Wonderful brief look back over at The A.V. Club at Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express, still one of my favorite movies of all time. Whimsical, gorgeously shoot, this is essential 90s cinema that many overlooked in favor of Kar-Wai’s later In the Mood for Love. In the Mood is still wonderful, but it never quite connected with me tonally like Chungking Express did.
The Dissolve’s Scott Tobias:
French-Tunisian director Mabrouk El Mechri, working from a script he wrote with Frédéric Benudis and Christophe Turpin, pours these biographical details into a scenario that’s half hostage thriller, half Irma Vep-style meta-movie. And though the latter part is more compelling than the former, JCVD never forgets that Van Damme’s image is the focal point. El Mechri opens with the best shot of Van Damme’s career (and really, a legitimate candidate for any list of all-time great opening shots), a single take of the 47-year-old kicking, punching, shooting, and stabbing his way through a gauntlet of attackers, who come after him with guns, knives, grenades, even a flamethrower. The shot is ruined when the cheap set collapses at the end, but the young Chinese director has no sympathy for his exhausted middle-aged star: “Just because he brought John Woo to Hollywood doesn’t mean he can rub my dick with sandpaper.”
The movie has its weak points, but overall JCVD is very compelling (especially for someone like me who grew up loving Van Damme’s earlier work like Kickboxer and Bloodsport), both for that aforementioned opening fight scene and a legitimately moving six minute monologue Van Damme delivers partway through the film. There’s something about his presence that makes me root for a comeback out of direct to VOD purgatory.
Santiago Valdarrama writes for A List Apart about simple “prebrowsing” techniques to speed up web performance between pages. Browsers analyze patterns of a page a user is likely to go next, and utilize DNS prefetching, resource prefetching, and prerendering to help the process along.
Bonus points for a wonderful illustration by Kevin Cornell, one of my favorite ALA header graphics in months.
Developer Michael Church writes about the difficulties a friend of his has at getting a senior development job:
This whole issue is about more than what one knows and doesn’t know about technology. As programmers, we’re used to picking up new skills. It’s something we’re good at (even if penny-shaving businessmen hate the idea of training us). This is all about social status, and why status is so fucking important when one is playing the work game– far more important than being loyal or competent or dedicated.
Low and high status aren’t about being liked or disliked. Some people are liked but have low status, and some people are disliked but retain high status. In general, it’s more useful and important to have high status at work than to be well-liked. It’s obviously best to have both, but well-liked low-status people get crap projects and never advance. Disliked high-status people, at worst, get severance.
Michael’s main argument is that the overwhelming majority of those who remain software engineers – even those that are highly talented – can never can crack out of a low social status. Very interesting and depressing nonetheless.
Like many other developers and designers out there, almost every day I make the rounds of Designer News, Hacker News along with occasional forays into Sidebar and Dribbble.
Usually that involves a lot of Safari tabs and context switching. Panda aims to change that: it’s a simple, well designed web app that puts many of these popular sites side by side. As a Chrome extension, it can be the default state of any new tabs you create. There’s a few minor customization issues that keep me from diving fully in but it’s worth a look.
Anthony Colangelo, writing for A List Apart:
When you hear the word “just” being thrown around, dig deep into that statement and find all of the assumptions made within it. Zoom out and think slow.
Your product lives and dies by the decisions discovered between ideation and creation, so don’t just put it up on a server somewhere.
MacStories’ Federico Viticci:
There are hundreds of new features in iOS 8 and the ecosystem surrounding it that signal a far-reaching reimagination of what iOS apps should be capable of, the extent of user customization on an iPhone and iPad, or the amount of usage data that app developers can collect to craft better software.
Seven years into iOS, a new beginning is afoot for Apple’s mobile OS, and, months from now, there will still be plenty to discuss. But, today, I want to elaborate on my experience with iOS 8 in a story that can be summed up with:
iOS 8 has completely changed how I work on my iPhone and iPad.
I’d consider Federico a much more hard core power user than most, but his argument is pretty sound. For years I’ve been extremely envious of Android users and their custom widgets, keyboards, and third-party sharing capabilities. No more.
Giant Bomb’s Patrick Klepek:
When Call of Duty: Modern Warfare multiplayer took off, the copycats were endless. It wasn’t just that every shooter started aping Infinity Ward’s leveling system, but games that never would have otherwise included multiplayer suddenly had new teams assigned to building it. The thinking was that single player brought people to the table but multiplayer kept them sitting down (read: not selling their copy).
Now, we may be seeing the rise of games that ditch single player entirely. It’s not a great PR message. Many are going to be reluctant to actually pull the trigger. But that may be a disservice to everyone involved. Players go into the game thinking they can get something they can’t, and developers are forced to compromise a gameplay experience, knowing it’s not what they’re truly building. That’s a lose-lose.
One of my favorite films of the year gets the film study treatment in this informative video.
Another few months, another Sublime Text icon replacement. This one, put together by designer Rafael Conde, is really gorgeous in its simplicity and subtle grid pattern. And Rafael mentions in the Dribbble comments, it flows especially well with stock icons in OS X Yosemite.