Awesome finds - May 2024

Some things I liked in May'24.

Books

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz: one thing I think I never mentioned: I really do enjoy a good old-fashioned mystery! I've literally read every Agatha Christie book in the last two years or so, and now I miss Poirot like he's my dearest late friend. And while this novel is by no means a perfect replacement, it is a pretty solid one, taking you through not one, but (no spoilers!) two, or maybe even three mysteries in one.

Music

• The Loop by Jordan Rakei: such a tender genius, I love him so much. Probs the most beautiful and breathtaking record I've heard in a long while. I rarely get the feeling from music "wow, I may not be worthy to fully comprehend what's being done here", but Rakei manages to get me there every time. It's just goosebumps, man:

• Mid Spiral: Chaos by BADBADNOTGOOD: it's been a hit and miss for me lately with everything they do, but this record is a perfect balance of things I love: jazzy-funky-soothing mix of sounds to fill your quiet night.
• Neon Pill by Cage The Elephant: I'm not as immediately in love with it as I was with their previous record, Social Cues, but it's still quite good, I just need a bit more time to really get into it. At least I hope so...
• HIT ME HARD AND SOFT by Billie Eilish: well, duh? I'm not a die-hard Billie fan at all, but this is a good, solid, memorable and incredibly well-made album. I love that she sings a lot on this record, rather than just talking - she has an incredible range and a really beautiful voice.
• To Be Hunted by Childish Gambino: Donald Glover has re-released his pandemic album, people are complaining that the soul is gone, blah blah blah, but I just can't stop singing "to be beau-ti-ful is to be... haunted" since I heard it again. Absolute banger in all existing versions, if you ask me.

Tech stuff

Anchor Links and How to Make Them Awesome: I've come to appreciate a lot of the native HTML/CSS browser APIs/functionality we take for granted, because whenever I don't have to add more JavaScript, I'm the happiest webdev out there. Anchor links are an incredibly powerful and useful tool, and this article explains all the ways you can make this experience even smoother for your users.

729: CSS native @scope by Syntax: sort of the same as above, one more time we are ✨ blessed ✨ with a feature in native CSS that you may not need in modern frameworks with style isolation (like Svelte), but still, the need for SASS-like preprocessors is getting less and LESS (pun intended) these days. And oh, this is a great explanation from the ever-great Syntax team on the subject.

Thoughts on embedding alternative text metadata into images: sometimes I'm just struck by the wastefulness of the web and its legacy, which we support in one way or another every day. This article is a very thoughtful explanation of how a seemingly nice and innocent idea of making alt text "native" to the image, rather than on a code/codebase basis, quickly turns into a monstrosity of problems when we consider legacy systems, malicious intent, context, and internationalisation. It's very curious, maybe not just from a particular case perspective, but it's very thorough and shows a thought process from a person who knows what they're talking about, which I'm really inspired by.

The Spam and Hate section raises some points I hadn't thought of before: it's very, very easy to hide something malicious by making it "visible" only to screen readers, thus targeting a very vulnerable group of users. I'll definitely have a look to see if there are any considerations about sensitive content for screen readers, or maybe some special settings? Sure there're no regulations in place, sadly...

Sneaky React Memory Leaks: How useCallback and closures can bite you: nice and sweet on how useEffect may become your enemy YET AGAIN. Yes, it is very logical and basically how JavaScript works. Yes, it might be a bit of a corner case. But every article like this makes you pay just a little more attention to performance bottlenecks you might run into in similar situations in the future.

No Web Without Women: are you familiar with Ada Lovelace and her role in modern computing? If so, good, because you SHOULD be. This is a nice list of women who have worked to make computing and our technology possible, and whose achievements are unfortunately often overlooked.

Culture

Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History: I like/bookmark art on social media ALL THE TIME, and most of the time it's obvious when something is AI-generated in the style of an artist, but it often makes me wonder how many things I need to check - starting with whether this image exists, to whether the artist is credited correctly. This article explores the market for such art (Etsy, obv) and asks difficult questions about how we deal with digital art forgery.

Covid is missing in art of today: absolutely fascinating twitter thread on the observation that art simply doesn't want to reflect on pandemic years. It's not (or rarely) brought up in TV, film and fiction, which is a bit odd given that art is usually quick to respond to issues of this scale. Arguments like "too painful/too dramatic" are obviously silly, take wars for example. Art IS a much-needed reflection! but that just isn't happening with COVID-19. Maybe we've been online for too long, like a collective "nah man, that's enough of that"?

This is a thread, click on a tweet to read the rest of it:

Welcome to the weird era I’ve been warning about since the pandemic started with scripts, where everything is either bizarrely set in 2019 for no reason, or the year is never mentioned. https://t.co/PGaVdN6Tlm

— Jessica Ellis (@baddestmamajama) May 22, 2024

Life bits

So-called ‘SMART goals’ are a case of style over substance: while setting SMART goals is a very popular technique, and this article focuses mainly on it, it's full of other useful insights about habits and task-setting: for example, weekly goals just don't work as well as daily ones, because the time pressure/responsibility is "dissolved". While debunking SMART goals, the authors give you a framework for setting better ones, and the advice seems very sound to me.

What Time Is It?: absolutely heartbreaking stuff, but oh so beautifully written. I often think about how little (thank god) we think and pay attention to the fact that we're a very fragile species. But life would be impossible to handle if we always kept that in mind. Anyway, dementia is very painful for everyone involved, and this little piece shows the love, and the pain, and the hopelessness, and that is what real art is for.

And finally, a beautiful snow-covered forest for those who long for winter in June (yes, already):

Have a joyful June! 🌺