The Tremendous 10 link roundup, #107

1. Calling Bullshit | “The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit. We’re sick of it. It’s time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.”
2. Design in Tech Report |By John Meada: “Design trends revolutionizing the entrepreneurial and corporate ecosystems in tech. Related M&A activity, new patterns in creativity × business, and the rise of computational design.”
3. My Neighbor Totoro | “David Jenkins’s review published on Letterboxd: No plot. No central character. No antagonist….”
4. Minimalist web publishing platforms | “Check out txt.fyi, a toy ‘publishing platform’ I made. I put that phrase in quotes because it’s designed to be as lightweight as possible: you type in text and hit publish, and your work is live on the internet.”
5. Introducing WordPress.com for Google Docs: A New Way Forward for Collaborative Editing | “…a new add-on that lets you write, edit, and collaborate in Google Docs, then save it as a blog post on any WordPress.com or Jetpack-connected WordPress site. Your images and most formatting will carry over too. No more copy-and-paste headaches!”
6. Christopher Gray, Architecture Writer and Researcher, Dies at 66 | “Christopher Gray, an architectural detective and social historian whose Streetscapes column in The New York Times opened readers’ eyes to the richness of buildings all around them, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 66.”
7. Offscreen | “Welcome to Offscreen, a print magazine and a weekly newsletter with a thoughtful, human-centred take on technology and the web. Discover purpose-driven people, products, and ideas that shape the digital age.”
8. Heinz Will Run Don Draper’s Ketchup Ads From Mad Men | “It only took 50 years, but Heinz is finally ready to sign off on one of Don Draper’s memorable ad pitches. According to AdWeek, the food company is rolling out a series of print ads originally seen on Mad Men in the Season 6 episode ‘To Have and to Hold.'”
9. Adobe Pokes Fun At Hovering Art Directors In Hilarious New Video | “To promote their stock photography service, Adobe has come up with a witty ad that spoofs annoying art directors who micromanage their designers.”
10. Ranking Every MST3k Episode, From Worst to Best | “Watching every episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 without commercial breaks of any kind takes 286 hours. Watching it with the sort of commercial breaks it had in its broadcast days is 352 hours. That’s almost SIX TIMES longer than watching the six seasons of Game of Thrones from start to finish. And that’s not including the show’s 21 “season 0” episodes on local Minneapolis TV station KTMA before getting picked up for the official “season 1” on The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central in 1989. Suffice to say, watching all of MST3k from start to finish is a gargantuan undertaking, and one that likely would take even the most die-hard fan years to accomplish.”

Image: screenshot from AMC’s Mad Men, via link #8.