on the list, 21 may 2021
3 min readMay 21, 2021
- Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR. This is gonna be in heavy rotation all weekend, and probably all summer. I loved Julius Bridgeforth’s review.
- StackBlitz’s WebContainers simultaneously feels years overdue, and completely mindblowing. “WebContainers allow you to create fullstack Node.js environments that boot in milliseconds and are immediately online & link shareable — in just one click. The environment loads with VS Code’s powerful editing experience, a full terminal, npm and more. It also runs entirely inside your browser.” Announcement comes complete with Alan Kay quote.
- Why is this interesting, The Micro to Macro edition. This post resonated with me — you have to feel the texture of data, and understand what’s happening behind the rows in the sheet. “In producing the charts that I used to manage the business, I had assumed that I was operating at the right level of abstraction. But it turns out that I had assumed too much about how the market should work. High level reports miss the nuance.”
- GitHub’s Flat Data project. Speaking of data, this approach for scraping and versioning data using GitHub and GitHub Actions is essentially ETL for the rest of us. “While Flat has a ton of utility for developers, we want to make it easier for scientists, journalists, and other developer-adjacent audiences to develop lightweight, data-driven apps.”
- Michael Tsai’s blogging about the Epic v. Apple trial. That’s a link to Day 13, where he does an amazing job with the blockquote roundup of the day’s coverage. Tsai is how I’m keeping up.
- Rare Ink is building an NFT marketplace for tattoos. “Much like digital art pre-blockchain, tattoo artists are only able to post designs on Instagram in return for likes and potential bookings. The value of the tattoo design and its artistic merit are currently not taken into account despite the community of tattoo collectors growing into a huge global audience.” Speaking of which, you’ve gotta believe there’s some deep thinking happening inside Instagram about NFTs.
- Jason Kottke’s recent media diet. There’s tons of gems in here, including his mini review of Godzilla v. Kong: “I watched this after eating an edible and I think that’s the perfect way to do it. Monsters, roar! (B)”
- Ava, what I talk about when I talk about not thinking. “Carver talks about love and Murakami talks about running and I want to talk about the blissful, perfect feeling of my brain going completely blank.”
- Dylan Jones’ oral history of David Bowie. I’ve been making my way through this over the past few weeks. I don’t think I’ve ever made it all the way through a book-length oral history, but this one works because the kaleidoscopic form is perfect for Bowie. You never quite get that head on look at him; you only see him reflected through the lenses of the people around him. Also, in case you needed another reminder, the 70s were wild.
- Google AMP is dead. Good riddance.
