New story: Research Notebook 17, about ten pages long, fantasy.
This one was surprisingly easy to write, and I really enjoyed the process. The story originated with my Edge of Magic web novel (the one I abandoned years ago), went through several upheavals as I tried to figure out what to do with it, and landed with a completely new story. The only thing in common is the name of the main character.
Baldur Bjarnason on better web apps. Agreed.
Anton Howes on why Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t invented until the 1970s. A fun question.
Bun, a new JavaScript runtime. Such speed! The built-in TypeScript and npm compatibility is nice, too. Planning on trying this out for some upcoming projects.
Rasmus Andersson on making fonts in Figma. Had no idea this kind of thing is possible in Figma.
Garrett Scott on Pipedream, a hyperlogistics startup. Kind of mind-blowing. I don’t know how I feel about the security aspects of having a chute into my house that other companies can access, though.
Laundry Jet, another interesting startup. Also something I probably wouldn’t want to use, this one because a) my house isn’t that big and b) if stuff gets stuck in there…
Matt Webb on tubes. The source of the above links.
Tree & Leaf, a lovely online genealogy site. I’m now itching to do something similar. (It’ll probably wait until after I’ve gotten this printed genealogy chart itch out of my system, though.)
ArchieML, the NYT’s markup language. A potential alternative to YAML that I’m looking at for some of my genealogy projects.
Darshana Narayanan on the dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari. I haven’t read Harari yet and now will go in with more skepticism than I would have otherwise.
Tess Joosse on recent research showing that quiet background noise can numb pain. Intriguing.
Matt Levine on Elon and Twitter. An entertaining read.
Gwendal Uguen and Luc Guillemot’s visual guide to the Aztec pantheon. A cool bit of educational material.
Yi Fuxian on China’s population peaking earlier than anticipated. I’m not actually tracking this closely or anything, but it did seem interesting.
The content-aware typography Tumblr. Ha.
Steven Johnson on not looking back while drafting. I tend to do this, though maybe with a little bit more rereading than he recommends (just the last page or so of what I’ve written).
Nolan Lawson on memory leaks on the web. Something I need to do better at checking for.
Matthias Ott on just putting stuff out there on the web. This makes me want to write more often. Still trying to decide if this two-week cadence is right for me or not.
Google Docs URL shortcuts for creating new documents. Had no idea these existed. Wow.
John Christensen’s Webb vs. Hubble comparison site. Double wow.
Ahmad Shadeed deep diving into some Figma CSS.
Nolan Lawson on style scoping vs. the shadow DOM.
C. J. Chilvers’ personal publishing principles. An interesting idea for a page. I like it.
Frontend Mastery on the new wave of React state management libraries.
Klim Type Foundry on The Future, a new Futura typeface. Mmm, I love type design writeups like this.
Robin Shreeves on scruffy hospitality. I.e., not worrying so much about cleaning your house before guests come over. We haven’t had guests since Covid began, but when we start up again (which will be soon, now that our youngest are almost fully vaccinated), this is good to keep in mind.
Kurt Schlosser on “parallel reality”. It’s a new type of screen with multidirectional pixels that can supposedly privately show up to 100 customers their flight information, all at the same time from the same screen.
Matt Webb on carbon dioxide detection. Makes me wonder if I should get a monitor for this.
Miriam Suzanne on why browser stylesheets have a default margin of 8px. CSS history!
Keith Peters on randomness in generative art. Cool.
Matthew Guay on documenting first before building (software). Love this. Every time I’ve done this, I’ve been glad that I did — implementation goes so much more smoothly.
Sheon Han on the hidden history of screen readers (JAWS and NVDA, mainly).
New story: Mother Tongue, about twenty pages long, fantasy.
I started working on this story back in 2016 but it didn’t come together at the time. This story is wildly different from that early draft, with the characters’ names (Dagh and Maria Bonita) being about the only parts that have survived.
Stephen Cranney on using scriptural phrases with DALL•E. I played around with Midjourney a bit and wish I’d thought to try this when I still had free credits.
Bjørn Karmann’s Occlusion Grotesque, a typeface carved into the trunk of a tree and digitized over time. Intriguing.
Markwhen, Markdown for timelines. Cool.
Mary Gaitskill on the hidden life of stories.
Matthew Butterick on the legal implications of Github Copilot.
Kit Wilson on reading ourselves to death and an overabundance of text.
3D maps of every London Underground station. Mmm.
A look at the Onyx Boox 25″ e-ink monitor. I’m really excited to see how e-ink develops over the next couple decades. (In writing this, I realized that I would love, love, love to have a thin, lightweight, small pocket-sized 400+ dpi e-ink reader. Something like an iPhone 13 Mini but just for reading.)
Patrick Clancey on rethinking mobile-first CSS. Some good points, though it’s not as much about ditching mobile-first as I thought it would be.
Una Kravetz on style queries, coming soon to CSS.
Mitch Benn on the pronunciation of /r/ in various English accents. Loved this.
Rich Harris on Prettier making tabs the default in 3.0. Tabs do seem more accessible and better than spaces, honestly.
Slack on remote development (not that kind).
NASA’s new Hubble e-book on exoplanets.
Epanorthosis, a thing I didn’t know about till the other day.
I’ve been reading more on my Kobo lately, after barely touching it for months. The contrast and typography are great. The physical buttons end up hurting my fingers a little, though, so I’ve just been using the touchscreen. (Honestly, I’d prefer it without the buttons, for my fingers and for the sake of symmetry. If/when Kobo releases a new Clara with the Carta 1200 screen, I’m absolutely planning to switch.)
Oh how I wish I could read them as fast as I buy them.
As part of my quest to start saving my genealogical research on paper, I built a small system for generating family sheet PDFs. (Kind of like my family group record redesigns.)
It takes input like this:
SE-0007:
father:
name: José Antonio Fuentevilla Fuentevilla
birth:
date: 13 Apr 1809
place: Polanco, Santander, Spain
death:
date: 23 Dec 1878
place: Polanco, Santander, Spain
parents:
father: José Fuentevilla Piñera
mother: Vicenta Manuela Fuentevilla Ruiz
link: SE-0013
mother:
name: Manuela Gándara Cobo
birth:
date: about 1811
place: Setién, Marina de Cudeyo, Santander, Spain
death:
date: 30 Nov 1879
place: Polanco, Santander, Spain
parents:
father: José Gandara Valdecilla
mother: Josefa Cobo Palacio
marriage:
date: 30 Dec 1829
place: Polanco, Santander, Spain
children:
- name: "[unnamed infant]"
birth:
date: about 1830
place: Polanco, Santander, Spain
death:
date: 14 Jan 1831
place: Polanco, Santander, Spain
- name: Josefa Fuentevilla Gandara
birth:
date: 31 Jul 1832
place: Polanco, Santander, Spain
death:
date: 5 Aug 1834
place: Polanco, Santander, Spain
...
And then generates an HTML page which I can then load in a browser and print to get this:
I’m using a page-naming scheme that helps me know which side of my family it’s on. The numbering is in order of creation. The family sparklines show an overview of the family. There’s a notes section (not shown) where I include notes on the family and what research we still need to do. The age calculations are primitive but get the idea across.
It takes a bit of time to copy things out of FamilySearch and keep it up to date, but I’m finding that these sheets help me see what work I still need to do. And it’s nice having something material and persistent so I’m not always on a screen.
I’ve been thinking more about genealogy sparklines. Decided to pick up the recent work I did in that vein and make it work for families, for use in my new family sheets. This also riffs off my old family analysis project.
Introducing the first draft of family sparklines:
(At this point are they really still sparklines, you ask? Good question.)
These families are from my Spanish line, by the way, which is why there is an abundance of initials.
Basic idea: larger hollow circles are marriages, smaller filled circles are children. Vertical marks at beginning or end for birth and death. (If the vertical tick isn’t present, the birth or death date isn’t known.) Father at the top of the chart, mother at the bottom, children in the middle. Vertical line from father to mother for the parents’ marriage. In cases where the marriage isn’t known (like in the bottom right MA/CS family), the vertical line and circles are left out. People’s initials are at the right to help know who is who. The smaller vertical tick marks on each line mark ten years of age. If there isn’t a death date, it goes five years past the last known date.
It’s still a work in progress, but I like how it provides an at-a-glance overview of a family. With the JAFF/MGC family in the upper left, for example, I can easily see that:
You can also see a child born before the wedding, how old people were when they married, gaps where there might have been children, etc.
I’m sure I’ll refine it further in the future, but I wanted to post where it’s at right now.
Lately I’ve found myself wanting to have local, paper copies of my genealogical research. As part of that, I wrote a script that takes input like this:
- Maria Isabel Fuentevilla Gándara | 1848 | ? | Polanco, Spain
-- José Antonio Fuentevilla Fuentevilla | 1809 | 1878 | Polanco, Spain
--- José Fuentevilla Piñera | 1779 | ? | Polanco, Spain
---- José Villa Oyuela | 1737 | 1803 | Polanco, Spain
----- Juan Antonio Villa Cacho | ? | ? | Polanco, Spain
------ Santiago Villa | 1687 | ? | Polanco, Spain
------ Maria Cacho
----- Rosa Maria Oyuela | ? | 1740 | Polanco, Spain
------ Damian Oyuela | ? | 1720 |
------ Josefa Rio
---- Rosa Piñera Pereda | 1747 | 1817 | Rumoroso, Spain
----- Juan Francisco Piñera Velo | ? | ? | Rumoroso, Spain
------ Juan Piñera | ? | ? | Arce, Spain
------ Francisca Velo | ? | ? | Arce, Spain
----- Maria Pereda Fuente | ? | ? | Rumoroso, Spain
------ Francisco Pereda | ? | ? | Rumoroso, Spain
------ Anna Fuente | ? | ? | Rumoroso, Spain
And turns it into what I’m calling a tabular pedigree chart:
It’s not glamorous by any means, and it’s still a work in progress, but it was super simple to implement with HTML tables and a bit of CSS. I print it to PDF from the browser. Overall, I’m fairly happy with it.
Still Eating Oranges on the significance of plot without conflict. I ended up using kishōtenketsu with the story I’m about to release.
Erlend Hamberg’s short overview of GTD. Helpful refresher.
Swarthmore’s explanation of the rope-around-the-earth puzzle. Hadn’t heard of this before but I love it.
Alex Trost on generative SVG grids. Fun.
Victor Shepelev reverse engineering {Shan, Shui}*. Love this.
George Francis on generative textures. I haven’t been doing art lately but this makes me want to get back into it.
The Verge on being able to edit and unsend iMessages in iOS 16. Finally. Finally.
Joris Peters et al. on where chickens were originally domesticated. (Appears to be central Thailand.)
Artvee, free high-resolution public domain art. So much to see here!
Huge straw sculptures at Japan’s Wara Art Festival. These are amazing.
The Browser Company on optimizing for feelings. Intrigued to see where this leaads.
Paul Katsen using GPT-3 in a spreadsheet. Weird new worlds!
“Farm vehicles approaching weights of sauropods exceed safe mechanical limits for soil functioning.” Obviously a bad thing, but the title delights me for inexplicable reasons.
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.
Len Falken on posting plain text. Interesting idea. The lightweightness of it, in particular.
Nicholas Rougeux’s 17th-century watercolor swatches. Love this. Also see the making of.