A simple list of my favorite people on the Internet — makers of great projects, writers of great blogs, crafters of great tweets, senders of great newsletters. Everyone below has in some way shaped…
Month: November 2019
constructions in magical thinking
👓 Constructions in Magical Thinking | Ribbon Farm

If you’re one of those sharp-eyed readers who notices such things, you may have noticed that earlier this week, we adopted a new tagline: constructions in magical thinking. We also got a cheery set of new mastheads to go with it (thanks Grace Witherell), which you’ll see in rotation at the top of the site from now on.
Remains of the Day is a personal blog started in 2001 covering a random assortment of topics of interest. That doesn't narrow things down much because I have both attention deficit and surplus.
I live in San Francisco. Before that I lived in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Chicago, where I grew up.
Most of my professional career has been spent at consumer internet companies. The world wide web was just heating up when I finished my undergrad education, and like many grads from Stanford, tech was always top of mind. I started off at Amazon.com and was there for seven years working on all sorts of things, but mostly product. I left Amazon to be a filmmaker, went to editing school at The Edit Center in NYC, then to UCLA Film School in their graduate directing program. But tech pulled me back in after just one year in film school.
That summer I joined the company that would become Hulu, leading the product, design, editorial, and marketing teams. In 2011 I formed a startup called Erly with a few friends. We were purchased in 2012 by Airtime, and I left that in late 2012. I was the head of product at Flipboard for two years, then the Head of Video at Oculus, which I left in July 2017. I'm now working on some of my own ideas, most of which sit at the intersection of media and technology, as well as doing some advising and angel investing.
You can find more fragments of me scattered across the web at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Letterboxd, among others.
You can also email me at eugene at eugenewei dot com.
👓 New plugin allows the far-right to ‘graffiti’ any website | Columbia Journalism Review
Dissenter acts as a workaround for people wishing to comment on websites, even those without a comment section. One user, Cody Jassman, describe the plugin as “like the graffiti painted in the alley on every web page. You can take a look around and see what passersby are saying.” The plugin was launched in beta at the end of February by Andrew Torba, who co-founded Gab, a far-right social network. Gab is well known for being the platform where Robert Bowers, the suspected Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, published anti-Semitic comments before he allegedly killed 11 people and wounded many others at the Tree of Life synagogue.
🔖 The IndieWeb is people! It’s people! | Imgur
End end screen of Soylent Green with a caption that described the difference between the IndieWeb and the corporate, siloed web.
h/t Peter Molnar
End end screen of Soylent Green with a caption that described the difference between the IndieWeb and the corporate, siloed web.
This is a kind of manifesto. It’s available for iOS and macOS.
🔖 Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. Visual Studio Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, macOS, and Windows.
👓 Why You Should Have a Website | James Gallagher
One of the main pieces of advice I have for people looking to accelerate their career is to start a personal website. I especially recommend starting a personal website to young and ambitious people who are just getting started.
Many pieces of advice around starting a personal website are incorrect. You don’t have to be a founder, a writer, or a brand to reap the rewards from having a personal website. You also don’t need to code your website yourself, or build some elaborate site with dozens of detailed pages. You just need to have a website that showcases your skills.
Thoughts on higher education, student debt, and the future.
👓An OpenEd Conference Update | iterating toward openness | David Wiley

After two amazing keynotes at #OpenEd19 this morning, I read the following statement to conference attendees: In 2003 I invited a small group of about forty people interested in open content…
👓 The Crumbling of the OpenEd Coalition | e-Literate | Michael Feldstein
At the OpenEd conference this week, David Wiley made an announcement that was more significant than it may have sounded.
Followed e-Literate
e-Literate is a mission-driven organization dedicated to helping higher education and the education companies that serve them continuously improve in their efforts to enable more students to succeed in a 21st-Century world. We do this in two ways: Media, Events, and Community-Building e-Literate has existed as a publication since 2005 and was started as a labor of love that long predated any business ambitions. Today, its content remains free, and its name has been adopted by a larger organization that subsidizes its work. In a real sense, we are a blog that owns a company. e-Literate continues its public good mission through the blog and is expanding to other publishing channels. As an outgrowth of this work, e-Literate has started the Empirical Educator Project (EEP), which is a network of universities and vendors that conduct collaborative projects and contribute knowledge to the public domain. The EEP network generates useful knowledge about how to help students succeed and, more broadly, how to transform the institutional cultures and processes at universities so that they can adapt to changing educational needs and remain as vital and healthy in the next millennium as they have been in the last one. This expanded mission is funded through sponsorships, registration fees, and similar media and events funding mechanisms.