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Alexandre Prokoudine on 2023 in preview for Libre Arts. Looking forward to Metal support in Blender.

The MuseScore 4.0 announcement video. When I used MuseScore recently for the hymn prints, I didn’t realize it was a new version and had completely forgotten what the old one was like. 4.0 is so much better. Wow.

Tantacrul with an in-depth video on how they made MuseScore 4. This was great, loved it. I wish there were videos like this more often for open source projects. (Maybe there are and I just haven’t seen them.) The new instruments and playback quality are incredible and have me itching to get back into composing, now that I can export audio that will actually sound good.

Tantacrul on designing Leland, MuseScore’s music font. Loved this. Especially liked learning about SCORE.

Oktophonie on engraving changes in MuseScore 4.0. A lot of this is covered by the video, but I still really enjoyed reading through it. Mmm. (Very impressed by the engraving quality in 4.0, too.)

SMuFL, the Standard Music Font Layout. Bookmarking this here in case I ever end up getting into type design for real and want to design my own music notation font.

BlenderBIM, a BIM plugin for Blender. I have no need for this but I wish I did! (Alternate timeline.)

The Visual Dome, AI art from a semi-consistent secondary world. Freaky but fascinating.

Andy Matuschak on cultivating depth and stillness in research. This resonated — both the part about feeling the need to release work frequently and the part about social media making it hard to think slow thoughts and read books. (Some of that might be more my takeaway than things he actually says, by the way.)

David Heinemeier Hansson on why 37signals is largely leaving the cloud for their own servers. Bravo. Decentralization is a good thing, and AWS’s monopoly is a bit worrisome for the future of the internet.

Zach Leatherman on the JavaScript community. I hadn’t seen that only 3% of sites use React and a staggering 77% still use jQuery. Wow. While I do use React at work, I too have felt the disconnect (as is probably clear from some of these link posts) and have often feel at odds with the direction of contemporary frontend engineering. More JavaScript isn’t the answer, at least for me. (Which I say in spite of really liking JS. It’s my favorite language to write code in at the moment.)

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Now that it’s been a bit longer (today marks four months since we found my dad’s body), a few more observations and thoughts, for anthropological interest:

• We’re fairly certain he died the day he disappeared (the 13th), but the official date is the 16th, the day we found him. Turns out the medical examiner’s office here doesn’t usually do time-of-death estimations as part of autopsies. (Does it matter? No, not really. The outcome was the same either way, and in the end it’s just a number that washes farther out into the past with each new day.)
• For a couple months I was waiting for the medical examiner to call and let me know the autopsy was finished. Turns out they were never going to call — I’d been misinformed. Luckily I happened to call them a few days after they finished the report, so we weren’t waiting excessively long for the cause of death.
• Speaking of which, we got the official cause of death from the mortuary on November 18, two months post mortem. The final death certificates came a few days later. We can order a copy of the full autopsy report from the medical examiner’s office, which I’ve been meaning to do but haven’t gotten round to yet.
• When the sad parts hit, I take comfort in consciously acknowledging that the mourning and the grief, however heavy, are a natural, necessary part of this process. They’re supposed to be here. I don’t particularly like being sad (especially in public!), but I also don’t want my dad’s death to mean so little to me that I no longer feel anything.
• To that point, there have been fewer sad parts lately. I honestly don’t know if that’s because I’m slowly healing or if it’s just because my memory is a colander. Probably a mix of both. I occasionally worry that maybe I didn’t love my dad enough and that I should be more sad than I am.
• My brain often tells me that my dad didn’t love me as much because I have almost no interest in business or sports, his two prime passions in life. I know this probably isn’t actually true, and that interest alignment isn’t on the same axis as parental love. I never thought about this when he was alive.
• The searching-in-the-canyon dreams stopped a while ago, thankfully. I’ve had a couple dreams where I see him randomly and go up to him and say something like, “You’re dead! What are you doing here?!”, but my dreams are also notoriously meaningless and I know it’s not actually him, just my brain doing its usual regurgitation thing.
• I haven’t felt his presence at all. No beyond-the-veil anything.
• I’m glad most of my children knew my dad in person. Also a bit sad that my youngest won’t have any real memories of him. There’s enough photo and video footage to make up for it a little bit, maybe, but it’s not the same.
• It took a few months before I finally threw away the bag of clothes my dad was wearing when he died. It was marked with a biohazard symbol and smelled of death, and I was too unsettled to ever open it. None of my siblings wanted it, either.
• His car is still in my driveway, a daily reminder along with the canyon (which I still can’t not see every time I’m outside).
• My doctor (whose sister took her life) said that immediate connections are statistically at a higher risk of suicide. I’m not at any risk myself, but I do worry more about other family members dominoing.
• It all still feels surreal and distant, like we’re just between visits and any day now he’ll call me or show up at our door with more cookies. There have been a couple times, too, where my brain is momentarily convinced that he’s somehow still alive, that he pulled off an impossible disappearing act and is living a new life in New Zealand or Florida or something. The illusion never lasts long, thankfully.
• At the very lowest points, I’ve felt that he abandoned us (his children). That he didn’t love us enough to stay. That’s rare, though. And I know it’s not true and that the depression was a parasite driving his brain, and who would expect a parasite to care about those left behind?
• I’ve slowly been handling the administrative tasks. Opened an estate account. (At the bank, by the way, I learned that I had to have an EIN to open the account. Miraculously I was able to create one on the IRS site in a mere five or six minutes on my phone.) Closed other accounts. I occasionally check his email, though it’s so full of spam now that it’s pretty demoralizing.
• Probate takes longer than I thought. Reading a summary of something is so much faster than living through it subjectively!
• I was able to design the headstone myself, which was a relief since I haven’t exactly been inspired by most of the headstone typography I’ve seen. (So much extra tracking, and the typefaces usually aren’t great either.) It currently takes over a year for the monument company to fulfill orders. A bit longer than expected.
• Given his age, my dad would most likely have died sometime in the next twenty years of natural causes. The fact of his absence currently doesn’t hurt as much as the awfulness of his method. I don’t know what it would feel like if he’d died of cancer or a heart attack instead.
• I frequently think about how some — older people, primarily — have loss upon loss upon loss carved out of their souls. Parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends. So many goodbyes, so many layers of pain. Whew.
• A few compatriots in suffering have shared their own stories of grieving and loss with me, and yet it doesn’t feel like an added burden at all.
• When people ask how I’m doing, I still have no idea how to answer. (Having a two-month flareup of bad back pain hasn’t made it any easier.) I don’t fault the question, though. Someday I’ll figure out how to answer it again. In the meantime, apologies to those of you who’ve asked and have had to endure the awkwardness!
• Though it might not sound like it given all of the above, I do feel like life is generally back to normal — yes, it’s overcast with occasional rain, but by and large I’m able to work and to be a husband and a father and to be an approximation of a normal, functioning member of society. (I can’t stop thinking, by the way, how infinitely harder this would all be if it had been my wife or one of my children.)

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New artwork: No Tongue Can Speak.

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Vox on how Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse shifted the style of animated films. Into the Spider-Verse was probably my favorite superhero movie — live action doesn’t fit the genre nearly as well, at least for me.

Nicholas Rougeux on the making of his edition of The Four Books of Architecture. Loved this.

Luca on one way to do generative art landscapes. I like that it’s a 2D technique that makes things look 3D. (Which I guess could technically apply to all 3D content on screens. Ha.)

Matthias Ott on transient frontend frameworks. Yep. For personal projects, I find myself occasionally wishing there was a platform-native way to build reactive UI. I haven’t yet thought through what that would look like, though.

Jack Evoniuk on how the Atari 2600 game Pitfall generated its world. This was great. A single byte!

Jim Nielsen on LCH color space in CSS. I’m convinced too.

Damir Yalalov on Microsoft’s new VALL-E text-to-speech model. Only three seconds of training data needed, apparently. We are fully in the “be skeptical of the provenance of anything you see or hear” phase.

Steve Krouse’s Val Town project, a website for writing, running, and deploying scripts. Intriguing.

Brad Woods’ explainer on 3D in CSS.

Clive Thompson on the power of indulging your weird, offbeat obsessions. This was great.

Josh Comeau on clever code considered harmful. Yes. I love clever code (within reasonable limits), but I fully agree here. It’s sometimes hard when there are cultural currents flowing towards clever, but swimming the other way seems very much worth it.

Robert van Embricqs’ flow wall desk. Very cool.

Ben Abbott on the Great Salt Lake report. I had no idea. I hope things get under control.

Benjamin Dean Taylor on five Latter-day Saint video game soundtrack composers. A world I haven’t really been aware of!

Libre Arts, an online magazine for people who use free artmaking apps (like Blender, MuseScore, Krita, etc.).

Simon Thalmann on using ChatGPT to write surreal prose poems. I really liked these and am thinking about writing some myself (though without AI helping).

Colin Devroe on blogging being alive and well. Yes!

The 2022 State of JS report is up. (Given that I don’t think chasing trends is a great idea, I’m not sure why I’m linking to this. Anthropological interest, I guess. Ha.)

Gabriele Corno with a video of a white moose in Sweden. Wow.

3D VR Zelda. Ooh! Very cool, at least for those who grew up on the first Zelda game.

Shiftall’s mutalk, a muzzle for VR. Um.

Mike Crittenden on ChatGPT uses for lazy parents. Ha.

Keith Houston on what to call chapter summaries. That’s what I’ve called them.

Glen Nelson on The Cultural Hall podcast about trends in Latter-day Saint arts. His fifth trend certainly applies to me.

The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, sponsored by the BYU Maxwell Institute (though run separately). Love this. Had no idea it existed until recently.

Saahil Desai on the design of pizza delivery boxes.

Rachel Neumeier on positive fantasy. Also see her other post about it. I like this. (I also like other kinds of fantasy, but it’s nice to see the emphasis on kindness.)

Mike Wakerly on how your tech stack is not the product. Yep.

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Another new project. I wanted to do something with the words of the scriptures and came up with this style, where it’s intended to be more decorative/evocative (so legibility isn’t at the top of the priority list). It’s also a fun way to play with textures in ways that I don’t always get to with my other art.

1 Nephi 3

Luke 2

Mosiah 2

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Me being me, I went ahead and explored what abstract hymn prints might look like.

I Stand All Amazed

In Humility, Our Savior

Press Forward, Saints

The Spirit of God

I also played around with making one in Blender via depth maps:

High on the Mountain Top

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A new experimental nerdy thing, for people who like hymns, sheet music, and textures:

How I make these hymn prints (as I’m calling them):

• Typeset the first phrase (or so) in MuseScore using the Bravura font, with the spacing trimmed to within an inch of its life
• Play it out loud to make sure I entered it right (cough) and export an SVG
• Drag the SVG into a frame in Figma and use the SkewDat plugin to skew it -4°, center it, then export a 4,000px-wide PNG
• Use ImageMagick to do some erosion and dilation (to simulate age and ink spread): convert input.png -morphology erode disk:18 -morphology dilate disk:16 output.png
• Texture the image in Affinity Photo and export the PNG
• Upscale with Real-ESRGAN to 12,000px-wide
• Downscale a little in Affinity Photo, add 8% monochrome noise, and export the final PNG

I’m still figuring out how I want to do these (full bleed or not, barlines, clefs and key signatures or not, etc.). Also thinking about possibly doing some abstract versions as well, to avoid all these music typesetting issues entirely.

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Trying to catch up on these, so this batch will be long.

Codon, a high-performance Python compiler.

Lottie Limb on France banning short-haul domestic flights in favor of train travel. Bravo.

Ben Darfler on his analog productivity system. I’ve nostalgically wanted to start using something analog again, but it never sticks.

Christian Hammond on peer programming with ChatGPT. Crazy.

Helen Warrell on MI6’s top female spies.

Inkbase, programmable ink from Ink & Switch (who are doing some great research).

Crosscut, another intriguing project from Ink & Switch.

Cuttle, an interesting web-based design tool for digital cutting machines like laser cutters.

Chris Coyier on Arc (the new browser). After reading this I tried Arc (I wouldn’t say I’m super happy with Firefox) but alas, my brain really does not like tabs on the side.

RFE/RL with a map showing countries that have been renamed in recent years. I didn’t know about Eswatini or Cabo Verde.

International Intrigue, a global affairs newsletter I’ve recently subscribed to and quite like.

Mark Harris on Saudi Arabia’s new megacity, The Line.

Avid Halaby on the Twitter whistleblower report. Some of these things are…not great (from a technical perspective).

One-dimensional Mario. Love this, even though it’s barely playable.

The 2022 State of CSS survey results.

Peter Rogers on a new class of antidepressant that works in two hours. Great news. I wish my dad had stuck around long enough for us to see if it helped him.

A new gold nanocoating prevents glasses from fogging up.

Samuel Arbesman on emergent microcosms. (I linked to a Twitter thread he wrote earlier; this is a blog post with more details.)

Matt Webb on transcribing ourselves 24/7. Interesting thoughts as alwayas.

Erik Spiekermann and Google have released a new, free edition of his Stop Stealing Sheep typography book.

Kottke on Bill Tavis’s Mandelbrot set in the style of a vintage map. Mmm. I love vintage maps, and this is delightful.

Supernumerary rainbow on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Rupendra Brahambhatt on lab-grown 3D-printed wood. Ooh.

BBC has a new radio play version of The Dark Is Rising. (Which I still haven’t reread.)

Alex Russell on the browser performance baseline for 2023. Still pretty low. We’re not doing a great job at serving users on slower devices.

Tom on the topologist’s world map he made. Cool.

David Bauer’s You Don’t Know Africa games. Love this.

Paul Fairie with 2022’s Headline of the Year nominees. Many of these are great.

Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff several times for a stunt. Crazy.

Blink, an iOS terminal app I wasn’t aware of. Nice.

Matthew Guay on notes apps helping us forget. Yep. I hardly ever go back to review notes.

Cat Valente on how capitalism always ruins the internet.

Klim’s Epicene Text is a lovely text font.

Stephanie Eccles’ 2022 12 Days of Web Dev. Nice coverage of new features.

Jackson Huff’s Clipboard, a terminal-based clipboard tool.

Fernando Borretti on tools for thought. I’ve largely reached the same conclusion with my own tools (separate tools for separate tasks), though I wasn’t as conscious of what I was doing.

Mandy Brown on writing being hard and that being okay. Yes, yes, yes.

Rach Smith on blogging. After a long period where I worried too much about what other people think, I feel like I’m finally getting past that — finally comfortable with the idea that things on here aren’t going to be perfect, and it’s more important to publish.

Spinda on using ChatGPT as a Redux reducer. Oh goodness.

Ben Kuhn on writing for the internet. Several good ideas here.

Jeff Kaufman on blogging thresholds. Yes, agreed.

Jason Kottke on 36 things he learned in 2022.

Steve Nadis on some MIT research where they had programmers do an MRI while coding.

Justin Alvey and Karen X. Cheng on using Stable Diffusion to create architecture photos from dollhouse furniture. Very cool.

Carson Katri’s Dream Textures, a Blender add-on for creating textures with AI.

Tesseract.js, a pure-JS implementation of the Tesseract OCR engine.

EasyBPY is a more ergonomic wrapped library for Blender’s Python API. Awesome. This is much better.

Riley Cran on all the custom old-looking fonts Lettermatic made for their game Pentiment. Mmm.

Stanko on making a rope with SVG and JavaScript. Nice.

Monique Judge on bringing back personal blogging. If you can’t tell, I’m always here for posts about blogging.

Dave Rupert on prototyping. “The composting of failures produces rich and fertile soil.” Yes.

Dylan Black taught ChatGPT to invent a language. Whoa. This is mind-blowing.

Devine Lu Linvega on weathering software winter. As usual, this makes me want to make small VMs.

Maciej Cegłowski on why we shouldn’t send humans to Mars. Color me convinced.

Michael Irving on the apparent discovery of the first virovore, organisms that eat viruses.

Jillian Hess on twelve ways to use a diary.

Nathan J. Robinson on living in the age of BS. Good to be conscious of.

Alan Jacobs on AI. “If you’re trying to get through your work as quickly as you can, then maybe you should see if you can find a different line of work.”

Kate Rose Morley with a nice tree view using HTML and CSS. Thinking about using this for descendancy charts.

Kent Hendricks on 52 things he learned in 2022. “Compared to irritant-induced crying (e.g. caused by onions), the tears you cry when you’re sad contain 24% more protein, which means they roll down your face more slowly and are more likely to be noticed by others, who, in turn, can comfort you.”

The hands of Maarten Baas’ Schiphol clock are drawn on in real time. Whew!

Vadim Makeev on a skewed highlight effect in CSS. Quite nice.

Jenny on work. “Your job won’t love you back, no matter what love you give it. But the people you work with will.” Yep.

Sam Hughes on creating new people (looking forward to reading Valuable Humans in Transit).

Rodrigo Copetti’s site on the architecture of old game consoles. Looking forward to reading some of these.

Matthias Ott on it being the year of the personal website.

Hillel Wayne on microfeatures he’d like to see in more programming languages.

Joseph Homer Saleh with a statistical reliability analysis for Roman emperors. Intriguing!

David L. Chandler on some new research that purports to show why Roman concrete was so durable. Quicklime, it appears.

Personal Sites, a directory of personal websites.

Tech Jobs for Good, a nice site for highlighting mission-driven jobs. (I’m not looking for a job right now, but when that day comes, I’ll be checking here.)

William Hales on CGI. Not graphics — cgi-bin. Ah, the good ol’ days. This has really got me thinking about simpler and easier ways to get web stuff up and running.

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My favorite reads last year, in the order I read them (and I won’t go into detail on these because I’ve already written about them in earlier posts):

Nonfiction

• The Golden Thread, by Kassia St. Clair
• The Cubans, by Anthony DePalma
• The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber & David Wengrow
• Stretching the Heavens, by Terryl L. Givens
• This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein
• The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf
• The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
• The Plantagenets, by Dan Jones
• How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith
• Human Errors, by Nathan H. Lents
• I Wish I’d Been There, edited by Byron Hollinshead
• Extra Life, by Steven Johnson

Fiction

• Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark
• Network Effect, by Martha Wells
• The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold
• Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor
• The Hands of the Emperor, by Victoria Goddard
• Babel, by R. F. Kuang
• Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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A reminder for my future self: when the making well runs dry, it’s good to spend some time on learning and studying. (Lately I’ve been feeling a little lost creatively, but I’ve started working through QGIS tutorials and reading up on Beziér curve algorithms and it seems to be helping. Thinking and journaling a lot also makes a difference.)

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