New artwork: Wherefore Didst Thou Doubt? III.
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New artwork: Taught by Their Mothers.
Links #63
Carbonyl, a Chromium browser in a terminal. More impressive than I expected.
Andrew Plotkin on the new 3D VR version of Colossal Cave. I spent many hours of my childhood playing interactive fiction like Colossal Cave and Zork, building my own with TADS and AGT, frequenting the IFDB and the annual IF Competition. Ah, memories. I’ve tried to play some of the old text adventures with Frotz, but I’m no longer a gamer and my brain refuses; it would rather read books. (I also struggle to watch movies for the same reason. I know this is weird.)
Hundred Rabbits’ Oquonie game. Gamer though I’m not, games still interest me, and I love the art on this one. The new pixel art version they’re working on also looks good.
Stephen Winick at the Library of Congress on the origins of ring-around-the-rosie. It’s more modern than I expected.
Fiona Harvey on Colossal Biosciences trying to de-extinct the dodo. This is the company that’s also trying to bring back the woolly mammoth and that clearly took the wrong message away from Jurassic Park.
Bertrand Delacretaz on the web platform being back. “We strongly believe in making maximum use of the Web Platform for our current and future developments, and in being frugal with anything that we put on top of it.” Yes.
Jason Wang’s videos showing exoplanets orbiting their stars. That first one! (HR 8799.) Wow!
Ewen Callaway on a study showing that microbiomes become similar among cohabitants over time. Which could have interesting ramifications.
Amelia Pollard on the intriguing architecture of the Vancouver House apartment tower. I would not live in that tower. Whew.
Rach Smith on a recommendation from Steven Pressfield: “Start whatever you’re writing with ‘this is what a bad version of this idea looks like:’, or something similar to free yourself from thinking that whatever you write needs to be good.” I like that a lot.
Felt map showing the number of times each U.S. state appears in an NYT crossword. No idea why Utah and Ohio are so popular.
Oliver Burkemann on how to forget what you read. I like that idea, of forgetting as a filter. (I probably like it especially because I never take notes anymore.)
Andy Bell on speed for developers vs. users. Yep.
Lincoln Michel on qualities of fairy tales. This is good and makes me want to write some fairy tales with these qualities.
Animation Obsessive on how to paint like Hayao Miyazaki.
Tyler Johnson on soulcraft at BYU. I liked this, and also quite liked Laura Miller’s watercolor illustrations for the piece.
Information Is Beautiful on the most successful Hollywood movies of all time, including some new ways of looking at the data.
New artwork: When Our Heavenly Parents We Meet IV. The colors in my art normally don’t represent skin color (to try to be more inclusive), but I wanted to do something special for Black History Month.
New artwork: Harrowed up No More, continuing the Alma the Younger thread.
New artwork: God Sent His Holy Angel.
I heard about Exercism’s 12in23 challenge and while I don’t care much about doing the official challenge, I do like the idea of learning more programming languages this year. (And every year, for that matter.)
As boring backstory, here’s a quick list of languages I’ve already written projects in and which therefore won’t be eligible. In very rough chronological order: BASIC (BASICA, GW-BASIC, QBasic), Pascal, C, C++, ASP.NET, VB.NET, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Objective-C, MSP430 assembly, Java, GLSL, Go, and Rust. We’re also starting to use TypeScript at work, so I’m going to leave it out.
The languages I want to learn this year, in no particular order: Elixir, Zig, Haskell, Lisp, Clojure, Unison, COBOL, FORTRAN, WebAssembly text format, OCaml, Nim, 6502 assembly, Scala, and D. This list is subject to change.
I’ve read about some of these, and several years ago I taught some short intros on Haskell and Lisp for coworkers (which just entailed walking through the basic features of each language, nothing fancy), but I haven’t written any actual projects in any of them. That’s going to be my main focus this time, by the way: writing something real in each language. Probably a parser. We’ll see. (I also haven’t decided whether I’ll do the same project in each language.) And I’ll be blogging about each language as I learn it.
First up: Elixir. Several years ago I read a little bit about Erlang and the BEAM, and I’ve looked at the Elixir intro page two or three times, but I haven’t really read anything in detail. I know that Phoenix is a web framework, and PETAL is the new LAMP (in some circles, anyway), and LiveView is apparently amazing, but that’s about it. Here we go!
(I’m going to use the #12in23 tag for these posts, by the way, so that I don’t have to think of a new tag name.)
Links #62
@elsif’s Genuary 9 generative art piece. Love the painterly feel of this.
Ian Sample on scientists steering lightning bolts with lasers for the first time. A sentence I never thought I’d write.
Jason Kottke with a video of a drone diving the full height of the Burj Khalifa. Whew.
The Book Cover Review, where they review book covers. I love book covers.
Chris Coyier on scalable CSS. I’ll mention here that I don’t really like Tailwind. Used it at a job and while I get the appeal, it takes away the joy of CSS for me.
Michelle Barker on a couple downsides of using a CSS framework like Tailwind. Yep.
Autogram on design systems and AI.
Scott Alexander on the ethics of eating insects. Food for thought. (Har, har.) Did I ever mention the time I bought waxworms and ate them? Looks like I blogged my plan to buy them back in 2018 but forgot to post about it afterwards. Eating one live was traumatizing and felt like a car accident in my mouth. I froze and then fried the rest and ate them in tacos and they were surprisingly good!
Bill Ferris on how to blurb someone’s book. Ha.
Gluon, a new framework for creating desktop apps from websites (like Electron or Tauri) using normal system-installed browsers, for a much smaller footprint. Intriguing.
Jim Nielsen on the anti-capitalist web. Yes, yes, yes. That’s probably one of the main reasons I love the web, too, now that I think about it.
Esther Hi‘ilani Candari’s ARTbook project, an art companion to the 2024 Book of Mormon Come Follow Me curriculum, aimed to be more diverse and inclusive. This is great.
Jeremy Keith on three attributes for better web forms. I didn’t know a lot of this!
Jessie Inchauspé on how the order we eat food actually matters. This changed my life, in the sense that it was a notable revision to my mental model that’s going to affect how I eat going forward.
Robb Owen on hand-thrown frontends (as opposed to assembling Lego bricks). I like this.
bsandro made a monochrome terminal for an e-ink monitor. Mmm. I really hope that larger e-ink displays with fast refresh rates become an affordable thing in the future.
Mirza Silajdzic on how Wi-Fi routers can be used to produce 3D images of humans. Fascinating and a little creepy.
Daniel Sims on gravity batteries in abandoned mines. This sounds really cool, actually.
git-sim lets you pre-visualize Git operations, which could come in handy.
The misleading St. Louis Fed graph. (And oh how I wish the U.S. would take a big chunk of its military spending and put it towards something more humane.)
Gideon Burton about children leaving the faith. A really good article. This is something I think about a lot, having children of my own and also seeing siblings and cousins leave.
Steven Garrity on efficiency over performance. Yes, agreed.
Blenderheads, a documentary about the people making Blender. Cool.
TBRCon2023, a virtual sci-fi/fantasy/horror convention. I was surprised by how many well-known authors they had. I’ve only watched parts of a few panels (video is not my thing and I struggle to make time for it), but what I saw was great.
JinjaX, a way to do Jinja includes via component instead of extension. Cool.
Kellan Elliott-McCrea on complexity in software. Yup.
Deena Theresa on a newly discovered anti-aging gene that apparently rewinds heart age by ten years. Hopefully this ends up being usable (and safe) for humans.
Haley Nahman on the contagious visual blandness of Netflix.
Becky Ferreira on a liquid metal robot that can escape a cage. It’s slower and clunkier than you might expect, but still fascinating.
Jason Kottke on sunburn photographic printing. Disturbing yet fascinating.
Chronophoto, a web game where you try to guess what year each photo was taken.
Tom Critchlow on the magic of small databases.
eBoy’s TiliX reference, a howto on drawing isometric pixel art.
Meta’s Text-To-4D dynamic scene generation paper. What is this new devilry.
widget.json, “a file format designed to push content from the web to your home screen.”
Joe Miller’s Screens, Research and Hypertext book. A fascinating exploration of hypertext and the web.
Chris Lattner’s introduction to LLVM, in the Architecture of Open Source Applications.
Robin Rendle on hypertext, which led me to the next link.
Kicks Condor interviews Nadia Asparouhova. Quoted in the Robin Rendle piece, this bit stood out to me: “Someone (I think Eugene Wei?) once tweeted that all Twitter accounts eventually sound like fortune cookies. I don’t want to become a fortune cookie. So I like things like newsletters, and my notes page, which are still discoverable and semi-public, but aren’t subject to short feedback loops. I also removed comments on my blog for the same reason, and I never look at my site analytics.” Also this: “The problem with likes is it naturally draws your eye towards the most-liked stuff, instead of deciding for yourself what’s most interesting. It almost feels like I’d be taking agency away from the reader by doing that.” This is one of the several reasons why I much prefer posting here.
Just got the framed prints back from the framer, and they’ve turned out lovely:
For those interested in collecting, here’s what we’ll have at the show:
- 1/1 signed single edition 12×12″ prints (with frame, they’re 13.5×13.5″), for $199 each
- Smaller 6×6″ prints of selected pieces, for $12 each
(The perspective here makes the foreground prints look weird. They’re not stretched in real life.)
The reason I’ve decided to make the larger prints single editions, by the way, is to try to make them more like originals. (They’re digital prints.) Hopefully being one of a kind makes them a little more special. This will be the only time these pieces will ever get printed larger than 6×6″!
Last but not least, the show’s opening reception will be this Friday from 6:00–9:00 pm at Writ & Vision.
Recent nonfiction reads
- The Rules We Break, by Eric Zimmerman. A fun exploration into game design that got me itching to design some games. The last third was less interesting to me because of what I wanted out of the book (it felt more geared toward professional game designers in some ways). I did, however, appreciate the parts on the problems with gamification and the ethics of game design.
- The Perfectionists, by Simon Winchester. A history of precision. So, so fascinating, throughout pretty much the whole book. Loved it. It covers the making of cars, photography, jet engines, GPS, the Hubble, and more. Highly recommended.
Recent fiction reads
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. Well written and immersive. I almost quit about halfway through when a flashback reminded me of some recent tragedy, but I’m glad I returned and finished it. Really liked the game development parts. Looking forward to reading The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry.
- The Lord of Stariel, by A. J. Lancaster. I liked it (the twist mid-book was nice) but I’m not planning to continue the series. The author’s content warning page is a great idea, though — I wish more authors did that.
- Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I don’t know how time slipped by like this, but it had been two years somehow since I last read a Vorkosigan book. (I’ve been trying to read at least one a year, spacing them out so that I don’t run out too quickly. I’m in the middle of the series now.) I liked this one a lot. Looking forward to seeing phase 2 of Miles’s career.