Links #89

Peter Dizikes on the new “whom of which” linguistic trend. This…may be testing my descriptivist tendencies to their limits.

SFINCS, the new Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (ala SPFBO and SPSFC). Looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.

Rocumentaries, a curated list of streaming documentaries. I don’t watch many documentaries but this seemed like a decent list for when I’m in the mood.

Emily Temple on Mark Twain inventing the bra clasp.

Paul Robert Lloyd’s classnames, thematically grouped lists of words to help with naming things like HTML/CSS classes. I love lists of words. (Helping my kid study for the spelling bee was quite fun.)

iOS Safari has a limit of 500 tabs at a time. Found that out through personal experience. (Current count: 25.)

Kris Sowersby on the design of Klim’s Martina Plantijn typeface. Enjoyed this. I don’t know if I can overstate how much I love a good typeface.

Dave Cramer on how Hachette makes books with HTML and CSS, from 2017. I knew Hachette had been using web tech for a while but didn’t know they were using Prince (with its TeX justification algorithm, which makes sense). If only the open source alternatives like Paged.js also had the TeX algorithm. (Maybe they do; I haven’t checked lately.)

Alice Ching on how the implementation of Figma draws inspiration from the gaming world. A fun read.

Fabien Sanglard on the core concepts associated with the creation of an executable (via C/C++).

Fully Stacked on the View Transitions API and the Navigation API, re: SPAs and MPAs.

Medieval murder maps for London, York, and Oxford.

Becky Ferreira on a new study reporting that people experience heightened consciousness when dying. I don’t think this necessarily proves anything about the afterlife, but it does show that interesting things happen in the transition out of this life.

Jim Nielsen on building great software by repeatedly encountering it. 100%. I feel like this made a huge difference when I was a designer at the BYU library, where I was using our apps all the time for my own use (checking out loads of books, mainly). This is also why I like making my own tools.

Molly Templeton on reading habits. Also see Tracy Durnell.

Utah’s flag status page. I recently discovered this and found it to be helpful when seeing flags around town at half-mast and not knowing why.

David Heaney on Meta’s new photorealistic VR avatars. These might be coming out the other side of the uncanny valley, much as it surprises me to say it.

Brennan doing “Sauron but it’s Donald Trump” on Game Changer. This is so amazing.

Adam Mastroianni on why scientific discoveries sometimes take so long to happen.

Jason Kottke on Erik Wernquist’s One Revolution per Minute video. That’s a pretty fast rotation, subjectively.

Morgan Housel’s thoughts on writings. I don’t particularly like venture capitalists these days, but there was some interesting food for thought here.

Orion, a “a [free] small, fun app that helps you use your iPad as an external HDMI display for any camera, video game console, or even VHS.”

Tantek Çelik on more thoughtful reading and writing on the web. Loved this. I think this is probably why I like blogging so much. It’s more quiet.

Josh Collinsworth with a message from the captain of the S.S. Layoff. Ha. Most of this is too true (in my experience, anyway).

Marc on software that fits in your backpack. Small tools, basically. I like it.

Nolen’s Flappy Dird, a Flappy Bird clone implemented in the macOS Finder (of all places).

ABA Games on the joys of small game development. I really liked this — these types of games feel like a fun size to work on. Especially liked the one-button page, not because I care much about one-button games (I don’t) but because it was so fun to see all the GIFs of the small games. Inspiring.

The Delta Wasp 2040, a 3D printer that can do clay and other ceramic materials.

Evan Ackerman on Disney’s new robot. Fun to see animators brought into the loop.

Jason Kottke on the unbearable slowness of light, from 2015. Puts things into perspective.

Bryan Braun’s new Let’s Get Creative page, a collection of high-quality, free, online creativity tools. Fun!

Sherry Ning on technology and craftsmanship. I don’t know that I fully agree with the premise here, but I still really like articles about craftsmanship. Recommended.

On the first Vesuvius Challenge winner. Excited to see where all of this leads.

Charles Q. Choi on using incoherent holography to change focus after a photo is taken.

Ramsey Nasser’s قلب, a programming language where code is written entirely in Arabic. Love this.

Richard Rutter on the sad state of break-after: avoid browser support. Yep.