Also, the San Francisco fire department makes their ladders from wood by hand.

This history of steel from Popular Mechanics is fascinating. Highly recommended.

Rewrote my about page to be somewhat more detailed. (The self-indulgence of it makes me cringe a little, but I realized I had stripped out a lot of the humanity of my site over the years, and I’m trying to slowly seed some back in.)

On flying spiders:

Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant resources. But whatever the reason for it, it’s clearly an effective means of travel. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.

Steve Yegge’s post on Grab back in January is fascinating, particularly the bit on how he thinks ride-hailing networks are going to change everything. (Also the Southeast Asia parts, since I lived in Thailand as a missionary.)

Circles and triangles are good, but I’m getting bored with this minimalist style and I think it’s time now to go back to making “normal” art. (I expected this to happen sooner or later.)

I’ve learned lately that I quickly lose interest in the fiction I’m writing unless it has the following:

• A strong narrative voice. This seems to be more important for me than anything else. I didn’t realize it was so critical until this morning, when the bland porridge of my current WIP grew too boring to continue (because it lacks a strong voice).
• A concept that piques my curiosity. What this means in practice is flexible — it can be about a character, a relationship, the setting, a plot point, a mood. It just needs to be concrete enough that I can think about it.
• A plot that runs on the rails of change. Meaning, dynamic scenes where the world and characters are in a different state at the end than they were at the beginning. Outlining appears to be the best way for me to get there, at least at this point. Dwight Swain’s book has been helpful here.
• Theme, possibly. I sense that I do need it as a unifying force and to help me in scene selection, but I’m not positive it’s a requirement. (I did just read Libbie Hawker’s book on outlining and the theme part resonated with me, so it may just be that, though — an untested resonance.)

These aren’t massive, groundbreaking revelations, of course, but I’d somehow lost sight of them over the years or wasn’t fully aware of them before. Now that I’ve tugged them back into my conscious mind, though, I’m ready to start finishing stories again.

Just saw this review of the reMarkable tablet, which I hadn’t heard of before. E-ink paper + pencil, basically. The tablet is a bit pricey — $599 plus marker tips once in a while — but I like the idea a lot.