I’ve started adding short reviews to the reading log, to make the page a little more useful. Just the 2022 reads so far, but I plan to keep going back as far as I can.
Blog
I’m back on Twitter. We’ll see it sticks this time. I still see this blog as the main channel for what I do, though.
More new artwork: Though Your Sins Be as Scarlet II. I haven’t been happy with the original and wanted to rework it.
New artwork: Holiness to the Lord II. I wanted to make a new version of Between Heaven and Earth and this is what came out of it.
I Need Thee Every Hour II
I made this a couple weeks ago but haven’t posted about it here yet:
When we were going through my dad’s things, we found a framed version of the original piece that he’d hung up in his office. That version was more representational than my more recent work, though, so I decided to do a more abstract, minimalist version in memoriam.
Observations on grief
Some thoughts about my father’s death, in no particular order:
- The past three weeks have felt like years.
- Suicide is awful. That first late night especially, when we had no idea where he’d gone and all we had were the notes he left behind, the rain out in the darkness puncturing our hope, the spreading stain of fear in our hearts. I got maybe two hours of sleep that night.
- Depression: also awful. My dad struggled with it almost all his life. I ache as I think of all the pain he suffered along the way. In the end, the cumulative weight was too much for him to bear, and it crushed him. I wish we’d been able to figure out a way to help him so we could have avoided this.
- My belief that Dad is alive on the other side of the veil has been comforting. This is a long separation — till the end of my life, (which hopefully isn’t anytime soon) — but it’s not forever. Perspective helps.
- I’ve often felt like I’m wading through muddy waters. Occasionally the path clears up for a bit, but then it gets murky again.
- Another way of looking at the same thing: At the beginning I felt numb and listless and lost most of the time. Thankfully that’s largely gone away, but every once in a while it comes back for a little while.
- During the first couple weeks, I tried to read but could barely get through even a couple pages a day (compared to my usual average of around a hundred pages a day). Since then I’ve gradually been able to get my fiction reading back up to semi-normal levels, but I’m still struggling with nonfiction. It slides off my brain. I imagine this will change in the near future.
- Whenever I look at my front porch I’m reminded of my dad. During our Covid isolation, he would frequently drop cookies off on the porch and then stand back to chat with me from a distance. It happened often enough that we got sick of the cookies, but as an excuse to visit (not that we needed one) it worked well. I’m glad he stopped by as many times as he did.
- A few days ago I noticed that when I step out my back door and look north, I can see the canyon where we found my dad’s body. It’s right there, staring back at me. (In fact, with the foliage around my yard right now, it’s basically the only part of the mountain that’s visible.) Turns out that part of the mountain is also garishly visible whenever I’m driving north in our part of town, a constant reminder now of those awful days of searching, hoping he was somehow still alive but feeling increasingly certain that at the end of our search we would find a lifeless, discarded body. Forever will that canyon — and by extension the entire mountain — be haunted in my mind, a cradle of sorrow. Perhaps time will heal it. I’ve found myself wondering how much worse it must be for those whose loved ones kill themselves in the same house.
- It’s comforting to me to remember that losing a parent is something that billions upon billions of my fellow humans (including most of the older generation alive right now) have gone through. There is life after death, in several different ways.
- Most of the time I abstract my dad’s suicide away so that I can function. Being able to set the thought aside if it’s not a good time to cry has been very helpful. I went days without crying, then listened to his last few voicemails and sobbed on the floor for a long while (alarming my kids who hadn’t really ever seen me cry before and who thought I was faking it). Audio and video recordings are the hardest — stark reminders that this man who once was a breathing, moving, talking person is now a few pounds of ash buried in the ground (the part of him that’s still here on earth is, anyway), and that he’ll never say anything new to me or to anyone else.
- Beauty for ashes has new meaning to me now.
- In the wake of death, there’s been so much connection to other people, and that is a wonderful thing, even if people feel like they don’t know what to say. (And even if they say the wrong thing, which doesn’t really bother me.) I know not everyone has a large network of support, though, and that breaks my heart.
- I feel a mild amount of guilt for wanting my life to go back to normal (or at least as normal as possible given what’s happened).
- Seeing father/child relationships (including my own with my children) keeps reminding me that I no longer have a dad on this planet. Off he went, through a one-way portal to another world, leaving a gaping abyss in his absence. I skirt my way around that abyss most of the time, but every once in a while I can feel it looming nearby, a flash of cosmic horror. (That said, my faith really is a foundation that makes all of this bearable.)
- As I talk with others about the past few weeks, by the way, and also as I write this post, I wonder whether I’m overdramatizing any of this. Maybe. But I have to remind myself that this really is something truly horrible, something undeniably in the category of Really Bad Things that can happen.
- I’ve frequently had mildly traumatizing dreams that I’m back at the canyon trailhead still searching for my dad’s body. I wonder how long my brain will take to finish processing that.
- Designing the headstone and typesetting the funeral program was kind of fun, in a sad way.
- Now that I’m dealing with the administrative issues that come with being executor, I’ve found myself wishing my dad had left an overview document for me: a list of all his accounts, insurance policies, bills, passwords, etc. Instead I’ve had to piece it all together from emails and texts and snail mail and his wallet, and even then I still don’t know if I’m missing something crucial.
- After years of doing genealogy, I find it intriguing to be on this side of probate, with a father who died intestate like so many of my ancestors. I’m learning a lot.
- As far as I can tell, the last time I spoke with my dad was almost a month before he passed. There were nominal reasons why we didn’t talk after that — Covid, other sicknesses, a work trip to Chicago, life — but they all seem hollow now. I wish we’d had some kind of contact in the week before he left us, a goodbye even if I didn’t know it was one at the time.
- In spite of all the sorrow, I know that this too shall pass. In the end, death will have lost its sting and the grave its victory. I’m learning now for the first time, though, just how far off that end feels.
After nine months of issue blogging (posting issues of Prints), I’ve decided it’s time to return to stream blogging.
A quick retrospective: publishing issues was fine (the structure helped, for example), but for a personal blog I’m now less convinced that it’s the right fit. Looking forward to posting more freely and frequently.
My dad died this week. He went missing on Tuesday and we found his body in the mountains on Friday after three excruciatingly long days of searching.
It’s been awful, but in spite of the core-shaking pain and a whole lot of crying, I’ve felt at peace — even more than I was expecting. I am so, so grateful for Christ and his gospel, giving me hope that I will see my father again and that this is just a temporary separation. I’ve also been amazed to see such a massive outpouring of support and love from family and friends and complete strangers.
Over the last day or two I’ve felt I needed to make this new piece about my dad and all the people supporting him and my family on both sides of the veil. It’s called Taken Home:
Projects — Prints 2.9
A new art piece:
Process notes: I mocked it up in Figma and exported a PNG, imported that into Procreate and painted it, upscaled it, made a heightfield image from that, used Blender with the heightfield as a displacement map, and then in Affinity Photo composited it with the original painting and added textures.
I’m intrigued by the idea of using Blender to add 3D texture and (hopefully) make things look a little more like a real painting. A couple years ago I first experimented with this on my Within the Walls of Your Own Homes piece.
In rereading that post just now, apparently back then it took two hours to render the image in Blender. Whew. No wonder I didn’t continue down that path. If I remember correctly, I was compositing a bunch of different textures together directly in Blender before doing the displacement. This time round, making the heightfield beforehand using Procreate and Affinity Photo seems to have paid off: render time is a mere one to two minutes.
The material nodes in Blender are pretty simple — image texture for the color, image texture with the heightfield through a multiply node to the displacement input on the final shader node.
(Also, to be clear, I haven’t done a deep dive into whether this is the actual reason the render times are so much faster.)
Links — Prints 2.9
Tyler Cowen and Russ Roberts on reading. Enjoyed this. I almost always enjoy reading about reading.
Movemap, a map of the U.S. to help people decide which county to move to, based on selectable factors.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Dominion, the new book by Tom Holland. (No, not that Tom Holland.) Appears to be a somewhat unedited draft, and there are parts I don’t agree with, but I found it interesting. I liked Holland’s Rubicon. Looking forward to Dominion.
Bastian Rieck on which Neal Stephenson books to start with. Snow Crash is next for me. Cyberpunk doesn’t appeal to me all that much, but still looking forward to it.
Kara Manke on a new inhaled Covid therapeutic. Hopeful.
Simon Willison on Stable Diffusion.
Integrating Stable Diffusion into Photoshop. Wow.
Alberto Romero on Stable Diffusion.
Stepan Parunashvili on Lisp and parentheses. Gets at the underlying idea behind Lisp.
Wouter Groeneveld on cool things people do with their blogs, via Jim Nielsen.
Antonio Cao on a Figma plugin using Stable Diffusion. Crazy.
Adam Symington on creating river maps with Python.
Aaron Reed at NarraScope 2022 on five lessons from fifty years of text games.
Heydon Pickering on using flex-basis with clamp in CSS. Nice.
Tom Critchlow on generating agency through blogging.
The blue Fugate family. Had no idea this was a thing.
Maggie Appleton on folk interfaces.
Cliff Jerrison on water actually being blue.
Wu Peiyue on Zhemao, who wrote a whole bunch of fake Russian history on Wikipedia over a decade. Fascinating story.
Carlos Fenollosa on no longer self-hosting his email. I wish I could self-host mine but yeah, it doesn’t seem feasible anymore.
Tsung Xu on performance biomaterials.
Fergus McCullough against alcohol.
Smell Dating, a mail odor dating service (har har). Anthropologically interesting.
Austin Gil on the HTML capture attribute.
Dave Rupert on modern alternatives to BEM (in CSS).
Ollie Williams on what’s new with forms on the web. Learned several new things here.
Denis Stebunov on why public chats are better than DMs. Agreed. Trying to do better at this at work.
Use.GPU, a “set of declarative, reactive WebGPU legos.” Interesting.
WASM-4, a WebAssembly fantasy console.
Tom MacWright on Wilderplace, a lovely looking new game by Saman Bemel Benrud. The blog for it is also worth reading through.
BBC News is available in Pidgin English. Had no idea! Love it.
Ben Sparks on why the A4 paper size is a thing of beauty. Had no idea about this, but it does make me happy.
Serge Zaitsev on learning new programming languages by writing Forths.