Ben Crowder

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Just added a guestbook to the site. (I came across Manu’s and nostalgia kicked in a bit. Figured it might be fun.)


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Links #102

Diana Kimball Berlin on no more forever projects. This. The forever projects I’ve done (thinking primarily of Mormon Artist and Mormon Texts Project) were fun, but I don’t think I’m made for that type of work. The closure from one-offs feels better to my brain.

Jason Rodriguez on how tech will never love you back. I’ve felt similarly, and that’s why I don’t spend a ton of time writing software outside of work these days.

Emily Miller on free indirect speech in Jane Austen’s works. Fascinating.

Sean O’Neill on Melly Shum Hates Her Job. Ha.

Jim Nielsen on AI being like a lossy JPEG. “It follows that, as Paul notes, you end up with not only a tool whose output is akin to the lossy, visual artifacts of a JPEG, but a tool whose output introduces into the world the cognitive and social equivalent of those big blocky compression artifacts of a JPEG.”

Tom Holt interviews K. J. Parker about writing. Enjoyed this. (And note that while it’s on a Chinese site, the interview is in English.)

Jason Kottke on Bill Braun’s trompe l’oeil papercraft paintings. These are awesome.

Jennifer Ludden on places in the U.S. that are piloting basic income programs. Yes! Delighted to see this. I realize this is America so it probably won’t catch on everywhere, but having it here and there is better than not at all.

John-Clark Levin’s Gen Z translation of Beowulf. Amazing.

Roger Pimentel on grace. This is good. “These explanations also invite another interpretation of this verse, which does speak to the undeserved, unmerited definition of grace that we find in other faiths. If we are, in fact, saved despite all we can do, that means all we can do, good or bad. This is a little bit counterintuitive, because we think of grace being a reward for those who do good works. But in addition to being saved despite our good works, it also means we are saved despite our constant mistakes, our frequent failing to love God and our neighbor, and our seeming inability to change for the better. Despite all we can do to stop it, grace still flows to us.”

Josh Collinsworth on the quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend dev. I think there’s something to this.

Rejected Icelandic female names and male names. I had no idea only approved names can be used. Wow.

JSON Canvas, an open file format for infinite canvas data. Cool.

Dead Simple Sites, a catalog of minimalist websites.

Jim Nielsen on following links on the web. “Discovering things via links is way more fun than most algorithmically-driven discovery — in my humble opinion.” Yep!

Rebecca Toh on reading people’s blogs. “I feel connected by our common humanity. We’ll never meet, but I can picture them sitting on their sofa writing on their laptop or using the computer in their kitchen, writing when the kids are asleep, writing in the morning, writing when the first snowfall arrives, writing about their new job, about losing their job, about moving to a new city, about this film they just watched, about their husband who died a few years ago. A blog is a small and beautiful thing and I am grateful it exists.” Love this.


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Links #101

David Epstein’s interview with Cal Newport about slow productivity. This was good and has been in my thoughts the past few days. For me, the part that stuck out most was the idea of obsessing over quality. I often default to more of a utilitarian “get it out the door, it’s good enough” mode, which is often fine, but I like the idea of slowing down and spending time obsessing over quality.

Elie Mystal on how the Supreme Court is antidemocratic. “The Supreme Court must be made to pay a price—a political, institutional, professional price—for its ongoing political thuggery lightly disguised as jurisprudence. Its members will never stop acting like the only nine Americans who matter until we stop them from doing that. And the only way to stop them is to limit their power, their budgets, and their unearned belief in their own supremacy.” I’m no SCOTUS expert, but I agree. The current state is not ideal.

James on how blogging, as a format, encourages incomplete stories. I like this idea. Messy, WIP, thinking in public, iteration. To me, that’s more interesting than only publishing pristine, polished perfection. (Apologies for the alliteration.) (Oh snap, I did it again. In spite of the foregoing sentences, I usually try to avoid using consonance and alliteration.)

Chris Haynes on streaming HTML out of order without JavaScript, using Declarative Shadow DOM. Intriguing, especially now that both Safari and Firefox have added support for Declarative Shadow DOM.

The opening paragraphs to Goodstein’s States of Matter textbook. Ha. More dark humor in textbooks, please.

Infographic on who lived when. Found this interesting, especially across different areas.

@Hugo_Book_Club on dystopian fiction. There’s…a lot of truth to this.

Per Brinch Hansen’s memoirs of programming. Haven’t read this yet but it looks interesting.

Matt Webb’s Galactic Compass app. I finally installed this and have used it a couple times, which has been fun. I love how it takes something ordinarily invisible (at least during the day and in the city) and makes it accessible. For example, I hadn’t ever thought about how it changes over the course of the day. Obvious in hindsight, sure, but now I have a better, more grounded sense of the earth’s rotation than I did before.


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A handful of new art pieces. There He Preached to Them:

There He Preached to Them

Give Me Strength:

Give Me Strength

He Will Deliver Me II:

He Will Deliver Me II

I Will Go and Do:

I Will Go and Do

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Bookshelf in 2024

In writing my /uses page, I realized it’s been a little while since I last showed what my Bookshelf app looks like. Time for an update. (What is Bookshelf, you ask? A web app I wrote to track my reading.)

Here’s the current state, and note that I took this screenshot last night, so the monthly stats are for February:

bookshelf-2024.png

I forgot to mention this back in 2020, but the app started in late 2011 as Bookkeeper. A few years later I rewrote it in Python (Django) and renamed it (because o-o k-k e-e). I’m pretty happy with its current incarnation and use it every day except Sundays. My brain likes those stats. It really does. I’m sure I’d still read a lot even without them, but boy, the stats certainly motivate me to spend more time reading. (Well, some days more than others.)

Notes:

  • Top left is monthly stats (genre breakdown, pages read, books read this month to date, average pages per day, and how far into the month we are).
  • Top right is yearly stats.
  • The bar chart tracks how many pages I’ve read over the past couple weeks, with each color representing a different genre (red is nonfiction, green is fantasy, blue is science fiction, brown is general fiction, etc.). The page count gets brighter the closer I get to my goal of 100 pages per day. And yes, the dashed gray dividers are one pixel off. I need to fix that.
  • For each book, I have some metadata under the title and author: percentage completed, number of pages I’ve read so far (included because in ebook land most books don’t start on page 1), number of days I’ve been reading the book, how many days are left at my current rate, how many pages per day I’m averaging so far, how many pages I’ve read today (this is used as my current rate if it’s greater than my average pages per day, and this is red if it’s lower than my average pages per day, as motivation to maintain my rate for each book), and how many pages are left.
  • The part at the right of each book row is the current page and how long it’s been since I last read that book (which also affects the background color). I tap the page number to enter whatever page I’m on. If it’s a book in Libby, by the way, I tag the book that way when adding it and it’ll adjust how it counts the pages (it takes around three Libby screens to get to a page the way I’m counting it).
  • The very faint ellipsis button in the lower right opens a menu with links to add books, search, see previous reads, and see stats for previous years.

tl;dr I’m nerdier than you thought.


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Things on my mind #9

  • The joy of breaking a larger task up into small, concrete to-do items.
  • How the title of this post series lends itself to sentence fragments in these list items, and how I still blithely end them with periods regardless, and furthermore how some list items will then evolve into full sentences. A garden of inconsistency.
  • Wondering how much time to put into exploring new hobbies vs. going deeper into what I’ve already been doing.
  • I added a /uses page. In writing it, I realized I no longer upgrade to new major versions of macOS, because doing so inevitably makes my computer slower. This should not be the case.
  • How I have zero visibility into who buys my art prints via Society6. (I just see which prints and how many.) Maybe someday I’ll make my own rather than doing print-on-demand.
  • With my current style of symbolic religious art, sometimes it seems like a piece is more visually interesting the more internal edges it has. Not sure if that’s always true, though.
  • I sometimes worry that having my religious work in my main feed alienates readers who aren’t interested in religion. But I myself don’t mind skipping uninteresting things in others’ feeds, so I need to stop overthinking this.
  • Going forward, I’m going to try batching art posts so they don’t dominate the blog.
  • I used to have a simple confirm button on my blog app when publishing/unpublishing a post, but I had too many accidental clicks (read: one or two), and days could go by before I realized it, so I’ve updated my app to require entry of a five-character random code. Working well so far.
  • Making new friends and acquaintances online continues to be one of the joys of having a personal website.
  • I want to use paper more often — writing/drawing by hand in notebooks or on index cards or what have you.
  • How lovely Terza Reader is. I’ve been trialing it for personal ebook reading and mmm, it hits the spot. Low-contrast Aldine letterforms are my thing.

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Links #100

The Vesuvius Challenge 2023 grand prize has been awarded. It’s mind-blowing that we can read scrolls in that condition — lumps of rolled-up carbonized ash, as they put it. Bravo, fellow humans.

Andrés Aguilera’s drone footage of an Icelandic volcano eruption. Wow. It’s fascinating to see the new possibilities drones unlock. (And somewhat less fun to think through the dark side of what drones enable. I know that’s true of almost any technology, but still.) (I might not be a full optimist, guys.)

Ethan Dalool’s notes about paper. I love this kind of web page. The 1-bit dithered look for scans is appealing, and there are several other interesting ideas, including printing your own graph paper. (Reading this made me realize I need to simplify my note paper PDF page. I’ve also been thinking about making a web app to let people generate their own custom lined/graph/etc. paper PDFs.)

Simon MacDonald on issues with React. Yep. I’ve worked with React for a few years now (at work) and I wouldn’t say it’s a blissful experience. Reactive UI is nice. Bloat is not.

Heydon Pickering on utility-first CSS. If you can take the snark, this captures some of the reasons I’m not so much a fan of Tailwind. (Plus, I just really like CSS itself.)

Tero Piirainen on Tailwind. Okay, after this, no more dunking on Tailwind, I promise.

Andy Bell on MDN and the need for a new global documentation platform.

Chartwell, a font using OpenType discretionary ligatures to make several different kinds of charts. Impressive.

Jon Porter on Lenovo’s transparent laptop concept. Hmm. No.

AboutIdeasNow, a catalog of personal sites with /about, /now, or /ideas pages. After seeing this, I fleshed out my own now page so it isn’t quite so threadbare and also submitted it to nownownow.com. If you have a now page, by the way, email me a link — I’d love to see it.

/uses, a catalog of personal sites with /uses pages. I don’t have one. (Yet, anyway. I don’t know if I’ll add one. Maybe.)

Ross Wintle’s manifesto for small, static web apps. Yes! I would even go a step further and amend this to “don’t use a JS library” and “don’t use a build step,” but what can I say, I’m a minimalist.


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Booknotes 3.7

Nonfiction

  • Becoming, by Michelle Obama (2018). So good. Loved it. Very human and down to earth, and an enjoyable read throughout. Easily one of my favorites this year.
  • No Ordinary Assignment, by Jane Ferguson (2023). Also really good, though more harrowing in places (the Yazidi genocide, etc.). A strong reminder of why journalism is important — and of how awful war is.

Fiction

  • And Put Away Childish Things, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2023, fantasy). Grown-up Narnia of sorts, set during Covid. Really liked the first half, less sure about the second half. Read it in a single day.
  • Lone Women, by Victor LaValle (2023, horror). I don’t know — I wanted it to be something different. (I don’t want to spoil anything.) Still interesting, though.
  • The Cunning Man, by D. J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey (2019, fantasy/horror). Folk fantasy is something I don’t come across as often. Liked that part of it, though I think I would have liked it more if it hadn’t had any Mormon connection at all.

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New artwork: In the Celestial Glory.

In the Celestial Glory

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New artwork: He Remembereth Us Also.

He Remembereth Us Also

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