The consistently excellent Jonathan Snook gave a talk at the recent Beyond Tellerrand conference about how to organize your CSS in a scalable, modular system. I’ve been a fan of Snook for years due to his work on SMACSS, a CSS organization system I’ve loosely adapted on my work projects. A highly recommended watch for those responsible for CSS on larger code bases.
Jaz Rignall conducts a long interview at US Gamer with part of the original LucasArts team. They reminisce over the golden years of the studio, where Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion and many others were produced. A must read if you grew up playing any 80s and 90s adventure games.
Peter Frase, writing for Jacobin on Bong Joon-Ho’s leftist political critique embedded within his Snowpiercer screenplay:
But the story Bong tells goes beyond that. It’s about the limitations of a revolution which merely takes over the existing social machinery rather than attempting to transcend it. And it’s all the more effective because the heart of that critique comes as a late surprise, from a character we might not expect.
The allegory is perhaps too general to root in any specific theory. But it evokes a tradition of critiques that grappled with the limitations of both reformist social democracy and Soviet Communism, which attempted to seize power and to ameliorate exploitation without really challenging capitalist labor as a system of alienation and domination.
Transition effects on icons are becoming increasingly popular, especially in navigation changes for the ubiquitous hamburger icon. While generally I rely almost entirely on detailed CSS3 transforms for my work, Marka provides an alternative, a simple JS wrapper around a icon for easy transforms. It might be fun to experiment with this on an upcoming project.
CSS Wizardy’s Harry Roberts writes one of the best single guides to keeping specificity low and complex CSS projects from getting out of control. I use to be more neutral on IDs, but at this point, I’m fully onboard with Roberts: they don’t serve any purpose a class can’t already deliver on.
Tasha Robinson at The Dissolve:
So maybe all the questions can boil down to this: Looking at a so-called Strong Female Character, would you—the writer, the director, the actor, the viewer—want to be her? Not want to prove you’re better than her, or to have her praise you or acknowledge your superiority. Action movies are all about wish-fulfillment. Does she fulfill any wishes for herself, rather than for other characters? When female characters are routinely “strong” enough to manage that, maybe they’ll make the “Strong Female Characters” term meaningful enough that it isn’t so often said sarcastically.
The prolific, brainy director has been profiled and interviewed in countless magazines. He’s a good subject, but the quality, usually due to the publication and questions asked, has run all over the place. That’s why I was a bit surprised that Esquire, of all magazines, had a knockout of a a Soderbergh interview. Smart, profane and frank. One example:
Esquire: After you won an Academy Award for Traffic, did you wrestle to keep your ego in check?
Soderbergh: No… What’s hilarious about it, ironically, and nobody will ever believe this… I was in the middle of shooting Ocean’s Eleven, which for me, as a director, was much harder. I just had to laugh. Best door prize ever. But I was literally set up to work the next morning. Sunday night was the Oscars. I flew to Vegas that night and I’m on set first thing Monday morning confronting a scene that I couldn’t figure out how to shoot. At the end of the day, the quote I use is “In the land of ideas, you are always renting.” The landlord can always go “Bye!” If you’re not humbled by that then you’re an idiot and you will fail. You will fail. The process of discovery or coming up with an idea is so resistant to formula.
Speaking of gaming and diversity, Kotaku’s editor-in-chief wrote a smart piece on the subject recently as well:
The old game-length question stopped perpetually leading to outrage once it had been asked a lot. It only stopped creating blazing headlines once all the true or half-true or false answers had been tried and once we’d all played enough of the games about which it had been asked.
Today, you’ll see the occasional game developer get in trouble with releasing too short a game, but the scandal of game length has mostly settled into the steady-pulsed understanding that some games are long, some games are short, some games are good, some games are bad, not always respectively.
We’re not quite at the same level of understanding of diversity in games, and I wouldn’t expect us to be. The length of a game may involve issues of value and aesthetic quality. Diversity is far more important, and much more complicated. It can affect aesthetics, yes, but it can also affect the people who play games and how we think about the work we’ve expected to entertain or engage us.
Succinctly, Steven argues it’s going to be a messy issue to sort through, but the more we probe on this issue, the stronger gaming will be as an overall industry.
Rowan Kaiser, writing for Indiewire:
The problem faced by woman and minority-starring video games is largely the same as the problem facing traditionally underrepresented groups across all forms of representation: their failures are treated as definitive, and their successes are ignored. Dozens of white man-starring video games have underperformed, but their failures are treated as specific to that game. Every woman-starring game, though, has to bear an unfair burden, just like “Bridesmaids” was treated as a referendum on the very idea of woman-centered ensembles in theaters.
If you love the ultra-fast keyboard launcher Alfred like I do, it’s worth checking out this post to set up your theme to closely mirror the look displayed out of the box in the new OS X Spotlight. I ended up downloading the provided Yosemite theme as is, along with the Blur workflow. My only change was increasing the default text size slightly.