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Four new art pieces (three religious, one family).

“Our Savior’s Love” hymn print:

“Joy to the World” hymn print:

In Wisdom and Stature:

Welcome Home (hey, look, I finally drew something sort of representational again):

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Just released an Italian reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon, available for download in EPUB.

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Nonfiction

• Books in Chains: And Other Bibliographic Papers, by William Blades, published 1890. An interesting little collection of essays about book history — chained books, signatures, the Great Controversy regarding whether the Germans (Gutenberg) or the Dutch (Coster) were first to invent movable type. Very nerdy and I enjoyed it, especially the bit where a printer was marking signatures and after getting through the double alphabet they started using the sequence of Latin words from the Lord’s Prayer. Ha! I also didn’t realize chained books were a thing for so long (three hundred years or so).
• First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, by Robert D. Richardson, published 2009. A short book about Emerson on reading and writing. I’ll admit this didn’t resonate with me as much as I was hoping it would, and I don’t know why. (I do plan to read both Richardson’s Emerson biography and Emerson’s essays down the road and should have a better idea then if Emerson just isn’t for me or if it was this particular book.) The idea that language is rooted in nature — and that even abstract words often started out as references to concrete things — intrigues me, though I don’t know how broadly true it actually is. This quote got lodged in my head: “Always that work is more pleasant to the imagination which is not now required.”

Fiction

• Walking to Aldebaran, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2019, science fiction. Enjoyed this, particularly the core concept and setting (bleak though it was). I did not see the twist coming until it was twisting.
• My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein), published 2011 (translation published 2012), fiction. The first of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. This felt like it paired surprisingly well with Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, though it’s around four hundred years later and it’s fiction. Sure seems like there was a lot of fighting and violence in Italy during both times. Whew. The book itself was good, though maybe not really my thing. Not planning to continue with the series, sadly.

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Pleased to announce that my painting When the Light Shall Begin to Break Forth is the cover art for Seven Visions: Images of Christ in the Doctrine and Covenants, a new book by Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch, published by Deseret Book (sequel to Seven Gospels).

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Helga Stentzel’s clothesline animals are lovely. I also enjoyed her Food for Thought and Edible Creatures series and her Hope piece.

Jesper on Andy Matuschak’s post about learning from textbooks. Particularly the last bit: “I’ve been doing way too much silent reading, and though I rarely stop thinking about things, I’ve been doing way too little writing and processing.” I feel the same.

Swissmiss on having a “no excuse hour” at the beginning of the day. I like this idea, though an hour may be unrealistic for some (see the next link).

Eleanor Konik on what it means to not have time. A good counterpoint and reminder. “But it’s okay if you just pick one thing you really care about, and it’s okay if that thing is ‘being a good friend’ instead of ‘maximizing your potential’ or ‘journaling daily’ or whatever.”

The First Presidency has authorized garment changes for women in hot and humid climates.

Matt Sarnoff’s subpixel text encoding. Ha. Not new (it’s from 2008) but still quite cool.

Heikki Lotvonen on a font with built-in syntax highlighting using OpenType features. Interesting idea. I’m not sure how realistically usable it is, but either way, fun to see the experimentation.

Michael Lopp on writing. Seems about right, particularly the last line.

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Nonfiction

• The Facemaker, by Lindsey Fitzharris, published 2022. Book group read. A harrowing but fascinating history of plastic surgery during World War I. Not for the weak of stomach. (Might not want to read it while eating anything squishy.) Back in 2020 I read Fitzharris’s The Butchering Art, which I think I liked a little more, but both are good and worth reading. I particularly enjoyed reading about innovations like the tubed pedicle and the discovery of blood types. Also crazy to learn about Violet Jessop, who was on the Olympic when it hit a ship, then the next year was on its sister ship Titanic when it sank (she survived), and then four years later was on the third sister ship Britannic when it too sank (she survived). Whew.
• The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, by Benvenuto Cellini (huge surprise there), translated by John Addington Symonds, originally published 1563ish, translation published 1887. Far more entertaining and readable than I expected it to be. There’s lots about Cellini being a goldsmith and a sculptor, brown-nosing popes and kings and dukes, getting into fights and, uh, murdering people, and getting into, um, short-term age-gap relationships, let’s call them. Leonardo and Michelangelo are mentioned. There’s plague. Jail time makes a cameo. There’s probably a significant amount of exaggeration throughout, and there’s definitely an inflated ego. Not to mention Italy in the 1500s is a crazy time, at least for Cellini. Glad I read this. (Not least because I have Italian ancestors and it felt kind of like reading about a batty old uncle.)

Fiction

• Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson, published 2013, historical fiction / alternate history. I heard about the book (and Atkinson, for that matter) in Lev Grossman’s newsletter. (Looking forward to reading The Bright Sword, by the way.) Loved the writing, concrete and vivid. And whew, this story was kind of brutal (and a bit earthy), which is understandable given its core time loop conceit but still a punch in the gut at the end of each loop. Reminded me a bit of The Edge of Tomorrow in some ways, though this takes place during World War I and II and there are no aliens. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was good, too. Ah, I love time loops.
• Firewalkers, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2020, science fiction. Post-apocalypses don’t appeal to me all that much (as I’ve mentioned before ad nauseam), but this one had interesting ideas and was compelling enough that I’d be down to read more stories set in this world.

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A couple weeks ago I built my own EPUB reader called Scroll, and since then have pretty much moved off Marvin. Here’s what Scroll looks like (light and dark themes):

Thus far I’ve read two books using it, and while there are still a few small issues, overall I’m very happy with it. I don’t plan to release it anytime soon, but as a not-even-close-to-the-same-thing substitute, here are some notes:

• I’d made decent enough progress with epub2pdf that it was usable, but reflowability and theme-changing are nice, and having quick navigation between books is even nicer, and printing a book to PDF in Firefox is slow, and browsers already natively support the HTML that’s inside EPUBs, so I abandoned the PDF route.
• Scroll (after both the noun and the verb) is a PWA without a backend. It’s actually just static HTML files: I wrote a script that concatenates all the HTML in an EPUB into one long HTML file, with some processing to fix links and wrap things and bake the table of contents out. Then there’s a little bit of vanilla JS for the reader functionality (saving the debounced current scroll location to localStorage (I wish Safari supported scrollend), restoring it on the pageshow event, calculating pagination, jumping to pages, switching themes, etc.), and another vanilla JS file listing the current books (so that I don’t have to re-build all the other book files when I start reading a new book).
• While I said “pagination” above, I’m not actually chunking the book into pages; I’ve chosen to stick with vertical scrolling for now instead of horizontal paging, primarily because being able to make sub-page progress is nicer than I realized. That said, I still want to know how many “pages” I’ve read, so I use the scroll percentage (scrollTop divided by scrollHeight, super simple) multiplied by a rough heuristic of 1,200 characters per page, ignoring whitespace. It’s not perfect but it’s good enough for my needs.
• I added a slight blur to the text so that it feels a little less digital. For now I’ve opted against a background image, but I may change my mind about that.
• Whenever I add/remove a book, I copy the baked files to a private directory on my server
• I’ve saved the root HTML file (which is just a list of the current books, loaded via JS) to my home screen as a PWA

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Mandy Brown responds to Alan Jacobs, including a compelling peasant woodland metaphor borrowed from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (which I need to read). “A peasant woodland is one in which human participation and activity help the woods become more productive for humans and wildlife both—not through anything shaped like a plan but rather through a kind of call and response, an improvisation in which all the critters and creatures of the forest are players among us.” This way of thinking about the web seems healthy.

Helena Zhang’s Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font. Fun.

Nathaniel Roy on Knopf’s logo variations. Also fun. I wish more publishers did this. (Maybe they do.)

Naz Hamid on being content with an older iPhone. I used to upgrade my phone consistently every two years, but this is the first year where I don’t feel like I need to. Freeing.

Devin Kate Pope on fearing home cooks. “The U.S. food system disconnects people from their food and each other. […] We, the people, are really remarkably capable of cooking everything and anything. Why am I more comfortable buying frozen tamales made by a corporation flown into my town than from the lady up the street? Who is the suspicion serving? Who profits when people are scared to eat food made by their neighbors?” Good point, one I hadn’t thought of much before. (Even though my favorite food in other countries is typically street food sold by small vendors, which is close to the same thing.)

Gareth Edwards on the imminent disappearance of the .io domain because of the sovereignty transfer.

Mandy Brown on staying in the gap, referring to Ira Glass’s taste gap story about creative work. I think of the original quote quite often and like this expansion of the idea. “The gap between your abilities and your taste is not a gap to be crossed but one to be cultivated.”

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Nonfiction

• Pure Invention, by Matt Alt, published 2020. A fairly quick read about Japanese pop culture and its influence throughout the world via exports like anime, Hello Kitty, Nintendo, and emoji. (Speaking of which, I didn’t know that the iPhone initially flopped in Japan because it lacked emoji at first.) Alt also has a related newsletter which I just discovered while writing this up. I’m not hugely into Japanese pop culture myself, but this was anthropologically interesting and worth it, I felt.

Fiction

• Witches of Lychford, by Paul Cornell, published 2015, fantasy. Rather liked it. Dark, atmospheric (British village), and good writing to boot. A while back I got the first novella for free somewhere, then forgot about it until recently when I saw someone mention it (I think on r/fantasy) and decided to give it a go. Looking forward to the other Lychford novellas.
• The Boys, by Katie Hafner, published 2022, fiction. I heard about this via Eliot Peper’s review, which said it had “the best plot twist I’ve experienced in a long time.” Color me intrigued. I’m happy to report that yes, that was indeed a heck of a plot twist, one I did not see coming at all. Wow. I felt like the book ended well, too. And then I got to the author bio at the very end and realized that Hafner also wrote Where Wizards Stay Up Late (a history of the Internet) some thirty years ago. I haven’t read it yet but have been meaning to for years. Small world!
• Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold, published 2016, fantasy. Part of the Penric & Desdemona series. Enjoyed it, though I was admittedly also using it as the testbed for my new ebook reader (more on that soon) so I wasn’t fully focused on the story.

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Mandy Brown on personal sites. Particularly this part:

A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.

Alan Jacobs on POS instead of POSSE, for personal sites. This is largely where I’m at nowadays, though I do reluctantly post art to Instagram and Facebook (for now, anyway).

Tracy Durnell on the secret power of a blog. “If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write.” I need to remember this.

Katie Clapham’s lovely Receipt from the Bookshop newsletter. “I open the draft when I open the shop, detail the day’s customers and transactions, and then send it out to readers before I go home.” I love this idea, and the newsletter itself is good, too.

Richard Rutter on the problem with superscripts and subscripts. I didn’t know about font-variant-position, cool. Also see Richard’s TODS default OpenType stylesheet.

Dan B. on how to build anything extremely quickly via the power of outlining.

Steven Arcangeli’s oil.nvim, a Neovim plugin that lets you edit your filesystem like a buffer. Cool idea.

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