A remarkable book – and resource – from Chris Brejon. All on lighting for CG animation, but as usual with this sort of reference, so much to say about cinematic lighting fullstop.

A deeply personal obit that will likely be lost to the sands of Facebook, but hey.

Via Phil G, a nice modern boilerplate for HTML pages – notable because of the excellently narrated explanation around it. Always useful to have something like this to refer back to.

Marvellous writing on one of Infocom's most notably experimental works, and its relationships to the present.

Finally, a set of links I don't feel ashamed to send people. Good. (Via Phil).

Using page.js as a really lightweight router for Svelte – worked very well, it turned out.

Whilst I'm an old-fashioned developer, sometimes I need to make something like an SPA, and I really like how lightweight and simple this routing library is – not to mention its excellent set of plain js examples. Really good.

Because we all forget things, and this is a nice, tidy list of simple HTML DOM wrangling (which I frequently have to do, and like to do as simply as possible).

Greatly enjoyed eevee's history of CSS and browser-based code; particularly, I enjoyed the moment where you're following along with things you knew… and then you viscerally go "oh, _here's_ where I began!" I twinged as I remembered where I began, my move away from table-based layout… and then the point where I started battling quirks mode for a living…

"Everything is Someone is a book about objects, technology, humans, and everything in-between. It is composed of seven “future fables” for children and adults, which move from the present into a future in which “being” and “thinking” are activities not only for humans. Absorbing and thought-provoking, this collection explores the point where technology and philosophy meet, seen through the eyes of kids, vacuum cleaners, factories and mountains.

From a man that wants to become a table, to the first vacuum cleaner that bought another vacuum cleaner, all the way to a mountain that became the president of a nation, each story brings the reader into a different perspective, extrapolating how some of the technologies we are developing today, will bur the line between, us, devices, and natural beings too."

Simone has a book out!

Notes from Jeremy Keith on starting out in front-end circa 2019. Really useful for [Longridge], because I never have a good answer to where to start any more, and lots of these resources look great.

"A compelling 120-word critique regarding automated front-end development, as provided by a class attribute inside this simple Squarespace template"

Yes.

Oh, awesome: a Pinboard Share extension for iOS 8.

New Danny Macaskill video: off-road (off ALL the roads) in Skye. Remarkable. Also: so much dronecam in biking videos now. (Nicely shot, thoguh).

Really, really useful: a tool from @mnot to test headers, caching, and responses to webpages. Will be using this a lot in future, am sure.

"The water that falls on you from nowhere when you lie is perfectly ordinary, but perfectly pure. True fact. I tested it myself when the water started falling a few weeks ago. Everyone on Earth did. Everyone with any sense of lab safety anyway. Never assume any liquid is just water. When you say “I always document my experiments as I go along,” enough water falls to test, but not so much that you have to mop up the lab. Which lie doesn’t matter. The liquid tests as distilled water every time." A truly lovely short story from John Chu.

The most useful tips in here: set the right headers; set the body of the response to an enumerator and it'll iterate over it, streaming it.

Some great Chess writing from Slate.

"‘If all that survives of our fatally flawed civilization is the humble paper clip, archaeologists from some galaxy far, far away may give us more credit than we deserve,’ the design critic Owen Edwards argues in his book Elegant Solutions." An excerpt from a Joe Moran essay on the paperclip.

"pup is a command line tool for processing HTML. It reads from stdin, prints to stdout, and allows the user to filter parts of the page using CSS selectors.

Inspired by jq, pup aims to be a fast and flexible way of exploring HTML from the terminal." That looks great.

"Something that journalists sometimes do is publish a disclosure statement. It’s sort of like an About Me page except it’s a listing of all their conflicts of interest—all the areas of coverage where you might have good reason to think they should not be trusted. It’ll say things like I once worked at Google or I’m married to an employee of Microsoft. I have never written one of these but I have fantasies about doing a comprehensive one. It would be the length of a novel, I think. An endless and yet incomplete litany of all the blood, privilege, history, and compromise on my hands." I could have quoted lots of this, but I chose this. It's good. It encapsulates the beginnings but not ends of lots of thoughts, and reminds me why, right now, I'm afraid of assuming anything about anything, why stereotyping "big companies" as being identical isn't just inaccurate but also unhelpful, and why the point of boundaries is that they always exclude _somebody_.

"Hatoful Boyfriend is the Fifa of pigeon romance and you should buy it for that reason alone." I'm loving the attention Hatoful Boyfriend is getting in the media; this review by Grant Howitt is charming, informative, and on the Guardian website. Brilliant.

Cracking interview with George Saunders, from 2011 (so pre-Tenth of December). Lots about the craft of writing, and about what Just Turning Up looks like. Also, his imaginary writing class in which Hemingway punches everybody out made me laugh out loud.

"Of course this is pure anthropomorphization. Bits don’t have wills. But they do have tendencies." This piece by Kevin Kelly is great – though this line neatly explains my suggestion that 'things' sometimes have 'desires' better than I ever have before.

Good to know SES can just be integrated as an ActionMailer delivery method.

Very clear explanation of precisely what's going on inside the Bootstrap grid – with diagrams, and also clear explanations of the roles of each styling class. The clarification of push/pull is particularly useful.

"A day of support at Mutable Instruments’ is more commonly populated with “If you see a 100kHz square wave at this node, it means the integrator charges itself very fast, probably through the op-amp compensation cap only, not the external cap – check for a bad solder joint on C9” rather than “Have you checked that the power cord is plugged?” (though it happens). Furthermore, once kits get built, ideas of mods and firmware hacks crop up – all requiring expert guidance. All in all, the “support” role at Mutable Instruments is more like “product engineering – the lost levels” – and that’s why, following the introduction of a product – support can be done by no other than the designer of the instruments themselves…" Still, MI's products are getting increasingly lovely. I've always been tempted by a Shruthi, and the Anushri looks lovely.

"Prototype iPhone apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components." Looks nice; also, lovely splash site.

"Boilerplate is not a framework, nor does it prescribe any philosophy of development, it's just got some tricks to get your project off the ground quickly and right-footed." Good documentation, lots of neat tricks in here, and some good jumping-off points for further research.