Robin Sloan on his new Spring ’83 protocol. I love new internet protocols. I’m thinking about borrowing the idea and implementing it as a “whiteboard” page on my site. Kind of like my now page, in that it would be updated periodically. But this would have its own style (rather than inheriting the overall site style). No idea yet if it would actually be useful or usable, but the idea intrigues me.
Of note: I discovered a few days ago that Marvin (the ebook reader I use on iOS) lets you import custom fonts. Works great, love it. Marvin continues to be by far the best ebook reader I’ve found. It’s been four years since it was last updated, though, and I worry that it’s eventually going to stop working. Probably going to bite the bullet at some point and build my own web-based reader so I’m not dependent on outside apps that may disappear.
Recent nonfiction reads
I got partway through the first volume of Boswell’s Johnson, but then bailed. The letters were a little too much detail for me, given that I don’t actually know much about Johnson the writer (my interest is more in his lexicography). Might still come back to it.
This was more of a fictiony couple of weeks.
Recent fiction reads
Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse. I almost gave up around fifty pages in, but then things got interesting. (Which is why I usually try to give books at least a hundred pages.) Loved the setting and the magic.
Diamond Dogs, by Alastair Reynolds. Novella. A tower progression story like Sufficiently Advanced Magic, but much darker. Brutal and violent. More math, too, which was the most disturbing thing of all. (I jest.) The story was interesting in a detached, cold sort of way, but it didn’t really speak to me.
Wakers, by Orson Scott Card. While I still prefer OSC’s early style more than his recent barebones style, and while I could certainly do without the juvenile humor, and while every character being sarcastic in the exact same way is now maybe a bit much for me, the story was compelling and the world was intriguing.
The Last Witness, by K. J. Parker. Novella. Oof, that ending. I would not say this is a happy story. Liked it a lot, though. Parker’s style fits my brain really well.
Books acquired since last post
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome — Mary Beard
The First Human — Ann Gibbons
Valor — John Gwynne
A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa — Alexis Okeowo
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century — Alice Wong
Lightblade — Zamil Akhtar
The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America — Ethan Michaeli
Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing — Randall Stross
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed — James C. Scott
Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down — J. E. Gordon
Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages — Richard E. Rubenstein
The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution — Peter Hessler
Saint Death’s Daughter — C. S. E. Cooney
Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books — Joseph Geisner
Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy — Adam Jentleson
Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture — Neil Dahlstrom
James Patterson: The Stories of My Life — James Patterson
Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall — Andrew Meier
The President’s Man: The Memoirs of Nixon’s Trusted Aide — Dwight Chapin
What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy — Jo Walton
Academ’s Fury — Jim Butcher
Cursor’s Fury — Jim Butcher
The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World — Patrick Wyman
The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years — Sonia Shah
Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves — John Kroger
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics — John J. Mearsheimer
Matt Webb on DALL-E 2 and prompt engineering. I got access to the Midjourney beta a week or two ago and tried it out. It’s a weird, uncanny new world. Some of the outputs are incredible. (Hard to know how much is actually new vs. pulled straight from existing images, though.)
Craig Hockenberry on IconFactory’s new WorldWideWeb app. Serve a folder up on iOS, accessible on your local network. Worked like a charm — I added a simple index.html to an iCloud Drive folder and started the server on my phone, and my wife was able to access it right away. This is great.
This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein. An unexpectedly pivotal book for me. I hadn’t paid much attention to climate change before this, other than noticing more frequent extreme weather events. I wish things weren’t the way they are. I wish we had a healthier relationship with the earth. I now have even less patience for unregulated capitalism. (Selfishness is supposed to save the world? Sheesh.) Anyway, the book was occasionally slow reading but overall it was good and important.
Building Ligatures, by TypeTogether. A pleasant history of TypeTogether and some basics of type design and typography. Nice overviews of some different scripts, too. The overall theme was working together to make things better, which was a nice followup to the suggestions in This Changes Everything.
The Last Nomad, by Shugri Said Salh. What a wildly different life she’s had. (She was a Somali nomad, though that’s only the first third or so of the book.) It definitely expanded my horizons and was worth reading. The FGM part was infuriating and so, so sad.
Recent fiction reads
All Our Wrong Todays, by Elan Mastai. Loved it. Some parts I think could have been glossed over or removed, but as a whole, I thought it did several interesting things with the time travel conceit. Especially near the end. Whew.
The Imaginary Corpse, by Tyler Hayes. The POV character is a stuffed yellow triceratops. At first the setting wasn’t really working for me and I almost gave up, but once it got into the mystery, I was fine. A little weird. (Which is what fantasy is good at.)
Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells. Novella. Sad to come to the current end of the Murderbot series, but she’s under contract for a couple more novellas and another novel, I believe (according to a recent AMA on Reddit), so that’s nice.
Books acquired since last post
Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell
Dispatches — Michael Herr
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind — Alan Jacobs
Verdigris Deep — Frances Hardinge
The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House — John F. Harris
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together — Heather McGhee
Spirits of Vengeance — Rob J. Hayes
Smoke and Stone — Michael R. Fletcher
Queenslayer — Sebastien de Castell
Crownbreaker — Sebastien de Castell
Subway: The Curiosities, Secrets, and Unofficial History of the New York City Transit System — John E. Morris
More Songwriters on Songwriting — Paul Zollo
Dark Sea’s End — Richard Nell
James Baldwin: A Biography — David Adams Leeming
The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir — Steffanie Strathdee, Thomas Patterson
The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization — Paul Strathern
Bone Swans: Stories — C. S. E. Cooney
The God Is Not Willing — Steven Erikson
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest — Stephen E. Ambrose
A History of Food in 100 Recipes — William Sitwell
The Restaurant: A 2,000-Year History of Dining Out — William Sitwell
The Infiltrator: The True Story of One Man Against the Biggest Drug Cartel in History — Robert Mazur
The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity — Nancy Gibbs, Michael Duffy
How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir — Hans Rosling
The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro
Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong — Eric Barker
Hild — Nicola Griffith
Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature — Zibby Owens
The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire — Francesca Cartier Brickell
Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England — Amanda Vickery
The Field of Cloth of Gold — Glenn Richardson
The Elements We Live By: How Iron Helps Us Breathe, Potassium Lets Us See, and Other Surprising Superpowers of the Periodic Table — Anja Røyne
Ryan Dahl on JavaScript containers. While the post itself is so-so, the idea of web-specific containers intrigues me. Feels like there’s something useful in that space. (I’m mostly coming at this from the perspective of wanting to simplify running apps on the web.)
Tania Rascia on building a web accordion with the WebAudio API. Cool! Makes me want to build something like that. I’ve been avoiding it lately because the web is ephemeral and I’d prefer to spend my time on things that have a chance at lasting longer, but that argument doesn’t always matter.
DALL•E 2 from OpenAI. This and Midjourney are getting crazy good. It’s a weird new world we’re entering. I’m intrigued by the idea of using output from these as reference for other art. (Still on the waiting list for both.)
Hugo Landau on mildly dynamic websites. This. For the last few years I’ve been craving something server-side like PHP (intertwined, no separate running process needed) but with a better language.
2022 Nommo Awards shortlist. I’d never heard of this (or the African Speculative Fiction Society) before, but I’m glad I have! Looking forward to reading some of these.
Duotrigordle, a 32-at-a-time Wordle. I initially thought it was completely mental, but once you get to ten or so guesses it’s mostly downhill since you have so many guesses to work off of. (I say this as if I play it regularly. In reality, I tried it once and probably won’t play it again, because I’d rather spend my leisure time reading.)
Before the World Was VI. Another take on the celestial yin & yang version.Follow Me. I really like the bolder colors here. One of my favorites.I’ve a Mother There III. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do another negative space piece but decided to go for it.In Their Own Image. Finally branched out to some other scriptures for my Heavenly Parents pieces. Initially this one looked too much like a restroom sign. Also, I don’t know that I’ve found the simplest way to represent this idea yet.A Beloved Daughter. I was reading Elder Renlund’s conference talk and realized I hadn’t done this yet.Prodigal Son II. Fairly close to the first iteration but without the unnecessary ground.
Other art
Lately I’ve been playing around with making meaningless decorative pieces in Blender, using displacement maps with (for the most part) procedural heightfields. For these I’ve generally textured the heightfield in Affinity Photo and sometimes also textured a separate color map. Looking forward to doing more work in this vein.
Pattern 001. This is the one that wasn’t procedural; I made the heightfield in Figma. While I like the way the sun lamp lights things evenly, it still feels maybe a little too harsh to me. I think of this piece as some kind of vintage fabric.Pattern 002 A. Kind of going for a Central American archaeological feel here. For this I wrote a Python script that generated rectangles on a grid in SVG for the heightfield. Switched to a spotlight lamp, and added some fog. I added the green in post.Pattern 002 B. Same script as 002 A, this time with different textures and lighting. Going for a Middle Eastern archaeological feel. I also added a slight bit of rippling and rotational blur on top to make it feel a little magical.Pattern 003 A. New script. Fairly pleased with how this turned out — all the different varieties that come out from random circles. (Since that’s all the heightfield is, really.) I added the lower-level squares on a last-minute impulse and I’m glad I did.Pattern 003 B. Same script as 003 A. I love love love the way the heightfield texture makes it look like things are growing, in a creepy way. Added depth of field to make things look more underwater. I’m happy with the old-photograph feel, too.Pattern 004. It still blows my mind that I can take a black-and-white heightfield and use it to generate art like this. Kind of cool how several of these look like they’re bowls even though the interiors aren’t actually rounded.
The Puzzler, by A. J. Jacobs. A fun book. I don’t really do puzzles myself anymore (my brain doesn’t like it), but I enjoyed reading about all the different kinds.
Recent fiction reads
The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Loved it. It took me a little while to warm up to it, but once the fantasy elements were introduced, I was there. Glad that there are two more novels and a lot of Penric novellas to come. (Plus the remaining Vorkosigan books I haven’t yet read, and the Sharing Knife series.)
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire. Novella. Mixed feelings. It was unexpectedly sad to me, but the world seems interesting enough (portal fantasies are my thing) and I liked Middlegame (looking forward to picking up Seasonal Fears soon), so I think I’ll still try the next in the series.
Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor. Novella. Loved it. I really like Afrofuturism. Looking forward to the other Binti novellas and Okorafor’s other work.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. Novella. I almost gave up on this a couple times early on, but it got more interesting once things started happening and I’m glad I stuck with it. Fairly philosophical. The permacomputing was nice to see, too.
A Warning to the Curious, by M. R. James. Basically a novella. Published in the 1920s. I don’t know that I felt particularly engaged (or scared) by the stories, but it was good to read something older.
A Spindle Splintered, by Alix E. Harrow. Novella. Really liked it, especially the voice. And the intersection of fairy tales and modern people? Also my thing. (Which reminds me that I want to reread OSC’s Enchantment sometime.)
Books acquired since last post
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story — Michael Lewis
A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich — Christopher B. Krebs
Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire — David Remnick
Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past — Andrew Albin et al.
Skyward Inn — Aliya Whiteley
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City — Andrea Elliott
Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion — Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Bob Andelman
Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy — Tim Weiner, David Johnston, and Neil A. Lewis
The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism — Dean Starkman
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath — Heather L. Clark
Black Stone Heart — Michael R. Fletcher
The Sisters Brothers — Patrick deWitt
The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community — Mary Pipher
After this issue, I’m going to split Prints up and go back to more of a normal blog format. I’ll still be posting the same content, just not consolidated into a single issue. (Though I do look forward to using the issue format again for something in the future.)
Reading
Recent nonfiction reads
Saints, volume 2. This took me a year or so, reading just on Sundays and only a few pages at a time. (I wanted to take it slow so that I’d finish around the time the third volume came out.) Loved it. Great series. Can’t wait to see how it ends!
The End Is Always Near, by Dan Carlin. I’m not a podcast person and haven’t listened to Hardcore History, but a couple people recommended this to me. Really liked it. This is the kind of thing I think about frequently. Also, the pandemic part was bittersweet (okay, mostly bitter) reading in light of Covid. (The book was published in October 2019.) That said, while Covid is certainly awful, I’m glad it’s not as graphic as some of the other plagues humanity has experienced.
Scotland’s Merlin, by Tim Clarkson. A look at the historical evidence for Merlin being from Scotland instead of Wales. (Spoiler alert: there’s fairly little evidence for anything at all from the sixth century A.D.) Enjoyed it, even if it felt occasionally repetitive. Also, did you know there’s a Myrddin programming language?
Recent fiction reads:
Vita Nostra, by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Another weird, mind-bending novel, this one in a Russian magic college of sorts. I think I liked it, maybe? (Though I wouldn’t say it was among my favorite magic school novels.) Sergey died two days ago, by the way.
Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson. Some parts I could do without, but Stephenson’s writing really clicks with me. Looking forward to reading the rest of his books (even if most of them are on the long end).
Books acquired since last issue
City of Bones — Martha Wells
The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life — A.J. Jacobs
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America — Carrie Gibson
Reign & Ruin — J. D. Evans
The Atlas Six — Olivie Blake
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx — Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia — Orlando Figes
The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution — Barbara W. Tuchman
Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures — Bill Schutt
Montaigne — Stefan Zweig
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers — Tom Standage
Empire of Cotton: A Global History — Sven Beckert
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction — Alec Nevala-Lee
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century — Steve Coll
Young Stalin — Simon Sebag Montefiore
Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman—from World War to Cold War — Michael Dobbs
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less — Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness — Russell D. Roberts
The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton — Jefferson Morley
The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert — Shugri Said Salh
The Business of Tomorrow: The Visionary Life of Harry Guggenheim: From Aviation and Rocketry to the Creation of an Art Dynasty — Dirk Smillie
Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture — Emma Dabiri
Here Is Real Magic: A Magician’s Search for Wonder in the Modern World — Nate Staniforth
On Assignment: Memoir of a National Geographic Filmmaker — James R. Larison
Cage of Souls — Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Devil You Know — K. J. Parker
The Last Witness — K. J. Parker
Miracles — C. S. Lewis
The Man Burned by Winter — Pete Zacharias
Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms — Charles Hudson
Seasonal Fears — Seanan McGuire
Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across North America — Jack Nisbet
Making
Releases
New story: “A Past Not Yet Forgotten.” This is the Retzi story I’ve mentioned before. Fantasy, about ten pages long. The form is a little experimental — for me, anyway.
And we have more art, this time a handful of illusions and a Blender piece. (Sidenote: for my non-religious art, I’ve decided to only post it here and not to Instagram or Facebook anymore.)
Penrose A. I wanted to take the SVG techniques I’ve been using lately and try them on a Penrose triangle. Voila. With this variation I was going for more of an inky look.Penrose B. With this one, I was aiming for a more chaotic watercolor look. The lighting is intentionally different from that in A and C.Penrose C. With this I was trying to get an old-book feel.Café Wall A. Another illusion piece, for fun. Whenever I’ve seen illusions like these, by the way, they’ve almost always been in black and white with crisp linework. I’ve enjoyed making more artistic versions. If you know of any other illusions you think might work with my style, let me know!The Floating City. Not an illusion! Made in Blender with some lightweight Python scripting to generate the meshes. Used a random Gaussian distribution for the location and height of the buildings, which are just five-sided cylinders. Applied the texture in a postprocessing pass. (The fog was in the original render, though. Mmm. Instant drama.)
Current projects
Dagh (working title): Another fantasy story. I originally started writing this five or six years ago, but this iteration only shares a couple characters’ names. The outline is done and I have four pages written.
Religious art: Feeling blocked at the moment.
I’m figuring things out re: other projects. My back and neck haven’t been great lately, and I’ve still been dealing with eyestrain issues and resultant headaches. (I want to draw, for example, but my neck issues have made that prohibitively painful.) This may end up being a season mostly for writing and reading, since those are comparatively painless at the moment.
Tom Critchlow on triple-entry blogging. I still need to move my site over to a fully static site. (It used to be. I’ve gone back and forth over the years.)
Thoughts
Found last week that I’ve been pronouncing ophthalmologist wrong all my life, by saying “opp” at the beginning instead of “off.”
The live view in Find My [Friends; leaving it objectless makes my brain sad] in iOS 15 feels like magic. I somehow hadn’t heard about it when it came out and ended up accidentally discovering it when my wife upgraded her phone recently. We’re living in the future. (Though I’ve been reading This Changes Everything lately and I don’t know if the future is worth the cost we’re paying for it.)
We’ve started watching Old Enough on Netflix and it’s adorable.
The Last American Aristocrat, by David S. Brown. Confession: I went into this thinking it was about Henry James. No. It’s about Henry Adams (grandson of John Quincy Adams), who I knew nothing about beforehand. It ended up being a much slower read, I believe because its prose was dense and less scannable. There were also some mildly confusing time jumps. Overall, though, I liked it and I’m glad I read it. Learned a lot about the late 1800s and early 1900s. Also picked up the word filiopietistic.
Recent fiction reads:
Network Effect, by Martha Wells. The full-length Murderbot novel. Really liked it. It was more horror in some ways, but still a comfort read. I’m going to be sad when I read Fugitive Telemetry and run out of Murderbot.
Books acquired since last issue
Shakespeare: The Biography — Peter Ackroyd
The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco — Marilyn Chase
First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance — Annie Jacobsen
Heir to the Empire — Timothy Zahn
Dark Force Rising — Timothy Zahn
The Last Command — Timothy Zahn
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death — Caitlin Doughty
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate — Naomi Klein
A Victorian Lady’s Guide to Fashion and Beauty — Mimi Matthews
Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power — James McGrath Morris
Emerson: The Mind on Fire — Robert D. Richardson
Part-Time Gods — Rachel Aaron
Night Shift Dragons — Rachel Aaron
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities — Craig Steven Wilder
An Eye for an Eye — Carol Wyer
The Puma Years: A Memoir — Laura Coleman
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America — James Bamford
The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens—and Ourselves — Arik Kershenbaum
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found — Suketu Mehta
The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth — Richard Conniff
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence — Christian Parenti
The City We Became — N. K. Jemisin
The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal — Simon J. Knell
Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation — Anton Howes
Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle — Clare Hunter
Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages — Dan Jones
Making
Releases
Some religious art:
When Our Heavenly Parents We Meet II. More in the zoomed-in negative-space vein. I like how it feels more intimate and personal.Why Weepest Thou? II. I know, I know, it also looks like a) an old floppy disk or b) a headphone-wearing creature with an open mouth which bears resemblance to my Nom Nom painting. Turns out these negative-space pieces end up looking like other things half the time.By the Laying on of Hands III. Going back to full bleed. In hindsight, this maybe feels a little too zoomed-in to me.By the Laying on of Hands IV. This is basically the same as the other. Felt like doing it at the time, now second guessing that decision. If it’s not yet clear, I have a complicated relationship with some of the pieces I make.I Am a Child of God III. Inordinately pleased with the painterly look of the background. The mult-layer SVG technique is a new favorite for sure. This piece also looks to me like a crazed fox wearing a white-collared shirt and red robes. These are the perils of negative-space art!
Current projects
Retzi (working title): Ten minutes a day is still working spectacularly well, and I’m making good if slow progress. The first draft of this story is done (it’s only five pages), just need to do a final editing pass. Expect it next time!
Religious art: Got burned out on this and planned to take a long break, but that didn’t last. Thinking about using Blender more for texturing, like I did with Within the Walls of Your Own Homes, using both displacement/bump maps and sculpting. But I also really like the SVG techniques I’ve been using lately, so we’ll see.
Picture book: Haven’t really done much of anything on this (soon to be a common theme). Thinking about using the multi-layer SVG technique for the art.
Shadow art: Nothing to report.
Type design: Nothing to report.
Musical: I think I have the basic idea and some initial song ideas.
Jim Nielsen on ordering CSS declarations. Agreed. I’ve been using alphabetical declarations for a while and it’s worked well (and any exceptions are then obvious).
