Just posted two new parallel language editions of the Book of Mormon:
- Simplifed Chinese–Hanyu Pinyin
- Simplifed Chinese–Hanyu Pinyin–English
Blog
Links #89
Peter Dizikes on the new “whom of which” linguistic trend. This…may be testing my descriptivist tendencies to their limits.
SFINCS, the new Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (ala SPFBO and SPSFC). Looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.
Rocumentaries, a curated list of streaming documentaries. I don’t watch many documentaries but this seemed like a decent list for when I’m in the mood.
Emily Temple on Mark Twain inventing the bra clasp.
Paul Robert Lloyd’s classnames, thematically grouped lists of words to help with naming things like HTML/CSS classes. I love lists of words. (Helping my kid study for the spelling bee was quite fun.)
iOS Safari has a limit of 500 tabs at a time. Found that out through personal experience. (Current count: 25.)
Kris Sowersby on the design of Klim’s Martina Plantijn typeface. Enjoyed this. I don’t know if I can overstate how much I love a good typeface.
Dave Cramer on how Hachette makes books with HTML and CSS, from 2017. I knew Hachette had been using web tech for a while but didn’t know they were using Prince (with its TeX justification algorithm, which makes sense). If only the open source alternatives like Paged.js also had the TeX algorithm. (Maybe they do; I haven’t checked lately.)
Alice Ching on how the implementation of Figma draws inspiration from the gaming world. A fun read.
Fabien Sanglard on the core concepts associated with the creation of an executable (via C/C++).
Fully Stacked on the View Transitions API and the Navigation API, re: SPAs and MPAs.
Medieval murder maps for London, York, and Oxford.
Becky Ferreira on a new study reporting that people experience heightened consciousness when dying. I don’t think this necessarily proves anything about the afterlife, but it does show that interesting things happen in the transition out of this life.
Jim Nielsen on building great software by repeatedly encountering it. 100%. I feel like this made a huge difference when I was a designer at the BYU library, where I was using our apps all the time for my own use (checking out loads of books, mainly). This is also why I like making my own tools.
Molly Templeton on reading habits. Also see Tracy Durnell.
Utah’s flag status page. I recently discovered this and found it to be helpful when seeing flags around town at half-mast and not knowing why.
David Heaney on Meta’s new photorealistic VR avatars. These might be coming out the other side of the uncanny valley, much as it surprises me to say it.
Brennan doing “Sauron but it’s Donald Trump” on Game Changer. This is so amazing.
Adam Mastroianni on why scientific discoveries sometimes take so long to happen.
Jason Kottke on Erik Wernquist’s One Revolution per Minute video. That’s a pretty fast rotation, subjectively.
Morgan Housel’s thoughts on writings. I don’t particularly like venture capitalists these days, but there was some interesting food for thought here.
Orion, a “a [free] small, fun app that helps you use your iPad as an external HDMI display for any camera, video game console, or even VHS.”
Tantek Çelik on more thoughtful reading and writing on the web. Loved this. I think this is probably why I like blogging so much. It’s more quiet.
Josh Collinsworth with a message from the captain of the S.S. Layoff. Ha. Most of this is too true (in my experience, anyway).
Marc on software that fits in your backpack. Small tools, basically. I like it.
Nolen’s Flappy Dird, a Flappy Bird clone implemented in the macOS Finder (of all places).
ABA Games on the joys of small game development. I really liked this — these types of games feel like a fun size to work on. Especially liked the one-button page, not because I care much about one-button games (I don’t) but because it was so fun to see all the GIFs of the small games. Inspiring.
The Delta Wasp 2040, a 3D printer that can do clay and other ceramic materials.
Evan Ackerman on Disney’s new robot. Fun to see animators brought into the loop.
Jason Kottke on the unbearable slowness of light, from 2015. Puts things into perspective.
Bryan Braun’s new Let’s Get Creative page, a collection of high-quality, free, online creativity tools. Fun!
Sherry Ning on technology and craftsmanship. I don’t know that I fully agree with the premise here, but I still really like articles about craftsmanship. Recommended.
On the first Vesuvius Challenge winner. Excited to see where all of this leads.
Charles Q. Choi on using incoherent holography to change focus after a photo is taken.
Ramsey Nasser’s قلب, a programming language where code is written entirely in Arabic. Love this.
Richard Rutter on the sad state of break-after: avoid browser support. Yep.
The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers (1934). I read this for book group. Sure learned a lot about bell-ringing. The mystery ended up being interesting, though the book felt rather slow at times and I found myself skimming through several parts lest I get bogged down and abandon it. On that note, by the way, in recent years I find myself struggling with older fiction. While there are scads of classics I want to have read, I lose interest whenever I actually get into one. Dry. As. Dust. (Old nonfiction, though, is unfettered by this curse. Don’t know why.) I’m hoping this is something that changes over time.
Avid Reader, by Robert Gottlieb (2016). A fun read, with plenty of publishing history. Gottlieb edited Catch-22 and The Chosen (Chaim Potok, that is) and Robert Caro and Antonia Fraser and Robert Massie and Barbara Tuchman and Nora Ephron and Dorothy Dunnett, among many, many others. I have to remind myself that all these iconic books once had an uncertain future, and many of them changed substantially through the course of their time on the editing table (a useful reminder when I’m working on my own writing and it seems hopeless).
Leadership, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2018). Loved it. So, so good. It’s a study of leadership (no surprise there) through looking at the lives and presidencies of Abraham Lincoln (depression, emancipation), Theodore Roosevelt (loss of mother and wife, coal strike), Franklin D. Roosevelt (paralysis, New Deal), and Lyndon B. Johnson (Senate loss, civil rights). I ate it up. Looking forward to reading more biographies of world leaders; recommendations welcome.
While not entirely unexpected, it was still sad to read that all four men died fairly young — fifty-six (Lincoln), sixty (Teddy), sixty-three (FDR), and sixty-four (LBJ). (Sometime in the last decade, by the way, my sense of what ages are “old” jumped from the sixties up to the eighties.)
- I’ve always seen the browser as a printing press.
- Because of that, I’ve always seen myself as a publisher first and then everything else second.
This, particularly the second point. I’ve seen myself as a publisher for a long time now as well, with all the books and language charts and magazines and even the art. And the web makes publishing so, so easy. It’s magical. Instant worldwide distribution. (Well, instant for the digital things I make.)
His first point has stuck with me as well — I’ve tended to think of my site mostly as a place to publish PDFs and EPUBs and images and other files I’ve made, but I like the idea of the web as the actual delivery mechanism, for more than just blog posts. This isn’t a new idea, of course; it’s just something I haven’t been thinking about as much till now. I’m looking over the type of things I’ve made — books, languages charts, etc. — and thinking what it would be like if the end product were a web page instead of a PDF or an EPUB. And of course nowadays I’m using HTML/CSS as the source for all three main formats for books (web, EPUB, PDF), so it doesn’t necessarily have to be either/or.
Anyway, nothing specific in mind yet. We’ll see what comes of it.
The Devil You Know, by K. J. Parker (2016). Novella. In the same vein as some of his other novellas — in fact, for the first twenty pages I wasn’t sure if I’d already read it without realizing it. Even so, I enjoyed it. The worldbuilding is right up my alley and there were some fun twists.
Sex Educated: Letters from a Latter-day Saint Therapist to Her Younger Self, by Bonnie Young (2023). It was good! Part of me wishes it had been longer — I read it in a single sitting — but short isn’t bad. (Says the guy constitutionally incapable of writing a long book review.) There’s level-headed wisdom here. I feel that the book is a good, solid step toward helping our relationship with sex (as members of the Church) be more healthy.
Three Parts Dead, by Max Gladstone (2012). First in the Craft sequence. I liked the legal aspect (and rather wish there were a lot more of it), the magic system was interesting, and I felt that the conclusion pulled all the threads together nicely. Intriguing worldbuilding, too.
Let’s Talk about Race and Priesthood, by W. Paul Reeve (2023). I think every member of the Church should read this book. It’s important. And heartbreaking. I am very, very glad that we made it through to this side of the racial restriction. The book has a lot of details I’d never heard before on how the restriction came about and evolved over time. Highly recommended.