Four new art pieces, including one at the end for Mother’s Day.
That It May Turn to You for Your Salvation:
Blog
Links #112
Cory Dransfeldt on personal websites. I don’t think I ever get tired of reading about personal websites, to be honest.
Rachel J. Kwon’s collection of articles about personal websites. “A collection of articles that to some degree answer the question ‘Why have a personal website?’ with ‘Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.’”
Evan Bush on new research suggesting that birds and mammals are probably self-aware, and several invertebrates, too. I don’t know how well-established this all is (perhaps it’s been debunked), but vegetarianism certainly does sound a bit more appealing now.
Richard Holman on doing something daily. The times I’ve actually finished writing stories have almost always been when I’ve had a daily regimen, whether that’s a word count goal or a set number of minutes. Without the daily, I don’t write.
Alan Jacobs on rational choices. “The intellectual/political monoculture of the modern university leads to an intellectual/political monoculture in the major media companies, and when you combine that with the many ways the internet has disrupted the economic models of all the arts, you get a general environment in which interesting, imaginative work is not just resisted, it’s virtually prohibited. All the incentives of everyone involved are aligned against it.”
Henrik Karlsson on thinking through writing. Some useful advice.
Veronique on blogging frequency. “There’s this part of me that always feels like I’m bothering people if I blog every day.” Same here. I also liked the quote from Winnie Lim: “instead of always feeling so hesitant because i feel so weird, i am just going to focus on being the fullest version of myself.”
Booknotes 3.10
Nonfiction
- The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean (2010), about the periodic table. Enjoyed the heck out of it. Fascinating throughout, with lots of interesting history about the discovery of various elements and other tidbits.
- Beauty Sick, by Renee Engeln (2017). An important corrective to my mental model, with what seems like good advice on what to do and what not to do.
- A Molecule Away from Madness, by Sara Manning Peskin (2022), about cognitive neurology. Also fascinating and hard for me to put down. Maybe not as great for my hypochondria, though. But still very much worth reading.
Fiction
- Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2019, science fiction), second in the Children of Time trilogy. It’s been five years since I read the first one, so my memory’s a bit fuzzy, but I think I liked this one about the same. Looking forward to Children of Memory. (And Tchaikovsky remains one of my favorite writers. I’m delighted that he’s so prolific.)
Four new hymn prints, experimenting with some new styles.
Links #111
Rachel Andrew on her aphantasia. Fascinating.
Aaron Francis on doing literally anything. I’ve found this to be true. Spending even a single minute on a project is often enough to get momentum to keep going.
Microsoft has open sourced MS-DOS 4.0. Ah, nostalgia. I can’t remember if I started with version 4 or 5, but it was around that time.
Robin Rendle on displaying language-specific quotes in CSS. Cool. I didn’t know about this.
Ben Abbott (a friend from high school) on stewardship of the Earth. “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else. As it happens, this is not unlike the first of God’s laws.” Agreed.
Étienne Fortier-Dubois on colonizing other planets and cultural diversification. Enjoyed this.
Jay Hoffmann on what he calls the analog web. “These websites don’t exist with any necessary agenda. They are handmade, and at times, even a bit weird. But they represent a person in some way; an interest, an ideology, a hobby, or nothing more bold than a point of view. Because they are distinct and imperfect, these sites can resist the wave of generated content heading our way.” I really love the analog web (or the indie web or the smol web or whatever you want to call it).
Andy Allen and Thomas Williams on sound design in software. Fun. Working on the web, I don’t usually get to do anything with this, but I think I’d like to.
Jason Kottke on Francine LeClercq’s cross-stitched CCTV footage. Love this. I’ve long wanted to play around with doing a cross-stitch implementation of some of my symbolic religious art.
Jules Bernstein on a new vaccine strategy from UC Riverside that looks promising. Oh, I hope this works out.
Four new art pieces, with style experiments on some of them.
In Your Mind and in Your Heart III:
Links #110
Henry Oliver on smartphones not being the source of all social ills. An interesting counterbalance, worth thinking about given humanity’s general reaction to new technologies over time. I love that I can read books on my phone and keep track of my to-do list and stay in touch with family and friends. (And of course I also recognize that it’s healthy to not be on screens all the time.)
myNoise (via swissmiss) has nice ad-free soundscapes (Irish coast, Japanese garden, distant thunder, white noise, etc.).
Eleanor Konik on maintaining sane task lists. Some useful tips here.
Barry Hess on how blogging doesn’t require writing perfect essays. Good reminder. Having standards is good, but an obsession with perfection can be debilitating if it means you never finish things.
Jeremy Keith on hanging punctuation in CSS. I had no idea hanging-punctuation exists. Browser support isn’t quite there yet, but someday!
Hans Zimmer: Hollywood Rebel documentary on Netflix. Enjoyed this. The thing that resonated with me the most (har har) was Zimmer’s relentless experimentation.
Massimo’s disturbing video of a komodo dragon swallowing a goat in one long extended bite. I don’t know why I’m sharing this.
Links #109
Kevin Wammer’s review of the Boox Palma. I am so tempted. (The phone form factor is a better fit for one-handed reading, which is mostly what I do.) So tempted.
Julianne Pepitone on a smart contact lenses that generate power from blinking, built by a team at the University of Utah. Cool. I don’t know how I’d feel about actually wearing smart lenses myself, though.
Martin Heinz on how to make your shell history more useful. Some good tips here.
Piano Music Bros. on the evolution of Mozart’s music, from age five to age thirty-five. Fun to see. (Though I also think the adulation of geniuses isn’t super healthy for all of us normies, so here’s your grain of salt with this.)
Links #108
Henrik Karlsson on reading serious literature to his kids. “It is about figuring out a rich reading experience that both parties are excited about. Books that pull you in and open a space for deep conversation.” I think I want to try this.
Michael Flarup’s list of 40 things he’s learned being a creative entrepreneur. I like several of these — shrink the first step, make a lot of things, and practice daily completeable to-do lists, to name a few.
David Jonathan Ross on Indoor Kid, a variable font for lettering comics. Cool.
Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp on how AI training sets like LAION are constructed.
Hillel Wayne on syntax highlighting being a waste of an information channel. Super interesting idea. To his point at the end about highlighting conflicts, I think being able to easily rotate through highlighting modes might help. And to generalize that idea a little more, toggleable analysis overlays seem like they could be useful in several other contexts too, like writing fiction or making digital art.
Links #107
Susanna Clarke has a new book coming out! It’s going to be released in October this year. Very much looking forward to it.
Jason Becker’s public letters project, with the first of four rounds of letters as an example from February 2023. Interesting idea. The introvert part of me isn’t so sure about posting correspondence publicly, but if someone wants to try this out, email me some possible topic ideas.
Susam’s Guess My RGB game. Fun.
C. J. Chilvers (not to be confused with C. J. Chivers) on why he went back to buying CDs. Food for thought. I’m intrigued by his statement that “physical media is making a comeback, including innovations in the hardware that plays physical media” — curious what those innovations are. (I should add that I don’t stream music very often. Most of the time I listen to music I bought years ago in iTunes Music on my laptop or phone.)
Andrew Kersley on how people hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one. I’m all for reducing car usage. Out here in suburbia, though, it seems nigh impossible. Maybe someday.