Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

The Social Tandem

The social tandem contains no more than two members at any given time. It is a chat room that two invited parties participate in. There are no identifiers, except what the parties decide to reveal. The conversations are streamed realtime on the public site and archived.

At any time, there are two participants. Each participant's session remains active for ten minutes, offset by five minutes with the other. Thirty seconds before the end of a session, the system provides a reminder and an increasingly frequent countdown. Thus each participant has encounters with two people. All interactions are in-band, meaning any information they wish to reveal is public.

Participants apply to be placed into queue. It costs a nonrefundable $5 to be placed into queue and requires a valid email address to validate one's hold position. Queue positions are determined randomly and automatically and open up continuously across all hours of

Design

Approaching Halfway with Kickstarter

The Magazine: The Book is nearly at 50% of the goal we need to make it happen.

Kickstarter campaigns can follow a few arcs.

They can flatline, which is about 20% of them, last time I was able to get statistics. 20% of all projects approved by the company get no bids. Another 20% get less than one-fifth of the way to their goal amount. 16% of all projects fail between about 20% and 50% of the total amount they plan to raise.

But at the halfway mark, when you raised 50% of your total, the odds are pretty dramatic: 97% of Kickstarter projects that fund halfway proceed to fund fully by the end of the campaign.

We're about 48% of the way to our total, and I'm confident that, as we hit our last 12 days, we'll start to see some steam as people both see that it's coming

Design

Help Us Make a Book

After some months of planning, I launched a Kickstarter campaign today to produce a hardcover, offset-printed book of essays and articles drawn from the first year of The Magazine's publication. Over two dozen essays about a huge range of topic — aging chickens, D&D, becoming a superhero, a 60-foot-tall lava lamp, and much more — are featured in the book.

I turned to crowdfunding because printing is expensive, and it made sense to build a project that could scale, but wouldn't start unless the necessary interest were expressed. As I post this, the project is nearly one-quarter of the way to its basic funding after about eight hours! It's quite exciting.

Join in on the fun, and get a great, beautifully designed book (and an ebook version, too). You can download a preview to see what it will look like and watch the video below, too.

Design

Yahoo's Logo Reveals the Worst Aspects of the Engineering Mindset

By Sara Kahn . Used under Creative Commons license.

Marissa Mayer is not a graphic designer. This is abundantly clear. She is an extraordinarily capable technologist, engineer, and executive, and she has made an enormous number of difficult decisions since taking over Yahoo. I believed she was likely the only person who had the ability to turn that company around.

But she's not a graphic designer.

Graphic design isn't about snowing a client into believing a story you spin. Graphic design is about understanding the way in which type, color, shape, and other factors may communicate specific feelings or facts. It is about legibility, optics, psychology, and more. One doesn't train in design to make posters or logos. One trains to develop an increasingly intuitive sense of what works and why. Focus groups don't help in the design process, although they can assist (as can the market, in terms of sales