nine films a perfect score of 5/5↩︎

  2. Last year, the average score was 2.8 / 5, so either films are getting better or I’m doing a better job of avoiding bad ones, I guess? ↩︎

Best Games I Played in 2016

Every year, I do a roundup of my favourite games that I played throughout the year. Previous years: 2013, 2014, 2015

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

Okay, so technically this game came out in 2015, which is a great start to a year-end list for 2016. I played it when it first came out and it just didn’t click with me. I’m not sure why. I knew going in that it fell under the ‘walking simulator’ umbrella. But I guess I was expecting more of a Gone Home style experience, where the game gives you an environment to explore and examine and a story that you uncover — or flesh out — for yourself. Except, as I found out, EGTTR is not that type of game. It’s more like a radio play crossed with a heavy dose of Sleep No More. So, last month, I went back and played it like that, like it was a play that I was witnessing rather than actually being any part of, and the game bowled me over. It’s poetic and beautiful without ever being mawkish and it’s one of a handful of games to have ever made me cry.

Rise of the Tomb Raider/Uncharted 4

I don’t think it’s cheating to put both of these games on here. They’re both really fun games that are great at different things. Uncharted had a great, grown-up story (a hero trying to settle down and re-adjust his priorities) and had the best free-flowing combat of any game I’ve played this year. In the previous Uncharted games, I’d hide behind cover and pick off the baddies one-by-one. In this, I was finally whizzing around the levels like the badass the game wanted me to be. Tomb Raider, on the other hand, had better, uh, tombs. Better puzzles that took advantage of the environment. The Baba Yaga DLC (which comes loaded on the PS4 disk) is stunning and a wild departure from what you’d expect from a triple-A blockbuster game.

TIS-100/Quadrilateral Cowboy

Look, if I can put Uncharted and Tomb Raider together on this list because of a thematic link, I can definitely put TIS-100 and Quadrilateral Cowboy together. In TIS-100, you have to solve a series of programming puzzles by writing assembly. Assembly! It’s frustrating and you spend most of your play-time just staring at the screen, not typing anything. And oh my God, it’s so rewarding when you finally figure it out. Just like real programming! Best part is that when you solve it, it shows you a leaderboard of how you did compared to your steam friends. If you’ve got nerdy programming friends, this is a huge pissing contest and it’s great.

On the other hand, Quadrilateral Cowboy is about hacking to pull off elaborate heists. William Gibson meets Oceans Eleven. The game’s action is more physical than TIS-100. You type your commands into your ‘deck’ in the game. For example, you program a door to open for five seconds, which should be just enough time for you to grab your deck and run through before the door shuts but not so long that the alarm will trigger. The real fun comes in stringing together a series of commands so that things will happen in sequence and allow you to steal the maguffin. Get that timing just right and you felt like you’re in Mission Impossible or something. But like, one of the good ones.

The Witness

Stop me if you’ve heard me tell this story before. When I was in my early twenties, I taught myself how to juggle. And the hardest part, I found, was just getting my brain to learn to let go of that third ball when two were already in flight. I spent weeks trying to throw that third ball in the air. I just couldn’t do it. My hand wouldn’t release it. Then, one day, something clicked – and I mean clicked, like I felt a physical sensation in my brain – and I could suddenly do it, no problem.

The Witness was that feeling again and again and again. Puzzles you think you’ll never be able to do, then suddenly, something clicks and you’re able to solve them. And then you build on that knowledge when you encounter the next thing you think you’ll never be able to do. Rewarding and beautiful.

Firewatch

Firewatch starts with a strong emotional flourish every bit as powerful as the opening of Pixar’s Up. And the genius of this bit of storytelling is that it completely affects the way you play the game, the choices you make. It’s a walking simulator – a nice hike in the woods simulator, really – with a deep undercurrent of melancholy and loss. The development team has a pedigree that meant I was at least expecting something interesting. I wasn’t expecting something so mature, so confident and so emotionally resonant.

Hitman

This year’s Hitman got so many things right. The slow roll-out of episodes meant that you didn’t feel that compulsion to just finish one level as quickly as possible so you could move onto the next one. You had time to get comfortable with each level and slowly ease yourself into the game’s mechanics. It also meant you were encouraged to explore, to try different things, try absurd things. But the thing I loved most about it was how ridiculous it allowed itself to be. It embraces the silliness of the game, from the opening training level set on a soundstage with a cardboard helicopter, right through to the Christmas DLC where your targets are the burglars from Home Alone. This was the first Hitman game I truly enjoyed.

Anatomy

There were a lot of quote-unquote ‘horror’ games in 2016 (I feel like the world reached peak ‘survival’ game this year), but these were mostly of the quiet-quiet-LOUD jump-scare variety. That’s fun and all, but it’s so one-note, it gets a little repetitive. Only one game genuinely chilled me this year and it was Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy. A short, brutally efficient horror experience, which gives you the most mundane environment – a suburban home – then changes that out from underneath you on subsequent playthroughs. This is the simplest game on this list but it’s the one that’s stuck with me the most.

Overwatch

I’m terrible at shooting games. Just terrible. I’ve got old man hands, slow reactions and poor situational awareness. Oh, and I panic really easily. But here’s what I loved about Overwatch: none of this matters. You can have all of these things and still contribute to you team’s success.

Inside

Stylistically, this is kind of reminiscent of the developer’s previous game, Limbo. But while Limbo was a cold, austere game with beautiful visuals, there’s something warm and human1 about Inside. A few minutes into the game, you’re followed by a gang of chicks. It’s one of the cutest things you’ll see. Tiny chirping pixels following you around. A little while later, a puzzle involves you sucking these chicks into a machine so they get spat out the top to hit a block and knock it where you can use the block. Then the chicks all run off. Except one. A chick — a tiny group of pixels — doesn’t move. And it’s devastating.

The Last Guardian

For the first couple of hours with The Last Guardian, I was worried. I was finally playing the game I’d been waiting almost nine years for. The game whose original announcement had me rushing out to buy a PS3 the next day. The game that was the spiritual sequel to two of my favourite games of all time. And I wasn’t enjoying it. It was cold and clunky. Was this what I’d been waiting for? But then I got to the part they’d shown in countless trailers. Jumping from bridge to bridge. And when Trico reached out to catch me with his mouth but missed and then swung his tail around for me to catch, I found myself holding my breath. Even though I’d seen this happen before. And I knew the game had worked its magic and got its hooks in me, hard.


  1. And sub-human - that little mermaid girl still gives me nightmares ↩︎

Vice gets rid of comments »

Vice is getting rid of the comments from its articles

Unfortunately, website comments sections are rarely at their best. Without moderators or fancy algorithms, they are prone to anarchy. Too often they devolve into racist, misogynistic maelstroms where the loudest, most offensive, and stupidest opinions get pushed to the top and the more reasoned responses drowned out in the noise.

I predict that lots more websites will be doing the same in 2017.

GQ's Oral History of Prince »

There were a lot of celebrity deaths in 2016, but none hit me quite as hard as Prince. My sister was a huge Prince fan, which meant I was basically a fan from birth. If there’s one comfort to be taken from his death it’s that – more than any of the other celebrities that died – Prince was incredibly private. Secretive, almost. Which means all we’re left with is everyone else’s stories of Prince. And this is a much more beautiful way to remember him, as a series of impossible-seeming, almost contradictory legends. Like this one from Van Jones, the political activist.

Van Jones: He was very interested in the world. He wanted me to explain how the White House worked. He asked very detailed kind of foreign-policy questions. And then he’d ask, “Why doesn’t Obama just outlaw birthdays?” [laughs] I’m, like, “What?” He said, “I was hoping that Obama, as soon as he was elected, would get up and announce there’d be no more Christmas presents and no more birthdays—we’ve got too much to do.” I said, “Yeah, I don’t know if that would go over too well.”

David Ehrlich's 25 best films of 2016

THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2016 from david ehrlich on Vimeo.

This is SO good. A great list, in a really great video.

SO good.

Inside the Halley VI Research Station »

Really cool 360˚ tour of Halley VI, which houses up to 70 research staff in the summer and 16 in the winter. Fascinating.

Tom Waits for No One

In 1979, Tom Waits made a music video for “The One That Got Away”. 5,000 rotoscoped frames of animation. Here’s one of the live-action videos they used to make the animation, proving that in the 70s, Tom Waits was as close to a horny cat from a Looney Tunes cartoon as any human would be.

You can read more about the production (and buy an illustrated scrapbook) from the director.

Holiday Hole »

Cards Against Humanity are crowdfunding the digging of a huge hole in the Earth. And livestreaming it.

Why aren’t you giving all this money to charity?
Why aren’t YOU giving all this money to charity? It’s your money.

So far, people have paid almost $50,000 to dig a hole.