Monkey Island 2 had some of the best art of its time. The colours, the character. And nearly all done in marker? So impressive.
Hello Jekyll
One of the nice things about having a blog that no-one actually reads is that you can do silly, borderline reckless things with almost no fallout. For example, you can completely change your backend from Wordpress to Jekyll on a whim.
So this weekend, that’s exactly what I did.
And I have to say, it’s been an interesting experience. I moved from Livejournal to my own Wordpress blog, on my own domain (fuckcuntandbollocks.com - RIP) in 2004. Besides the general embarrassment that comes from reading stuff from your past, (especially when I moved away from the earnest, personal writing on Livejournal and I was trying so hard to be clever and articulate over here), there’s also the sheer volume of cruft that’s built up over time. I’ve spent the weekend blowing the cobwebs off the darker corners of my Wordpress database and trying to extract this content into something that makes sense and will out-live Wordpress. Both of these have clarified exactly why I needed to move to something like Jekyll.
Now my blog is written in text files that live in my Dropbox and I don’t have to worry about the latest Wordpress 0-day exploit.
But there’s still a lot of work to be done. Broken images need to be found. Broken links need to be fixed. The migration is maybe 90% complete. So bear with me while I get it finished.
PT: The Movie
Someone put together all the best bits of PT (one of my favourite games of last year) and cut them together as a ‘found footage’ horror film. And you know what? It still scares the pants off me.
The matte paintings of the original Star Wars trilogy and their creators »
When I was about ten years old, I saved up all my pocket money for months and bought myself a hardback copy of Industrial Light and Magic: The Art of Special Effects. And the thing I loved most about this book was all the matte paintings. Such a simple idea, but so powerful and so evocative. I’d get lost in them for hours. And here we are, over twenty years later and they still draw me in, every time.
The Fleshlight Model Visits the Fleshlight Factory
My favourite part of this video is where she’s standing next to the owner of the fleshlight factory and the interviewer asks the owner “have you ever used the fleshlight?” and he’s like “of course!” then realises he’s standing next to the lady whose fake vagina he masturbated into. I haven’t seen anything that awkward in ages.
Broad City Meets Sleater-Kinney »
I don’t know who in NPR thought it would be a good idea to invite the stars of Broad City (one of the best shows on tv right now, btw) to interview Sleater-Kinney, but that person should be given a massive promotion.
How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled their back-end for Kim Kardashian »
One of the things nerds love to do is look at other people’s stacks and say, “what a house of cards!” In fact I fully expect people to link to this article and write things like, “sounds okay, but they should have used Jizzawatt with the Hamstring extensions and Graunt.ns for all their smexing.”
I rarely link to articles that relate to the kinds of things I do at my day job because they’re usually so dry and boring. But remember when I said Paul Ford was one of my internet heroes? Well, this shows why. So terrifically written.
An Oral History of the Poop Emoji »
Fun fact: the computer I’m typing this on is called 
. Every time I see this in a list of network devices, it cheers me up.
This is Water
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKYJVV7HuZw
A while ago, I went through a rough patch, both mentally and emotionally and this speech – specifically the audiobook version – helped get me through it. I’d listen to it at night when I was more likely to be hit with a panic attack and it helped calm me and also helped me think outside of myself, which was exactly what I needed.
God, I miss DFW.