All the President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward (1974), about Watergate. I totally ate this up. Journalism histories like this are my favorite. A couple years ago I read and really liked Yours in Truth (about Ben Bradlee), and at some point I’m planning to read Katharine Graham’s Personal History. (And of course I’m interested in more than just the Washington Post.) Always open to recommendations!
Size-specific Adjustments to Type Design, by Tim Ahrens & Shoko Mugikura (2014). Some great type specimens in the latter half of the book.
Fiction
Moon Over Soho, by Ben Aaronovitch (2011). Second in the Rivers of London series. Some earthy bits, and it definitely felt more like a police procedural than Alex Verus and the Dresden Files. Liked it enough that I plan to keep reading the series.
The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison (2014). “This is a boring book,” I wrote back in 2016 when I bounced off it after one or two chapters. This time round, though, I loved it! A lot! I wish there were dozens and dozens of books in the series. (And yes, I’m looking forward to The Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones.) It often reminded me of The Hands of the Emperor in lovely ways. So glad I came back to it.
Some dinky pixel art experiments, exploring what it looks like when you add texture and make them look kind of like mosaic tiles. (I’m sure someone else has already done this, but I haven’t, so here we are.) Also, this isn’t great pixel art, just to be clear.
For this first experiment, I made the squares in Figma and set the colors there, which was pretty laborious. Exported to SVG and added turbulence/displacement filters to get some variation. When exporting to PNG via Inkscape, I ran into the perennial issue where the filters sometimes only work on the top and left sides of the shape. (Someday I’ll figure out what’s going on there, since the filters look fine in Finder via Quick Look. In this case, from a distance, it still kind of looks okay.) Finally, I added some textures in Affinity Photo with opacity set to around 20% and blend mode set to soft light or overlay.
Second experiment: making things easier. I made a 48x48 image in Procreate Pocket on my phone and painted the scene using the oil paint brush. (Which is why the eyes are crazy and there isn’t a ton of definition on the characters. Like I said, not great pixel art.) I then wrote a quick command-line script (JS/Node) to take a PNG and export an SVG where each pixel of the PNG is a <rect> in SVG. Way faster than making the squares in Figma. The script shrinks each square a little and adds some jitter to the points as well. And I changed the background color to be more ground-like. Exported to PNG and textured as in the first experiment.
Some ideas for future exploration:
More subdivision on the tiles, for a little more geometric variety
Programmatically export masks from the SVG so that each tile can look more different from its neighbors, texturally (a masked tile would be next to an unmasked one, basically, with some randomness thrown in)
Rounding the edges of the tiles a little
Rendering the tiles in Blender (either with heightfields or by generating actual geometry with Python), ideally with some procedural texturing
Spectral.js, a nice JS color-mixing library from Ronald van Wijnen. Looks useful for generative art.
David Moldawer on rambling, in context of Robert Jordan writing Wheel of Time. I occasionally do something like this with writing, though I’ve thought of it just as journaling rather than as a dialogue with myself. (But now that I’ve read Chatter, the latter framing seems potentially more advantageous.)
Tom MacWright on AI. “I also just don’t especially want to stop thinking about code. I don’t want to stop writing sentences in my own voice. I get a lot of joy from craft.” That resonates.
Hexagony, an esoteric programming language on a hexagonal grid, by Martin Ender. “The name is a portmanteau of hexagon and agony, because…well, give programming in it a go.” Ha.
Julian Gough’s The Egg and the Rock, a book being written on Substack. One of the most interesting things I’ve read in a while, about cosmology and science. Absolutely going to be reading this as it’s posted.
John Thyer on making small games. Enjoyed this. Planning to make another small game sometime. (That’s the only kind I’ve ever made, as it happens.)
First, by Evan Thomas. Great biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, who I didn’t know much about before this. Learned a lot about SCOTUS. I miss the days of a more balanced Supreme Court. Mildly surprised to read that O’Connor once got a priesthood blessing from Bill Marriott and also read the Book of Mormon.
James Patterson, by James Patterson. An “ego-biography,” in his words, which seems about right. I haven’t read any of Patterson’s books and I’m not sure I will (thrillers are too stressful for me, so I avoid them most of the time), but this was an easy, entertaining read. Not as much about writing as I’d been hoping for, though. Still, the little bit about outlining was something I needed to hear, and the perspective on co-writing was interesting.
Fiction
Taken, by Benedict Jacka. Third in the Alex Verus series. A fun, popcorn read. I think I liked this one more than the first two. Sort of like Dresden but without the problematic bits. Looking forward to seeing where it goes.
Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie. Whew, content warnings galore on this one. Much more graphic than the First Law trilogy, at least in my memory. After filtering out all the grimdark grit, though, it was a compelling vengeance tale, and my brain really liked the prose.
John Gruber on Wavelength, a messaging app with built-in AI. I installed this but haven’t yet had anyone to talk with besides the chatbot.
Adam Posen on U.S. zero-sum economics and how relocating manufacturing production back to the U.S. isn’t actually a good thing. I have no idea if he’s right, but I’m generally in favor of globalization.
