New artwork: Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant.
Blog
New artwork: Single to the Glory.
New artwork: Exalted Above the Hills. And yep, I am fully aware it looks like a triforce. And like a Sierpinski triangle.
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.
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.
New artwork: Hearts of the Children V.
New artwork: Before Our Journey’s Through II.
Things on my mind #2
- Apparently I binge blog.
- It is good to be part of a family. (I especially felt that with my aunt’s funeral and road trip it took to get there.)
- While I’ve been saying “saith” with two syllables all my life, the reason for one syllable suddenly made sense to me the other day.
- Remember that ebook of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker? It was too good to be true. It’s a woefully bad digitization, with full pages missing, lots of OCR gunk, and page breaks in the middle of paragraphs. Back to the print edition.
- Favorite ice cream flavors: Umpqua’s Chocolate Brownie Thunder, Ben & Jerry’s Tonight Dough, Dreyer’s Cookie Cobblestone, and an ube flavor I had at Handel’s one time.
- Back pain is something I think about all day, every day. I’m conscious of it almost all the time (like, I think about it every few minutes). I wonder if the cognitive hit here — taking up mental RAM — has diminished my ability to work on projects.
- I’m trying to find the right balance between pushing through and resting when my back is flared up. (As it has now been for a few days.) Yesterday, though, my physical therapist recommended generally being more active when my back isn’t flared up and more specifically recommended weightlifting, which has always been a no-no with my spondylolisthesis, but I think there’s something to it.
- Landscaping our backyard has turned into a nice opportunity to take texture photos for my art. (Well-used industrial machinery has lots of delicious scrapes and scuffs.)
- Reading history and how I know what’s written is only the merest sliver of the totality of what actually happened, even when the history is of something relatively short (a few days as opposed to seven thousand years, for example). I wish I could see more of all the little mundane bits in between. (But do I really?)
- Lately I’ve been thinking about how there’s a lot of power in iteration — coming back to the same project over and over again in tiny increments. (Eating an elephant, etc.)
Links #74
More catching up.
Ian Sample on the first UK baby with DNA from three people born after new IVF procedure. Science fiction concepts continue to take over the world.
Austin Kleon on artists being allowed to make bad work. This resonated a lot with me. I certainly feel like I frequently have experimental periods with my art that end up being more failure than success, anyway.
Jason Kottke on how big the biggest black holes are. Whew.
@emilm on some lovely Krita brushes. Used one of these on my last piece for the brushstroke texture. Great examples at the top of the thread, too.
What Midjourney thinks professors look like, based on their department. Ha. Stereotypical but with some truth to it.
Christopher Butler on the internet. “Pockets of life within the propped-up corpse of the internet might be it. It may be the best we get. But I’d prefer to be more optimistic than that. I’d like to think that those of us living on in small ways inside this thing have a collective, good reason to keep it alive. I’d like to think that what’s happening in here can spread and once again reach the surface.”
ast-grep is super interesting.
Nate Oman on possible ways to theologically reconcile same-sex sealings. Interesting food for thought.
Mark Hachman on Sightful’s new Spacetop AR laptop. Want.
Maggie Harrison on a new wooden satellite. Very cool.
Liz Busby on religion in speculative fiction. I think I generally prefer slightly more analogous than explicit, but I also haven’t been reading much overtly Latter-day Saint fiction lately.
Bun 0.6.0 can build standalone executables.
Isabella Rosner on some amazing 17th- and 18th-century Quaker names. Love these.
Strawberry, a tiny build-free frontend framework. Love the website. Also see VanJS. I don’t know if I’d actually use either, but I’m certainly interested in tiny build-free frontend frameworks.
Jim Nielsen on .well-known/avatar. I like the idea. Ended up putting mine at bencrowder.net/avatar.jpg, because my Unix roots make .well-known feel weird to me, like it’s a hidden directory.
Elizabeth Rayne on a sensitive robot hand. “This hand doesn’t just pick things up and put them down on command. It is so sensitive that it can actually ‘feel’ what it is touching, and it’s dextrous enough to easily change the position of its fingers so it can better hold objects, a maneuver known as ‘finger gaiting.’ It is so sensitive it can even do all this in the dark, figuring everything out by touch.”
Mark Shwartz on a new nontoxic powder that uses sunlight to quickly disinfect contaminated drinking water. I hope this works as well as it sounds like it would.
Dwarkesh Patel on lessons from Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. This got me started with The Power Broker again (which I started a year ago but ended up dropping).
The cognitive load developer’s handbook. A good lens.
Meta on multilingual models that can do speech-to-text and text-to-speech for 1,100+ languages. Wow.
Andre Fuchs’ ultimate list of kerning pairs (for type design).
Molly Templeton on two kinds of unforgettable reading experiences. Many of my reading memories are tied to where I was when I was reading those books — I remember reading Lord of the Rings for the first time at the UTA bus stop my freshman year of college, reading Goethe’s Faust while pacing my bedroom, reading The Sword of Kaigen while waiting at the bus stop, reading Heir to the Empire on the floor of my bedroom when I was a kid, and apparently all my memories are either at the bus stop or in my bedroom. Ha.
Austin Kleon on disability and art. This was heartening.
John Warner on originality being undervalued. “Artistically, the question of how faithful something is to another thing that already exists is simply fundamentally uninteresting. It asks us to respond to art primarily through the lens of nostalgia, rather than on the art’s own terms.”
Simon Willison on that lawyer who ChatGPTed himself into a load of trouble.
John Ousterhout on scar tissue in relationships. Good metaphor.
Rob Stein on IVG. “The researchers used cells from the tails of adult mice to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then coaxed those iPS cells to become mouse sperm and eggs. They’ve even used those sperm and eggs to make embryos and implanted the embryos into the wombs of female mice, which gave birth to apparently healthy mouse pups.”
Eric Karrfalt on swallowing upside down as a way to combat GERD. “A novel exercise is described for resistance training of the lower esophageal sphincter. Resistance is provided by gravity as food is swallowed and pushed up an incline into the stomach. The incline is established by kneeling with the head bowed lower than the stomach. After several months of daily repetitions, symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux ceased and the exercise was discontinued without relapse.” I’ve started trying this.
Hannah Devlin on suspended animation with rats. More science fiction poking its head in. Crazy!
Joel Cuthbertson on Connie Willis and her upcoming novel. I still need to read All Clear and Blackout.
Daniel Huffman with another walkthrough of one of his mapmaking projects. Loved this.
Booknotes 2.5
Nonfiction
- The Invisible Kingdom, by Meghan O’Rourke. An important book about chronic illness. It’s so, so frustrating what these people have to go through — and not only the chronic illness itself but also the poor treatment from doctors who tell them it’s all in their head. (I have a friend with Lyme disease and a lot of this book sounded like it lined up with what I know of her experiences.)
- Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. Whew. Another important book that was painful and maddening. So many monstrosities. Ugh. I hadn’t heard about lynching postcards before, or the bridle reins made from the flesh of Native Americans, or how much those early Americans hated Italians, or most of the stories about how people tortured and killed African-American slaves. The comparison between Nazi Germany and American slavery was on point and really hit home for me — especially that the Nazis thought America was too harsh in some cases. Sheesh. The comparison to Dalits was also illustrative. I hate caste systems. Humanity’s capacity for horrific violence is awful. On a mostly happier note, I didn’t know that the idea of inoculation came from West Africa! That was great.
- Shareware Heroes, by Richard Moss. I read this for the nostalgia, as a kid who grew up playing lots of MS-DOS shareware games in the ’90s. Fun to read more about Kingdom of Kroz, Hugo’s House of Horrors, Commander Keen, Scorched Earth, ZZT, Capture the Flag, Jill of the Jungle, One Must Fall, Descent, Terminal Velocity, and Wacky Wheels, among others. (My 2011 post about DOS games links to some of these.)
Fiction
- The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. It was interesting, though I think I maybe didn’t like it as much as the other Stephenson novels I’ve read. Still enjoyed the voice, though. A few icky bits. The parts about Turing machines were fun. Also, there are violently murdered Mormon missionaries. (Which was not fun, to be clear. Thankfully the murders happen off-page.)
- Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Really liked it, especially the religious aspects (which I can’t really talk about since it would be fairly spoilery, so let me just say that some parts resonated, and if you’ve read it then email me and we can talk about it). Also picked up the word slugabed, which was fun. Bujold continues to be one of my favorite authors.