Not much has happened with the Mormon Texts Project in the last couple months, mostly because of my tendinitis. The tendinitis hasn’t gotten worse (thankfully), but it hasn’t gone away, either, so I’ll have to be careful going forward (writing scripts instead of doing things manually, etc.). I don’t think I’ll have to stop making ebooks, though.

Anyway, MTP is not dead. But we do have some minor changes happening.

We originally started out making plain text Project Gutenberg editions of these books. Then, in March 2011, we added EPUB, Kindle, and web editions to the lineup. (We’re still working on converting our backlog over, by the way. The EPUB of Life of Heber C. Kimball is done and I’m not too far from finishing up the Kindle edition.)

Starting today, however, we’re now focusing solely on EPUB, Kindle, and web. No more Project Gutenberg.

Why? Time, mainly. I don’t have unlimited free time, and the more formats we produce, the fewer books we make. I’d rather focus on EPUB/Kindle/web (which are all based on HTML/CSS) and get more books out there — besides, anyone is more than welcome to take the source files to our books, turn them into plain text (which is easy since we use Markdown as our base format), and submit them to Project Gutenberg. And I hope people do.

As far as specific books go, we’re getting close to completing the initial proofs for William Clayton’s Journal, Emmeline B. Wells’ Hephzibah, George Q. Cannon’s My First Mission, and Parley P. Pratt’s Voz de Amonestacion (the Spanish translation of A Voice of Warning). And I’m slowly finalizing Essentials in Church History, which is one big book (so it’s taking a while).

Tangentially to MTP, I’m also reformatting the Journal of Discourses EPUB/Kindle editions, because I’ve learned a lot about styling ebooks since I first released them. (The newly formatted versions of volumes 1–9 are already available, by the way.) And I’m finally going through the JD word by word, proofing against the original page images and fixing all the typos, which are legion (I got the text from Wikisource and apparently they didn’t check it very carefully). It will probably take a year or so to finish proofing, since there are around ten thousand pages to go through.

Oh, one last thing: I’ve added a section on the MTP page linking to other sources for free LDS books online. If you know of any that aren’t listed there, let me know.

There’s a cool new remesh modifier in Blender (due for release with version 2.62, though you can use it in the latest trunk builds). I’m mainly interested in it because you can create voxel-type effects like this with it:

It still needs some work (the third monkey was unlucky and had its eye gouged out, apparently), but still, not bad.

First, 3D projection from Sony (see all three):

And a seriously cool wireless camera concept:

Mmm. And, finally, a microphone that purportedly turns any surface into a multitouch interface:

I recently came across a Quora answer to the question “What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?”, and wow, it’s good (it’s the first one in the list). Mmm.

And now of course I’m seriously itching to brush up on my math (I got to a high school calculus level) and then forge ahead and learn all the cool, crazy advanced stuff I never got to learn — mindbending, super intimidating high-level math. I checked out some books on precalculus and applied linear algebra yesterday (one of the perks of living — er, working — in a library), and we’ll see how this goes. I’m one of those people who didn’t have to take any math in college but wished they did. Yeah, I know.

The Hero of Ages, by Brandon Sanderson. Great ending to a great series. There’s some seriously awesome stuff near the end, too. I haven’t yet read Alloy of Law, but I’m planning to soon.

The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss. I liked Name of the Wind more, but this one wasn’t disappointing. It’s definitely a harder PG-13, though, and all of the risqué parts felt gratuitous to me, so I unfortunately can’t recommend it wholeheartedly. I am very interested to see how the trilogy ends, though.

Hidden Talents, by David Lubar. I marked down in my reading log that it was decently good, but I can’t remember anything about it, so maybe it wasn’t that good after all.

Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn. Brilliant book. Medieval Germany + aliens. I loved it, although it wasn’t exactly a fast read. But it’s really, really good, brimming with humanity. There are also fun etymological nuggets scattered throughout, and I really enjoyed the philosophical/religious discussions (the main character is a Catholic priest). Very, very well done. If you like thoughtful sci-fi, read it.

The Christian Imagination, by Thomas C. Peters. A short, delightful book about G. K. Chesterton and creativity and imagination. I read it in a single sitting and loved it.

Variant, by Robison Wells. Intense. Liked it a lot. I read most of it in a single sitting, because yeah, it’s that kind of book. The main twists are great (I didn’t see any of them coming), and I can’t wait for the sequel. And luckily (in a way) it’s only a two-book series, so closure is nigh.

Rot & Ruin, by Jonathan Maberry. Zombie book, pretty good. I liked it. There’s a lot of swearing, though.

A Stir of Bones, by Nina Hoffman. I heard about this one from the Tor blog, and it wasn’t too bad. A bit on the weird side, but in a poetic, dreamy kind of way. I liked it.

Wonderstruck, by Brain Selznick. Similar in style to Hugo Cabret. I thought it was okay, but it didn’t really grip me. (Hugo didn’t either, to be honest.) I love the half-art half-text thing, though.

When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead. For some reason I went into this book convinced that someone was going to get cancer and die. It wasn’t till near the end that I realized that wasn’t the case and that the book was actually going to be sci-fi. And that was cool. It’s always a little disappointing when I go into a book thinking it’ll be sci-fi and it’s not; it’s a pleasant surprise when it’s the other way round. Anyway, it too was a little weird, but I liked it.

And that’s where we stand. I’m going to try to finish two more books tomorrow so I can hit 59 books for 2011 (same as 2010) — probably Prospero’s Children (I’ve got 85 pages left) and Diana Wynne Jones’ Wild Robert. I’m also reading Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (Gary Schmidt is awesome), The Hidden Reality (Brian Greene, on multiple universes), One Eternal Round (Hugh Nibley on the Book of Abraham hypocephalus), and a book on the archaeology of Celtic Britain. And about a dozen more. Man, I need more time to read. Also, per y’all’s recommendations in my last recent reads post, I bought Way of Kings and plan to dive into it sometime.

Almost all my creative blocks lately seem to rise from fuzzy, unclear thinking. (Amendment: almost all my creative blocks other than fear. Creative fear is definitely a dragon I’d like to behead for good sometime, but that’s a topic for another time.)

For me, this withering power of murky thought mostly shows up when I’m coding, but I’ve realized it’s there in my writing and my art and everything else I do. I can tell when the clarity departs because I start feeling like I’m flailing my mind-limbs around, unsure what I’m doing, having only a vague idea of where I’m supposed to go with the project. I can’t get very far when I’m like that, and it inevitably ends up tempting me into avoiding the project for a spell (which I’m oh so good at by now).

But once I sit myself down and map out what needs to happen — writing things down to make them concrete — then bam, things fall into place again. Motivation, momentum, and hot-knife-through-butterhood all come flying back to me like I’m a creativity magnet once more. It’s awesome.

This isn’t just an occasional occurrence, either. Every single time I’ve been blocked on a coding project, writing out some pseudocode clears things right up again. Likewise, when I find myself avoiding a story, it’s almost always because I haven’t clearly thought through what needs to happen next. I’ve usually been more of a discovery writer, but I’ve found that my stories always turn out better when I outline things in at least some detail beforehand. Especially the ending. And thankfully there’s still plenty of room for extemporaneous creation even when I plan things out in advance.

Art’s the same way. I’ll get to a point with an illustration where I have to stop and think through what’s next — whether the composition is working, whether the colors are right, what the background story is (and if an illustration doesn’t have a compelling backstory, it’s really hard for me to maintain interest in working on it), etc. If I don’t think through the problems, I backburner the piece, and that’s why I’ve got a pile of unfinished illustrations sitting on my hard drive. (So to speak.)

It’s kind of like streaming video — if I’m buffered (by thinking things through), everything goes smoothly. But if I haven’t thought things through, it’s all stuttery and usually stops me dead for at least a little while. I don’t have to think everything through in advance, though — I do not ask to see the distance scene; one step enough for me.

So yes, clarity of thought = important. Now I just need to remember this every time I get stuck…

Time for some more etymological fun.

algorithm

Algorithm comes to us via Old French augorisme, from the medieval Latin algorism-us. (The Spanish word guarismo “digit, cipher” is also related.)

And medieval Latin got it from the name of the Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who gave us Arabic numerals and algebra (which comes from al-jabr, from jabara, “to reunite, to restore,” and we got it via the Italian word algèbra).

I should also point out that the ibn in al-Khwārizmī’s name, which means “son,” is related to the Hebrew word ben, whence I get my name — Benjamin means “son of the right hand.”

maudlin

Nowadays maudlin means something is shallow and sentimental, but originally it meant “given to tears.” Not too hard to see how it got there. The interesting thing, though, is that it came from Magdalene (via some Middle English variants, whence the spelling and pronunciation difference), and the OED says it was “in allusion to depictions of Mary Magdalene weeping.”

wardrobe

Wardrobe comes from the Old French warderobe, a northeastern variant of garderobe. And that meant a locked-up chamber that guards your robes, basically. Which makes sense.

surname

Sur- “above” comes from the Latin super, which also means “above.”

Name is an old word that’s cognate in most of the Indo-European languages (seriously, it’s everywhere: namo in Gothic and Old Saxon, nama in Old Frisian, nōmen in Latin, ὄνομα in Greek, ainm in Old Irish, etc.).

Put them together, and you get surname, which means “additional name” — something added to your first name, whether it be a name (occupational, locational, patronymic, what have you) or a title or epithet, as was more common back in the day (Richard the Lionheart, Alexander the Great, etc.).

Now that I’ve had my Kindle Touch for a few weeks, it’s time for a quick review:

What I like about it

It’s lightweight and feels great in my hands. It’s certainly easier on my eyes. There’s also something uncanny (in a very cool way) about touching a screen that doesn’t look like a normal screen and having it react — it’s magical, which I didn’t expect. I like the slab serif font (Caecilia). Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem (Whispersync, read anywhere, etc.) is very nice, especially now that library lending is starting to happen.

What I don’t like (because, well, I’m a nitpicky designer type)

The touchscreen doesn’t work half the time. I just tried to change my font size and had to tap the size icon nine times before it registered. Nine! Maybe there’s some twisted logic behind where to tap, but tapping on the Kindle Touch is often an exercise in frustration. (P.S. I love my iPhone. Best touchscreen ever.)

Speaking of my iPhone, the Kindle is almost painfully slow in comparison to the iPhone/iPad. (And, a little less importantly, it feels somewhat low-res in comparison to the Retina Display on my iPhone. But then again, my iPad also feels low-res.)

Most books I’ve seen on the Kindle are fully justified, and justification rarely looks good. I also don’t like how page refreshes give you no indication whether you’ve moved forward or backward, other than the very small location/percentage at the bottom.

So…

The Kindle is cool, even in spite of the things I don’t like about it. It’s a slick gadget. I’m glad I have one.

Honestly, though, if I’m going to read ebooks, it’s almost always going to be on my iPhone. For me, ebooks are largely about convenience, and my iPhone is with me all the time (except when I’m in the shower). I hardly ever carry my Kindle or iPad around with me, which makes it hard for either to become a daily part of my life.

About the only thing I see changing this is if the library lending program grows enough that most of the books I want to read are in it. Right now the selection is puny. (And I hesitate to put much money into buying Kindle books, what with the DRM and all. And at this point it’s still not clear whether Kindle or EPUB will become the MP3 of the ebook universe.)

Anyway, this is just me. If your experience with the Kindle Touch or the other new Kindles is different (or the same), do tell.

iBooks 1.5 came out this morning and it has a nice new selection of typefaces:

Mmm, Charter and Iowan are tasty, especially on the Retina Display. It’s about time we got some good typefaces in iBooks — I’m not at all sad to see Baskerville, Cochin, and Verdana go.

Anyway, Charter’s my new default. Just looking at the screenshot of it again makes me want to go read more ebooks. (Apparently I have issues.)