Erin Kissane has started a new research studio with the most punk URL I’ve ever seen: wrecka.ge. Get out of here! That’s fantastic. But also everything about this project is, as Erin writes:

We need new networks that genuinely work better, not only for indie-web people or tech people or other outliers, but for all of us working toward collective survival. And I don't think we'll get them by just trying harder—or by swapping in new infrastructure toward the same old ends, or by building reflexively against the cartoon versions of old networks, and definitely not by trying to scold people into make more ethical social networking choices.

For years, across jobs and gigs and fields, I've been making the case that we can't build better things unless we figure out what has been happening to us—what's gone wrong or right, and how, and according to whom, and on what evidence—and then use the things we learn to try new things, carefully and attentively, until we get to something genuinely useful and good.

Erin has done a brilliant job in recent years of explaining how networks and communities online often have terrifying real life consequences for people and so this whole project feels like, in part, a response to the implosion of the One True Network That Shall Not Be Named, where everyone scattered to the four winds once it died. Before then, briefly, there were glimmers of hope that a social network might be a force for good.

So that wreckage is worth exploring not just to bemoan the state of things but to actively make them better. And that, to me, simply rules:

The site, and the tiny studio it represents, are named after the debris of a disaster because I don't think we can get far without acknowledging the wreckage piled up around us, on our networks and far beyond them. It's also named after the process of turning that rubble into something we can think with and work with, because I imagine that's the mode I'll be working in for the rest of my life.

I just subscribed so fast I almost broke my finger! Go support Erin’s work! That’s an order!

Great piece by Gareth Edwards about the soon-to-be defunct .io domain and a wild story about colonialism, borders, and the internet:

In 2006, Montenegro declared independence from Serbia. With the digital revolution now firmly underway, the IANA was determined not to let chaos reign once again. It created two new top-level domains: .rs for Serbia and .me for Montenegro. Both were issued on the requirement that .yu would officially be terminated. It would take until 2010 for this to happen, but the IANA eventually got its way. Burned by the experience, the organization laid down the new, stricter set of rules and timescales for top-level domain expiration that exist today.

It’s these rules that will soon apply to the .io domain. They are firm, and they are clear. Once the country code no longer exists, the domain must cease to exist, too, ideally within three to five years. Like a tenant being told that their landlord is selling up and they must move, every individual and company who uses a .io domain will be told the same.

I’m in New York this week for a work thing, stationed close to the Empire State building. The last time I was here it was almost a decade ago and...I didn’t have a great time. Actually, I haven't liked New York the three times I’ve been here.

I’m sorry! I’m absolutely not walking over here!

Despite how excited I was when I first entered the city, New York felt like a very sad place. It was lonely and isolating at a time when I thought I was as lonely and as isolated as I could be. Boy howdy was I wrong! Somewhere along Fifth Avenue the bottom opened up as I was blasting The Horrors into my sad little ears, and it suddenly didn’t feel cool or tough that I was alone in New York. Instead, it felt like my life had just exploded in a rather pathetic sort of way.

Perhaps it was bad timing? Or maybe it was just easier to moan about a city than it was for me to address the problems I was struggling with.

The second time I came to New York, I felt the same way but in a less dramatic fashion. I was here for a conference and at that time my somewhat-more-stable life had begun to fray and unfold once again. After the first speaker wrapped up I bounced and hiked around the city for days without talking to anyone, getting fabulously drunk alone in dimly lit bars.

I was a sad drunk child in the bowels of a giant machine. New York wasn’t built for me, it was a place for people who had figured their shit out, for those who had already conquered the world. New York simply didn’t require my contribution because it was already complete. In fact, there were 50,000 sad motorcycle boys called Robin who loved fonts and I was simply encroaching on their sad boy turf.

Now though? New York, man. I get it!

I still require stillness, quietness, great Californian skies and empty sidewalks. But as I’ve been hiking around the city this morning, I can totally see why folks love this place.

Here, just outside this cafe window right now:

• A tree is being ripped out of the ground
• A wall is being painted
• Everyone, everywhere, is shouting
• A lady is taking a picture of a flag
• There’s a couple having a fight or...huh...maybe not? But this conversation doesn’t look like fun either way.
• A dude is just absolutely slamming a sandwich (that dude is me in the window’s reflection).
• Cars are cussing at each other with enormous, goose-like honks.
• Everyone on the street looks so determined, so energetic, with some vital place they’re heading to next.

So this time is definitely better but—heyo!—I’m still sad. This time it’s for boring career reasons rather than serious life-choice reasons. I’m burned out: I want so much more than what I have! Yawn. I want a challenge again! Sigh. I want to be in rooms with scary problems that make my brain hurt! Yah, sure. I want a sense of momentum and purpose! Meh. I demand that work be fun! Okay whatever but I do though.

For now none of that matters. Today is for the hiking, the walking, the blasting of The Horrors and Deerhunter into the ears. It’s for the sad, unfulfilled boy to pace around the Natural History Museum until the feet hurt.

Mandy Brown wrote this fantastic piece about building a space on the web for yourself:

A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.

Yes, yes, yes! Websites have always been tiny mutinies, perfectly designed for rebellion! In these spaces we design the rules, we set the agenda. But perhaps what makes Mandy’s post so interesting to me is when she writes about difficulty. Often we want websites to be easy; we compare different content management systems and publishing workflows, we talk about how—with just a click!—a website can be made.

Instead, Mandy argues that building a personal space on the web should be difficult and how there’s something important to learn from that physical work:

...more often than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work things out. Efficiency is an anti-goal; it is at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being.

I love this, of course, and the more I think about this it’s really how I’ve split my website between Notes and Essays. Notes are super easy to post and I’ve setup a macOS Shortcut that generates a markdown file with all the metadata for me so I can scribble ideas like a notepad. With Essays I’ve made them intentionally difficult because the difficulty is the point. I write all the HTML, CSS, and scripts by hand. And over the years I’ve found that this labor forces a project to slow way down, and for me to become much more considerate and careful than I otherwise would. Only then can I think deeply about details that I might skim over.

Efficiency be damned.

Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”

This UX is awful? That UI looks old? Accessibility busted? Performance bad? Design team can’t ship stuff? Customers annoyed by tons of bugs? Everything takes too long to build? No time for small usability improvements?

Hire. HTML. And. CSS. People.

Matt Webb just added a new feature to his website called cursor party:

If you’ve visited my actual website, rather than reading by email or whatever, such as reading this very post, you may notice somebody else’s cursor pass by as you’re reading.

[...] Mostly my blog is pretty quiet. I think of it like one of those always empty tiny galleries with like maximum three paintings that you get in some neighbourhoods (there’s one around the corner from where I live now in Peckham).

And if you’re in there - which is rare - and somebody else happens to step in at the exact same moment - which is super rare - then you’re like, huh, that’s nice, and you feel the cosy glow of co-presence and finish looking at the pictures then wander out again.

Cosy glow websites! Co-presence! A less lonely web!

In the year of our lord 2024 it feels so very antiquated that there’s separate licenses for web and desktop fonts. Every project I work on requires both font formats and I know there’s business reasons why a type foundry might make those separate purchases but as a designer it’s a deeply frustrating experience to just...use the fonts and make cool things with them.

If a type foundry wants to keep desktop and web fonts as separate purchases instead of bundling them together then they really need to offer easily downloadable trial fonts. In fact, perhaps the main reason that I use so much of David Jonathan Ross’s work is that he has three buttons next to his fonts: Try, Test, Buy.

Won’t trial fonts just open the gates to piracy though? Well, earlier this month Rutherford Craze gave an update on his trial fonts:

This weekend it’ll be one year since we started providing full, non-subset trial fonts. At the time I wasn’t entirely confident it’d work — but with tangible benefits and only hypothetical risks, I had to at least give it a shot. Reader, it has been a resounding success.

It’s good for foundries because it’s good for customers and designers. (I can’t count the number of times I’ve bought a font and realized, with horror, that actually it’s the wrong weight or style for my needs and now I can’t really afford to buy the right one.)

Trial fonts are a balm against anxiety, helping us make decisions as designers, and help us trust the purchase is the right one. And so now whenever I see that a foundry doesn’t offer test fonts, I tend to avoid buying them, just in case.

Sarah Jeong:

We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.

We are fucked.

My views change on AI stuff all the time and so I’m just noting them here for the future—but!—I can’t think of any creative or even barely useful applications of generating things inside images besides "I can lie to you about motorcycle crashes and natural disasters faster than I can think.” (Unlike Apple Intelligence, where you draw a circle and then a lame image is generated for you—I would certainly judge anyone who used it for anything outside of a placeholder image to be later replaced—but that sort of image generation doesn’t feel immoral to me.)

Removing things from images I’m weirdly ok with, too! I use that in Lightroom all the time and it doesn’t feel like “lying” to me. Removing a traffic cone from a road to make the image more appealing is morally fine I guess because it feels like you’re focusing on the important details. Also, I don’t feel duped when I see that a photographer has brightened, lightened, desaturated, added a vignette or removed small details from their photographs. It gives me the same feeling as when I see the before/after edits on a chunk of writing.

But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of this product. There are only shady applications for it. Looking at a lot of the examples here I can’t tell what’s real without inspecting them—the crashed motorcycle has a bicycle tire for example but man I would never look this closely in most situations.

So right now I think this stuff should be straight up illegal.

Nolen Royalty writes about his wondrous One Million Checkboxes project, and how something very peculiar happened:

A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database?

A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens.

[...] I hadn’t been hacked.

Someone was writing me a message in binary.

Nolen also gave a fantastic talk at XOXO last week where he told a part of this story and I think it was one of the most inspiring talks I’ve seen in a while. It took every ounce of effort in me not to run back to my hotel room and hurriedly build something out of pure excitement.

Here’s a lovely monospaced font by Helena Zhang that’s worth checking out. It has just the right amount of charm and charisma, but it’s still readable at small sizes. I’m downloading this thing immediately.

Also:

Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television.

The ever-so-excellent website is by Tobias Fried and there are just so many details and animations and lovely bits of UI here. Right up to the end of the website where things usually trail off.

Extremely. Very. Good.