Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

This is actually one psychological driver for piracy — people who have paid for a book resent being expected to pay for it again due to an arbitrary-seeming lock-in onto an aging piece of hardware. From their point of view, honesty is being punished.

There is no guarantee that B&N will stay in business, or that Amazon won’t discontinue support for older Kindle files, in the not too distant future. This is something that the hardcore readers cannot help but be aware of, because it has already bitten them in the past, if they bought a Zune, or a Palm Pilot, or any number of other devices.

Also, due to job-hunt and financial issues, my age group finds it extremely hard to go out and be in social settings, so the usual networking and schmoozing that previous generations indulged in isn’t nearly as possible for us, nor can we be as good at it when we have the chance to. Lack of practice has that effect.

When confronted with a potential emergency, people typically play it cool, adopt a look of nonchalance, and monitor the reactions of others to determine if a crisis is really at hand. No one wants to overreact, after all, if it might not be a true emergency. However, because each individual holds back, looks nonchalant, and monitors the reactions of others, sometimes everyone concludes (perhaps erroneously) that the situation is not an emergency and hence does not require intervention.

At the age of 29, I’ve likely forever lost the following opportunities due to cost and probable inability to make up for lost wages and career potential:

• Getting married.

• Having children.

• Owning a home that’s bigger than 500 square feet. (hint: that’s not big.)

The show’s therapeutic exploration has been frequently hilarious to watch, but I’ve also found it a wee bit uncomfortable, because amidst the extended homages and wink-and-nudge parodies, “Community” has been an open wound this spring. That’s not “uncomfortable” as a pejorative. “Community” has simply gone for a wider range of emotions and reactions than most network sitcoms would ever attempt and it continues to succeed an admirable [and occasionally astounding] percentage of the time. As effective as NBC’s “Parks & Recreation” has been at poking around in the hearts and souls of viewers, “Community” has often been at jabbing a wire hanger into weird recesses of our brains.

Light, indeed, is the most important external cue to synchronize our internal body clocks, and the lack of light can have severe negative effects on our sleep patterns. Even a well-lit workplace exposes us to no more than 100 Lux, which translates to 1,200 Lux-hours over the course of a 12-hour workday. Meanwhile, on a cloudy day, the intensity of outside light is about 120,000 Lux, which means even a short 20-minute walk outdoors would expose us to 40,000 Lux-hours, or more than thirty-fold the exposure of that entire indoor workday.

Little mention is made of the exact rents paid by Hurston (although there is, in classic writerly tradition, frequent reference to her being late on it), but it’s interesting to note a practice common to Harlem in the 20s and 30s: rent parties. For admission of pocket change, a fine party was thrown, with the proceeds going towards paying that month’s rent.

No visit to a contemporarymultiplex is complete without a bit of shit being rubbed in your eye right from the start, which happened in my case when the automatic ticket-printing machine spewed a rectangle of air at me instead of a ticket. Pathetically, I looked around for human assistance, only to find a big queue at the box office, where a solitary staff member was gradually processing incoming fleshbags with the joyous gusto of a woman forced to slowly count dust motes in a jail cell forever.

On a day-to-day basis, the level of detail supplied in even a 200-page design document is vague at best. It doesn’t answer the 1,001 specific details that each area requires, or the countless creative details that are part of everyday development. Any design document is really nothing more than a framework to work from and something to improve the likelihood that work from multiple people will fit together in a seamless fashion. It’s the Cabal process that helped spread around all the big picture ideas that didn’t make it into any document —things that are critical to the feel of the game, but too nebulous to put into words. It also helps maximize individual strengths and minimize individual weaknesses and sets up a framework that allows individuals to influence as much of the game as possible.

…our results provide strong evidence for the importance of female matrilineal relationships in human social organisation. There has been a tendency to emphasise the importance of male-male relationships in an essentially patrilineal form of social organisation as defining human sociality, but our results tend to support the claim that mother-daughter relationships play a particularly seminal role in structuring human social relationships irrespective of dispersal pattern, as has been suggested by some sociological studies.

Mobile isn’t just ‘mobile’. It’s also the couch, the kitchen, the three-hour layover, all places where we have time and attention to spare. 42 per cent of mobile users say they use it for entertainment when they’re bored. Those aren’t 10-second sessions. That means we shouldn’t design only for stunted sessions or limited use cases. Nielsen is confusing device context with user intent. All that we can really know about mobile users is that they’re on a small screen, and we can’t divine user intent from that. Just because I’m on a small screen doesn’t mean I’m interested in less content or want to do less.

The Internet isn’t making us any more honest than the printing press or reality TV did. But it is helping us learn more about each other by allowing us to explore the myriad emotions and activities of other human beings… The vast majority of us will choose to be ourselves online because in doing so we’ll naturally attract more people like us. Call it digital gravitation.

A critique is not a mandate. But be warned that there’s something strange that happens in meetings: people leave with very different views about what happened. If you are quiet during the critique, scribbling notes, people will leave the session feeling validated – that you heard them – and expect that their comments will be illustrated in the next round of revisions you do. And they’ll be personally frustrated when they don’t see the changes they described, because they’ll feel like you ignored them and they wasted their time. At the end of the critique, it’s critical that you set expectations about what you intend to change, and why you intend to change it.

Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.