Two new pieces:
Together Forever II. This one came out of losing my father. (That said, it isn’t actually a depiction of my own family — my parents were divorced and I have more siblings than this.)
Abide with Me II. This has felt applicable to me a decent number of times these past few months.
Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker is finally available as an ebook! (On the Kindle store, anyway. I haven’t checked other places.)
Not much going on here lately because I’ve had a fairly bad flareup of back pain since early Thanksgiving week.
(This is from my grade 2 spondylolisthesis at L5-S1, which I’ve had for nineish years now. Every once in a while I move wrong and get a flareup. The more flared up it is, the more back pain — mostly lower but often upper too — and the harder it gets to walk. When it’s really bad I’m hobbling around like a ninety year old.)
Lots of lying in bed on a heating pad trying to recover and to avoid flaring things up further. Lots of reading, but not much else outside of work. I’ve got a handful of projects in progress, though, that I’m hoping to get to a presentable state before long.
In the Image of Our Heavenly Parents: A Couple’s Guide to Creating a More Divine Marriage, released today, edited by McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding, with illustrations by yours truly.
New artwork: On These Two Commandments.
Lin Kayser on Hyperganic’s 3D-printed rocket engine using an algorithmically generated model. So cool.
Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens, a book-in-progress about keyboards. Looks interesting!
Leah Rodriguez on NASA sending a person of color and a woman to the moon as part of the Artemis program. This is admittedly from back in April 2021 but I hadn’t seen it till now.
Relativity on how they 3D print rockets. I didn’t realize 3D printing rockets was a thing. Wow.
Miriam Suzanne on how our tools might be holding us back, in respect to CSS.
Paul Stamatiou on product quality. Some interesting thoughts.
Blender Conference 2022 video playlist. Putting this here to remind myself to go watch these. I really struggle to make time to watch videos, though.
Christopher W. Jones on the earliest complete sentence in written Canaanite. “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”
Chris Randall with a video of a Brocken Spectre. Whoa. That’s just…whoa.
A lyrebird impersonating an evacuation notice in Sydney.
The United Nations on the world reaching 8 billion people last week.
The Bledwel Test, a catalog of movies mentioning menstruation. A fairly short list.
The Artemis 1 rocket launch. It still blows my mind that we can successfully launch rockets into space.
Mandy Brown on time and rest. Yes.
UNSW Face Test. I got 69% (31/40 on the memory, 52/80 on the sorting). It’s surprisingly hard.
Ear2Face, which can take a photo of just an ear and create a photo of what the face looks like straight on. It’s nowhere near perfect but still startling how well it does.
Andy Matuschak on doing-centric explanatory mediums. If I recall correctly, Figma’s tutorials are all like this. It’s great.
ByteOverlord’s port of Quake to the Apple Watch. Wow.
Harry Vangberg’s Foreign Dispatch, a project to take ideas from code editors and apply them to writing in foreign languages. Cool.
Ethan Hawke’s TED talk on giving yourself permission to be creative.
NASA’s list of citizen science projects. Quite a few. Reminds me I need to read Mary Ellen Hannibal’s Citizen Scientist book.
David Heinemeier Hansson on the bubble popping for unprofitable software companies. I think the current model (unprofitability + VC funding) is completely bonkers. Also not a huge fan of growth capitalism, where you have to grow just to survive. This has been on my mind a lot lately.
Howard W. French on coastal west Africa over the next century. “By 2100, the Lagos-Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people.” Fascinating.
Christopher Ekeroth on little languages — DSLs — being the future of programming. I like this a lot. It’s a space I’ve thought about in the past, and this has nudged me back into thinking about it some more. (Little languages for generative art, text processing, web apps, etc.)
Roy Tang on word people and web people. I’m very much a word person, which is probably why I struggle to watch videos as mentioned above. Also very much a web person.
David Nield on SuperGPS, which apparently can pinpoint location to within four inches. Which would be much more exciting if we didn’t live in a world run by surveillance capitalists.
Chris Young on a new hybrid EV battery that can recharge in 72 seconds. Can’t wait till electric minivans come down in price enough that I can justify getting one.
Gabriella Gonzalez on the end of history for programming. Some interesting thoughts here. I’m not far enough into the functional programming mindset for this to resonate, though.
Jim Nielsen on natural language inputs. Love this. I’ve done a little of this on some personal apps but want to do more.
Matt Welsh with a cautionary tale about using Rust at a startup. While I do like Rust, this take makes sense to me.
Nat Friedman is hiring a tech lead to help solve an archaeological puzzle. Mildly gimmicky but still fascinating. I wonder what it is.
John Scalzi on weaving the artisan web by blogging. I look forward to more people blogging post-Twitter. I love blogs so much.
Thai Wordle. I already know I would not be very good at this.
Spline, a browser-based collaborative 3D modeling app. I remember hearing about this a while ago (before it launched, I think), and it’s nice to see how far it’s come.
Matt Webb posted about a book blogging thing from days of yore, and I figured I’d have a go at answering it.
How many books do you own?
Somewhere around 1,500 physical books and 3,200 ebooks. I haven’t counted recently.
What is the last book you bought?
The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen. (Purchased five hours ago.)
What is the last book you read?
Rob Wilkins’ biography of Terry Pratchett. (Which I’ll talk about in my next recent reads post.)
What are five books that mean a lot to you?
This question was hard, not only because there are a lot of books but also because my brain is completely awful at retrieving things this way. There is no index on those columns. And what does “mean” mean, anyway? But here’s the best I can do right now:
I won’t tag anyone, but if you do this on your blog, send me a link!
New artwork: Before the World Was VII. Exploring the idea of using semicircles to represent Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father. (The other ways I’ve tried so far include interlocking circles, yin/yang shapes, whole circles, triangles, and circle-and-triangle figures.)
Grief hit a little bit harder the past few weeks and made reading more difficult.
New story: Bag Field. About twenty pages long, fantasy.
I started writing this story in March 2021 but didn’t get very far. Picked it up again at the end of August and here we are. Ten minutes of writing a day is still working well, by the way, especially when I look back at the year — six stories finished, roughly 90 pages together. Much better than not finishing anything. (That said, I do hope to spend more time on writing going forward.)