Weeding Out Fake Reviews 🕵️‍♀️ WebGL Experiments ⚗️ Funny UX 😂

Heya,

One Christmas, I argued with a colleague over Die Hard's Christmas bona fides. Now, history will absolve me, but here's a list with some really tough Chrismas movie sells.

And, so with a sneaky intro link, we enter the last newsletter of the year. I will be taking a lil' break over Christmas and the New Year, but I will be back on the 8th January.

Let's give it up for my final batch of links for 2018.
Chris.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Advent of Pixels is an advent celebrating beautiful design.

Last year we had an advent calendar with a Rick Roll, this year it is confetti and beautiful design. It's weird because I feel like 2018 was more of a Rick Roll kinda year.

Christmas XP. 🤶🏿

This is the reason why I made the advents their own category. Click through to see a bunch of incredible WebGL experiments from digital artists. There's a Spider-Man game; there's a strange dancing blob and isn't that what the holidays are all about?

🕸️ The Cool Side of the Web

Fakespot helps cut through the fake reviews on Amazon.

I listened to ReplyAll episode 124 and I've been avoiding Amazon ever since. However, I needed to use it for Secret Santa and FakeSpot was indispensable in throwing light on the shady reviews.
Very handy.

If you'd like to end the year upbeat rather than beatup, then read through this list of 99 good news news stories.

I found the headlines alone were enough to give me a lil' boost of good cheer.

line05x5d is hard to describe. 😵

Remember the old spirographs? This site is kind of like them. But in your browser, responding to mouse movements and clicks.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Floating island with waterfall.

If CSS+JS were invented by Hayao Miyazaki. In a congested field, this is probably my pen of the year.

Glider.js is a tiny, fast alternative to carousels. It also just happens to be mobile friendly. 🎠

🕷️ Design & Development Arena

UI design terrifies me as both a beginner and a non-designer. This guide helped.

On the subject of UI, here's a bunch of awesome interaction GIFs.

A very funny guide to UX in 2019. 🤣🤣

I have been running into some problems with my personal site; this guide helped me recover some speed.

🤔 Articles of interest

The dark and violent history of showering. 🚿

I feel that showering should be inherently peaceful, this origin story brought back memories of the shower scene in First Blood. *Definitely not a Christmas movie.

Measuring the filter bubble: How Google is influencing what you click.

An interesting case study from the team at DuckDuckGo on how our personal data is used to shape search results. How do you work SEO according to political affiliation?

🙃 Backwards talking dreams - Fun stuff

Ending on a happy note, this video "Shrek Retold" was made by 200 different people. 👹

This also presents me with an opportunity to mention a shot for shot remake of Indiana Jones by a couple of 12-year-olds.

Outro

And, that wraps us up quite nicely.

What's more rapid than eagles? Everything on Twitter. If you find yourself stirring all through the house, then hit me up.

I am not sure how you forward an email into a stocking, but if you find a way then stuff stockings with this email.

If this is your first time seeing this email, then feel free to join the party, pal. Sign up here.

I'll look forwarding to seeing you all next year, the year of the Earth Pig.

Have a good one,

Chris