Wonderful, exhaustive look at David O. Russell’s career by Steven Hyden of Grantland. One smart observation:
Russell makes movies about families — some bound by birth (The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook), others by circumstance (Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees, and American Hustle). But they’re always loud, frayed, self-destructive, and yet somehow functional units.
Object-fit is a CSS attribute that should have had widespread support a long time ago; super useful. It’s a bummer that Microsoft still lists the object-fit parameter as merely “Under Consideration”, but falling back for IE is easy and safe.
David Bax, host of the consistently excellent Battleship Pretension podcast, writes on the dangers of the Netflix “all at once” TV model. For some shows, making an entire thirteen episode season available at once works. But some shows like Bloodline suffer from the format and treatment.
Wonderful to see the technology behind Slack’s Mac app get such a slick site and documentation from Github. Can’t wait to dive into this for side project work.
Patrick Lee over at The A.V. Club runs thorough analysis of Mass Effect’s well known Paragon vs. Renegade morality system. As Lee argues, 99% of the time, picking the “good” Paragon option results in success and no negative consequences. But what if there was more of an edge? Lee:
Would Paragon purists still be willing to free the captive rachni queen if she returned the rachni to their historical warmongering? Would they let that batarian walk free in order to rescue a dozen people if there was a real chance he would use his freedom to kill hundreds? It would obviously be overkill for every Paragon option to blow up in Shepard’s face, but by allowing Paragons to stroll infallibly through the galaxy, Mass Effect defangs a world it spends a lot of time insisting will bite.
Designer Liam Campell, writing on Medium:
I don’t buy the story that you’ve either got a natural knack for design, or you’re totally hopeless. And yet I hear designers describe the programmers they work with as “design blind” with a slimy sense of pity; the insidious implication being that designers are not made, they are born — that some special children are ordained by the stars at birth into the sacred order of designers, and all others are doomed to brutish, unenlightened lives of “design blindness”.
What bullshit.
Essential reading by the Filament group on how to speed up the “critical path” of your web site’s load performance. The post includes coverage of asynchronous JavaScript loading and inlining critical CSS.
Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff on Mad Men and TV’s transition away from antiheroes:
The story of Mad Men isn’t about a man who slowly closes himself off from others. It’s the story of a man who builds a workplace family around himself, even if he’s not consciously aware of it. For as lousy of a husband and father as Don is, he’s often a magnificent coworker. He recognizes in his protege, Peggy Olson, something that nobody else likely would have, and he urges Joan Harris not to do something unthinkable simply to land an account.
A deep dive over at BFI on Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic. There’s coverage of the film’s origin story, treatment of sex and race, direction, and its prophecies of the future.
As designer Mike Borsare writes over at the Thoughtbot blog, selecting a color palette for your web site or app doesn’t have to be a painful process. Limit your options to three, use the color wheel, and get inspiration from what’s around you.