Michael's Monthly Recommendations (January 2019)

05 Feb 2019

Feburary 2018 - March 2018 - April 2018 - May 2018 - June 2018 - July 2018 - August 2018 - September 2018 - November 2018 - December 2018 - Yearly Recommendations 2018 - January 2019 - February 2019 - March 2019 - April 2019 - December 2019

I read, watch, listen to, play, and use a ton of different things, and each month, I pick out a few of my favorites to recommend.

Goodbye Big Five Kashmir Hill
A journalist completely cuts each of the five big tech companies (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple) – including all of their subsidiaries and anything hosted on their web service platforms – out of her life for a week at a time. Her experiments reveal how embedded these comparies are in each of our lives, especially in subtle ways that you wouldn’t normally think of. For instance, in the week she blocked Google, she couldn’t use Lyft or Uber (because both use Google Maps and won’t let you set a pickup location if Maps is blocked), and she also couldn’t log in to Dropbox (because it uses reCAPTCHA on its login page).

Gestalt_OS (Play for free in your browser) Stephen Lavelle and Lucas Le Slo
An instructionless puzzle game where you have to learn the meanings of mysterious symbols through experimentation. And it looks like Windows 95.

If you enjoy it and manage to play through the whole thing, there’s also Gestalt_3.1.

Daily Overview Benjamin Grant
Daily Overview uses satelite and drone imagery to inspire awe with views of the Earth that you’ve never seen before. I recommend scrolling through their Instragram, listening to this lecture + interview with the founder, or buying their coffee table book.

Game Engine Black Book: Doom Fabien Sanglard
Take what I said last year about the previous book in this series, and replace every instance of “Wolfenstein 3D” with “Doom”.

Icons by Icon Solid.