Before search engines the web relied on links and recommendations, I believe we lost an important human element of the web as blogrolls fell from favour. Now search engines are becoming useless and social media is imploding I think it's more important than ever to make the web a web again, so here are links to friends and things I found interesting that you might find interesting too.
ART
- Dave Whiteland is a writer, comic artist and programmer. Wonderful things come from his brain. He is currently interviewing cats. He published one of the very first web comics.
- Elephant Town is the latest webcomic from Danielle Corsetto, I'm loving the pacing, style and character development.
- Fergus Dunnet is an artist, illustrator, puppet maker, animation and well of creativity.
- Letters to the Ocean - "Every day for twelve years, I sent a letter to the Pacific Ocean. The letters were returned by the US Postal Service with markings indicating that “no such place exists.” I have over 3,000 returned letters which I have exhibited at various points."
- Myfanwy Tristram is an illustrator, activist and comic artist with a sharp eye for people and fashion.
- The Illustrated Jules Verne - The Original Illustrations of the Voyages Extraordinaires. All the beautifully etched plates.
- Void.as is a studio from Norway that make amazing light installations.
CODE
- Alex Trost is a front-end developer and also runs Frontend Horse. I really enjoy the energy and playfulness he brings to everything he produces.
- Anna Powell-Smith makes a lot of very interesting data-vis projects, from mapping money laundering for Private Eye to Land Ownership and the Doomsday book.
- Cassie Codes - I love Cassie's playfulness, whimsy, design sense and expansive knowledge. Would recommend having a look through her CodePen, treasure trove of learning.
- Computer Lib/Dream Machines In Steven Levy's book Hackers, Computer Lib is described as "the epic of the computer revolution, the bible of the hacker dream. [Nelson] was stubborn enough to publish it when no one else seemed to think it was a good idea."
- Godot Engine is an open source game engine I've recently started playing with and really enjoying.
- Hexagonal Grids This is a great guide exploring different approaches to working with hex grids. There's pseudo code examples for each of the approaches.
- Joe Wright is a software developer I worked with briefly and learnt a huge amount from in that small time. Watching him methodically convert a giant monolithic piece of mission critical legacy code in place to something sane, tested and predictable was inspirational.
- Matthew Somerville is a programmer, musician and remover of bank holidays. You may know him from accessible train times, his work at mySociety or one of his many other projects.
- Schneier on Security - "I am a public-interest technologist, working at the intersection of security, technology, and people."
- Sonic Pi is a tool from Sam Aaron that lets you make music with code.
- T.J. Sheehy is another software developer who was instrumental to my understanding and way I approach my work. He has a quiet, gentle, humble way of teaching, and unexpected passion and determination for finding the best solution.
- Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behaviour - Really interesting article about the Pac-Man ghosts personalities and some links to go more in-depth. I love the complex behaviour they managed to get from such simple rules.
- Valerie Aurora in her first programming job debugged a nuclear explosion detecting satellite using the offset of a reflected giant space laser!
- 📺 CodingTrain - I recently came across this channel and haven't fully dived into the archives yet as there are over a decade of videos spanning a huge range of programming topics, the style, friendliness and positivity is so refreshing and I really love his teaching style.
COOKING
- East by Meera Sodha is one of my favourite cookbooks, I've never made a recipe from it that I haven't really enjoyed.
- Hot Bread Kitchen is a bakery in New York that employs immigrant women from all over the world, the recipe book is full of a huge variety of breads and some meals that go with them. The recipes are super clear and I've always been successful making them.
- The Green Roasting Tin by Rukmini Iyer is brilliant for recipes you can just throw in a tray in the oven and have something really tasty. There's really quick and longer recipes
- 📺 Cloud Doughnuts Love these tiny doughnuts, really quick to make and a great special treat. I added ground cardamom to the dough and the coating.
- 📺 The 5 minute baguette This recipe is brilliant, perfect for quickly putting together the night before to bake in the morning. You can also use 100g of liquid starter or preferment in place of the yeast and the timings still work, just remove half the weight from the flour and water.
DESIGN
- Color Wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works is an interesting article talking about how we physically see colour versus how it is traditionally taught and how it relates to the actual physical attributes of the spectrum. The description of how the filters work is one of the clearest/easy to understand I've read.
- Hifi Archiv is a hoard of retro hifi adverts and manuals grouped by manufacturer. I particularly love the Philips ones.
- Light and the Eye this series of articles is the perfect follow-up to "Color Wheels are wrong?" and goes into much more depth about the physics, mechanics and evolutionary purpose of colour vision. It's not a light read but it is fascinating.
- Obsolete technology - "There is a lot of potential in past and often forgotten knowledge and technologies when it comes to designing a sustainable society."
- Poline is a tool for generating and exploring colour palettes. It is magical and addictive to play with, and a great to experiment with theory.
- Present & Correct is a design blog and I love the links they share it's one of the first feeds I check. "We want to spark a distant memory, make you smile or look at the most mundane in a new, and fonder, light."
- Star Trek Chairs Countless off-the-shelf office chairs, lounge chairs or car seats appeared in Star Trek productions. Here is a list of the models that we found, among them many design classics.
- Zugakousaku is a collection of examples of interactive design/storytelling.
MAKER
- Precious Plastic
- 📺 DIYPerks - Another person that approaches everything he produces with a positive, encouraging and methodical manner. A natural teacher.
MATHS
- How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did
- MIT Press: Open Access Materials nearly 300 books mostly covering topics connected to science and technology.
- Superformula - there is something magical about these shapes, the simple rules that form them and the way they reflect nature in 2D and 3D.
- The Prisoners' Dilemma - a post from the sprawling brain of Robin Houston exploring the Prisoners Dilemma and how the optimal play changes when looked at over time. Lots of other great stuff on his blog, I especially love the series on mazes and his experiments with flood filling.
- 📺 Divergence and curl: The language of Maxwell's equations, fluid flow, and more by 3Blue1Brown. I'd love to have a play with some vector fields.
- 📺 Math For Game Devs by Freya Holmér is one of the clearest, best explained series teaching the maths commonly used in GameDev/Animation out there. Her videos on The Continuity of Splines and The Beauty of Bézier Curves are both really well made, researched and worth watching
MUSIC
- Finn Anderson is a signer-songwriter, pianist, composer for theatre and all round lovely human. Into The Arms Of Ghosts is my favourite wind down album.
- Kristin McClement is a singer-songwriter, print artist and member of the Wilkommen Collective in Brighton. Give her a listen.
- Nicolette Macleod is an artist, incredible singer, writer and composer for theatre and dance as well as my partner in-crime at URSALUNA Studio.
- The Great 78 Project is an effort from the Internet Archive to digitize the original 78rpm discs which were made from shellac and are starting to degrade. It's a treasure trove of amazing music and interesting recordings.
- 📺 The Irrepressibles - I saw Jamie and the Irrepressibles live when Nicolette was supporting them at a gig in Manchester and went in completely unprepared for the mix of theatrical, orchestral, electrical and vocal power. Well worth seeing live.
NATURE
- Borneo Orangutan Survival UK "Saving orangutans from extinction, together"
- Merlin is a scarily accurate app that helps you train your recognition of bird song and general identification.
- OneKind is a Scottish animal rights charity helping to end animal cruelty, and protecting wildlife, farmed animals and pets. One of their recent campaigns resulted in snares being banned in Scotland!
- Scottish Ornithologists' Club (SOC) "On the one hand, a birdwatching club. On the other, a network of volunteers across Scotland, gathering vital information about Scotland’s wild birds.". They have a wonderful library that is well worth a visit and useful app.
PHOTOGRAPHY
- Back To The Future - A Wonderfully playful collection of photos taking an old photo and recreating it as closely as possible with the same people and location. The attention to detail in the outfits, props, lens choice, and treatment is superb.
- Rune Guneriussen creates photos with light, structure, nature and curiosity.
- Water Wigs is a fun project by Tim Tadder where he captures bald heads being hit by water balloons.
- Yousef Khanfar is a master of light and landscape. I've been lucky to attend a couple of his workshops which were instrumental to my learning about composition.
- 📺 Mathieu Stern creates videos experimenting with lenses and cameras in novel and interesting ways. I really enjoy his playing with vintage lenses and projector lenses.
- 📺 Morgan Cooper has a masterful use of colour in his shots and I love the intentionality, storytelling and variation in his work.
PODCASTS
- Clarkesworld Podcast - This is an amazing resource, over 11 years of short fiction stories for free. (patreon)
- LocalFirst.fm A podcast about local-first software development
- Midst is a semi-improvised story told by "a trio of playfully omniscient, mysterious, and unreliable narrators". It's great at painting a world and drawing you in and lovely sound design. Start at the beginning, I didn't get into Moonward (Season 4) but the first three seasons are fantastic.
- RadioLab: Colors - I don't think there are many people who haven't heard RadioLab (Though if you haven't listened they have a great backlog), but I love this episode about colour in particular. 🌈🦐
- The Game Design Round Table - It's worth exploring the large backlog of episodes, some really great interviews and discussions about all aspects of game design, theory, digital and physical. They aso have a great Discord community.
- The Strange Case of Starship Iris - Feels like a space western in the same vein as Firefly, great character development.
- Within the Wires - Each season is 10 episodes and is standalone, but they are all set in the same alternate universe. That said I would still start with the first season. Brilliant storytelling and sound design.
MISC
- A Pickpocket’s Tale - "The spectacular thefts of Apollo Robbins."
- A Precious Hour , my mind often comes back to this post. I'm going to try and adopt the practice. "Starting at the beginning of February, I made a change. Each day I blocked off a precious hour to build something."
- Dr Julius Neubronner’s Miniature Pigeon Camera
- HOWTO: Be more productive - brilliant article by Aaron Swartz on being productive and the non-fungibility of time. I found this really helpful. Most his articles are a great read, another recommended one is Fix the machine, not the person.
- How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
- Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling
