I meant to post about this a few weeks ago, but BCC Press has published a print edition of In the Image of Our Heavenly Parents. (The ebook is still available as well.)
Blog
Links #73
I’ve been a slacker when it comes to posting these, so we’re going to go a little lighter on commentary in an effort to get caught up.
Shin Oh’s Malaysian voxel illustrations. Love these so much.
Harold Cooper’s spinning diagrams with CSS. Fun.
David Popa’s ice floe art. Cool.
BYU campus HFAC demolition video. Sad to see it go — I had plenty of classes and dates there.
Oliver Darkshire with Neil Gaiman’s cover quote for his book. Ha.
Neal Agarwal’s space elevator page. Cool.
Sørvágsvatn, a cool-looking lake in the Faroe Islands.
Victor Tangermann on scientists potentially figuring out how to regenerate lost hearing.
Samuel Arbesman on his upcoming book, The Magic of Code.
Natasha Lomas on hydraulic haptics for touchscreens. Cool. I look forward to something like this going mainstream. Seems like it could be especially helpful for those with impaired vision.
Jo M’s trainbot (stitching together images of passing trains).
Felix Häcker on his IKEA chair making his screen black out. When I read this, I wondered if my IKEA chair was causing the random Bluetooth glitches I’ve been seeing for the past couple years. (Every once in a while — sometimes as often as once a day — the Bluetooth on my laptop would shut off for around thirty seconds, so my earbuds and keyboard and trackpad would stop working. This usually happened during Zoom calls, conveniently. And it happened on several different laptops from different companies.) I changed chairs a couple weeks ago and haven’t had any glitches since then, though it feels still too early to know if the IKEA chair really was the culprit.
François Valentin on old maps and new maps.
Baldur Bjarnason on AI. Agreed, AGI is not near.
Dina Genkina on a new wooden transistor. Cool.
Fabien Sanglard on the polygons of Another World on the Amiga 500.
Robin Hanson on chasing your reading. Agreed. (Though I don’t do it often enough.)
Ben Werdmuller on AI in the newsroom.
Amelia Wattenberger on the UX of chatbots (and how it’s not great because there aren’t any affordances).
Chrome is replacing the lock icon.
Chris Coyier on CSS logical properties.
Jim Nielsen on the web’s backwards compatibility. Yes, 100%.
Andi with a detailed look at WebGPU.
Oliver Burkemann on using “just go to the shed” as a way to start on something.
Molly Templeton on readers being more than just consumers of books.
madhadron on the seven ur programming languages (interesting even if I don’t quite agree on the specific categorizations), also see the discussion on Hacker News.
Jessica Taylor Price on orcas that have been killing sharks and removing their livers.
Mary C. Dyson’s Legibility, an online book about how typography affects ease of reading.
Warp is integrating AI into their terminal.
Vadim Demedes’ Ink. Basically React for CLIs. Interesting.
Naomi Klein on AI. Wise words. This take resonated with me more than most others I’ve read.
Charlie Becker on doing the weirdest thing that feels right. An interesting lens, might try this.
Jason Kottke on SineRider (Line Rider + math).
New artwork: Mourn With Those That Mourn.
Things on my mind #1
Trying out a new column idea. Might do it regularly. Things on my mind, in no particular order:
- Death. My aunt passed away tragically last week on a flight to London (which also resurfaced some of the feelings about my dad’s death). And one of our neighbors in our ward passed away a couple days ago.
- On this blog, I want to post more than just an endless stream of art releases. Especially more short essays and other posts that involve writing, since that’s the fun part for me. I think I’ve just been lazy.
- I’ve been sitting on an ever-growing links post for (checks notes) over a month.
- With the religious art, I wonder if I’ve been doing too many sequels and not enough new ideas.
- Also thinking about spending more time gathering religious art ideas from parts of scripture I yet haven’t used much (or at all). And gathering new texture photos.
- How I make my art. Part of me wants to paint every piece in Procreate (it’s the most satisfying way to do these pieces), but painting is (much) harder on my back and often leaves it flared up, and some of these types of pieces seem to work better with a crisp graphic design feel.
- Working on this type of symbolic/geometric art for so long feels like it has dug deep furrows into my brain and I’ve forgotten how to draw anything else (like the art I used to make).
- I need to figure out ways of working on other types of projects that don’t exacerbate my back pain. I feel like it’s become 100% art all the time and while it’s nice to make progress there, I miss having a wider variety of projects on the table.
- AI. I have pretty much no interest in using it myself, at least for now, but it’s anthropologically and culturally interesting and we’ll see what kinds of effects it has on everything.
- I’ve been at my new job for a month now. Slowly starting to come out of the usual initial onboarding whirlwind.
- Using a heating pad during the day at work has helped reduce my back pain a little, but with the warmer weather it also makes my back ridiculously sweaty each day. I do not like this and need to find a more sustainable solution.
- A fly is buzzing around the room now, first one in the house this year. Mmm, a snack. (Just kidding.)
New artwork: In Their Own Image II.
New artwork: Even as unto Thee.
I’ve occasionally used ImageMagick’s erode and dilate filters to make art look a little less digital. Turns out those filters are also available in Photoshop and Affinity Photo, just under different names: minimum blur and maximum blur. I had no idea. (I should mention that there might still be subtle differences between the algorithms. I didn’t do a deep dive. But from my limited testing they seem to do the same thing.)
I’ve added a scripture reference index for my religious art, to make it easier to find pieces related to specific passages.
New artwork: I Am a Child of God IV.
New artwork: I Will Give You Rest IV.
