Four new art pieces.
In the Celestial Kingdom of Heaven:
Be Still and Know That I Am God:
Blog
My piece Harrowed Up No More was featured today on episode 31 of Behold: Conversations on Book of Mormon Art, produced by the Book of Mormon Art Catalog. (The episode link above goes to YouTube, but it’s also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.)
Christopher Jones, an assistant professor of history at BYU and editor of the Journal of Mormon History, joins Book of Mormon Art Catalog director Jenny Champoux. They discuss Harrowed Up No More by Ben Crowder. This episode complements week 31 (Alma 36–38) of the 2024 “Come, Follow Me” Book of Mormon curriculum.
I’m heavily biased here, of course, but I enjoyed watching this. It’s rewarding to see people not only discuss the symbolism I was thinking about while making the piece but also interpret it in new ways I hadn’t thought of before.
Links #123
Heather Cox Richardson on Biden stepping down from the race. “In a time of dictators, Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and install himself in power against the wishes of the people. President Joe Biden voluntarily turned away from reelection in order to give the people a better shot at preserving our democracy. He demonstrated what it means to put the country first.”
Dave Karpf on Biden and Harris. “I believe Kamala Harris is going to win. The party is excited and unified. She is positioned to exploit every one of Trump’s glaring flaws. Many of the attacks that Trump will use against her will backfire, revealing that the Republican Party is currently run by crooks and creeps who hate a lot of America and a lot of Americans.”
Jason Kottke on Peter Ablinger’s talking piano. Wow. That’s…crazy.
Behdad Esfahbod on the state of text rendering in 2024. (Esfahbod is the author of HarfBuzz, the predominant open source shaper.) Fascinating read. I also liked Some Font Tools, his presentation with Marianna Paszkowska on some new fonttools features.
GT Academy, a series on how to design a sans serif typeface.
Benjamin Reinhardt on what it takes to get new materials out of the lab and into mass production. “Despite university teams regularly announcing triumphantly that they’ve created a material with seemingly magical properties like artificial muscles made out of carbon nanotubes or ‘limitless power’ from graphene, new materials-enabled human capabilities have been rare in the past 50 years. Why is there such a gap between headlines and reality when it comes to new materials? Is there anything we can do about it?”
Booknotes 3.15
Nonfiction
- Turning Pages, by John Sargent, published 2023. Ah, I love books about publishing. Several good bookmaking stories in here, though perhaps not as many as I would have liked. I somehow went into this book thinking Sargent was a mid-level editor or something; it wasn’t until at least halfway through that I realized he was the CEO (of Macmillan). And…CEOs are quite a bit less interesting to me than the people who actually work on the books. But this was still a good book.
- Breaking Bread with the Dead, by Alan Jacobs, published 2020. I’ve been reading Jacobs’ blog for a while and it’s good, as was this book — in particular, I liked the temporal bandwidth idea and the acknowledgment that the past is strange. “These are the writers who help us to encounter our ancestors not as anthropological curiosities whom we observe from a critical distance, but as those with whom we can, and should, break bread.” I need to read more old books, and study more history.
- Slow Productivity, by Cal Newport, published 2024. Some good ideas and anecdotes in here. The core message — do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality — resonated with me.
Fiction
- The Giver of Stars, by Jojo Moyes, published 2019, historical fiction. I read this for book group. Enjoyed it more than I was expecting to. (Until recently, my interest levels in historical fiction have been fairly low.)
- Penric’s Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold, published 2015, fantasy. Liked it a lot, as with pretty much all her books and especially the World of the Five Gods series. Looking forward to the rest of the Penric stories.
- Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch, published 2013, fantasy. Rivers of London book 4. A bit earthy as usual, but other than that, liked it as usual. And that twist at the end!
Links #122
Marcin Wichary’s talk on pixel fonts at Config 2024. Way good. The effects on his slides (made with JavaScript and Canvas) were amazing, too. And the font editor is fun. Also see his segmented type demo.
Fontra, a newish browser-based tool for variable typeface design. Very cool. Looking forward to trying this out. (Also, I found Just van Rossum’s video from October to be helpful as intro documentation of sorts.)
Simon Cozens’ HarfBuzz WASM shaper demos, including one for Nastaliq and one for Egyptian hieroglyphs. Love this.
FontGoggles, a better way to preview fonts, including .ufo and .designspace files, with automatic reloading.
Rob en Robin’s F.C. Variable, an illustration variable font. Ha.
Robin Sloan on designing a script for his new book. It does look good. I don’t know that I’ve ever really thought about designing a conlang script, but now I totally want to.
Links #121
Mike Hogan on keeping a development diary. 100%. I do this both at work — just a Markdown file that I edit in Vim on my work laptop — and on personal projects. Very much recommended. (It’s so much easier to start working on a project when I can look at the last diary entry to see where I left off and regain context.)
Sharon McMahon’s proposal to improve U.S. elections. All eight of her proposed reforms sound great. I hope we see at least some of these happen.
John Gruber on the attempted assassination. Yep.
Kristine Haglund on the beauty of holiness. “Beauty is an index to the divine not because it lifts us out of the earth, but because it lets us see the ways we are part of it and lets us hear God whispering that ‘it is very good.’”
Wm Morris on what’s possible with ebooks. Some interesting ideas here. When I make EPUBs, I try to not care about the formatting, because so much of it is in the hands of the reader app; that’s a big part of why in recent years I’ve focused more on making PDFs (Historia Calamitatum, Plutarch). I’m intrigued, though, by the idea of web pages as a possible best of both worlds — they’re reflowable, you can easily design full responsive layouts that work on any size device, you get the full power of CSS (including features like scroll snap), you can view source, etc. (Thinking about Make Something Wonderful, for example.) There are downsides, clearly, but maybe those can be worked around more than I’ve realized.
Family descendancy list generator
New release: a family descendancy list generator. (The first version of one, anyway. It’s still pretty new.) It’s a web app that lets you enter a descendancy list in a text-based format like this:
And you then get something like this when you print:
Seven years ago I started making these types of charts in Google Docs, which worked out okay, but I got tired of fiddling with tab stops and here we are.
This marks a change from how I’ve been building genealogy chart apps, by the way. CLI scripts are all well and good, but doing it this way should hopefully be a lot easier for people to use.
Four new art pieces.
Booknotes 3.14
Nonfiction
- The Wager, by David Grann, published 2023. Whew, what a story. Compelling throughout, and I learned lots of interesting things about seafaring to boot. I’m so glad I was not a sailor in the 1700s.
- The Power Broker, by Robert A. Caro, published 1974. This was almost 1,200 pages long and took me over a year to read (though for much of that year I was admittedly only reading a couple pages per week; it’s actually quite readable and I sprinted through the last 200+ pages in a single day). Really good book, and what a fascinating (and detailed!) study in power. While it was very long, I feel that the length was fully warranted and worth it. (Stockholm syndrome? Maybe. But I do think I’m going to remember this book a lot more than some shorter books I’ve finished in a sitting.)
Fiction
- The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, volume 5, by Beth Brower, published 2021, fiction. Witty and delightful. Loved it. Looking forward to volumes six and seven, and I’m glad there are many more to come. I can see myself rereading these often over the years, which is saying something since I’m not a rereader at all.
- The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera, published 2023, fantasy. Well crafted and inventive, with good prose and worldbuilding, and an interesting take on religion. Also, that twist near the end! Great and unexpected. There were some gross parts I didn’t care for, though, and even without taking those into consideration, I don’t think I would say that I loved the book. But I’m glad I read it.
Grepping by Unicode range
TIL that ripgrep supports searching by Unicode ranges. For example:
rg "[\u0250-\u1FFF\u2027-\uFFFF]"
This greps for anything after the Latin Extended-B block, excluding some general punctuation like em/en dashes, curly quotes, and ellipses. (Useful to me for easily checking which characters I’m using on my website and thus what a new font would need to support.)