Started reading Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media by Jacob Mchangama 📚
Reading this along with a few of my co-workers this summer. The author will be speaking at our org’s annual meeting later this year. LA Review of Books has a good review.
Ty updated his website recently, and it looks awesome.
The whole thing is set in Noted, a font he designed based on his own handwriting. It’s for sale on his site along with several other nice type designs.
Once in a while I still see a great website design with a “Site by …” link in the footer. Or a humans.txt file. Or both!
I love seeing these things, especially in 2023 amidst all the AI hype. The web is created by people, for people.
Amy Hupe has a new podcast called Systems of Harm, which examines ways to design more inclusive digital products. 🎙️
Episode topics so far have included cognitive biases, trans exclusion, and dyscalculia.
We’ve created a way of working where the digital maker community (including its leaders) is addicted to speed in design and deployment but largely averse to, and largely ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of this pace. Where we are is a natural right-on-time symptom of the adolescent phase of our industry. And it’s time to grow up.
Lisa Welchman, writing earlier this year on maturing the culture of digital.
To add insult to injury, last fall, AT&T internet service across Hope Village [in Detroit] went down for 45 days before being restored.
The Markup’s latest article on broadband disparity in cities throughout the U.S. is infuriating and worth your attention.
“Initially we turned to Mapbox, an established leader for generating and publishing online maps. But when we embedded a map from Mapbox on our staging website, we found it assigned a tracker that could not be disabled without violating Mapbox’s terms of service.”
The Markup explains how they built an interactive mapping tool that respects your privacy.
Want to read After Black Lives Matter by Cedric Johnson 📚
Johnson was on a recent New Books Network podcast to talk about his new book on policing and anti-capitalist struggle.🎙️ At the end of the podcast, he has a chance to discuss some of the interesting work he’s doing as an urbanist studying the Olympic Games in Los Angeles ahead of the 2028 Games.
Reason #1,461 to love Micro.blog:
A small feature I requested on Monday (alpha sorted categories) made it into production by Tuesday evening.
I set up an account on last.fm today so I can keep track of all the great music I listen to while I wash the dishes. www.last.fm/user/nsms…
More to come. 🎵
Discovered these potato chips at the supermarket recently. Nice flavor in between both salt and vinegar and BBQ chips. 4/5 would recommend.
Want to read The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet (author of The Family, co-author of Killing the Buddha) 📚
Founders Grotesk Condensed + Iowan Old Style + system-ui + SF Mono
Playing around with custom CSS and the Tiny theme for Micro.blog by @Mtt.
This morning I made sure to download Canela, Domaine Display, Founders Grotesk, and Graphik; some of the nice type shipped with MacOS.
I do wish Apple made these fonts available by default on MacOS, iOS, and Safari (like Iowan Old Style and Avenir). They can give documents and presentations oomph.
Just catching up on the weekend’s news and stuff, and the workers at Bandcamp won their union!!!
It doesn’t get much better than this: Mavis Staples performing “The Weight” with more than two dozen of her friends on a gigantic stage 🎵🎶
Sunday under glass: Listening to When Your Heartstrings Break, 1999 album by Beulah. 🎵
Inflation index, food on a stick edition: $12 USD for two small corn dogs. Seems a bit high.
At the Children’s Festival of Reading earlier today.
📍World’s Fair Park, Knoxville, Tenn.
Tee shirt by Greg Pizzoli
I rented a car recently and the worker behind the counter recognized my email address was a personal domain name. We ended up chatting for a bit about web development and WordPress and even Netlify.
Having email on your own domain name is like knowing a secret handshake or wearing a “Talk to me about websites” badge on your chest.