Links For November 22, 2014

How I beat Journey… by playing Jericho

My first instinct was to turn 90 degrees and sprint off through traffic, but it was moving too fast, so I harnessed all my Jericho nerves of steel and kept walking, just like I was heading home. My heart was beating like a drum! I walked right by the Chaser.... “Just be cool!” I kept going up the street, never looking back. My partners were tagged. I was alone now, with 4 checkpoints to go and no one to help me. At the end of the block, I heard screams of panic and saw another ex-runner turned Chaser go after another group of runners on the other side of the street. He was lightning quick and those guys didn’t stand a chance.


Nigga? Please.

Say nigger or nigga as much as you like, just be prepared to deal with the consequences of your actions. The consequences of context. The word has racial connotations, and those connotations are different for white people and black people, whether we choose to accept that or not. It’s about personal responsibility.


The Indigenous Art Behind the Seahawks' Helmet

The name “Seahawks” came from the winning submission to a 1975 naming competition, but the logo was done by NFL Properties, the merchandising and licensing arm of the NFL. The league’s designers looked through books about Pacific Northwest art for inspiration, and it turns out that there was one specific piece that inspired the logo: a Kwakwaka’wakw transformation mask seen in Robert Bruce Inverarity’s 1950 book, Art of the Northwest Coast Indians.


Too Many Cooks (2014) — Art of the Title

Well, pre-production was fast, just a couple of weeks, maybe a week. The shoot was three days. It was fun because you kind of learn these TV cheats that a lot of sitcoms would use. Like there’s a police scene where it’s a briefing and they’re clapping and congratulating a guy — that was in a show, I can’t remember which one. It might have been TJ Hooker. It was just people standing with folders against a wall and then a cop there and you totally believe it’s a police briefing room. It’s the craziest thing.

So you were learning how to create ’80s-style TV by shooting a parody of ’80s TV?

Yeah!


Stupid Projects From The Stupid Hackathon

This weekend, Amelia Winger-Bearskin and I organized our second Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon, a hackathon that asks participants to produce project that have no value whatsoever (PATENT PENDING). It was a resounding and unqualified success.


The Psychology of ‘It’s So Cute I Could Eat It’ – Science of Us

It seems this incongruous feeling is much like nervous laughter or tears of joy: It helps us regulate our emotions and bring us back down to a more even-keeled state after an unsustainable emotional extreme.


The Good Web Bundle

It’s Hard to Build a Good Web

But I see some glimmers of hope a lot, too. MetaFilter and MLKSHK got back up on their feet, and then some. I see the scrappy team at The Toast make a site that brings joy, on their own terms, in a way that I had always hoped was possible. I see NewsBlur do a great job making an app in a category that the conventional tech industry said was old fashioned or dead, and build a thriving and vibrant community on top of it. I see a bunch of sites where instead of women getting harassed, women are founders. I see a web where people are having fun with each other, while they’re goofing off during their lunch hour. I see the web we’ll curl up with when we’re stuck at our parents’ house at Thanksgiving and can’t stand listening to the TV blasting anymore. I see an industry that changes just enough to treat a mom-and-pop indie app as being just as important as anything that gets VC funding.


How Sesame Street Got Started