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A few more parallel language editions of the Book of Mormon:

  • Georgian–English
  • Nepali–English
  • Simplified Chinese–English v2 (the Church updated the text recently)
  • Traditional Chinese–English
  • Traditional Chinese–Simplified Chinese

As mentioned at the end of the third batch post, I was running into an issue with Traditional Chinese where Firefox would hang when I tried to print it. Finally found out that the reason it was hanging was the font — after I switched it from Noto Serif CJK to Noto Serif Traditional Chinese, it started working.


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New artwork: Family Prayer VI.

Family Prayer VI

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Links #75

Nate Johnson on pivoting from journalist to electrician. Career pivots intrigue me, having been through one already and wondering whether I have another one coming down the road someday.

Joann is doing some really cool things with AI art.

Louise Perry responds to Brian Caplan on feminism.

0xProto, an open source monospace font, with sane ligatures.

Robert Macfarlane on John McPhee.

Adam Mastroianni on the illusion of moral decline (the “back in the good old days” claims). Interesting research. And note that this is for morality people generally agree upon.

Shapecatcher, where you can draw a Unicode character and it’ll find the code point for you.

Katja Grace on AI and people saying we don’t trade with ants. Enjoyed this.

Thierry de Pauw on letting unreviewed code go to production. Interesting! Don’t know how I feel about this.

Mike Crittenden on toddlers polluting analytics. I hadn’t thought of this before, but it makes a lot of sense.

Vsauce on whether people used to look older.

Davis Kedrosky defends Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Which was nice to see since I’ve largely only seen reviews that put it down.

Shariar Shahrabi on procedural Chinese landscapes with Blender’s geometry nodes. I need to learn how to use geometry nodes.

Chris Siebenmann on creating HTML via string templates.

Sol Reader, a reading-focused VR headset. This is the kind of thing that piques my interest (I spend a lot of time lying on my back, and holding my phone up to read is hard on my hands and wrists), but the text display does not look all that great (surprisingly low resolution with bitmapped fonts, at least from the image I saw).

Gretchen McCulloch on why pirate speech sounds the way it does. Fun.

A macOS Automator script to print booklets from PDFs. Used this to help make a girls camp booklet.

Mori, a new genealogy web app. The version control especially intrigues me.

Matthias Ott on CSS as a design tool. Agreed. Figma is great, but there’s still a fairly large disconnect between designs and implementation.

Jakob Greenfeld on talking to people. Yes.

Akshay on plain text journaling. I somehow didn’t realize I could create custom little one-off syntax highlighting rules in Vim. Ended up adding some for my work to-do file and log file.

Jennifer Sandlin on Mr. Doodle’s house. Wow.

Tomas Pueyo on how maps twist our perception of the world.

Morgan Housel on what happened to the U.S. economy after WWII. This was good.

Christian Heilmann defending frontend engineering as a full-time job.

Rasmus Andersson is hiring founding engineers for Playbit, which looks super interesting (new OS for creative work).

Nobody Has Time for Python on hype cycles. Tongue in cheek but there’s a lot of truth to it.

Saurabh with some advanced macOS commands. I didn’t know about some of these.

Julian Gough with some last-minute gravitational wave predictions. I have no idea if it’s right, but wow, the evolving universe idea (where black holes are a universe’s offspring, giving birth to baby universes) is fascinating. Also, the International Pulsar Timing Array idea is genius. Wow.

Blender 3.6 is released.

Oscar Holland on a handbag smaller than a grain of salt. Wow.

Mark Poulier’s architectural shadow art. I’ve been meaning for years to make art in this vein (monochrome art made only of shadows, basically).

James Stanley on incongruous technologies. Reminds me of the “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” idea (which I first heard about from Robin Sloan, but I can’t find a link so instead I’ll link to Alan Jacobs). I’d be very interested in seeing what else could be done with watchmaking-scale gears.

Paul Graham on how to do great work. This is super long and I haven’t read all of it yet, but the parts I did read seemed reasonable. Lots of food for thought here.


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New artwork: Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant.

Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant

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New artwork: Single to the Glory.

Single to the Glory

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New artwork: Exalted Above the Hills. And yep, I am fully aware it looks like a triforce. And like a Sierpinski triangle.

Exalted Above the Hills

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Things on my mind #3

  • Father’s Day was sad, as expected.
  • At least once a week I wonder who in my immediate or extended family will be the next to die, and when. I hope I’m not taking for granted whatever fleeting and finite time I have left with them.
  • I miss being able to do dishes and yard work: something I never thought I’d say, back before my back got bad.
  • The Great Vowel Shift — what phonological changes in English are underway now, and will I even be able to notice them? (Also want to acknowledge that there’s already such diversity in accents in English across the world, which seems to mean that any shift would probably be more local than global.) And are other languages experiencing phonological shifts right now?
  • Stemming from my WWII reading: I’ve been wondering what the world would be like now if nobody had ever been murdered, and if infant mortality was unheard of. What lost inventions and works of art would we have? I suspect that most of the inventions eventually get invented by someone else in this timeline, but the works of art seem forever lost.
  • Do people named Tod think about death more? (Yes, yes, it’s effectively a German dad joke, but also a real question.) (Ben means “son of” in at least some Semitic languages, but I almost never think about that, so I guess I have a likely answer.)
  • The Apple Vision Pro seems like it might open up ways for me to do my day job (software engineering) with less back and neck pain. But it’s not something I’d want to use around other people, because of the isolating factor. (Also: wow, expensive.)
  • Loved Across the Spider-Verse. I wish every comics book movie was in this style. Also really enjoyed Flamin’ Hot and American Born Chinese.
  • I love Procreate’s sharpen filter.
  • There’s so, so, so much I don’t know. I need to spend more time learning and studying.
  • Why does the US–Mexico border between Los Algodones and Colonial Migel Aleman (the southwest part of Arizona) sort of follow the Colorado River but also not? Or is the Google Maps border wrong?
  • Ebooks are great, but there’s something special about libraries as a place where bookish people go.
  • I’m slowly coming to terms with the likelihood that I’m only ever going to be a digital artist (as opposed to doing, say, acrylics or oils, and producing originals), mostly because of my back but also partly because I feel more drawn to digital.
  • Inkscape’s live path effects (like tiling) are cool. I need to learn to use Inkscape better. Wish the UI weren’t so clunky.
  • I’ve wanted to start using web components but the JavaScript dependency has been less attractive, so I’m looking forward to declarative custom elements.
  • Lately, to make progress on stalled projects, I’ve been using a five-minute productivity hack — where I set a timer for five minutes and work on the project until the timer goes off. It continually surprises me how much I can get done in such a small amount of time.

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Booknotes 2.6

Nonfiction

  • Draft No. 4, by John McPhee, on writing nonfiction. I hadn’t read anything of his before this. Mostly enjoyed it. The Kedit section interested me a lot. And this was fun: “The planet, of course, is covered with demonyms, and after scouring the world in conversations on this topic with Mary Norris I began a severely selective, highly subjective A-list, extending Mancunian and Vallisoletano through thirty-five others at this writing, including Wulfrunian (Wolverhampton), Novocastrian (Newcastle), Trifluvian (Trois-Rivières), Leodensian (Leeds), Minneapolitan (Minneapolis), Hartlepudlian (Hartlepool), Liverpudlian (you knew it), Haligonian (Halifax), Varsovian (Warsaw), Providentian (Providence), and Tridentine (Trent).”
  • Convictions, by John Kroger, about life as a federal prosecutor (an AUSA, more specifically). Really liked it, especially the mafia, 9/11, and Enron parts. Parts of it kind of made me wish that I’d gone to law school. Apparently I really like legal nonfiction. (Less so the illegal stuff, har har.)

Fiction

  • All This Will be Yours, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Novella about time travel. It’s fairly silly, but there were some interesting ideas, which I think is largely why I read Tchaikovsky. At some point I need to go back and finish the Children of Time series.
  • The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. A reread, for book group. Loved it just as much if not more this time round. So, so good. Epistolary fiction is my jam.

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New artwork: Hearts of the Children V.

Hearts of the Children V

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New artwork: Before Our Journey’s Through II.

Before Our Journey’s Through

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