Technology

I finally ditched Spotify at the end of 2024. I never loved it, and I felt extra icky about giving them my money ever since they had no trouble finding $250 million for the sham supplement salesman and douchebag magnet Joe Rogan, despite their inability to promote or pay the vast majority of the musicians who are the heart and soul of their service. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was learning… See more →

From: Twitter <noreply@twitter.com>
To: Rob Weychert <rob@robweychert.com>
Date: October 10, 2007, 5:54pm
Subject: Welcoming you to Twitter!

Hello, new Twitter-er!

Using Twitter is going to change the way you think about staying in touch with friends and family. Did you know you can send and receive Twitter updates via mobile texting, instant message, or the web? To do that, you'll want to visit your settings page (and you'll want to invite… See more →

The level of naivete, if not outright hubris, on display in a recent New York Times article about AI-generated art is gobsmacking:

The resulting image didn’t end up going into an ad, but Mr. Carmel predicts that generative A.I. will become part of every ad agency’s creative process. He doesn’t, however, think that using A.I. will meaningfully speed up the agencies’ work, or replace their art departments. He said many of the images generated by… See more →

rumz.org v3

If Rumsey Taylor is not on your radar, this is an excellent opportunity to rectify that error.

Hindsight 2070: We asked 15 experts, "What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?" Here’s what they told us.

Most of these are more aspirations than likely outcomes, and one is included in a rather transparent attempt at ideological diversity (see if you can guess which one!), but an interesting collection… See more →

You Are Not a Tool

To me, that combination of many things — of not being tied to one particular tool — is where the power often lies.

The Tragedy of Baltimore

In 2017, it recorded 342 murders — its highest per-capita rate ever, more than double Chicago’s, far higher than any other city of 500,000 or more residents and, astonishingly, a larger absolute number of killings than in New York, a city 14 times… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

February is gone, but its links remain.

I owe you a belated “Happy new year!” since I failed to get this newsletter out the door the past two months. If you’re desperate to see the links that never made it to your inbox during those months, you can find December and January (along with every other edition) on my site.

In February, I finally launched Tinnitus Tracker, a live music diary I’ve… See more →

The Leaked Louis C.K. Set Is Tragedy Masked as Comedy

Over the years, C.K.’s comedy evolved, as any comic’s will, but at their best and most well known, his jokes were about interrogating himself as a means of interrogating American culture. As C.K. shuffled uncomfortably on stages and sets, clad in rumpled T-shirts and slouchy dad jeans, he served as his own act’s useful idiot: C.K., author and character at once, played the privileged guy… See more →

George Bush, Who Steered Nation in Tumultuous Times, Is Dead at 94

I like this Bush obit as a crash course on the political forces that shaped the world during my formative years.

24 Ways

Always delighted to see this advent calendar of web design articles light up my RSS feed every December.

The Fun Is Back in Social Media…Again!

TikTok probably feels a lot like Flickr or Twitter in the early days, where everyone… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

November is gone, but its links remain.

I published a couple of nerdy blog posts in November: one about how I’m using my Letterboxd data to address my cinematic blindspots, and one about a common convention of editorial design that’s currently incompatible with CSS Grid.

Lots of interesting stuff in the links this month; for what it’s worth, my favorites are Earworm’s series of videos about jazz.

As usual, you can get many… See more →

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 →

Hello, dear reader!

August is gone, but its links remain.

My site was quiet in August, as I’ve been heads-down on a project I’m pretty excited about. Its release is just one facet of the ambitious September I have planned, so if all goes well, there will be much to report in next month’s newsletter.

My alter-ego Windhammer recently returned to the competitive air guitar stage for his 10th anniversary, tying for second in the… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

June is gone, but its links remain.

It was a relatively busy month on my site! I had an unexpected reason to revisit an animated student film I made 20 years ago, wrote about designing better concert listings, chronicled my experience learning about the future of typography at the Ampersand conference, and offered middling reviews of the year’s most celebrated horror films, A Quiet Place and Hereditary.

This month’s links are the sort… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

May is gone, but its links remain.

The only thing I published on my site this month was a brief, snarky review of a 69-year-old movie (nice), but if all goes well in June, I’ll have a couple of substantial posts about creative projects (new and old) coming your way.

The links below include some meaty reporting on politics and a triptych of opinion pieces on our culture wars’ state of discourse.… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

April is gone, but its links remain.

I’ve been obsessed with my current personal project lately (more on that soon), so apart from a handful of very brief movie reviews, I didn’t do much writing in April, though the web designers in the audience might want to take a look at my notes from last week’s Generate conference.

The links this go-round include some gems for Prince fans on the second anniversary of… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

March is gone, but its links remain.

I gave a brief talk about designing information at the annual Society for News Design conference, and also shared my notes from the other talks I took in.

Always ahead of the trends, I left Facebook at the beginning of the month, a little over two weeks before the news about Cambridge Analytica broke (news which long-time readers may not have found shocking). Since think… See more →

Hello dear reader!

February is gone, but its links remain.

My site was pretty quiet in February, up until yesterday when I published the final post in a series about the process behind my redesign. This one is about color, and the recent revelations I’ve had about how to work with it.

This month’s links have the usual range of topics, with the highlight for me being a treasure trove of interviews and demos on… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

January is gone, but its links remain.

In my little corner of the internet, I posted a roundup of my favorite stuff from 2017 (including a look ahead at plans for 2018). As a subscriber, you may be especially interested in the stats I compiled about the 299 links I shared last year.

I released my first open source software project, Column Setter, a Sass tool for building custom responsive grids that… See more →

Happy New Year, dear reader!

December is gone, but its links remain.

I did some more film writing this month, most notably on The Disaster Artist and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and I also published a collection of all the shorter film reviews I wrote in 2017.

This month’s links are a good mix of the topical (net neutrality, sexism, the new tax bill), year-end reflections, inspiring art and design, and more. I hope… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

November is gone, but its links remain.

Most of my writing energy this month went toward a post about the typography and spatial relationships underpinning my site’s recent redesign. I also wrote a handful of film reviews, the most substantial of which outlines my disappointment with the ambitious Loving Vincent, an animated film made from thousands of oil paintings.

Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of this month’s links are devoted to thinking through… See more →

Hello, dear reader!

October is gone, but its links remain.

For my part, I wrote a bit about my first ten years on Twitter, dusted off the ol’ dream journal, and published the full calendar for Robtober, my annual horror movie binge. I also wrote a bit about each of the 31 movies included in Robtober this year. They’ll all be collected on my site later, but for now they’re available on Letterboxd.

With Robtober keeping… See more →

I didn’t understand Twitter at first. A service that would constantly update me via SMS about the minutiae of my friends’ activities? Uh, no thanks? Using it via its website was less intrusive and slightly more appealing, but the whole thing still seemed to me like a really disorganized and fairly pointless chat room. Nevertheless, most of my friends in the web design community had joined by late 2006, and the service dominated SXSW Interactive… See more →

Why Hollywood Is Trying to Turn Everything Into Movies — Even Mindless Games Like ‘Fruit Ninja’

Vinson then realized that he was faced with a formidable predicament. There are no protagonists or antagonists in Fruit Ninja.

Goldner says the key to making movies from board games and toys is to “focus on understanding the universal truth about the brand.”

The film’s director and co-­writer, Tony Leondis, told me that “The Emoji Movie” actually began with… See more →

Animated Subway Maps Compared to Their Actual Geography

These are a wonderfully concise look at design thinking.

How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science

Murray Energy — despite its enormous clout with Mr. Trump and his top environmental official — boasts a payroll with only 6,000 employees. The coal industry nationwide is responsible for about 160,000 jobs, with just 65,000 directly in mining, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

By… See more →

What’s Your Ideal Community? The Answer Is Political

It’s conceivable that people who live in cities come to value more active government. Or they’re more receptive to investing in welfare because they pass the homeless every day. Or they appreciate immigration because their cab rides and lunch depend on immigrants. This argument is partly about the people we’re exposed to in cities (the poor, foreigners), and partly about the logistics of living there.

The suburbs… See more →

Barbara Crampton on Stuart Gordon, Chopping Mall, and the new wave of indie horror

For fans of 1980s B-horror, here’s a good AV Club interview with the delightful Barbara Crampton.

Anti-Christ in a custom van: The churchy cheap thrills of A Thief In The Night

It may seem impossible to not think of the end of the world in poetic terms, but never underestimate the premillennialists.

Why Punching Down Will Never Be Funny

Watters and… See more →

Fear of a Female President

To understand this reaction, start with what social psychologists call “precarious manhood” theory. The theory posits that while womanhood is typically viewed as natural and permanent, manhood must be “earned and maintained.” Because it is won, it can also be lost. Scholars at the University of South Florida and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported that when asked how someone might lose his manhood, college students rattled off social… See more →

Could Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?

They had me sign my rights away for $1,” Ms. Crane told me. She never did get that dollar.

Meanwhile, in most areas of the United States, women still need permission from a doctor to buy birth control pills, even though they are arguably safer than a lot of other drugs now sold over the counter and there are very few health risks involved. It’s true… See more →

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There’s nothing wrong with walled gardens. They’re safe spaces. They take care of your enjoyment and entertainment, so you don’t have to.

But there also a bit boring. I certainly don’t relish the idea of spending my days within the boundaries of someone else’s vision.

There’s a different kind of garden. It takes its name from another short story by Borges.

The Garden of Forking Paths. It is uncontrolled. It is full of possibilities. It’s… See more →

A Gunfight in Guatemala

Crazy story: Sebastian Rotella. Art direction: David Sleight. Animation: Christopher Park.

Police Building Apartments

Lately my favorite part of my commute is passing this building.

Here’s The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read To Her Attacker

Having too much to drink was an amateur mistake that I admit to, but it is not criminal. Everyone in this room has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much, or knows someone… See more →

A Final Visit With Prince: Rolling Stone’s Lost Cover Story

“All of us need to be able to reach out and just fix stuff. There's nothing that's unforgivable.”

The Contributions of Others: A Session with Jeremy Keith

“I’ve found that on the web, it’s best to assume nothing. That might sound like a scary prospect, but it’s actually quite liberating. Giving up on “pixel-perfect” control doesn’t mean giving up on quality. Quite the opposite: it… See more →

Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?

“People are expecting more of body cameras than the technology will deliver,” Professor Stoughton said. “They expect it to be a broad solution for the problem of police-community relations, when in fact it’s just a tool, and like any tool, there’s a limited value to what it can do.”

Inside Operation Trump, the Most Unorthodox Campaign in Political History

Politics require some amount of cynicism and hubris. Trump… See more →

The Website Obesity Crisis

Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.

The 2015 ProPublica Year in Visual Storytelling

A nice roundup of ProPublica’s more visually and interactively rich stories from the past year.

Animated homage to The Wire

When I hear Blind Boys of Alabama’s cover of “Way Down in… See more →

There is a popular myth in geek circles which claims that the QWERTY layout standard for Latin keyboards was actually designed to slow down typing, since early typewriters were prone to jam. While this is a misunderstanding (jams were caused by the mechanical proximity of common letter pairs, not the speed of typing), it has occasionally made me wonder: could technological shortcomings that ostensibly get in the way of the user experience actually, ultimately, be… See more →

A bout of insomnia last summer led me to sign up for a free trial of Hulu Plus, which would let me use my iPad to catch up on episodes of Bob’s Burgers I had missed earlier in the season. When I inevitably failed to kill the subscription before the negative option billing kicked in, I decided to make the most of the month I accidentally paid for by devouring the entire combined run of… See more →

I have long been skeptical of music subscription services like Spotify and Rdio. What serious music fan would pay a monthly fee to have a remote, fallible gatekeeper between himself and a woefully incomplete music catalog? To forsake my personal collection in favor of that system would be like dumping a lifetime’s worth of home equity to move into a rental apartment in a gated community. That’s what people do when they’re getting ready to… See more →

Last month, I expressed some concerns about remix culture and the questionable value of much of its output. Shortly thereafter, as if in response, the juggernaut of skewed pop music known as Beck revealed that his next album, Song Reader, will be released exclusively as sheet music.

The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart… See more →

We notice the sort of design that demands to be noticed, and make the mistake of proclaiming it to be some kind of “game changer”, glossing over its functional failings in favor of its unique approach to a problem. But the truth is that the game is much more likely to be changed incrementally, by design that doesn’t call attention to itself. When we wake up tomorrow, we won’t be greeted by a new and… See more →

I first gained access to the internet on the cusp of adulthood, a few months before I graduated high school in 1994. In the years that followed, it steadily gained presence in my daily life, and in tandem with higher education and venturing timidly into “the real world”, the internet helped expand my universe far beyond its humble origins.

Today, I live in a major metropolitan hub, have personal and professional relationships on almost every… See more →

Personal statistics fascinate me, and in the information age, I’m collecting a ton of them. Last.fm keeps track of what music I listen to and when I listen to it. Letterboxd does the same for movies, and the tagging system I’m using within it tells me how the movies were formatted, where I watched them, and more. Goodreads and Instapaper keep tabs on my reading, Foursquare and Tripit chronicle the details of my travels, and… See more →

The whole of communication technology is merely an extension of pigment on surface, the fundamental technique of indirect language transmission. Radio and television and computers do more work for us, sure. They parse ideas into shapes and colors and sounds. But there is nothing they can do that can’t be recreated with a lump of mud and a fertile imagination, a method as viable today as it was five thousand years ago.

The only thing… See more →

My fourth year at Austin’s juggernaut of an interactive conference was more of a mixed bag than years past, as both I and SXSW adapted to its growing pains.

This year’s conference was, I believe, about three times the size of my first (in 2005). Daytime sessions expanded to remote areas of Austin’s sprawling convention center, and overcrowded lunch and evening activities tested even Texas’s deft corralling hand. Those who knew the territory well enough… See more →

I was recently involved in a music exchange with a handful of friends, in which we each put together a compilation of songs, and everyone involved got a copy of all of the compilations. Aside from giving me a good excuse to put together a fun mix, it allowed me the ever-cherished opportunity to do some unsolicited philosophizing, and I thought both were worth sharing with a larger audience.

Here’s an excerpt of an e-mail… See more →

For the last few years, I’ve been getting the bulk of my world news from a number of New York Times RSS feeds. I’m sure you don’t need me to extoll the publication’s manifold virtues. However, as a Philadelphia resident, one thing the New York Times can’t give me is detailed local news. As my schedule’s density has increased, my ability to absorb the local goings-on through my usual channels (free weeklies and sheer osmosis)… See more →

On the Web

• Refill 7: Fucking sick laser-engraved skate decks.
• Happy Cog Philadelphia Is Hiring: We’re looking for a standards-savvy front-end web developer that is nothing short of amazing.
• Letterhead Fonts Embraces DRM: The suggested alternative to embedding fonts in PDFs? Convert to outlines. Welcome back to the 20th century! I’m all for protecting your products from theft, but this ain’t the way to do it.
• The Super Stunt: The full story behind the biggest… See more →

A brief history of type

Like all the arts, [typography] is basically immune to progress, though it is not immune to change. —Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

The art of typography has a rich and storied tradition, and like most art forms, its production processes have moved at a snail’s pace. After Gutenberg’s landmark invention of movable type (a printing method consisting of individual letters carved out of metal) in the fifteenth century, the… See more →

On the Web

• The Jerry Springer Episode Debacle: The Lost Film Fest’s Scott Beibin tells the full, outrageous story of faking his way onto the Springer show, complete with clips from the episode.
• swfIR: A new standards-friendly, whiz-bang image replacement technique that harnesses the power of Flash.
• Great (Chalk) Album Covers: Coudal Partners’ and 37 Signals’ bathroom chalkboard is put to very good use.
• Looking to Cash in on a Punk Rock Youth: Apparently there… See more →

I’ve done a bad thing. And I didn’t act alone.

Nine esteemed colleagues and I collaborated with Friends of ED editor Chris Mills to create a book called Web Standards Creativity, which will be released early in March. It is poised to infect the minds of innumerable readers with several creative approaches to standards-based web design and development. These progressive ideas in XHTML, CSS, and DOM scripting could single-handedly set back the cause of mediocrity… See more →

When I saw the gorgeously dreadful October 2006 edition of Stan’s site on Sunday, I remembered that I had intended to dust off my site’s costume from last year and put it back on. I dug around in my files, and was somewhat horrified to discover that the costume had vanished. Then I realized that if I was looking for that costume, summer must have ended. And boy oh boy, was there a lot of… See more →

I was born on 3 June 1976. Today, I am thirty years old.

I share 1976 with some important stuff. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed Apple Computer, which would inadvertently revolutionize creative technology and desktop computing. Seminal releases from the Ramones and the Damned—and a legendary television appearance by the Sex Pistols—brought punk rock’s disaffected bite into the public consciousness. We said goodbye to luminaries like Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, and Howard… See more →

On the Web

• Deadguy138’s YouTube Channel: A growing collection of rare live video footage from some great underground bands: noise, punk, metal, jazz, and more.
• Lawsuit Over Brokeback Mountain Reveals Unease Over Pay for “Arthouse” Films: Are major film studios’ “independent” divisions lowballing creative talent and then cashing in on awards buzz? Yes.
• Time to Redesign: Someone has finally taken notice of how much I “suCkSS.”
• Best Fight Scene of All Time: A truly inspiring… See more →