Bryan Braun (again) on web components — the past few years I’ve avoided frontend dev (I’m allergic to unnecessary stack complexity), but this post gives me hope
I ended up tweaking my Vim syntax highlighting earlier this week (after my first post), to be more in line with what Ben had posted. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far (with the disclaimer that all of this code is internal and wasn’t written with the expectation that it would ever be seen by anyone else) (and I’m also still fairly new at writing Go and Rust):
And some Rust, Go, and HTML:
These are certainly more soothing to my eyes, which was something I didn’t realize I needed. While these aren’t perfect in the least — with enough variation between languages to look almost like entirely different color themes, though I think I see that as a feature and not a bug — I’m happy with the tweaks for now and plan to stick with them.
New artwork: Christ Visits the Nephites III, a third installment in the series. This time round I experimented with a style that feels a bit like medieval stained glass. Fairly happy with how it turned out, though of course now I mostly see its flaws. (But early medieval stained glass was full of flaws and imperfections! So it’s in that spirit.)
Min — minimalist web browser (and I’ll mention here that I’m veering closer and closer to spinning up my own WebKit-based keyboard-controlled extremely minimalist browser, so that I can have full control over the UI, but that also seems a little crazy)
Over the weekend I read Ben Kuhn’s post on syntax highlighting and thought the idea sounded intriguing, so I tried it out.
Here’s what I had before (and let me add that I was tweaking my Vim colors a few days before this, so this wasn’t technically my normal setup) (and let me further add that this is fairly old code and not anything particular exciting):
And after, where comments are bold and brighter than the rest of the dim code:
Hmm. This isn’t a perfect implementation of the idea in the least, but even so, I don’t know that I like having comments so predominant.
This does, however, give me several ideas for modifying my existing color scheme (or starting from scratch, which is feeling a bit more likely right now). Something more soothing, less garish. And still some way to make comments stand out more — italics or a somewhat brighter color, probably. (Sidenote: nvim-treesitter has caught my interest.)
Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.
Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.
Still mulling it over. (I like it, just figuring out whether/how to apply it to myself.)
Just wanted to say thank you to all of you for reading this blog. I realize the time you spend here is a very small sliver of your lives overall (hopefully!), but it’s still time you could have spent elsewhere. Thank you.
I finished implementing transmission rays in my ray tracer for class (had to track down an elusive floating point precision bug) and have started in on the next assignment (implementing a bounding volume hierarchy and introducing jitter).
We had our first snow of the season but are now back in the 80s during the afternoons. I look forward to autumn.
I moved the projects on my site to a new work page.
In the recent issue of my newsletter, I said I was going to put art on the back burner for a long time. It didn’t last. And now I’m — again! — feeling like I want to shelve it. Ridiculous. (I spend an unworldly amount of time waffling back and forth on what kinds of projects I ought to be spending my time doing, and with which priorities. Does that sound fun? No. It is not. I have no problem being decisive in the other parts of my life, which makes it all the more frustrating.)
We’re coming up on novel editing time. I’ve been jotting down thoughts on how to improve the book. The main question in my mind right now is whether I should a) do a relatively light edit mainly focusing on language, with the aim to finish this one, get it out the door, and learn more from writing the next novel or b) toil away at this one for several months until it’s as polished as I can get it. I see the advantages of both.
With the story ideas, I’ve gotten one to the point that I’m almost ready to start writing it. I’ve started planning the next novel, too. In yet another example today of egregious waffling, I haven’t yet decided how in-depth I’ll outline these pieces before I begin the writing. And in a final (for this post) attempt to find a silver lining in said waffling, I suppose one good thing about it is that I end up trying several different things instead of tunnel-visioning in on just one.
Brain dump time. These are some of the things I think about re: art, specifically the type of art I’ve been doing these past few years (which admittedly has some quirks that other types of art wouldn’t necessarily have). These are in no particular order:
Concept. With this kind of minimalist religious art, the question is always: “How can I convey this idea in as few lines/shapes/colors/etc. as possible?” I usually mull over an idea, sketch something out until I feel loosely satisfied with it, then send it to my wife and we do a few rounds of feedback and revision. I also find myself thinking about other ways to represent things minimally, beyond just the circles, triangles, and rectangles I’ve used. (Yesterday’s Peace, Be Still felt like a nice change, for example.)
Process. The main question is usually: “What’s the fastest way to execute this idea without a drop in quality?” And, close on its heels: “What style do I feel like working in right now?” At the moment, the process I tend to use most is this: refine the idea in Illustrator, then export to SVG, open the file in Vim and add in the filters (turbulence, displacement, erosion, etc.), using Quicklook to preview my work, then open it in Inkscape and export to a 6500×6500 PNG (or thereabouts), which I then texture in Photoshop. Writing it out like that makes it seem fairly time-consuming, but it’s usually not too bad. (On average, I think I spend a total of perhaps an hour per piece, though it’s usually broken up over several days.) Lately I’ve been itching to simplify my texturing process, or perhaps to try wildly different textures. (With this type of art, I’ve found that it’s the idea that matters most. As long as it’s adequately conveyed, the rest — which tools I use, what style I do it in, etc. — doesn’t matter nearly as much.)
Releasing. I often think about whether I should care what time of day I post pieces (and usually decide that I don’t care), whether I should only post one piece per day max (I go back and forth here but usually post whatever pieces are finished regardless), and how much explanation I should give in the captions. I also think about how checking Instagram and Facebook for likes and comments feels a little like a soul-sucking death trap. Sometimes I think about ditching both platforms and posting art only to my site, but I’m not quite ready yet.
Storage. Last and probably least, I find myself frequently thinking about how much storage all these original image files are taking up. It’s a bit silly since it’s peanuts compared to video and I have plenty of disk space, but the part of my brain that loves plain text often points out that a novel takes up a mere few hundred KB while these original image files are usually a much larger 50–80 MB each (full-resolution lossless PNG; I’ve thought about JPEG but I don’t think I want to go down that road). And then I tell that part of my brain to hush, since it’s not a real problem.
