If you’re a fan of Warehouse 13, you’ll enjoy this book, I suspect. While it’s not as visibly rooted in actual historical fact as Warehouse 13 always was,1 it’s got that same “Indiana Jones, but about saving the world instead of just finding cool stuff for the museum” vibe.
That’s, really, most of the tl;dr of the book, although I’ve left out the magic. It’s a somewhat loosely-defined magic system, which normally I’d be annoyed by, being the “I want to understand the laws of magic” person that I am, but in this case it fits the cinematic feel of the series. The only really solid rule is that magic doesn’t come from people, but is a natural thing — ley lines! — that they channel through a focus of some sort. There’s also a lot of dangerous ancient artifacts around, which is where we get the Warehouse 13 aspect.
Zoe makes for a reasonable protagonist in Ancient Magic and Cursed Magic, but I think Hayley, the protagonist of Hidden Magic, is the one who really makes this collection. Zoe is the seasoned veteran, someone who was raised with magic and made a career out… well, being a badass. Hayley, meanwhile, is a junior museum curator, and spends the first quarter of her story in the perfectly reasonable belief that magic isn’t real. Discovering it with her is a lot more fun, and that “what is happening” mindset makes her a lot more relatable to the reader. Frankly, I’d argue that Hidden Magic should’ve been the first book in the collection, but Ancient Magic dovetails into it so well with the little crossover that it’s hard to be mad.
End result, I quite liked this little collection. It was a pretty quick read, and a fun one; give it a go.2
Well, right up until it wasn’t, but you’ve gotta let the show have its core concept, after all. ↩
Normally, this would be a Bookshop link, but I’m unable to find the collection — or any of the component novellas — on Bookshop, so here’s an Amazon link instead. Strangely, despite being published under the same title, the thing I’m linking to is a 6-novella set, while the one I read only contains the first 3. I, frankly, have no idea where I got this ebook. ↩
I like this song because it’s kinda about the importance of communication in relationships! Positive influence! Of course, Escape is also on this album, and that’s a song about a woman who needs to get a restraining order and a gun, so… ↩
Now that the Bon Iver song off this album is thoroughly overplayed in my head, I’m listening to other parts of it. ↩
Can you tell that I’ve become a big fan of Yoste? ↩
I sent this song to a friend with this note: “and I love Woodkid because that isn’t even his horniest song, but Woodkid Horny Music is EXTREMELY different from regular horny music” ↩
This song had no right to hit as hard as it did, I, as a former Choir Kid, feel called out. As a side note, this was real fun to search for in Apple’s link building tool, which intermittently doesn’t know about unicode. ↩
One day I’m gonna have a sufficient dataset, thanks to all these playlists, that I can do some fun analysis. I’m betting The Fray is gonna be on an annual cycle. ↩
So far, my favorite off the new album, but I’ve also only listened to about half of the album so far. ↩
This album is kinda all over the place, but I love it ↩
People say not to judge a book by its cover, but looking at the cover of this book having just read it, I think it does a remarkably good job of explaining the book. The title really covers a lot of it, and the porthole hints at the little bit of steampunk that drifted in around the edges of the ‘werewolf’ bit.
In short, the book is utterly ridiculous. It’s not quite as “empty fluff”-y as you might think, and has some interesting things going on with some of the backstory, but it’s still entirely ridiculous.
But you know what? It’s 2020. The world sucks. Let people enjoy things! Read a ridiculous werewolf-regency-romance novel!
You can judge this book by its cover, but think about what context you’re using to judge it. Does “ridiculous and fluffy” mean bad? Or is it that it’s feminine-coded, and our sociocultural background has spent our entire lives teaching us that we should frown upon that sort of thing?
I was going to start with “it’s been a while since the last anthology I read and reviewed,” but, as it turns out, it hasn’t. I wonder if it’s the variety of stories that makes an anthology feel further away in my memory? No single story has as long to get lodged in my memory, or something. Hmm.
Still, I do like the anthologies – they’re fun in the same way that a 22-minute-long TV show is, a great way to fill a bit of time without getting yourself too invested in something.
Knaves is, admittedly, less fun than some of the other ones, because the focus is on villains. So, by the nature of their stories, it’s a bit of a gloomy topic.
Which isn’t to say the stories aren’t interesting, because they absolutely are. “All Mine” is heartbreaking, as is “Hunger in the Bones”; “The Bloodletter’s Prayer” is a fascinating piece of dark fantasy; “Cat Secret Weapon #1” is a delightful spin on the Bond archetype; “The Hand of Virtue” is sweet and a touch melancholy; and “Old Sol Rises Up” is… well, honestly, mostly confusing. But I suspect that was the intent, so I won’t fault it.
And, of course, there’s an introduction – every anthology has to have one. What caught my eye and, frankly, got me to actually read the introduction was who wrote it – Howard Tayler, the man behind Schlock Mercenary, another delightful piece of media that I’m happy to recommend. Read the intro – it’s weird, and silly, and fun.
Craig Laurance Gidney This book is… melancholy. I read it in bits and pieces over the course of a couple of months, which it’s well suited for, as a collection of short stories. Some of them were creepy, and some were sad. One or two were happy, and hopeful. But overall, the feeling I have is melancholy. Part of that is the way the last story ends, which is certainly coloring my opinion, as I set the book down and immediately started writing this, but I think the whole thing feels that way, as well. Melancholy certainly isn’t the best of moods to be in, but sometimes it’s what you need. And, considering that I’m posting this as we’re making our way into autumn, it’s entirely appropriate. Get yourself a seat looking over trees preparing to shed their leaves, a mug of tea, and read this book.
Part of the MHCID’s program requirements is that we give a presentation, detailing what we did during the internship. This year, gathering everyone together for a TEDx-style event… wasn’t in the cards. Instead, each group made a video presentation, filling approximately the same niche.
It’s been a while since I had a chance to do any video editing, and I had fun putting this together. As mentioned in my previous posts about this project, it was a group effort – we each recorded part of the audio, and split up the work of finding video clips, icons, and images to go with what we were saying.
It was fun to put together, and I’m pretty happy with the end result. Check it out:
I’ve just released Fluidics 2.1 on the App Store, only five months after the last update, so I’m speeding up a bit on my release cycle, apparently. If you’d like to see the whole “what’s new” list, check out the release post over on the Fluidics site; this post is more of a “making of” kind of thing.
Unlike the last update, this wasn’t a ground-up rewrite. I briefly considered tearing out the App/SceneDelegate stuff and rewriting it to use the new SwiftUI-style App setup, but because there were some visual bugs with the release of iOS 14, I wanted to get the update out sooner rather than later.
This version requires iOS 14 – the previous version has no issues on iOS 13, and just about everything new in 2.1 requires iOS 14, so I went ahead and bumped the minimum version.
The main addition in Fluidics 2.1 is the new widgets, available with three variants.
From the top:
The ‘add’ widget, which displays the four Quick Adds, and allows one-tap logging from the home screen.
The ‘status’ widget, in wide form – my personal favorite – which displays the goal, not only in the fill state of the widget background, but also in text form, as well as the four quick adds.
The ‘status’ widget, in small form, displaying just the goal in text form.
All of the widgets allow launching the app, and use deep links to interact with it in specific ways.
The linking format is technically open, so I can drop a link into this post that would open the app and log water. It accepts a handful of URLs:
fluidics://fluidics.app/quickAdd
fluidics://fluidics.app/customAdd
fluidics://fluidics.app/add/:unit/:amount, where :unit is one of “flOz“, “l“, or “ml“, and :amount is a parsable number.
(Creating that linking framework was the spot where I was most tempted to drop SceneDelegate entirely – the Scene class’ onOpenURL(perform:) modifier was looking real nice compared to the tangle I wound up with in the SceneDelegate. Oh well, maybe for next update.)
One of the fun things to set up was the customizability of the widgets. I’ve bounced off the IntentKit framework in the past, but never got very far due to time constraints. With widgets being driven off Intents as well, though, it was time to sit down and actually write it up.
Honestly, the Intent definition editor is cool. I could go off on a whole mini-essay about the usefulness of constraints in design, and how perfectly it expresses the constraints of valid inputs and configurations, but I digress.
Having done that bit of setup, I’m definitely going to look more at this in the future. I’m still trying to figure out what, exactly, a SiriKit integration for Fluidics should look like; once I’ve done that design work, though, the coding aspect is seeming much more manageable now.
The last little feature I added was the ability for Pro users to switch the icon. It felt like the right kind of thing to lock behind the Pro subscription – a purely cosmetic tweak, and an additive change. Actually implementing it in SwiftUI was fun – it’s a Picker, attached to a custom Binding. I should probably refactor it a bit for readability, but the actual implementation is pretty solid, and I’m happy about it. It also allows for further expansion in the future – I can add new icon choices pretty easily, going forward, and may do so if I have any fun ideas for what to offer there. And yes, I’m open to suggestions.
It’s fall! The obligatory joke would be something about pumpkin spice, but actually I’m just planning to explode into a cloud of apple cider flavored things.
This feels like one of those songs where my mom will ask me what the lyrics mean and I’ll just shrug. ↩
This was one of those “I haven’t listened to this song in ages!” additions. Which I then swapped out immediately, because when I added it to the playlist, I added the version that was already in my library – which turned out to be an iTunes Match track, of a 48k YouTube rip from years and years ago. Whoops! ↩
SYML recently released what are, essentially, mixtapes of his work. Not sure what that was about, but it did lead me to discover a couple tracks I hadn’t heard before, so… I guess it worked? ↩
Is the resurgence of roughly ‘80s sounds in music a general trend, or is it just what I’m interested in right now? (I’m going to cite the new Wonder Woman as evidence for ‘general trend.’) ↩
Having done all that research during the spring, summer was about prototyping and iteration.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
The term “low-fidelity prototype” might sound a bit negative, but they’re a wonderful, wonderful thing. Low-fidelity prototypes are easy to make, which makes them easy to toss aside. In the same way that you use sketches and wireframes to go through a lot of ideas very quickly, a low-fidelity prototype lets you try things out without pouring a ton of resources into making something pixel-perfect.
We went through several iterations, developing clickable flows that highlighted the key points of the features we were designing. Those flows in hand, we went back to the users, and gathered more test data – did they understand what the new features were for? Did the terminology and usage make sense? Was it useful?
High-Fidelity Prototype
That user feedback in hand, we went back and created a high-fidelity prototype. One of the main goals we had in mind with this was to have it, if not ‘pixel-perfect,’ viable for handoff to the developers who would be creating it. Instead of mapping out every possible screen, we identified the key user flows, and created a guided tour of sorts, a limited clickstream that showed as many of the possible UI states, without requiring us to create hundreds or thousands of screens.
As part of this, I started to wonder what stateful prototyping tools would look like. Think about it – using current prototyping tools, if we want to have a collapsable sidebar, we need to make two of every screen, one with the sidebar open, one with it collapsed. Once you start getting more states – say, to use a non-random example, if you’ve got multiple collapsible elements in a sidebar, and some user-configurable data in the main area – the combinatorics make it entirely unfeasible to create a realistic prototype. This… is a thread I’d like to follow up on in the future.
Delivery
And with that, our portion of the project was over. We’d been working up to it for quite a while, yet it still felt very sudden. The last bit to do was handoff, which happened as a Zoom meeting with a couple of the design leaders at Project Jupyter, and a pull request to jupyterlab/design.
Not to be cliche, but this project has been an amazing experience. I’ve learned a lot in doing it, and I absolutely loved working with this team.
I mentioned in my post about the research we did that we were working on finalizing a couple deliverables, and that I would eventually post them here. Months later, I’ve finally got the time to do it.
And, before I go any further, credit where it’s due: this was a collaborative work by the whole team:
One of the key tenets of design is you are not your user. Something of a parenthetical on that is that… nobody is The User. Someone is ‘a user,’ but there’s no definitive User out there.
But we’re human, and we need a way to think about the people we’re creating things for, so we develop personas. Create a character who embodies part of your user base – and note, you’re not just making someone up, you’re personifying data you’ve already gathered. (And be sure not to stereotype, while you’re at it!)
Journey Maps
Journey maps fall more into the “UX” than “UI” field. The idea is to follow your user (or rather, one of your personas) through their process of interacting with your design. And, in fact, not just interacting with it, but potentially… not interacting with it. Discovering it for the first time, say, or using a competing product instead.
Once you’ve got the what figured out, get into how they feel as they’re doing it. Is the design meeting their every need and desire, leaving them shouting with joy? Is it completely failing to do something critical, leaving them wondering who in the world could’ve come up with something this terrible?
In short, it’s an expansion of the persona – another tool for getting in the collective head of your user base.
Seeing that linkage, we opted to combine these two deliverables. Take a look:
This… isn’t so rigorously researched a design artifact as personas and journey maps should be. In our case, we actually did back it up with some interesting research into the ways that people use and think about organization – I think the key reference would be the Five Hat Racks, although Justin pulled together a lot of research from the early years of computer science as a field, as well. To summarize, there are ~5.5 ways to organize digital files:
Amount of use
By provenance (source)
Chronologically
User self-selection/favorites
By concept, or by Venn Diagram (thus, .5)
Regardless, the end result makes for a fun visual, so I thought I’d share it here:
Alex Acks
I was genuinely surprised that I don’t have another review to reference here — I would swear that I wrote one about the book where these characters were first introduced, Murder on the Titania, but apparently not.1
So, the introduction: in the Sherlock Holmes style, very vaguely. Zombies, and steampunk, and all the other internet buzzwords abound, but it works surprisingly well together. The primary arc of the first story can be summed up with the image of a Native American man and a Latina woman rolling their eyes as an elderly white man tries to convince himself he’s the hero because he’s slightly less of an imperialist than the bad guy.
And if that hasn’t sold you on the concept, I’m not sure what will. It’s a fun little read, check it out.
I do love a good anthology. It’s all the fun of starting a new book, several times over, and with much less of a time commitment each time.
This did have some of the downside, though – about halfway through, I found myself getting rather bored of the concept of pirates. It’s a bit too coherent a theme, I feel; the book had a lot of the variance that makes anthologies fun, but keeping everything tied to ‘pirates’ limited it a bit more than is really healthy for an anthology.
After that midway nadir, though, it recovered nicely, going off into some interesting science fiction bits, and ending on a delightfully weird fantasy (or, possibly, extremely-distant-future?) piece.
So hey, have some fun with a variety of pirate stories.
Every once in a while I think about the story of how this collaboration happened, and I consistently have the mental image that Daft Punk didn’t want to collaborate with The Weeknd, they were just too overwhelmed by him suddenly bursting in to argue. Almost certainly not what happened, but a fun image nonetheless. ↩︎
I can’t listen to this without picturing the scene from The Old Guard. ↩︎
Somehow I still think of Bon Iver as being a little-known indie artist, despite the fact that he’s on this playlist in collaborations with Taylor Swift and Kanye West. ↩︎
A nice song to sing along to, though I can’t read the title without getting the Thirty Seconds to Mars song stuck in my head instead. ↩︎
I wonder if Tiktok pays royalties on the songs that go viral on Tiktok? ↩︎
This song feels like an entire album all in one, it’s wild. ↩︎
While trying to play this the other day, I determined that the search engine in the iOS Music app is still hot garbage, because searching for “dark syml” found exactly zero results. ↩︎
My friend Soph sent this to me, like… a month ago, and I finally listened to it and immediately texted her back like “that song is amazing thank you!!!” ↩︎
Erin M. Hartshorn
“This feels like an indie novel,” I told one of my friends as I was reading it. “The content is really interesting, but the title says ‘there wasn’t an editor.’” Looking at the cover now, I’m doubling down on that statement. It looks, honestly, ridiculous. But it was also one of the most fun books I’ve read recently.
It also feels like it’s setting up for a series, both in the subtitle and in the amount of world-building it contains, which I’m pretty okay with. That world building was quite interesting, and I’d like to see what Pepper does next. It’s a fascinating blend of little and big stakes — competing for promotion from ‘assistant manager’ to ‘manager’ at work, a bit of relationship drama, and, oh, a serial killer.
Which leads me to the other thing I said to someone about this book as I was just starting to read it. “It feels like the plot is going to be a Scooby Doo episode, just a real estate developer using ghost stories to drop property values… except they’re murdering people so that they’re Actual Ghosts.”
And hey, if that doesn’t sound like a fun book to you, then… you’re reading the wrong blog for book reviews. Give it a read.
Following my recent post on form design, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what is, in the US, one of the most universal forms: the ballot.
This sits at the intersection of my interests in design and civic engagement. It’s also a much more controversial topic than I’d normally touch with a ten-foot pole, but here I am.
(‘Pole/poll’ pun? Absolutely intended.)
And first, an admission: that image up top, of people at a polling station? That’s an utterly alien concept to me. I’ve never been to a polling station; I live in Oregon, a state that finished moving to universal vote-by-mail when I was in elementary school.
Now, vote-by-mail is a very controversial topic these days, but as someone who grew up with it, I thought it would be interesting to do a case study of how it works in Oregon.
Vote by Mail: A Case Study
Overall, the user experience of voting in an election in Oregon is, to my eye, already a ways ahead of most of the rest of the country. There’s still room for improvement, though.
So, what is Oregon doing right, and what are we doing wrong?
In doing the research for this article, I found out that “register when you get your driver’s license” went from “… if you fill out this extra piece of paper while you’re at the DMV” to being an automatic process, thanks to the amusingly-titled “Motor-Voter Law.”
Ease of Information
While I can’t say we don’t have our share of crappy political ads, the state has a standard way of providing information on everyone running: the voting pamphlet, sent to every household prior to the election. (They are also available online.)
(Image credit: Statesman Journal)
These pamphlets, nice as they are, aren’t perfect. The actual process for putting information in them is a touch convoluted, and surprisingly unregulated. While each entry mentions where the information comes from, and plagiarism or misquoting are banned, there is nothing enshrined in law (or policy) to prevent misleading entries.
Let’s take a look at the information architecture of the section on a single ballot measure.
At the top, the easily-memorable measure number takes precedence, followed by the shortest-form summary, the title.
Each measure has a very clear summary section, as well as the “Result of ‘Yes’ Vote” and “Result of ‘No’ Vote” area, which state, very explicitly, what each bubble on the accompanying ballot will do.
The estimate of financial impact is prepared by an eminently qualified committee; the text of the measure is resolute in itself.
But then things break down, with “Arguments in Favor” and “Arguments in Opposition.” This is an official state document; everything about this measure, so far, has been as factual and rigorous as one could hope. These arguments, though, are unregulated beyond “no plagiarism, no misquoting people.” If you want to write a 350 words of “why you should vote against this,” pay the fee to have it entered in, and file it as an “Argument in Favor” there’s nothing to stop you.
And that’s a problem. This is an official state document; it’s got the seal on the cover, and a lot of very solid information in it, giving it credence. Unverified information in the Arguments gains legitimacy by association.
For comparison, let’s take a look at a different state.
California’s voter pamphlets are laid out very differently. The first thing that caught my eye – and made assembling this comparison in a visually-pleasing way rather difficult – was that the ballot measure doesn’t have a table of contents.
I’ll give California this, though: they’ve lined up “Proposition” with “20” much better than Oregon did “Ballot Title” and “96.” The all-caps feels a bit “Newspaper Headline”, though, and what is going on with the kerning in “Prepared by the Attorney General”?
To save you a great deal of scrolling, I’ve pulled together the section headings from the 2020 Voter’s Pamphlet, Proposition 20, and summarizing somewhat:
Official Title and Summary
Summary of Legislative Analyst’s Estimate of Net State and Local Government Fiscal Impact
Analysis by the Legislative Analyst
Overview
(Specific Proposal Title)
Background
Proposal
Fiscal Effects
Argument in Favor of Proposition
Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Proposition
Argument Against Proposition
Rebuttal to Argument Against Proposition
Distinctly more words to it, but notice some key differences:
There’s an actual analysis of the legislation, expanding beyond the fiscal impact to the actual outcomes of the bill. This is provided by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, who are explicitly nonpartisan.
Arguments in favor and against are paired with rebuttals, allowing for more of a dialog between sides.
Note, however, that there’s still no legal requirement for an “argument in favor” to actually be in favor. There is a strong precedent for judicial intervention, which is something of an improvement, at least. And the typography makes a statement, too.
On the left, the Analysis by the Legislative Analyst. It’s rich text – there’s use of bold to highlight key points, and various levels of headings to organize it. On the right, the Arguments, sans formatting. They’re also in a smaller font size, and have their own unique style of heading. In short, the Arguments look different, providing a subtle reminder that this section is not the product of the nonpartisan election officers.
And now, back to the other aspects of the election. But first, a reminder to find other sources of information on the candidates and ballot measures. As a good starting point, I recommend Vote411, from the League of Women Voters, and Ballotpedia.
Ease of Voting
A few weeks before the election, the Oregon Department of State mails out ballots to all registered voters. The package includes the ballot, a return envelope, and a second ‘privacy’ envelope that you can use if you’re worried somebody might be able to see the contents of your ballot through the outer envelope.
One of the inspirations for this post was the American Institute for Graphic Arts’ “Design for Democracy” program. They did a larger-scale version of my research on form design, investigating and determining best practices for ballot design.
Let’s take a look at a (reasonably) representative sample of an Oregon ballot. This comes from the 2020 primaries, courtesy of Lincoln County:
It’s actually pretty good. The visual design follows most of the guidelines, although the “Write-in” lines and text need a bit more space. The main issue I see is the instructions – they’re fairly clearly written, but they are written. Pairing them with a visual explanation – the cartoons, in AIGA’s example – makes them even easier to follow.
The UX of Elections
Elections in the US, being controlled at the state level, rather than federally designed, are something of an ongoing A/B test. We can see different electoral systems in use across the country, and use opinion polls after the fact to judge how well-represented people feel by the results.
Were I polled right now, I’d feel fairly happy with how my state handles things.
So, what are the key action items for, say, another state, looking to implement some of Oregon’s best practices?
Reduce the friction of voting. Make it easy to register, easy to get your ballot, easy to fill out your ballot, and easy to turn it in.
That’s it, that’s the list, the whole idea. Make it easier to vote, by whatever means possible. I’m an advocate for doing so by enabling universal mail-in-voting, thanks to some of the inherent benefits:
No standing in line, or going into cramped polling places – an excellent benefit during a pandemic!
Voting on your own time, rather than needing to take half a day off to wait in line. (‘On your own time’ within reasonable limits – there’s still a deadline to get it turned in on time.)
But, of course, I’m not done. I have some recommendations for Oregon, as well:
Validate the voting pamphlet materials. Don’t just trust what people submit, make sure it’s actually espousing the viewpoint it claims. Do some fact checking, while you’re at it.
Visually distinguish public submissions. Use some gestalt principles – things that are close together, and look similar, look like they’re part of a group. Move the public submissions a little further away, and make them look different, to remind people that they aren’t from the same source as the rest of the material.
Demonstrate how to fill out the ballot. The instructions are fairly well-written, but “comfortable reading English” should not be a requirement to vote.
Image credit: Elliott Stallion, Unsplash.
Postscript: while I’m advocating for improving voting, I am absolutely not advocating digital voting. No.No, no, no.
