Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft’s fifth expansion pack, was met with buzz and approval of fans and critics alike when it released in November 2014. I was one of those critics, laying effusive praise (and an extremely high score to match) at the expansion’s feet in my review. It wasn’t just player and critical…
Image: Gizmodo NSO Group, a company that sells hacking services to governments so they can spy on journalists and dissidents, exploited gaping security holes in iPhone software, according to a report byLookout Security and Citizen Lab. But don’t worry: Apple just pushed a fix. The New York Times reports: The NSO Group’s software can read…
It’s hot. The subways are crowded. People are peevish, sweating, and on edge. At times like this— when the social fabric of the city seems to hang by the thinnest of threads—it’s important to relax, take a deep breath, and contemplate exactly who you hate in this godforsaken underground tunnel maze, and why. [We will…
It’s almost musical, isn’t it? In a development that makes perfect sense this year, a 2014 photo from a gunsmithing shop, Gulf of Maine Gunsmithing in Raymond, Maine, has suddenly gone viral after hitting the Twitters Tuesday. Not content with a series of rather boring warnings about “Demarats” and their desire to tax you to…
Kotaku, alongside Polygon and a handful of other similar sites, has developed a bad reputation with gamers because of efforts by a few of its writers to inject “social justice” politics into the culture and discussion surrounding video games. What gamers want to do is simply play video games and visit websites to discuss the…
1. No Man’s Sky is a small videogame made by a tiny, indie studio that, like most small indie videogames, is clearly trying to achieve a very specific experience for a very specific audience. No Man’s Sky is a massive, triple-a videogame being released by Sony on a disc for a full sixty bucks that,…
Summary: These two overly demanding website design patterns aimed at driving engagement are in conflict with how people utilize browser tabs. In UX design, “dark patterns” are deceptive strategies used by designers to trick users into doing potentially harmful things that support their organization’s goals. For example, sites that automatically add extra items into users’…
There’s much debate over just what “native advertising” means. Talk to enough publishers, however, you’ll find agreement on one thing: it isn’t banner ads. The banner ad is now 18 years old. It has become a symbol of all that’s wrong with online advertising. It is more often than not devoid of creativity; it stands…
Blogging was fun, and it broke the rules. As founder Nick Denton said in a 2013 interview, “The basic concept of Gawker was two journalists in a bar telling each other a story that’s much more interesting than whatever hits the papers the next day.” Which is another way of saying Gawker tried to harness…
Photo: Molly Wiedemann Outside of a rarefied top tier, it can be extremely hard to make money in creative fields online. Writers are continually asked to work for pennies or, even worse, “exposure.” Artists may have it even worse. Clients want to pay a paltry sum for work that can take hours — and is…