I guess this shows just how old I am because I loved every single one of the “Oscar-bait” movies in this list (I do agree on TCM though)…

When I was a kid, I would watch Turner Classic Movies and try to appreciate films from the 1940s, only to find the exercise strangely difficult. I could admire them—in theory—but I struggled to experience these stories the way their original audiences did.

I feel similarly about many Oscar-bait dramas of the 1990s, including but not limited to: Chocolat, American Beauty, Shakespeare in Love, Scent of a Woman, The English Patient, and Life Is Beautiful. I simply don’t understand what contemporary audiences saw in these films.

That aside, as usual Daniel makes an interesting larger point, about why we don’t see as many dramas as we used to:

Action and horror, meanwhile, have visceral elements that translate across generations: big dinosaurs, jump scares, campy set pieces, and other straightforward pleasures. The first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark are timeless and feature almost no dialogue.

Ben Roy explains why prompting an LLM to write an essay misunderstands what writing actually is:

People fundamentally can’t prompt good essays into existence because writing is not a top-down exercise of applying knowledge you have upfront and asking an LLM to create something. AI agents also can’t create good essays for the same reason. Even though their step-by-step reasoning is more complex and iterative than human prompting, a chain of thought is still trying to accomplish a predefined goal. By contrast, real writing is bottom up. You don’t know what you want to say in advance. It’s a process of discovery where you start with a set of half-baked ideas and work with them in non-linear ways to find out what you really think.

I will continue to argue that for general business writing LLMs are fantastic if they are given the right context and guidance, and that it can save hours of work (with high quality results). But all my experiments with using LLMs for creative writing has so far fallen flat. Maybe—likely?—that will change within the next few months. But for now, the brain work this kind of writing requires remains. Not a bad thing imo.

Lalit Maganti writes about building a SQLite parser with AI — a project he’d been putting off for eight years, finished in three months. His comparison of AI coding to slot machines is uncomfortably familiar:

I found myself up late at night wanting to do “just one more prompt,” constantly trying AI just to see what would happen even when I knew it probably wouldn’t work. The sunk cost fallacy kicked in too: I’d keep at it even in tasks it was clearly ill-suited for, telling myself “maybe if I phrase it differently this time.”

Also, I agree that this is still true today, but I’m not convinced it will remain true beyond 2026:

AI is an incredible force multiplier for implementation, but it’s a dangerous substitute for design.

Tracy Durnell explores non-visual negative space—what happens when writing leaves room for the reader to think:

The current design trend of business and self-help style books is to use tons of subheadings and callout boxes and always, a list of the key points at the end of the chapter. While this is a highly skimmable format and often nice visual design, it essentially sucks the negative space out of the text — the places in which the reader might step back and consider their own examples or anticipate what point the author is trying to make. There’s no time for hunches here.

And:

The negative space of the text helps build the aesthetic experience. Small details flavor the text with a sense of reality. Drawing out events — leaving questions unresolved and conflicts unsettled — can build tension. And textual space creates a gap for the reader to make the personal decodings of the text that build meaning.

Not everything has to get to the point immediately. Sometimes the best thing a writer can do is leave room for the reader to get there on their own. I’m thinking about this because I’m currently reading The Will of the Many. It is slow, and long, and one of the best books I’ve read in ages. The negative space is probably a big reason why I love it so much.

I’m late to this one, but I like Liz Pelly’s take on Spotify Wrapped. It’s not just about music—it’s about what happens when we let corporations automate our memories:

Spotify Wrapped now feels like just another example of something personal and precious that is being automated away from us; another example of a supposedly unbearable task of thinking and writing being “offloaded” in order to make life more frictionless.

The post is essentially about friction—and why we need it. She argues that working through the process of remembering what mattered to us and thinking critically about our year is what keeps us sharp and curious. When we just accept what a streaming service tells us about our taste, we’re not just outsourcing a task. We’re losing our own sense of what connected with us and why.

It encourages music fans to believe that the records they streamed the most must be the ones they liked the most, which is surely not always the case.

Her suggestion is straightforward: write your own list. It doesn’t have to be polished—a notes app screenshot, a handwritten list, whatever. Just something that came from you, not from an algorithm optimizing for engagement metrics.

Wait hold the phone. Frank Chimero is writing again! One of my all-time favorite design writers. Welcome back to my RSS feed, (Internet) friend.

I wanted to get back to walking, reading, and writing. These were the foundational practices during the most prolific and enjoyable parts of my career. I longed to feel generative again and to have ideas with depth, meaning, and pleasant uncertainty, ideas whose remit extended beyond the boundaries of one company. I missed the opportunities of the internet as a common place for finding your people and feeling like a part of a group that actually had ideas instead of opinions or pleas for attention.

Source: Time is On My Side →

This tracks. It’s definitely my most-used emoji.

Whether you’re overwhelmed, overextended, or simply over trying to keep it together, the 🫠 Melting Face is the perfect pictographic companion for the full spectrum of emotional discomfort—from awkwardness to shame to existential dread. […]

Because, in the words of Erik Carter, the graphic designer involved in proposing the emoji: “Sometimes it does feel as though the best we can do is smile as we melt away.”

Source: Lifetime Achievement Award: The 🫠 Melting Face Emoji →

In Code shufflin’ Robin Rendle writes about why he, as a designer, still messes around with coding projects. I think this is why I continue to obsess over my side project as well—and proactively reach out to indie devs who use the Cloudflare platform to see if I can help.

I’d forgotten what it feels like not to ask permission for changes and instead make pull requests and break things. There’s a momentum to this sort of work that I crave deep down in my bones because it doesn’t rely on meetings or six months of quarterly planning or going up the chain of command. And what I love most about shuffling code around is that every day there’s progress, every day there’s a tiny degree of success you can point to.

I love the Murderbot books, and this interview with author Martha Wells is a delight:

Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.