September 2018

Hello, dear reader!

September is gone, but its links remain.

It was a big month for me, as I finally finished the project I was preoccupied with for most of the summer: Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited, inspired by Sol LeWitt. I also wrote about why and how I did it.

This month’s newsletter is a few days late because I wanted to include Robtober 2018, my annual deep dive into horror films which always takes… See more →

I hadn’t planned to publish this post since I failed to document this fest as thoroughly as the previous one, but I decided not to waste the bits I did document, so here they are.

Short Film Competition

The first short film competition screening was probably the least kid-friendly screening at the festival, and sure enough, a family with kids was front and center in the theater. Saturday morning cartoons, right? Literally two seconds in,… See more →

What I Did on My Summer Vacation twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Here’s how. v6.robweychert.com/blog/2018/09/r…

Here’s why. cubes-revisited.art/about/

I made something. cubes-revisited.art

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
—Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967

I felt the first rumblings of the obsession a little over a year ago. I’m a big fan of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, and on a pilgrimage to MASS MoCA’s sprawling retrospective exhibition of them, I glimpsed some curious cube structures by LeWitt scattered around the museum. A short while later, in a used bookstore in Philadelphia, I stumbled… See more →

My dad has been gone for eight years. v6.robweychert.com/blog/2012/09/g…

Seeing some interesting assumptions about what I’m asking here. Reading time ≠ progress meter and isn’t necessarily on the article page. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Let’s hear your thoughts on articles including an estimated reading time. Is it helpful?

I want to be as good at—and articulate about—something as this guy is at and about paper airplanes. youtu.be/3BNg4fDJC8A

I’m suddenly seeing a lot of Fred Perry polo shirts in the wild. Do non-Proud-Boy dudes wear them? Is my instinctual revulsion unfair?

There is a new @lowtheband record out today. Therefore, I will be listening to the new @lowtheband record today. lowtheband.bandcamp.com/album/double-n…

To clarify, I’m looking for good resources for non-designers who occasionally need to put together a reasonably competent brochure/deck/etc. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Anyone have recommendations for good online crash courses in graphic design fundamentals?

I want a smaller phone, not bigger. I want to do less with it, not more.

👀 lifewire.com/basic-cell-pho…

I love love love this peek at some of the visual inspiration for @ustwogames’s stunning Monument Valley games. milanote.com/the-work/the-s…

If you’re at an internet conference and your hotel room number is 404, do you make a sound?

Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar twitter.com/tanzinavega/st…

I’m hearing lots of music lately that takes its cues from what Purity Ring was doing six years ago, except they’re somehow making it boring.

Hello Portland! I bumped into @kellianderson on my flight so I feel like my @xoxo is off to a really good start.

PSA: URLs aren’t broken. Shitty implementations of them are, junked up with database gobbledygook, UTM codes, etc. Design URLS for users. twitter.com/wired/status/1…

Somehow missed the new @s_davachi record when it came out a few months ago. It is speaking my language. sarahdavachi.bandcamp.com/album/let-nigh…

See also this great @ProPublicaIL piece on verifying anonymous sources. propublica.org/article/ask-pr…

It’s a good week to brush up on media literacy. Here’s a handy guide to approaching journalism with unnamed sources. fivethirtyeight.com/features/when-…

👀 twitter.com/washingtonpost…

Since the album version is 9 minutes long, I call the song “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight”

“Google is just a doorman, not the destination. Yet [they believe] that they should dictate how the web evolves.” polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-…

ISPs are inventing fun new terminology to use in place of “selective throttling.” See? Killing net neutrality has spurred innovation! twitter.com/business/statu…

“What happened to make a rich white man the vox populi? […] How are the winners still insisting they are losers?” cjr.org/the_profile/tu…

Whatever you’re working on, do it like Mike Ehrmantraut would do it.

“What I want for him, and for all boys, is for the process of becoming men to be expansive, not reductive.” theatlantic.com/family/archive…

This has been another episode of Spending Hours Debugging HTML/CSS Before Spotting That Impossibly Subtle, Single-Character Typo.

I was at a party where I was being honored for some kind of achievement that wasn’t all that much of an achievement. JS said a few nice words about me to those gathered, and when I thanked her afterward, JK appeared and showed me an amazing new project: something to do with a structure that lived in his backyard, whose upside-down mirror image was beamed holographically across the city to his office via direct… See more →

“He asked her again if she was okay, and she said, ‘I remember.’

“Everyone froze.

“She said, ‘I remember what that nun did to me.’” twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/s…

running on empty this morning, yay grief twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Just got ambushed by a master-class-level nightmare about my dead dad, so if any horror writers want a consultation, I’ll be up for awhile.