A few new pieces of art.
He Will Deliver Me, about David and Goliath:
Nevertheless II, another Gethsemane piece:
By Day and by Night, about the pillars of cloud and fire. I’d tried to do this piece multiple times in the past but it never clicked for me until I brought the pillars together at the center.
Jillian Hess on Robert Caro’s notes. I wish there were an ebook version of The Power Broker.
Cory Doctorow on how to leave dying social media platforms without ditching your friends.
Simon Willison on recommended software engineering practices. I like a lot of these.
Two-Minute Papers on Google’s Imagen Video. It’s a crazy new world we’re in.
Ben Rugg’s Stable Diffusion for Blender addon that takes a prompt and a scene and generates images.
Aleksandra Artamonovskaja on women working with generative art. Of the pieces shown, I think my favorites are Iskra Velitchkova’s, Aleksandra Jovanić’s, Anna Carreras’s, Helena Sarin’s, and Nadieh Bremer’s.
Kelly Turnbull on a fake bomb detector filled with dead ants. This delighted me.
Yoz Grahame on “table” in American vs. U.K. usage. Ha.
Bob Cesca on a visually stunning political ad. Loved this.
MadMaraca’s gorgeous voxel art. More on her site.
John Earnest’s Decker project, a contemporary re-imagining of HyperCard in some ways.
Robin Sloan with an epilogue on his Spring ’83 protocol experiment.
Matt Baer on building for the Tidbyt. Cool!
SolidPython, a Python library that compiles to OpenSCAD.
libfive, a library for solid modeling. Intriguing.
Ben Werd on blogging. Blogging gives me so much joy.
Simon Willison on what to blog about.
Keiran Paster on language models that can write prompts. Uncanny.
Vasilis van Gemert on how our web design tools are holding us back. I’ve experienced this as a frontend engineer implementing Figma designs. The current state of things is better than it was years ago, but there’s still a noticeable gap.
Claire L. Evans on the architect Christopher Alexander.
Everest Pipkin on building worlds in Roblox. Anthropologically fascinating.
GANcraft, a paper on using AI to render Minecraft worlds in higher-resolution 3D. Decent results, too!
Matt Webb on the Minecraft generation and voxel-based thinking. Food for thought here.
Jack Rusher’s list of classic HCI demos, in a lovely classic-Mac style.
Raph Levien on Minikin and open source text layout engines.
Melissa Wiederrecht’s gorgeous Sudfah generative art project. These are great.
Melissa Wiederrecht on her even more gorgeous Take Root piece.
Samuel Arbesman on emergent microcosms. Some fascinating projects here.
Bert Chan on Lenia, a continuous cellular automata project based on Conway’s Game of Life.
ALIEN, an artificial life simulation program. The video is especially breathtaking. Wow.
Alok Singh on what it’s like dissecting a cadaver.
Rafael Shimunov on the Eli Lilly fiasco on Twitter. That didn’t take long.
Rosa Astra on Twitter impersonation. Yes.
Lincoln Michel on trite physicality in fiction. Hear, hear. I’m guilty of this.
Rob Stenson’s ST2, a Blender addon that adds support for OpenType and variable fonts and makes good typography possible in Blender. Rob also made coldtype, which I linked to a while back.
Nicholas Rougeux’s Geometric Primes series. Love these! Especially the first two collections. Mmm.
Brent Simmons on life after Twitter. I feel a little lucky in that I’ve already been off Twitter most of the past few years.
World map on its side. Wow.
Blessed, an unofficial guide to the Rust ecosystem. (To make up for the standard library being small.)
Erika Koth Barrett’s interview with Jenna Carson about being the first Latter-day Saint chaplain in the U.S. federal prison system. Fascinating.
Max Böck on the IndieWeb for everyone.
Rach Smith on being tired of timelines. Agreed. I too miss the level of interaction I had back when I was fully on Twitter years ago, but interacting with people via RSS and email is gentler enough on my brain that it’s very much worth it in my mind.
A short followup to what I wrote last year about Press, my abandoned typesetting engine project: I’m now fully convinced that the web platform is where I want to do typesetting. It’s open, programmatic, and capable. Source files are plain text, easy to version control, and fairly future-proof. And even though it’s not WYSIWYG — at least not the way I’m using it — it’s much more comfortable for me as a working environment.
For non-book work (charts, some kinds of documents), I’ve found that browsers already support everything I need (like @page). That’s how I’ve done all my recent genealogy design work, and it’s how I’ll do any language charts I make going forward. And for things like books where browser support isn’t quite there yet, Paged.js works well (and will presumably be phased out once browser support gets better).
Not to mention how nice it is for both print and digital workflows (EPUB, web) to all use the same technologies. I also love that the web is cross-platform. Something I ran into when I was making charts with PlotDevice (which is Mac-only) was that people on Windows couldn’t modify the charts even when I gave them the source. That’s not a problem with the web.
I’ve even started using the web platform for less webby things like making wallpaper for my phone:
Here’s the HTML (the 375×812px size is the CSS resolution of my iPhone 12 Mini — RIP — and also keep in mind that this was for a one-off never to see the light of day, so I took the liberty of cutting a few corners):
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="background">
<svg id="darknoise" viewBox="0 0 375 812" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<filter id="noiseFilter">
<feTurbulence baseFrequency="0.5" numOctaves="8" />
</filter>
<rect width="100%" height="100%" filter="url(#noiseFilter)" />
</svg>
<svg id="lightnoise" viewBox="0 0 375 812" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<filter id="noiseFilter2">
<feTurbulence seed="485" baseFrequency="0.005" numOctaves="12" />
</filter>
<rect width="100%" height="100%" filter="url(#noiseFilter2)" />
</svg>
</div>
<div class="quote">Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.</div>
<div class="reference">Matthew 11:28</div>
</body>
</html>
The CSS (with the font purchased from FontShop):
* {
box-sizing: border-box;
font-family: Clifford Pro;
}
html {
height: 100%;
}
body {
color: #777;
font-size: 1.6rem;
margin: 0;
text-align: center;
}
.background {
background: radial-gradient(circle at 50% 90%, #222, #111);
bottom: 0;
left: 0;
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 0;
z-index: -1;
}
.background svg#darknoise {
bottom: 0;
filter: saturate(0);
left: 0;
mix-blend-mode: multiply;
opacity: 0.9;
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 0;
}
.background svg#lightnoise {
bottom: 0;
filter: saturate(0);
left: 0;
mix-blend-mode: soft-light;
opacity: 0.4;
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 0;
}
.quote {
line-height: 1.4;
margin: 25rem 1.5rem 0;
}
.reference {
color: hsl(0 40% 32%);
font-size: 1.3rem;
font-style: italic;
margin-top: 1rem;
}
I then used headless Chrome to export the PNG (Firefox would probably have worked as well, though I haven’t yet tested it for this):
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --headless --disable-gpu --screenshot --window-size=375x812 index.html
It’s not the world’s most amazing wallpaper or anything, but I’m still pleased that I was able to make something I’m reasonably happy with using technologies I love. (I could have also used WebGL shaders or Canvas. Lots of options!)
Here’s to the open web.
My ill-timed return to Twitter has ended. I’ve thought about moving to Mastodon (supporting the federated model and all), but honestly I’m content just blogging here, even if it means a smaller audience.
After linking to Felt not too long ago, I actually tried it out and goodness, it’s a delight. Easy to use, beautiful (I like the graphic design so much more than what Google Maps has), and the tools are great.
I made a family history map showing the towns where my Spanish and Cuban ancestors lived and shared it with my siblings:
Though I haven’t done these things in this particular map, being able to call out specific buildings and add text labels and custom polygons are all features that make Felt compelling to me. For example, I’m making another map showing where my dad’s family is from. I know my great-grandmother had a bakery on a certain street, but I don’t know exactly where it was on that street. Rather than choosing some arbitrary point along the street for a misleading pin, I’m able to mark the whole street with a custom polygon.
It feels like Google Docs for maps. Love it.
New artwork: Lamb of God.
David Wolpe on a Mondrian painting that’s been hanging upside down for 75 years. I feel like this is something that could easily happen to my art as well.
R. K. Duncan on SFF’s fatphobia. Something I hope to do better at.
Tyler Boswell’s September set of generative art. Love these.
Tyler Boswell on grouping styles in generative art. Good idea.
Aerographene, which seems too amazing to be real.
Oh My Git, a game for learning Git.
Matthias Ott on not having to like your work.
Simon Collison on building for the web. Hear, hear.
Manuel Matusovic on learning modern CSS. Keeping an eye on this.
Fontshare, free fonts from the Indian Type Foundry.
Kent Dodds on MPAs, SPAs, Remix, and more.
Felt, a web app for making maps.
Keith Peters on building a raytracer. Made me a bit nostalgic for the small raytracer I worked on for classes during my master’s.
Iain Anderson on Adobe and the Pantone licensing change. Sheesh, I really don’t like capitalism sometimes.
Cameron Owens on how surgeon drill bits work — specifically, how they avoid drilling into your brain after they get through the skull bone. Comforting!
Evan Prodromou on ending frequent flyer programs to help fix the climate. Or at least not destroy it as quickly.
Austin Kleon on 30-day challenges. This was good.
Dave Karpf on how Kevin Kelly’s one thousand true fans idea maybe isn’t so great. Agreed, things haven’t turned out the way we might have hoped.
New artwork: Their Work and Glory V. I wanted to do a warmer, more subtle version of TW&G IV with (I believe) better composition. The colors ended up pairing with New and Everlasting III and Peace Be unto Thy Soul.
Finally catching up on these almost a month later.
Diffusion Bee lets you install Stable Diffusion locally on an M1 Mac. Haven’t actually tried it yet, though.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss on software quality being systemic and not as dependent on individual performance. I think I agree.
Tom Warren on Adobe buying Figma. Dang it. It was nice while it lasted.
Walt Hickey on the percentage of Congress over the age of 70 over time. Whew.
The Center for Latter-day Saints has a new online magazine, The Season. I’ve been enjoying it so far.
Jonty Wareing on the Cyrillic multiocular “o” in Unicode 15. Ha.
Baldur Bjarnason on the danger of reasoning from first principles.
Jennifer Ouellette on fire ant rafts and the Cheerios effect.
Terence Eden on modern tech being a bit rubbish. I sort of agree but also think a lot of modern tech is amazing compared to what I grew up with in the 1990s.
Forecast Advisor. See who has the most accurate weather in your location.
Daniel Eckler on Stable Diffusion. Things are moving fast.
David Crawshaw on software he’s thankful for. A good practice.
James Stanley on FreeCAD vs. SolveSpace. I haven’t done anything with either (or CAD in general, really), but now I want to.
Klint Finley on the future of the command line. And a fair amount about Charm.
Warp, a new terminal written in Rust. I’ve been meaning to try this out to see if I like it more than Kitty.
Wikipedia on farang, the Thai word for foreigner. I didn’t realize it referred to the Franks (the tribe).
NASA’s DART mission hits asteroid. Cool!
Matteo Mazzarolo on named element IDs being available as JavaScript globals. I had no idea. Not sure if I’d ever use it, but cool.
Enryu on lookism in TikTok. Interesting.
Neale Van Felet on the design of Audio Hijack 4. Enjoyed this retro.
Infinite Canvas, a catalog of apps with infinite canvases (which make me happy).
Chuan on an interesting new syntax for writing SVG.
Kottke on ten hours of walking in NYC as a woman. From 2014 but either way, whew.
DreamFusion, text to 3D. Things are getting interesting.
Joey Camacho’s Raw & Rendered, daily 3D renders. Beautiful.
summarize.tech does AI-powered summaries of YouTube videos.
Nathan Raw’s Stable Diffusion morph videos.
Stable Diffusion Conceptualizer. A style library, kind of.
Daniel Eckler with a thread on AI art. And a second thread.
Felix Kreuk on textually guided audio generation. Intrigued to see what all of these AI tools mean for things like filmmaking, especially given another ten or twenty years of progress.
Theatre.js, motion design in the browser.
David Hoang’s arrows. Love those shadows!
Eliot Peper on writing being a tool for making new ideas.
Herbert Lui on writing as a way of thinking, in a similar vein.
Edward Slingerland on his method for writing nonfiction books.
James Stanley on alternative revolutions (CAD-wise).
CHARL-E Stable Diffusion package for Mac. Haven’t tried this one either.
Ben Myers on semantic selectors in CSS.
Jay Alammar’s illustrated Stable Diffusion, explaining how it works.
Andy Heriaud on how bad the Mexican week episode of The Great British Bake is. Wow.
DALL-E-Bot, diffusion meets robotics. Cool!
Kim Zarins on aphantasia and science fiction and fantasy.
Oliver Burkeman on how to get out of a rut, a different take on GTD next actions.
WebVM, a WebAssembly VM with networking.
Creating holograms with your phone. Old but intriguing. I need to try this.
Amanda Petrusich on Steve Keene, prolific painter.
Surma on transpiling JavaScript to C++ for WebAssembly. Agreed on it maybe not being the best take, but interesting nonetheless.
Massimo with a video of the Taipei 101 skyscraper’s damper during an earthquake. Whoa!
Q&A with Fiona Hill on Putin. Worthwhile.
Matthew Butterick’s legal investigation into GitHub Copilot.
The Give Up GitHub movement. I’ve been planning to move off it, still need to set aside some time for that. (Thinking of just hosting my code locally on my server.)
Manohar Vanga on fifteen ways to draw a line. I especially love the convex hull method. Planning to borrow that!
Manohar Vanga again, this time on generative overlay textures. Thinking about incorporating something like this into my art.
Léonie Watson on why we need CSS Speech. Hoping this happens!
Brad Frost on breaking up with CSS-in-JS.
Alix E. Harrow on writing and bodies. I think about this a lot in my own writing. I default to the Le Guin side but I’m trying to move more to the middle.
Jonn Elledge on London station names. Naming is hard.
Dan Hollick with an explainer on blending modes.
Bayt Al Fann with some beautiful examples of Arabic calligraphy. Love these.
Oliver Darkshire on small bookstores and capitalism. Agree, agree.
Martha Wells on getting unstuck with discovery writing. Good. I keep wishing I were an outliner.
Maggie Appleton on programming portals, her name for GUIs that bring up CLIs.
Pushing the Needle comparing the timelines for the space race vs. building a bike lane in Seattle.
Brad Heitmann on Mike Lee’s unsavory ties to Russia. Oh how I hope Lee gets voted out.