A handy one-pager for front-end web developers:
Here are ways to keep track of what you can use, of what’s new in web browsers, and ways you can influence the development of the platform by making your voice heard.
I’ve been reading lots of modern takes on Greek classics. So when I saw that there was going to be a short of run of Sophocles’s Electra at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, I grabbed some tickets for the opening night.
With Brie Larson taking on the title role in this production, it’s bound to be popular.
I didn’t know anything about this staging of the play—other than it was using the Anne Carson translation—which is how I like it. I didn’t know if it was going to be modern, retro, classical or experimental.
It turned out to be kind of arty, but not in a good way. Arty like art school with all the clichés.
The production somehow managed to feel packed with gimmicks but also seriously underbaked at the same time. There must have a been a lot of “yes, and…”s during the workshopping, but no subsequent round of “no, but…”s. So we got lots of ideas thrown at the wall like spaghetti. Very few of them stuck.
Instead of enhancing the core text—which is, thankfully, indestructable—most of the gimmicks lessened it. It’s like they were afraid to let the play speak for itself and felt like they had to do stuff to it. Most of it ended up creating an emotional distance from the story and the characters.
It wasn’t bad, per se, but it definitely wasn’t good. It was distinctly mediocre.
Now, take all of this with a big pinch of salt because this is just my opinion. The very things that turned me off might tickle your fancy. Like the way it was half way to being a musical, with characters singing their dialogue in that monotone way that they do in Les Mis (but this is like Les really Mis). And the vocal effects that did nothing for me might be quite effective for you.
Even as I was watching it, I was thinking to myself, “Well, this isn’t really for me, but I can kind of appreciate that they’re trying to experiment.”
But then towards the end of the play, it went too far. Over the PA came samples of reporting of recent news stories; graphic, grisly, and crucially, real. If you’re going to attempt something like that, you need to earn it. Otherwise you’re just cheapening the real-world suffering. This play absolutely did not earn it.
Elektra has finished its run in Brighton and is now heading to London where it’s supposed to play until April. I’m curious to see how it goes.
A few years back, Jessica got a ceiling fan for our living room. This might seem like a strange decision, considering we live in England. Most of the time, the problem in this country is that it’s too cold.
But then you get situations like this week, when the country experienced the hottest temperatures ever recorded. I was very, very grateful for that ceiling fan. It may not get used for most of the year, but on the occasions when it’s needed, it’s a godsend. And it’s going to get used more and more often, given the inexorable momentum of the climate emergency.
Even with the ceiling fan, it was still very hot in the living room. I keep my musical instruments in that room, and they all responded to the changing temperature. The strings on my mandolin, bouzouki, and guitar went looser in the heat. The tuning dropped by at least a semitone.
I tuned them back up, but then I had to be careful when the extreme heat ended and the temperature began to drop. The strings began to tighten accordingly. My instruments went up a semitone.
I was thinking about this connection between sound and temperature when I was tuning the instruments back down again.
The electronic tuner I use shows the current tone in relation to the desired note: G, D, A, E. If the string is currently producing a tone that’s lower than, say, A, the tuner displays the difference on its little screen as lines behind the ideal A position. If the string is producing a tone higher than A, the lines appear in front of the desired note.
What if we thought about temperature like this? Instead of weather apps showing the absolute temperature in degrees, what if they showed the relative distance from a predefined ideal? Then you could see at a glance whether it’s a little cooler than you’d like, or a little hotter than you’d like.
Perhaps an interface like that would let you see at a glance how out of the tune the current temperature is.
Do you need a button for your next project but you’re not sure about the right markup? Don’t worry, The Button Cheat Sheet™️ has got you covered.
Spoiler alert: it’s the button element.
A useful resource for CSS grid. It’s basically the spec annoted with interactive examples.
Piece together your own regular expression or choose from a pre-made selection.
(Like the creator if this site, I’m not a fan of regular expressions …or they’re not a fan of me. The logic just doesn’t stick in my brain.)
A handy translation of git commands into English.
This really is a most excellent introduction to React. Complete with cheat sheet!
This is a really nice glanceable reference for CSS grid.
A one-stop-shop with a quick overview of the new JavaScript features in ES-whatever-we’re-calling-it-now.
A handy guide to navigating all the new-fangled JavaScript.
George Lucas, Ted Chiang, Greg Egan, Stanley Kubrick, Tom Stoppard, William Shakespeare, and Ridley Scott are all part of Matt’s magnificent theory that the play is the thing.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are replicants.
Characters look like people, except they exist for only the duration of a movie — only while they are necessary. They come with backstory and memories fully established but never experienced, partly fabricated for the job and partly drawn from real people known by the screenwriter. At the end, they vanish, like tears in rain.
A nice little cheat sheet for simple simple typography wins.
Chris Heathcote's notes from his PaperCamp talk on guidebooks.
A nice little report on community management at Flickr.
Oh McSweeney's, does your satisfyingly smug brand of dry wit know no bounds?
A handy cheat sheet of jQuery methods to print out and keep on hand.
A cheat sheet for combining typefaces. No hard and fast rules but a handy guide to print out and use.
How a Twitter from me saved Leisa's ass.
Just in case you haven't seen Brian's microformats cheat sheet, here it is. Print and keep by your desk.