Links #165

Bryan Macomber’s teardown illustrations/animations of how things like mechanical pencils and retractable pens work. Very cool, love the style. Reminds of the explainers Bartosz Ciechanowski used to do.

HellMood’s 16-byte Sierpinski triangle demo. Sixteen bytes!

Derek Sivers on being a netizen. I’ve been online since 1991 and that same early ethos was instilled in me, too. I believe it makes for a better internet.

Harry Roberts on the new No-Vary-Search browser cache control header.

Ally Piechowski with some helpful git log commands for getting familiar with a new codebase. Bookmarking these.

Nishant on Earth’s radio wave bubble, which is only 240 light years across. One of the most compelling answers to the Fermi paradox I’ve seen so far.

Tracy Durnell on human-oriented online posts. Some interesting ideas here. The analog parts made me think of Robin Sloan’s printing projects: “In the years since, the Kindle has matured and curdled … the web has become an even more brutal arena … and only one realm has remained truly, reliably apart. Only one realm has remained reliable, period. That’s the realm of the physical, of course.” Making and shipping zines (or some other printed matter) is tempting.

Asher Cabrera on adding UI for reply posts on a blog. I like this. Lately I’ve defaulted to these batched link posts with a smidge of commentary per link, but maybe I’ll get back into the habit someday of responding more fully, at least some of the time.

James Goldberg on how Mormon literature is arriving. Unrelated to the link: hard to believe it was almost twenty years ago when I first met James and got involved with New Play Project (writing, typesetting playbills and scripts, helping run auditions, selling tickets and concessions, a little bit of directing). Good memories. And that means it’s been eighteen years (18!) since I started Mormon Artist (may it rest in peace). Sometimes I find myself missing those days of working on larger collaborative projects. (On a related note, withdrawing from social media has absolutely been good for my mental health, but it’s come with the undesirable side effect of feeling far more disconnected from other people doing creative work. I haven’t yet figured out how to balance this.)