Weekend Reads (July 13): Revisiting the Early Web, Smartphone Addiction, Shelley Duvall (RIP), Gamelan Music
Recommended weekend reading for July 13, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Cue the nostalgia: Fast Company’s Alex Pasternack takes us back to the World Wide Web circa 1994, complete with screenshots of the websites for the White House, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others.
The fickleness and sluggish speeds and the modem’s loud dial-up whistles: These lost markers of the early Internet suggest a time when our information superhighway was little more than a humble country road. The highways and megalopolises would come later, courtesy of some of the world’s biggest corporations and increasingly peopled by bots, but in 1994 the internet was still intimate, made by and for individuals. Even such corporate like Microsoft’s were managed by a single person. Soon, many people would add “under construction” signs to their Web pages, like a friendly request to pardon our dust. It was a reminder that someone was working on it — another indication of the craft and care that was going into this never-ending quilt of knowledge.
Signs like those can be hard to find on today’s internet. As the web slides into a new period of decline — warped as it’s become around platforms and profiteers and propagandists, polluted by the scrapings and regurgitations of bots and spam and slop and slime — there’s a growing push to return to some of the more democratic principles of the old days. With the future in mind, I recently went poking around for some parts of the old web that launched in 1994, and still define it today. Beyond sheer nostalgia, there might be something useful about browsing the Web’s baby photos, back when it was still the Next Big Thing. What screenshots we can still get are like windows into an alternate world. Look in and think about how and why this web grew the way it did, and what could have been. Or try to imagine what life was like when the web wasn’t worldwide yet, and no one knew what it really was.
Via Kottke. I discovered the web in 1995 as a college freshman. Those screenshots of Mosaic and Netscape Navigator take me back to countless hours spent in the computer lab in the basement of UNL’s Selleck Quadrangle, exploring this newfangled thing called the World Wide Web. (Which we capitalized back in the day because it was that important and groundbreaking.) Even though I knew it was something special, I had no idea how ubiquitous, even vital it would eventually become.
At the risk of sounding like I want all the kids to get off my lawn, there was something uniquely pure about the Web 30 years ago, starting with its roots in academia and the public domain — which allowed it to freely expand. God only knows what would’ve happened if the Web had been developed with corporate interests in mind. Those eventually came, of course, but the real beauty of the early Web was that it was truly democratic; it made information open to anyone and everyone, even a geeky 19-year-old living in eastern Nebraska.
While the Web has improved in some ways over the years, the fact is that it has been hampered by corporate interests, and in particular, the “walled gardens” of social media platforms like Facebook, which often control what you see through labyrinthine algorithms. (And never mind all of the privacy issues.) Which is why I’m a firm proponent of people building and owning their own websites. Another way in which the Web has improved is that it’s never been easier to share your thoughts online thanks to tools like Ghost, Micro.blog, and Scribbles.
There are 26,000 federal government websites in the US, and the US Web Design System (USWDS) is a framework intended to help them all be consistent and user-friendly.
USWDS design principles include focusing on real users’ needs, earning trust and embracing accessibility. The system requires websites to be optimized for all users, including people with disabilities such as those using screen readers or those with color blindness. Williams said accessibility is important to the team’s efforts, noting that they “prioritize any accessibility-related bug or improvement we find (or is contributed by our community).”
Via TLDR Design. To date, only about 160 government websites use the USWDS, so there’s obviously still a long way to go. But given the fact that the web has become the de facto method for many people interacting with the government, any attempt at consistency and accessibility is a good thing worth applauding.
While battling her smartphone addiction, Tara Isabella Burton has experienced some revelations.
To “break my smartphone addiction,” it is becoming increasingly clear to me, was a nigh-impossible goal, not simply because smartphones are incredibly addictive, but because to combat them required combatting the entire culture they represent. It required, in other words, a change of an entire way of life. It required active, constant refusal to participate in a culture that wanted to pervert my desires for friendship, community, beauty, and fulfillment into a desire for stuff and ease and looking good in social-media photos.
Via The Dispatch.
One resourceful hacker figured out how to get Doom running inside Fortnite. That’s right, a video game running inside a video game. (Cue the “Xzibit Yo Dawg” meme…)
On July 7, Jackson Clayton shared a video on Twitter showing what at first just appeared to be someone playing the OG Doom. But then Clayton hops out of a window in Doom’s classic opening level, E1M1, and begins building structures straight out of Fortnite’s battle royale mode. It’s a wild thing to see and I had to know how Clayton got Doom in Fortnite.
No one else will probably ever get to play this due to copyright issues, but it’s yet another entry in the impressive (and ever-growing) list of things that can run Doom, which also includes an ultrasound scanner, a toaster, a thermostat, and a pregnancy test (to name but a few).
Liz Gorny charts the evolution of “bro movie” posters in recent years, and what it might tell us about modern perceptions of masculinity.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, movie posters for men used to be so “masculine” they were almost camp. Masculinity, in a more muscular, rough-and-tumble sense, was in, and posters leaned towards flamboyant thematic interpretations with greater gusto. Take Con Air, with its title typeface set in a literal red-hot branding iron complete with metallic eagle; or Spawn, a superhero film with an almost pitch-black poster; or Demolition Man, which looks something akin to the 2010s Math Lady meme. Across multiple genres (from crime to thriller to fantasy), colourways were darker, more posters were set at night, motion blur was in abundance, and sodden white vests were big.
From the early 2000s to today, the frequency of vests decreased and so did most of these zealous, almost comical presentations of manliness. “For a male lead character to connect now I think he has to have a lot of depth,” says Sam Ashby, a key art designer who also runs and edits Little Joe, the queer film journal. “He can’t be a one-dimensional himbo and go around shooting stuff. I think he has to have a tragic past; he has to respect women, whilst still probably fucking loads of women. For me that’s really led to a huge shift in terms of how men are presented on these posters.”
Via Dribbble.
As a lifelong Trekkie, I couldn’t pass up this list of the 12 darkest endings on the original Star Trek series.
The Original Series has been held up in the decades since it was first broadcast as a paragon of Star Trek’s founding attitudes, even if the intervening years have shown them to be naïve at times or not as progressive as they might have seemed back in the 1960s. Yet TOS did its share of delving into the darkness too. Here are a dozen episodes of the series that ended on far grimmer notes than Star Trek was originally known for — and in many cases, the episodes and the show were better for it.
Shelley Duvall, best known for her work with Robert Altman and her role in The Shining opposite Jack Nicholson, died earlier this week from complications with diabetes. She was 75 years old.
Duvall was known for working with director Altman, who cast her in “Brewster McCloud” as her first screen role. She went on to appear in his films “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” and “Thieves Like Us” before starring as part of the ensemble cast of “Nashville” in 1975. After gaining attention in “Nashville,” Altman cast her in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians,” then gave her unusual screen presence a chance to shine in “3 Women,” for which she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress as well as a BAFTA nomination.
Duvall also starred in Time Bandits and Roxanne alongside Steve Martin.
Related: Alissa Wilkinson on Duvall’s career, and in particular, her performance in The Shining: “Her performance was perhaps misunderstood at the time, just as the narrative surrounding her life would be later.”
Bandcamp offers up a guide to Indonesian gamelan music., including a number of gamelan releases available on their platform.
Gamelan is one of the richest musical traditions in the world. It is also one of the most complex because gamelan is more than just a style of music—it is a way to make instruments, create an ensemble, and even organize important parts of social life. Gamelan describes not just a sound but the complex process and relationships that produce it. Native to Indonesia, the traditional ensemble has roots in pre-Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim-influenced mythology that goes back approximately 2,000 years; it has also been a deep influence on branches of modern music in the West.
I saw a traveling gamelan ensemble perform when I was in college. I don’t remember the individual musical arrangements but I do remember it being an incredibly influential and eye-opening experience.
In light of Biden’s recent performances and Trump’s status as a convicted felon and rapist, Alan Noble reflects on the cost of voting for unfit candidates.
There are many issues to take into account when voting for a candidate, but one of them is how your vote will form your own soul. The reality is, many, many people who vote for unfit, brazenly immoral and unjust candidates come to have their own conscience deformed by that vote. But this article is not going to argue that you shouldn’t vote for either candidate. I already made that case. I know that most people who vote will vote for one of the candidates anyway. So, instead, I want to talk about what to do when you feel conscience-bound to choose one of the candidates and you know that they are profoundly immoral and in some ways unfit for office. In other words, how do you vote for the lesser of two evils without succumbing to that evil? How can you “hold your nose and vote” without the odor eventually affecting you?
Related: Russell Moore is exasperated by the “paradoxical juvenile gerontocracy” as exemplified by the current presidential candidates. “[O]ur culture seems especially riddled through with this realization that those we thought were grownups are old, exhausted, and childish.”
Finally, scientists recently discovered a possible clue to the cause of migraines.
A study in mice, published in Science on 4 July, now offers clues about the neurological events that spark migraines. It suggests that a brief brain “blackout” — when neuronal activity shuts down — temporarily changes the content of the cerebrospinal fluid, the clear liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. This altered fluid, researchers suggest, travels through a previously unknown gap in anatomy to nerves in the skull where it activates pain and inflammatory receptors, causing headaches.
As someone who experiences frequent headaches, including migraines, I welcome any news that might lead to more reliable treatment.
Related: When I do have a migraine, the best solution is to retreat to the darkest, coldest room in the house, turn off all the lights, put a cold rag over my eyes, and put on one of these albums.
Also related: Back in July 2021, I sent Opus subscribers a playlist of music for migraines.
From the Blog
I’m a big proponent of people freeing themselves from the walled garden of social media and starting their own websites and blogs. For many years, the primary platform for doing so was WordPress, arguably the world’s most popular content management system (CMS). In recent years, however, WordPress has grown more complicated and less focused on blogging. The good news is that several alternative blogging platforms have stepped into the gap, including Ghost, Micro.blog, and Substack.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.