Art Delano @ardgedee@octodon.social
There are billions of people around the world who don't realize that at this very moment you're reading this profile.
The most reliable tangible record of web design ca. 1994-2001 will be, ironically, the innumerable printed how-to books about it. Remember how laughable most of those were? Well, they have screenshots. We won't be able to recreate how the sites *behaved*, and thus when the retro design backlash arrives (sooner or later you know this will happen, as surely as 8-bit graphics did), the kids of tomorrow will be freely taking liberties with assumptions about how the web used to work.
But as the history of web design enlarges with time, the benchmarks seem to get muzzy. Amazon.com's design evolution is an interesting story of opportunism and pragmatic responses to technology and human behaviors. There is a linear progression from "throw things up and see what sticks" to a highly coordinated suite of marketing schemes. But, at the same time, can *you* recall exactly what it looked like when you first saw it? Unless you kept a screenshot of the occasion, probably not.
I was wondering if it would be plausible to date somebody's first introduction to the web based on a select few design cues that they remember.
It's self-defeating in a few ways, though. There's the number of sites that, once built, never change until torn down. And as the public web continued to expand greater numbers of site owners preferred older design strategies. And most corrosive of course people's imperfect memories.
Remember blue borders around picture thumbnails? Black borders around picture thumbnails? "Click here" captions under picture thumbnails? Hover popups on picture thumbnails? Picture thumbnails?
Remember black text on grey? White text on dark blue? green text on black? Amber text on black? Black text on white? Dark grey text on light grey? White text on black? Dark grey text on white?
Today is a Yo La Tengo kind of day.
But above all, what comes across is the universality, across the globe and across the centuries, of made men in high places willing to ratfuck each other and millions of bystanders for petty gains.
Been listening to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in podcast form.
http://www.3kingdomspodcast.com
Random thoughts follow:
• Cao Cao is a dudebro.
• I keep flashing back to Larry Gonicks' portrayals of key figures and events in his brilliant Cartoon History of the Universe II
• Specifically, Liu Bei is somebody I recall being a profane and rough but highly charismatic dude in Gonick's retelling, but the podcast makes him into somebody who's clever and ubiquitous, but pretty colorless.
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TIL that saying "follow" makes a zillion followbots find and follow you.
Is there a way to see the lists of people I follow and the people who follow me without having to download a CSV? The Mastodon UI is opaque about this function.
Right, Land's End. You busted me. That's not my real name.
Signed,
Alan Smithee https://octodon.social/media/1t6LgV-hFwUgHgmazB4
@phire anyway since you asked, my regular #podcasts listening include MBMBAM, The Adventure Zone, Judge John Hodgman, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and Peter Adamson's various History of Philosophy series.
Looking forward to adding Romance of the Three Kingdoms to that list soon: https://www.metafilter.com/166067/
Network is slow this morning so I got to watch Amazon's query engine first recommend autocompletes on literal string matches for a term and then backfill the list to bump out most of the full word matches (including the match I had wanted) with brand-names and product-names that only match the first four letters.
https://octodon.social/media/TZkOz3NElFHZmw-DByY
The sky was getting lighter for the past half-hour but is now darkening again rapidly. Which is crazy to witness first thing in the morning, but it means an isolated thunderhead is passing over us.
thanks @CobaltVelvet for keeping octodon.social up when it's getting flogged hard. population's nearly doubled since I signed up this morning.
The association of people who move the plunger up and down in the French Press to make the coffee stronger will now come to order. If possible.
