New artwork: On These Two Commandments II. I think this new (to me) style might end up being a good fit for this type of symbolic art.
Blog
Links #77
Michael John Goodman’s digitized edition of William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer. I don’t know that I agree with the “most beautiful book ever produced” bit, but it’s certainly an interesting book, and nice to see another digitized version of it. The ornamentation on the page borders has given me some inspiration, too. (More to come on that later, if anything ever comes of it.)
Doug Wilson on Tobias Frere-Jones designing the Whitney typeface. I also enjoyed the posts about designing Archer and Surveyor.
The Judd Foundation library site. Wow. That’s amazing.
Gabarito, a nice, friendly (and newly open-sourced) geometric sans typeface. Seems like it would work well on a picture book.
Maya on dark mode in the ancient world (purple parchment, etc.), and “ancient” is used loosely here. Never seen any of these before, but wow, they’re fascinating.
For the Lord God Giveth Light
I have a new piece, For the Lord God Giveth Light, that I painted for the I Lexi exhibition which opens August 18 at Writ & Vision in Provo.
The piece is a reference to 2 Nephi 31:3. “For my soul delighteth in plainness; for after this manner doth the Lord God work among the children of men. For the Lord God giveth light unto the understanding; for he speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding.” The large white circle represents God; the small yellow shapes represent God’s light; the red shapes at bottom represent us mortals in our variety.
Prints won’t be available until after the exhibition closes. (Though the framed print in the show will be available for sale.)
Introducing Life of Theseus, from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. Available as a free PDF download.
Making-of notes
- It’s set in LfA Aluminia, a resurrected version of Electra. I enjoyed this article about the making of the typeface.
- Chrome still has the bizarre copy-paste issue in macOS Preview, so I used Firefox. But Firefox doesn’t yet support
hyphenate-limit-chars, sadly. I decided not to stress about it. - It’s left-justified since browser justification still isn’t great and I didn’t want to spend eons fine-tuning the spacing. I did, however, tweak word-spacing to eliminate hyphens at the ends of pages and most widows and orphans (though I wasn’t fully strict here). Also manually inserted
­to insert hyphens as needed (mostly in the Greek names — and I probably got some of those wrong but I did try my best) and turned off ligatures that crossed hyphenation breaks (“ff”). - I used Paged.js, which generally worked well. Whenever I made changes, though, reloading the page and finding my place again (usually by cmd+f with some string of text) started getting laborious. Thinking about either building a Firefox extension that maintains scroll position even on hard refresh or building an Electron app that does the same.
- Not sure yet if I’m going to continue on with typesetting the rest of the Lives, but hopefully I do.
Things on my mind #5
- The importance of good friendships.
- Layoffs. Planet laid off 10% of the company early this week, with one casualty from my team. (Better than last time, where every other member of my team was affected. But still sad.) I’ve now lived through three rounds of layoffs in the last fourteen months, which is…a lot. Hoping for more stability in the industry going forward.
- The recent UAP/UFO hearings. I don’t believe it’s actually aliens (though the science fiction reader in me certainly would not complain), but even natural explanations for some of the exhibited behavior would still be intriguing. And yet Occam’s dull razor says that the most boring explanation will be the one that applies here.
- Still thinking about taking a break from making new symbolic art for a while. Maybe doing some other kinds of art. Maybe not. We’ll see.
- Unrelated: I still have a hefty amount of impostor syndrome when it comes to being in the art world (doing exhibitions, etc.). I think part of it comes from being a digital-only artist and part of it comes from the simplistic nature of my art.
- We’re coming up on one year since my dad disappeared. It’s been in my thoughts a lot lately. Those dates (September 13, when we realized he was gone, and September 16, when we found his body) are burned into my brain.
Links #76
bookofjoe with a map of driving orientation by country. Seems too late to ever unify on this globally, but who knows.
Jake Archibald on self-closing tags in HTML. Color me convinced.
Visualization showing how curved Chile is, because of the curvature of the earth.
HarfBuzz’s new WASM shaper lets you write your own shaping engine in WebAssembly. Interesting.
Christopher Butler on personal machines (like smartphones).
Longshot Space has a kinetic system for launching satellites on the cheap. Ooh. (Speaking for myself here and not for Planet Labs.)
Carla Hurt on how to learn Latin by yourself in 2023. Lots of good stuff here.
Primarium, documenting handwriting models across countries. By TypeTogether.
Jessie Gaynor on gentle parenting in classic literature, from McSweeney’s. Ha.
OrbStack is an interesting lightweight Docker Desktop alternative on macOS. Looking forward to trying this out, just need to upgrade macOS first. (I used to upgrade religiously each year but got burned too many times. tl;dr I’m still on Big Sur.)
Penny Thomson’s amazing moving miniatures. Love these.
Keith Houston visits Narbo Martius. Some lovely inscription photos.
Deepak Gulati on 19th-century ornamental tile illustrations.
Nat Eliason on doing hard things. Yes. I’m still thinking about this weeks later. Recommended.
Elie Mystal on Clarence Thomas.
Lin Yangchen on the Fell typefaces, including some customizations. I love those fonts.
Tsundoku, a word for new books that pile up unread. (Cough.)
Matt Stoller on the new merger guidelines.
Loz Blain on DishBrain, a new computer chip with human brain tissue. We certainly live in interesting times.
Valdemar Erk on using the HarfBuzz WASM shaper to make a long animation in a font. Wow.
Adam Rogers on Silicon Valley predatory pricing. I really don’t like Chicago School economics. Or late-stage capitalism.
Ollie Williams on the new @font-face syntax.
Andy Bell’s experience living through wildfires on Rhodes in Greece. Harrowing.
Bill Chappell on Republicans’ excess death rate spiking after Covid vaccines arrived. No comment.
Henrik Karlsson and Johanna Wiberg on cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born. Fascinating. I plan to reread this regularly.
Fabien Sanglard on Commander Keen’s adaptive tile refresh technique.
Esther Crawford on her experience at Twitter under Musk.
Carolyn Y. Johnson on scientists reviving a 46,000-year-old roundworm. Wow.
Jess Zafarris on the etymology of the word blackmail (which apparently does not have to do with black or mail).
Eleanor Janega on successor states and social media. This was good.
Amy Hoy on the boom times being over in tech. The answer: “We can build things that people will pay real money to have and use.” Yes, yes, yes.
Suw Charman-Anderson on hyper-independence and whether writing really has to be so solitary.
Axess Lab on why toggles suck. Agreed.
W. David Marx asking why Internet creators haven’t become superstars. I hadn’t thought about it much, but it’s true. Fascinating.
Francisco Pires on the recent potential superconductor breakthrough. Hopefully it pans out.
Mario Wolczko’s crazy Unix system recovery story.
Benjamin Breen on why early modern books are so beautiful. “Printed books from this period cover a huge range of topics and dozens of languages, but for me at least, they have one thing in common: I almost always find them far more interesting — more beautifully designed, more strange, more intriguing — than modern books.”
@gigaj0ule on a new cancer drug. “Small molecule oral cancer drug kills 100% of solid tumors across 70 evaluated cancer types in vitro and in animal models with a therapeutic index of 6 and no discernible side effects.” Wow.
New artwork: Face to Face III.
New artwork: My Yoke Is Easy II.
Things on my mind #4
- Cars on a busy road (sans honking) sound kind of like waves on the beach.
- I feel like my relationship with my dad is still evolving and changing, in some ways. My take on that: any relationship has actual interactions (very important) but also mental model interactions in the absence of the other half. Since I’m still able to interact with my mental model of my dad, that half of the relationship apparently continues to change over time.
- But at the same time, it’s been ten months of utter silence.
- The amount of family photos and videos we have keeps growing, and it’s already much larger than the hard drives on our laptops. We have a decent backup strategy in place (local + Backblaze), but we don’t yet have a good solution for viewing the photos and videos. Thinking about getting a cheap media server with a massive amount of disk space, set up to allow streaming to our phones and computers.
- In 30 years, what do I want to look back on having done? (Outside of being a good husband and father, etc.) I feel like I don’t necessarily know the answers to that question.
- In a similar vein, I feel like I’m largely discovery writing my life. I’m not really planning five, ten, twenty years ahead. I’m okay with that, though, because my goal is to follow the spirit, and those revelations generally come one step at a time. (And have served me well so far.)
- An iteration mentality, where I accept that my process involves doing lots of passes (even 10+) until the thing is done. The one-draft mentality only works once in a rare while. Also, outlining is not an escape from iteration.
- I installed Threads and then a few days later deleted it.
- Lately I’ve had a few things push me into a break from art: nothing was coming together in spite of my attempts; my wrists and arms have been aching; and I’ve wanted to get back into other types of projects (I feel I’ve become a bit of a one-trick pony in recent years).
- I’ve been preparing a print for an upcoming art show, and the museum paper I printed it on is lovely. Very happy with how it turned out.
- As a software engineer who occasionally needs to interview for jobs, I’ve found myself hesitant to put hobby code up online because of the time it would take to make the quality professional enough. But I now think it’s more important to make the code available, even if it’s not perfect or professional. So I’ll be posting the code for my genealogical chart scripts soon.
- An awful thought: I have a large enough number of books now that I’m pretty much guaranteed to die before I finish reading them, given average life expectancies and my reading speed.
- Siberian unicorns.
- When I make and release things on here, is my goal really to help other people, or am I doing it more to make myself look good? How do I keep focused on the first and not slip into the second?
Booknotes 2.7
Nonfiction
- The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Read it for book club. I found it so-so — there were some interesting bits, but the overall thesis didn’t really convince me. I love popular science when it’s done well, though.
- No Filter, by Sarah Frier. A fascinating history of Instagram the company. Seemed fairly well balanced. Interesting being in the middle of reading it when Threads was released. (I like that Instagram is better designed than Facebook, but in general I wish I never had to use either again. Much prefer just posting things here. Maybe one of these days I’ll jump off the bandwagon for good.)
Fiction
- Stargazy Pie, by Victoria Goddard. Liked it, and planning to read the rest of the series (along with the rest of Goddard’s swiftly expanding collection of books). Somewhat darker than I expected after reading The Hands of the Emperor, but still cozyish.
- Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang. Pretty quick read. It felt sort of like a literary thriller and sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion. (Meaning the character’s choices, not that the book was poorly written, because it wasn’t.) Also, I love pandan! Planning to get some extract so I can try pandan pancakes…though hopefully not with the same outcome as what happens in the book.