Four new art pieces. When Ye Are in the Service:
Blog
My piece Harrowed up No More was featured recently in Jennifer Champoux’s Religious Educator article “Creating the Book of Mormon Art Catalog: Why Religious Art Matters.”
Links #104
Lincoln Michel on productivity. Which reminded me of Austin Kleon’s post about the quantity vs. quality parable. I feel like I’ve been doing okay at this with art, but not so great at it with writing.
Joan Westenberg on why building on someone else’s platform is a dead end. Hear, hear. After reading this, I decided to stop posting my individual art pieces to Instagram and instead post batches (four or more), with the caption just linking to my art page.
Twelve hymns from the new hymnbook are coming in May, including “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Sweet. I especially love that the new hymnbook will include hymns from all over the world and not just Western hymns.
Amit Merchant on text-emphasis in CSS. I had no idea. I don’t know when I’d use it (is there a typographic tradition where emphasis is done this way?), but it’s interesting.
Manu Moreale on growth being a mind cancer. “We celebrate when Apple becomes the first trillion-dollar company but we don’t celebrate when someone says ‘You know what? I think I have enough.’” Very much agreed. Not a huge fan of growth capitalism.
Four new art pieces. To and Fro in the Earth:
Links #103
Taylor Troesh on scrounging for between time. Several useful ideas here. “Work on X for 5 minutes” is one that has worked well for me over the years.
Cal Newport’s workingmemory.txt idea. I like this. When I’m working at my day job, I keep a todo.md file on my laptop that I dump tasks into (basically a workingmemory.txt), and a log.md file where I journal my way through things I’m working on. Together, those files make it relatively easy for me to offload state and pick things up again after interruptions. (Along with other benefits like rubberducking.)
Vicky Osterweil on Dune 2 and image without metaphor. “We are living through an era of thudding cultural literalism. In our narrative products (movies, TV and to a lesser but noticeable extent, novels) that has meant that instead of story we get plot, premise and lore, dialogue is replaced by exposition, emotion evoked only by music cue and cliche. The characters are structural objects of the plot, pure reflections of their social and narrative positioning, stripped of messy contradiction or conflictual desires. Whenever an artist even introduces any kind of metaphor they make sure to explain it tidily and neatly by the end, like a kid elbowing you in the ribs going ‘did you get it did you get it?’, meaning the best we can hope for is parable or fable.” I haven’t seen the film yet but plan to, literal though it may be.
Hugo Barra on the Apple Vision Pro being an overengineered devkit. Barra was Head of Oculus at Meta, so he’s going to be biased, but still an interesting take.
Will Richardson wrote a compiler to show that tmux is Turing-complete and can execute real code by switching between windows. Ha. This makes me happy.
Denise Hill on NASA engineers debugging a Voyager 1 issue. One advantage to the long request/response cycle, I suppose, is you have plenty of time to think about it. Plenty.
P. L. Stuart’s top 50 indie sf&f books to read. Going off the (relatively few) authors in here whose books I’ve read, this seems like a good list.
Michael Pohoreski’s nanofont3x4. Fun to see innovation like this, even if it’s not always fully pragmatic. And this is a bit more readable than I expected, given the tiny size.
Eric Portis explains color spaces, with nice visuals.
Gerard Gallant on the state of WebAssembly, including tail calls, garbage collection, and WASI.
Jeffrey M. Perkel in Nature on WebAssembly and scientific computing. Fun to see how it’s being used.
Jim Nielsen on how making websites is analogous to making films, with particular emphasis on the role of the screenplay. Some interesting ideas here.
Michael Austin on how “line upon line” was originally used by Isaiah.
Wikipedia article on Antarctic English. “Antarctic English also has over 200 words for different types of ice.”
Jason Kottke on Kevin Kelly’s advice to be the only. “What you offer to others is just different enough that you become your own category of one: nothing but you will do. Not better, different.”
Étienne Fortier-Dubois asks how expensive architectural ornamentation is. Enjoyed this exploration.
Caleb Hearon’s Dropflow, “a CSS layout engine created to explore the reaches of the foundational CSS standards (that is: inlines, blocks, floats, positioning and eventually tables, but not flexbox or grid).” Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Robin Rendle on how the medium you use the most influences the way you think. Food for thought.
Canva is acquiring Affinity. Noooooooooooo.
Four new art pieces. And Putteth Off the Natural Man:
Just added a Doctrinal Mastery index for my religious art, going off the Church’s list. (Thanks to Bryan for the nudge.) Coverage is currently spotty, but going forward I’ll be working on that where I can.
Three new art pieces. All Are Alike unto God:
Booknotes 3.8
Nonfiction
- A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas (1552). Essentially a catalog of the awful horrors the Spaniards inflicted on Native Americans, some witnessed firsthand and others related secondhand to las Casas by priests in other provinces. Brutal and bleak, but I’m glad I read it.
- Agent Zigzag, by Ben Macintyre (2007). A history of Edward Chapman, a double agent for Britain and Germany during WWII. My main takeaway, as is always the case when I read books about espionage: I am so not cut out to be a spy. Anyway, this book was interesting enough but felt like it lacked a bit of pop and zing, which I apparently crave when reading spy history. Still worth reading, though. I have most of the rest of Macintyre’s books and plan to read them.
Fiction
- I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith (1948, general fiction). Absolutely delightful. Loved it. The voice is so good and the book is funny and charming and I just really, really liked it. More books like this, please. (Recommendations very welcome.)
- The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie (2011, fantasy), second of the First Law standalones. Dang, that man can write. It’s an extremely violent, visceral, and fairly earthy book, so there’s your strong caveat, but aside from all that I really, really liked it. (Quite a bit more than I liked Best Served Cold, by the way.) It’s a very well crafted novel, in my view — surprising plot twists, characters doing interesting and unexpected things (while staying in character), compelling voices (with zing! with pop!), and wry, funny prose with hardly a sentence out of place. The POV hopping during the first part of the battle was quite effective, too. Also, war: awful.
Just added a guestbook to the site. (I came across Manu’s and nostalgia kicked in a bit. Figured it might be fun.)