Author Archive

Schwarzeneggenomics: ranking every single Arnold movie

I’d argue Pumping Iron is ranked too high, but I can’t fight much with film critic Matt Singer; dude has his Schwarzenegger knowledge down cold.

Hack design

Now, more than ever, good communication between designers and developers on a tech team is essential. But I have run into a lot of really smart web developers that either have no interest in or are intimidated by web design. That’s what makes this new (free) online web course so interesting: it’s a design course targeted at developers. Impressive from what I’ve seen so far.

Oranges and blues

Cool breakdown at BoxOfficeQuant by stat major Edmund Helmer on what colors dominate modern film trailers.

Last roll of Kodachrome

Legendary photographer Steve McCurry (probably best known for his National Geographic ‘Afghan Girl’ shot) was given the last roll of Kodachrome film ever produced. He took a trip around the world to shoot those last 36 frames.

If there’s any sign of technology’s rapid progress, it’s in the switch in photography (and now film) from analog to digital. But McCurry’s shots highlighted here – from New York to India – are powerful, and still illustrate the warmth of ‘real’ film that will be gone forever.

Twelve curated tips and workflows from the trenches

Git is an endlessly powerful version control system, by far the strongest I’ve ever used in my career. Yet that said, I stick pretty much to basic command line (pull, push, diff) commands on a daily basis. Developer Nicola Paolucci’s post on Git tips I think will change this. Major hat tip to him for two actions I’d invoke commonly: listing all deleted files in a respository and searching for a string in all revisions of git history.

Girl Walk // All Day

Somehow this amazing dance film completely illuded me through all of 2012. But now it’s 2013 and there’s no excuse: if you dig Girl Talk, dance, or just great DSLR driven cinematography all over NYC, you should check out this film.

Why Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar snub is a moral outrage

Film critic Scott Mendelson on Zero Dark Thirty:

All because [director and writer] Bigelow and Boal didn’t spoon-feed their opinions to the audience in a way that made for easy digestion.  They didn’t have a fictionalized scene where a character explicitly explains to the audience how they got each piece of vital information over the eight years during which the film takes place.  They trusted the audience to make the connections… One must remember that the film initially began back when Bin Laden was still alive and it was presumed that he’d never actually be caught.  It was initially a Moby Dick-esque story of futile obsession, and I’d argue the film still stays on that path even with the new ending.

Moral ambiguity. Presenting complex issues without trying to fall on one political side or another. Forcing you, as the audience, to engage, debate, ponder what we’ve been doing with our foreign policy for the last twelve years. That’s what Zero Dark Thirty is all about (and at least partially what makes it great) and I agree with Mendelson regarding the Bigelow snub. Ridiculous.

The 2012 Slate movie club

This Slate feature always crops up this time of year and never disappoints. At the time of this writing they have already had six entries and the writing team is really solid: Dana Stevens from Slate, Wesley Morris from Grantland, and freelancers Keith Phipps (formerly a senior writer at The A.V. Club) and Stephanie Zacharek (most notable for her writing at Salon and The New York Times).

Sass for web designers

Now that I’m dabbling more and more with Sass, I’m really excited to see the great Dan Cederholm will be releasing a whole book on the subject. (For those that haven’t read Cederholm’s CSS3 entry into the A Book Apart series, do so.)

jQuery 1.9 final, jQuery 2.0 beta released

Can’t wait to dig through these releases and give them a try.