Blog

• Kailash Nadh on the making of an open source Kannada dictionary — loved this
• TypeLit.io — typing practice with classic lit
• Ink & Switch on local-first software — lots of food for thought here
• AIDungeon — I didn’t realize a BYU grad had done this, but it’s impressive and I can’t wait to see where this kind of tech leads in another five to ten years
• YouTube keyboard shortcuts — I wish I’d known about these years ago (j has been handy lately when watching tutorial videos)

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• This week, unlike last, saw some splendid progress on editing the novel. The middle two-thirds of the book do need to be almost entirely rewritten after all (sadly!), but the book will be better for it. I’m midway through outlining the new material. Hoping to get that wrapped up soon so I can start making the actual revisions and get this book out the door before the end of the year.
• I’m six pages into a new short story, about an incubator for human babies. So far it seems to be going well, though as usual I’m wondering if what I find interesting in it will turn up dry and dull to everyone else. Oh well.
• Earlier this week I attempted work on faux stained glass versions of my Roll Forth and I Am a Child of God pieces. I’m now feeling rather strongly that my time working on that kind of art has come to an end, perhaps forever. (This makes me feel both relieved — more time for writing! — and guilty — that I’m effectively abandoning the people who liked my art. I think about this often. But the pieces I already made still exist, so I guess I’m not taking anything away from anyone.)
• I’ve been getting back into Blender as a pivot to a different kind of art that might be a good fit for me right now, and it’s lovely fun. If I stick with it, expect to see some just-for-fun renders on the blog from time to time.
• Luckily I had only written a page or so of my semester paper when the professor announced that he was nixing that assignment in favor of a third presentation. (Such are the perils of working ahead in class.) My first presentation will be on multi-scale modeling and rendering of granular materials.
• The corneal abrasion is gone, and good riddance.
• I upgraded Caddy (my local dev server) to version 2. It took a little bit of finagling to figure out the right syntax I needed to use, but being able to import snippets with arguments has made my config files so much cleaner.
• We’ve started watching BBC’s Secrets of the Castle. Fascinating show, and right up my alley.
• Nonfiction reading: A Distant Mirror was somewhat slow going until I bumped the line spacing in Marvin up a notch. Still learning a lot and enjoying it. A short list of some of the medieval quirks that stood out to me: 1) nobles trying to enforce clothing rules (commoners not being allowed to wear certain patterns, for example), though said rules proved basically impossible to enforce, 2) laws that tried to make sure nobody had any advantage over the others by banning both innovation (in tools and techniques) and working late, among other things, and 3) the insane Feast of Fools.
• I’m about a third of the way through Arthur’s Britain. It regularly blows my mind that the 1300s of A Distant Mirror are closer to me in time than they are to the 500s of Arthur’s Britain. (Same kind of thing as with Cleopatra and the pyramids.) My mental model of history tends to compress all of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages — roughly a thousand years — into what feels like maybe a decade or two. Hoping to fix that through much more reading.
• Fiction reading: Finished Peace Talks. Whew. Nice that the next book is already out.
• I also read Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time and rather liked it. (I’m totally a sucker for that kind of story.) Looking forward to his other books.
• Currently a third of the way through Luke Smitherd’s The Physics of the Dead. It’s not a setting I would want to spend any time in, but the story questions it raises are intriguing.

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A new poem: “Rusted Crowns.”

I started this one almost a year ago with just the first stanza written, then picked it up again this week and completed it.

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Some quick toolmaking updates:

• Not very long ago I felt like Storybook was a bit cumbersome, and in a fit of consolidation glee I decided to trash it and instead use Arc for my writing. I got as far as adding wiki-style links and backlinks (still helpful additions), then realized Arc wasn’t actually a good fit after all — my brain apparently doesn’t like having the story drafts in among all the other notes. It seems to like things in separate bins.
• So Storybook lives after all. There are, however, gobs of cruft that have built up over the years — several features I tried out and then ended up not sticking with — so I’m going to rewrite it from scratch using FastAPI and plain text storage (as mentioned before). Leaner and more focused. Looking forward to it. (On this I’ve done some preliminary planning and have written a script to export the old data in the new plain text format, but that’s it.)
• I’ve been using Arc to plan the editing of the novel. It works, but I’ve also found myself wondering if an infinite canvas tool like Figma or Milanote might be even better, with the power to break out of the cold confines of a linear column of text. You can probably tell where this is going, can’t you. And you’re right: because it foolishly doesn’t seem like that hard of a problem, and because I want full control (ha, what an illusion) over both the experience and my data, yes, I’m making my own infinite canvas web app. It’s called Space. It’s in the early amorphous stages of planning and will likely stay that way for a while because I’m in the middle of the semester. But I’m excited about it. (And have been for a while; this project’s been on the docket for over a year.) I initially planned to use canvas, but before I settle on that I’m going to try WebGL; if it works, it would allow for much more interesting possibilities, along the lines of the spatial interface ideas I alluded to a while ago.

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• Jim Butcher on scenes and sequels — good writing advice
• Justin E. H. Smith on whether birds are dinosaurs — which is apparently a somewhat heated debate? (I had no idea)
• A raycasting engine made in Factorio — one of the wonders of the Internet
• Tyler Hobbs on flow fields in generative art — hoping to use this technique someday
• FAQs on protecting yourself from Covid aerosol transmission — recommended

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As a spur to get myself writing more, I’ve put up a new writing statistics page. There you can see in all its wilted glory how little I’ve written over the years.

Or how little I’ve finished, I should say — and that’s the main change here. By tracking actual published words, I’m hoping this sparks much more finishing and publishing. And by “publish” I still mean publishing here on this site. I imagine down the road I may submit pieces elsewhere, but for now I’m content with the small scale.

This brain hack is already working. Last week I hardly worked on the novel at all, but after putting this page up I’ve found myself fully back in the throes of editing, since finishing and publishing a 65,000-word novel — the first draft of which is already complete — seems the best way right now to push 2020’s zero up to a more impressive number. And now I have compelling motivation to make sure I get this thing edited before the end of the year.

Also, inspired by the colophon in Cory Doctorow’s Pluralist newsletter, I’ll probably add daily or weekly drafting word counts to the page soon, as further motivation to keep writing each day. Public shaming works wonders! (More seriously: while the idea of posting these kinds of metrics would have mortified me a year or two ago, I’m glad I’ve gotten round that obstacle. Working in public has been wonderfully freeing.)

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• This has been a week for avoiding novel editing, I’m afraid. Not much to report. (It hasn’t been a week for side projects at all, in fact.)
• Hubris snagged me. The path tracer I thought was done last week wasn’t. It is now, though. I’ve since started work on the semester paper (a brief survey of procedural modeling), which I’m hoping to finish quickly so I’ll have plenty of time for the final project.
• I’m on the third day of a corneal abrasion, which has been buckets of fun, let me tell you. Visited the ophthalmologist this morning and got antibiotic drops to keep it from getting infected. I’m now in the blurred-vision stage, but a) it shouldn’t last more than two weeks and b) thankfully it’s not so bad that I’m unable to read.
• Nonfiction reading this week: I finished The Dream Machine. So good. Part of me wishes I’d been able to work at Xeroc PARC during those golden years. The rest of me, though, is mighty glad I’m living in the age of laptops and iPhones and Wi-Fi. But yes, if you’re at all interested in the history of computing, read this book. Highly recommended.
• I also finished The Last Days of Socrates. In another time it might have held my interest more, but this time round it unfortunately fell dull upon my eyes.
• To sate my thirst for more things medieval, I’ve started on Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, about 14th-century Europe. Much more my style, and while I’ve only just begun, it’s good so far.
• Fiction reading this week: I ended up bailing on ’Salem’s Lot after a chapter or two. While I think Stephen King is a very talented storyteller, I’m realizing his books aren’t really my thing after all. Which is a mild surprise to me, but I’m glad I’ve finally figured that out.
• In its place, I’m now about halfway through Jim Butcher’s Peace Talks, the second-to-latest book in the Dresden Files series. Easy reading and fun, if occasionally cringeworthy.
• By the way: The Dream Machine ended up being book #1,000 (see my reading page). A thousand books in pretty much exactly twenty years. With my hundred-pages-per-day goal, I think it’ll only take around half that time to read the next thousand. (This year I’ve already finished eighty books — eighty! — and expect to pass a hundred without too much difficulty. But it’s also 2020 and I have a corneal abrasion, so who knows.)

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• The editing of the novel has begun. It’s a jungle of complexity, at least compared to making paintings, where it only takes a few moments to assess the work. I’ve written large, complicated programs before, too, but with those it’s always clear when the output is correct or not. Here, instead, there be dragons: endless possibilities and no “correct” answers. And holding a whole novel in my head is hard. Kvetching now out and done with, I’m midway through putting together that minimal set of changes and will soon mark out on the outline where each change needs to go. (This would be so much easier if I’d outlined the book in advance, figuring this all out before spending months drafting. True, my weak attempts at outlining to date have sputtered and died, but now my motivation has multiplied.)
• To replace the art-filled hole in my life, I have not been writing more (sadly) but instead have gotten back into making charts for dead languages and editions of obscure old texts. The current projects: a Latin adjectives chart (the thing you didn’t realize you desperately needed) and an edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (in English, possibly with the Latin on the side).
• In what will seem a contradiction given what I’ve just said: putting school first has made a mammoth difference. I wrapped up the rest of that last assignment (bounding volume hierarchies followed by adding jitter to get antialiasing, glossy reflections, translucency, soft shadows, etc.), then went kind of crazy and plowed right through the next two assignments (texture mapping and path tracing). Oh my goodness I love global illumination and path tracing. Diffuse reflections make my heart sing. I’ve also gotten my semester project proposal approved and will be doing procedural modeling of spaceships.
• Our stake wisely decided to cancel weekly in-person church meetings for the time being. Utah’s Covid numbers seem to have strapped on a small jetpack. Luckily we now have a mask mandate in the county, and that letter from President Worthen (BYU) and President Tuminez (UVU) wasn’t messing around. (Personally, given human nature coupled with America’s rabid individualism, I fully expect both universities to have to go fully remote by sometime next month. I also hope I’m wrong.)
• Nonfiction reading this week: more of the same. I’m almost two-thirds of the way through M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine, and it’s now turned from a history of computing to more of a history of the Internet. Loving it.
• Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain is still right up my alley, chock-full of early medieval British history. I hadn’t realized how hard it can be to identify places mentioned in the annals — the Historia Brittonum lists twelve battles, for example, and for almost all of them it’s been impossible to identify exactly where they took place, with two or more candidates for each location. Mind-blowing. This book is a bit slower going since it’s a paperback and not with me all the time.
• I’m almost halfway through The Last Days of Socrates. Still trudging. It’s not completely boring, but (is this bad to admit?) Greco-Roman history and culture have never really appealed to me aesthetically. My tastes skew medieval. (And that’s where my interest in Latin comes in, to be honest.)
• Fiction reading this week: R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War got much, much darker (trigger and content warnings galore), so I’d like to amend my “adore” from last time, which no longer feels like the right word. Still a very compelling book, though. The Rape of Nanking analogue was horrifying.
• After that, in what was clearly not a palate cleanser, I read Elly Griffiths’ The Crossing Places. I was mainly there for the British archaeology; thrillers stress me out and abduction (particularly of children) ratchets that up even more, so I only read books like this in limited quantities. The archaeology parts were great, and now I’m looking forward to reading some of Francis Pryor’s books.
• You’d think that after those two books I’d want something light and cheerful. Instead, for unfathomable reasons buried deep in my psyche (perhaps the advent of fall has something to do with it too), I’ve just started Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot. The initial apostrophe bothers me because I am shallow, but boy can King bring characters to life in just a few words.

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• Lea Verou on web components — seems reasonable
• Barton Gellman on what could happen if Trump refuses to concede — alert alert alert the end of America is nigh and this article is important (also, Barton wrote Angler, which is a great book)
• In Abeyance — fascinating newsletter about the built world
• Interpolating stop motion up to 60fps via AI — great that it can do this, but I think maybe it loses something essential about stop motion too?
• Jason Kottke on getting rid of euphemisms about slavery — amen

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• Mar Hicks on technology built to last — COBOL sounds more and more intriguing (honestly!)
• Ehsan Noursalehi on the new Microsoft Teams dynamic video conferencing mode — this looks amazing and I want it
• Ehsan Noursalehi’s Why Do We Interface microbook — short read, worth it, and the microbook idea is interesting too
• Obsidian — another note-taking solution (don’t mind me, just poaching ideas for Arc)
• Jessica Kerr on software development as a craft — or not; good food for thought

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