Cool Picks

Picks for December 2024

📘 Absolution, by Jeff VanderMeer is the surprise continuation of the singular Southern Reach series which was an influence on my own supernatural bee comic.
🕵️‍♂️ The Operator is an intriguing video game that uses simulated computer interfaces to have players solved a mystery: "Computer, enhance!"
👽 Tomáš Čerkala makes gorgeous illustrations of haunted space stations and landscapes worth scrutinizing over every detail.

📘 The Overstory, by Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize, so it hardly need my recommendation, but after skimming it years ago it's come back to me with a wallop of earth mother transcendence.
🎮 Hue is a fun little platformer that uses a genius mechanic to create puzzles around color.
🤖 Olivia Sullivan makes illustrations and weird tone-poem comics that I'm currently obsessed with.

📘 This is What it Sounds Like, by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas, is a thought-provoking book on the way we hear music, from neuroscience to personal taste and preference.
🎨 David Arnes's Color Description is a mesmerizing tool for exploring his API of named colors.
🤖 Noper is making the kind of reality-adjacent dreamscapes that AI was made for.

📘 I'm currently working my way through Malcom Harris's sweeping historical tome, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.
🔠 Linefont and Wavefont are two new variable fonts (data fonts?) that Dmitry Ivanov has released on Google Fonts to visualize numbers as shapes, as letters, as squiggles.
🫂 This article about game design strategies to facilitate friendship has given me a lot to think about in the context of online education, but offers thoughtful advice for a variety of experience designers.

🤖 Geoffry Litt shares the transformative idea of using Chat-GPT as a muse rather than an oracle — ask you questions, instead of providing answers.
📘 I just finished binging the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, and what a haunting reimagining of man vs. nature! Definitely worth starting at the beginning even if you've seen the Alex Garland film.
🖼️ The animated techno-treasure maps of lesCogumelos are like a laser-guided missle of my favorite aesthetics.

🌐 Arc is officially my default browser, and has made the past couple months of work and research a total joy with it's innovative design and loving attention to detail.
🌈 Poline is am "enigmatic color palette generator" that uses math, and possibly witchcraft, to make the color wheel more fun than it's been in a long time.
📘 The Politics of Design is a pocket-sized book jam-packed with new perspectives on the design canon and provocative projects.

🔈 Articles of Interest by Avery Trufleman continues is run of excellent podcasting with its new season on the history (sartorial, economic, cultural) of Ivy style. The first episode in particular has some great stuff on the syntax of design.
👟 Cinderella 2059 is a series of futuristic and glass-like renderings by Geo Metrieva that are positively delicious with their subtle animations and typographic captions.
⏳ Timelines from throughout history are a great way to lose an hour of your life and ponder the visualizations of time and information.

📘 Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir is the third installment in the Locked Tomb series, and like its predecessors, a baroque and gnarly space opera grounded in utterly human, uh, necromancers.
🎥 Video inpainting with image generation algorithms continues to delight me to an unreasonable extent. The shifting realities like this one be Karen X. Cheng are so easy to believe.
🤖 QQL is a more polished AI art experiment, by Tyler Hobbs and Dandelion Wist — an inviting GUI lets anyone generate abstract compositions of calming spirals and dots with an unexpected antiquarian vibe, and submit their creations for curation and minting.

🚆 The Coding Train is a free series of tutorials by Daniel Shiffman that makes it feel fun to learn, with courses like "Git and GitHub for poets"
🤖 SALT is one of the more interesting AI projects I've seen lately, consisting of an interactive SciFi "film" made of generated images and animations — a single author cinematic experience.
📘 Civilizations by Laurent Binet is a globe-trotting counterfactual novel that imagines a very different path for Seventeenth century colonists; a why-didn't-I-think-of-that concept and that feels elegant and lethal.

🪴 How Many Plants is a beautifully illustrated site documenting houseplant care. We need more plant and gardening content, don't we folks?
🤖 Paul Trillo is a video director who makes formally surreal works of digital trickery, including this incredible DALL-E inpainting trick.
📘 Seeing like a State by James C. Scott is a rollicking history of centrally planned cities, forests, and life that critiques Modernism through politics.

📕 Futureproof by Kevin Roose: A rollicking look at the automation revolution and how to adapt to an algorithmic future by embracing our strengths as humans.
🌐 Low-tech Magazine: A solar-powered web publication with an energy-efficient design.
🦅 Birds aren’t real: An incredibly successful fictive artwork and indictment of conspiracy movements.