Hyperlinks #1

Lauren Polizzi's Website 🦕

Lauren Polizzi is a Hollywood art director and set designer who has been active for over three decades, and she has a pretty amazing website about her work. There is an extensive amount of cool stuff here to pour over but Christ, her page on Jurassic Park alone is exhilarating.

The Digital Antiquarian — Ebooks 📚

I first discovered Jimmy Maher's writings many years ago and it makes me happy to see he's still relentlessly going at it. Since 2011 he has been chronicling the history of computer games from the 1960's to the present — one excellently written, well-researched article at a time. When he's done covering a year those articles get bundled into a DRM-free ebook. The 1998 one just went up and it's sitting on my Kindle right now, screaming to be digested.

This is a treasure trove for anyone with any interest at all in old-school computer gaming, the history and the culture around it — and Jimmy is a hero for making it all freely available.

How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports 🎶

I don't really understand how music works, but this interactive article still enhanced my already substantial appreciation of this classic ambient album.

MonoSketch 🤓

I'm a sucker for text-based terminal interfaces and so is Tuan Chau, who built one of the neatest web apps I've seen in a while. MonoSketch gives you a blank canvas and a set of tools in the style of apps like Figma or Whimsical, but the canvas is a grid and the only thing that can exist on it are ASCII characters. Sometimes the best tools are ones with strict limitations, and that's the case here. The extended ASCII table is surprisingly versatile when you put your mind to it.

In its current state it's also a nice example of an honest app that doesn't try to be a Product or overstep your boundaries as a user: runs 100% in the browser, doesn't throw up a cookie banner, doesn't ask you to create an account, doesn't store anything in the cloud and lets you export your data in a common format. I like it.