Links #60

Vox on how Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse shifted the style of animated films. Into the Spider-Verse was probably my favorite superhero movie — live action doesn’t fit the genre nearly as well, at least for me.

Nicholas Rougeux on the making of his edition of The Four Books of Architecture. Loved this.

Luca on one way to do generative art landscapes. I like that it’s a 2D technique that makes things look 3D. (Which I guess could technically apply to all 3D content on screens. Ha.)

Matthias Ott on transient frontend frameworks. Yep. For personal projects, I find myself occasionally wishing there was a platform-native way to build reactive UI. I haven’t yet thought through what that would look like, though.

Jack Evoniuk on how the Atari 2600 game Pitfall generated its world. This was great. A single byte!

Jim Nielsen on LCH color space in CSS. I’m convinced too.

Damir Yalalov on Microsoft’s new VALL-E text-to-speech model. Only three seconds of training data needed, apparently. We are fully in the “be skeptical of the provenance of anything you see or hear” phase.

Steve Krouse’s Val Town project, a website for writing, running, and deploying scripts. Intriguing.

Brad Woods’ explainer on 3D in CSS.

Clive Thompson on the power of indulging your weird, offbeat obsessions. This was great.

Josh Comeau on clever code considered harmful. Yes. I love clever code (within reasonable limits), but I fully agree here. It’s sometimes hard when there are cultural currents flowing towards clever, but swimming the other way seems very much worth it.

Robert van Embricqs’ flow wall desk. Very cool.

Ben Abbott on the Great Salt Lake report. I had no idea. I hope things get under control.

Benjamin Dean Taylor on five Latter-day Saint video game soundtrack composers. A world I haven’t really been aware of!

Libre Arts, an online magazine for people who use free artmaking apps (like Blender, MuseScore, Krita, etc.).

Simon Thalmann on using ChatGPT to write surreal prose poems. I really liked these and am thinking about writing some myself (though without AI helping).

Colin Devroe on blogging being alive and well. Yes!

The 2022 State of JS report is up. (Given that I don’t think chasing trends is a great idea, I’m not sure why I’m linking to this. Anthropological interest, I guess. Ha.)

Gabriele Corno with a video of a white moose in Sweden. Wow.

3D VR Zelda. Ooh! Very cool, at least for those who grew up on the first Zelda game.

Shiftall’s mutalk, a muzzle for VR. Um.

Mike Crittenden on ChatGPT uses for lazy parents. Ha.

Keith Houston on what to call chapter summaries. That’s what I’ve called them.

Glen Nelson on The Cultural Hall podcast about trends in Latter-day Saint arts. His fifth trend certainly applies to me.

The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, sponsored by the BYU Maxwell Institute (though run separately). Love this. Had no idea it existed until recently.

Saahil Desai on the design of pizza delivery boxes.

Rachel Neumeier on positive fantasy. Also see her other post about it. I like this. (I also like other kinds of fantasy, but it’s nice to see the emphasis on kindness.)

Mike Wakerly on how your tech stack is not the product. Yep.