Nonfiction
As far as A Distant Mirror goes, I spoke too soon. Mired in the uninteresting-to-me Battle of Poitiers, I ended up abandoning the book once more. I now expect this to be a tome I read over several years, a hundred pages here and a hundred there. Which is something I’ve come to terms with.
I just finished John Seabrook’s The Song Machine, which I read in the hope of learning more about the process behind creating hit songs — anthropologically, not as something I intend to try myself. The dissonance between the hits the book covered and my own taste in music (film scores, some Broadway, hymns), however, ended up being strong enough that I didn’t really care for the history. Probably should have bailed early on. People who like pop and rock and hip hop, though, would probably like this book. (I hate earworms. So. Much.)
And mere minutes ago I began Madeleine Albright’s Madam Secretary, about her time as U.S. Secretary of State. Memoirs sometimes irritate me — overall, I think I’ve found that I prefer biographies — but I’m hoping this one doesn’t veer in that direction. And apparently this is the curmudgeon post where I get all my kvetching in.
Fiction
Shimmerdark ended well. Enjoyed it.
After that, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. The haunting Arthurian atmosphere was delicious, though I wish there had been more actual Arthurian elements. (Which just means I need to go find those sorts of books. This book doesn’t actually need to change.) Lovely prose, lovely character voices (or voice, rather — they all felt somewhat the same to me, but in a wonderful way that felt appropriate to the storytelling). And the boatman metaphor! Whew. I read The Remains of the Day just over a year ago and loved it, and I’m looking forward to Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun.
Lastly, I picked Cryptonomicon back up again and am now a third of the way through. Definitely earthy. Also, I knew that Stephenson is notorious for what you might call info dumps, but they’ve turned out to be fascinating, and the writing is so compelling and readable that I actually look forward to them almost as much as I do the story itself.
The issue in which we drop the bullets. (In the lists, that is.)
Nonfiction
Eyes in the Sky was good but didn’t click with me as much as I’d hoped. I’d still recommend it to anyone interested in aerial surveillance, though. Or anyone who wants to be a little creeped out.
Next I read James Gleick’s Genius, a biography of Richard Feynman. A bit slow in places thanks to the physics details (which I should have expected if I’d thought about it at all), but overall I very much enjoyed it. History of science is my jam. (I should mention too that a few years ago I read and liked Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.) Looking forward to reading Gleick’s books on chaos and information theory.
After a six-month hiatus, I’ve again picked up Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and it is deliciously good. Perhaps not the right choice of words given that the section I returned to was all about the Black Death, but in a bizarre plot twist the book now feels like a cozy comfort read. I do not understand myself. At any rate, what I’ve found lately is that A Distant Mirror rewards a slower, savoring pace, which I wasn’t prepared to commit to six months ago. With eight hundred pages left, I suspect I’ll be reading this one for months.
Fiction
The City of Brass was great — fantasy novels set in the djinn-haunted deserts of the Middle East are apparently my thing. I can’t remember if I’ve actually read any others (The Phoenix and the Carpet, maybe? I was a kid at the time and don’t remember anything about it except that there was a lot of sand), but I want more. Recommendations, please.
Next I read Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Quirky typographic pseudohistory is also very much my thing. Robin’s newsletters are always a delight, too. Looking forward to Sourdough.
I started Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon but shelved it after twenty or thirty pages because it was too similar in time period to Genius. It’s daunting because of its length, but I hope to get back to it soon.
After that I read Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne. Bizarre postapocalyptic biotech with a three-story-tall murderous flying bear. Great writing. Weird as heck. (Which is refreshing once in a while. I particularly like it as a reminder that a string of words on page or screen can conjure incredible magic in the mind.)
Next: Will Wight’s Skysworn, fourth in the Cradle series. These have workmanlike, windowpane prose ala Sanderson, which lately does not spark much joy for me. But the action is compelling enough that here I am four books in and still planning to read the rest.
And now I’m just over halfway through Sarah Mensinga’s Shimmerdark, which came out a couple weeks ago and is great. It didn’t hook me until about a third of the way in, but then things got much, much more interesting in several ways. (Back in September I read Sarah’s novel Currently and really liked it. Shimmerdark is even better.)
Tyler Hobbs on color arrangement in generative art. I haven’t done much generative art lately (and don’t know how much I’ll end up actually doing in the future), but I like Tyler’s work and this is a good writeup.
Phil Plait on David Novick’s colored spheres optical illusion. Wow.
Shawn Wang on quality vs. consistency. Which is something I feel I could do much, much better at here on this site.
Matthias Ott about personal websites. A good thing to remember.
Jason Kottke linking to a map of the world’s lighthouses. Look at Norway!
I used to use Fabric to deploy my personal apps, but I often ran into issues with it, so several months ago I switched over to simple shell scripts that use ssh. Much more resilient, and far easier to maintain (at least for me).
Here’s a sample of what one of these deploy scripts looks like for a Django app:
#!/bin/sh
git push
ssh myusername@myhost /bin/zsh << EOF
cd /path/to/app/code/
echo "- Pulling the code"
git checkout main && git pull
echo "- Restarting the app"
supervisorctl restart myappname
echo "- Running migrations"
/path/to/venv/bin/python manage.py migrate
echo "- Collecting static"
/path/to/venv/bin/python manage.py collectstatic --noinput
EOF
I’ve thought about using a CD pipeline instead, but I’m not convinced that introducing an extra dependency — no matter how slick — is actually worth it for something small and personal like this. (CI/CD sure is nice at work, however.)
New experiment: blog-driven productivity.
Ordinarily I work on projects and then, when they’re done, I post about them. Occasionally I post about work in progress (something I’m trying to do better at as part of working in public). In both cases, though, the project work comes first.
This idea flips that around: start writing the blog post first, from the perspective of your future self after you’ve already finished the project. Then do whatever backfill work is needed to turn the post from optimistic lie to settled truth. (And when the work is actually done, publish the post.)
My brain tends to think of it as an extremely loose analog to test-driven development in software engineering.
It’s not anything particularly novel, but it intrigues me and who knows, maybe there’s something there. (In some cases, for some people, your mileage may vary, etc.)
Katherine Rundell on giraffes. Unexpectedly fascinating.
Sokyokuban, a Sokoban game set on a hyperbolic plane. Mind-bending in a great way.
Shawn Wang on preemptive pluralization when developing software. This seems like a wise practice. (Not following it has bitten me more than once.)
Michael Mulet on how he made a video game in a font. Fascinating and horrifying.
Alan Jacobs on blog gardens. I’m particularly intrigued by the idea of writing about the same topic in depth over longer periods of time as a way of organically writing what effectively amounts to a book.
Rob Weychert’s Plus Equals, a new zine about algorithmic art. The first issue was good, looking forward to future installments.
Riccardo Scalco’s Textures.js, SVG patterns for d3.js. Yum. I don’t even use d3 (at least not right now), but I’m tempted to do something with it just so I can use these.
Jason Kottke on the invention of a new pasta shape. Max sauceability as a concept will stick with me for a long time, I think.
Rytis Bieliunas on some of the darker corners of Go (the programming language). I’m writing a lot of Go at work now and this was helpful.
Austin Kleon on blogging as a forgiving medium. The idea of continually editing and refining posts after publishing them intrigues me. I fix typos if I find them, but that’s about it at the moment.