I somehow missed hearing about this before now: El Pregonero de Deseret is a Spanish-language Mormon literature newsletter by the Cofradía de Letras Mormonas. They’ve got three issues out (issue 1, issue 2, issue 3). Also see the AML post) introducing it and another post talking about the third issue. Very cool.

Per President Nelson’s announcement and the new style guide, I’ve renamed the Mormon materials page to Religious materials.

Mormon Artist will stay as it is for now, but if/when we resurrect it, we’ll consider changing the name. (I’ll admit that the lack of a short, simple adjective to replace “Mormon” is kind of hard, with “LDS” out of the running as well, but we’ll cross that bridge later. Hopefully the forthcoming instructions will have some good solutions.)

Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is only $1.50 on the U.S. Kindle store right now. Such a good book on creativity and resistance. Highly, highly recommended.

Also, I’ve effectively retired my Twitter account (deleting almost all my tweets, cessation of posting, etc.) and will pretty much only be posting here on this blog. The “what to post where” dilemma is solved, knock on wood. (I do plan to still post new artwork to Instagram and Facebook, at least for now.)

Other reasons for this move: I like running things on my own platform. And Twitter is a (very) mixed bag with a whole host of issues. I don’t think I’ll miss posting to it.

On the real reason people rent middle-aged men in Japan.

It’s all part of his job as a rented “ossan,” the Japanese word for a middle-aged man.

He allows himself to be hired by anyone, for nearly any purpose — not involving physical contact — as long as they pay his hourly wage: a mere 1,000 yen (about US $9). And he loves it.

Tyler Cowen on the possible number of foreign spies:

But I wonder if the actual number of foreign spies isn’t larger yet. John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence, admitted in 2006 that the U.S. was deploying about 100,000 spies around the world. Given that the U.S. is the world’s technology and military leader, and yet has a relatively small share of global population, is it so crazy to think the number of people spying on us is larger than that?

The linked Politico article is good, too. Makes me wonder how much espionage has infiltrated the Utah Valley tech sector.

Reading through the Preact source, I came across this short introduction to JSX. It’s clear and does a good job of explaining how JSX works. Recommended.

(I’ve avoided the newish JS frameworks over the past few years since things were changing a little too fast to make it worthwhile for me, but React seems to be here to stay, so I’m diving into it when I have free time. (We’re also starting to use it at work.) FWIW, I did look at Angular and Vue, but neither really appeals to me.)

A spectre is haunting Unicode:

In 1978 Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange — several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字).

abcjs is a JS library for turning abc music notation into SVG. Nice for embedding music on a web page.

One of my favorite things: driving with the windows down late at night. (Though I have young kids, so for me “late at night” is, like, nine o’clock.)

From The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James:

By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots…. The ROOTS of a man’s virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.