Four new art pieces. To and Fro in the Earth:
Blog
Links #103
Taylor Troesh on scrounging for between time. Several useful ideas here. “Work on X for 5 minutes” is one that has worked well for me over the years.
Cal Newport’s workingmemory.txt idea. I like this. When I’m working at my day job, I keep a todo.md file on my laptop that I dump tasks into (basically a workingmemory.txt), and a log.md file where I journal my way through things I’m working on. Together, those files make it relatively easy for me to offload state and pick things up again after interruptions. (Along with other benefits like rubberducking.)
Vicky Osterweil on Dune 2 and image without metaphor. “We are living through an era of thudding cultural literalism. In our narrative products (movies, TV and to a lesser but noticeable extent, novels) that has meant that instead of story we get plot, premise and lore, dialogue is replaced by exposition, emotion evoked only by music cue and cliche. The characters are structural objects of the plot, pure reflections of their social and narrative positioning, stripped of messy contradiction or conflictual desires. Whenever an artist even introduces any kind of metaphor they make sure to explain it tidily and neatly by the end, like a kid elbowing you in the ribs going ‘did you get it did you get it?’, meaning the best we can hope for is parable or fable.” I haven’t seen the film yet but plan to, literal though it may be.
Hugo Barra on the Apple Vision Pro being an overengineered devkit. Barra was Head of Oculus at Meta, so he’s going to be biased, but still an interesting take.
Will Richardson wrote a compiler to show that tmux is Turing-complete and can execute real code by switching between windows. Ha. This makes me happy.
Denise Hill on NASA engineers debugging a Voyager 1 issue. One advantage to the long request/response cycle, I suppose, is you have plenty of time to think about it. Plenty.
P. L. Stuart’s top 50 indie sf&f books to read. Going off the (relatively few) authors in here whose books I’ve read, this seems like a good list.
Michael Pohoreski’s nanofont3x4. Fun to see innovation like this, even if it’s not always fully pragmatic. And this is a bit more readable than I expected, given the tiny size.
Eric Portis explains color spaces, with nice visuals.
Gerard Gallant on the state of WebAssembly, including tail calls, garbage collection, and WASI.
Jeffrey M. Perkel in Nature on WebAssembly and scientific computing. Fun to see how it’s being used.
Jim Nielsen on how making websites is analogous to making films, with particular emphasis on the role of the screenplay. Some interesting ideas here.
Michael Austin on how “line upon line” was originally used by Isaiah.
Wikipedia article on Antarctic English. “Antarctic English also has over 200 words for different types of ice.”
Jason Kottke on Kevin Kelly’s advice to be the only. “What you offer to others is just different enough that you become your own category of one: nothing but you will do. Not better, different.”
Étienne Fortier-Dubois asks how expensive architectural ornamentation is. Enjoyed this exploration.
Caleb Hearon’s Dropflow, “a CSS layout engine created to explore the reaches of the foundational CSS standards (that is: inlines, blocks, floats, positioning and eventually tables, but not flexbox or grid).” Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Robin Rendle on how the medium you use the most influences the way you think. Food for thought.
Canva is acquiring Affinity. Noooooooooooo.
Four new art pieces. And Putteth Off the Natural Man:
Just added a Doctrinal Mastery index for my religious art, going off the Church’s list. (Thanks to Bryan for the nudge.) Coverage is currently spotty, but going forward I’ll be working on that where I can.
Three new art pieces. All Are Alike unto God:
Booknotes 3.8
Nonfiction
- A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas (1552). Essentially a catalog of the awful horrors the Spaniards inflicted on Native Americans, some witnessed firsthand and others related secondhand to las Casas by priests in other provinces. Brutal and bleak, but I’m glad I read it.
- Agent Zigzag, by Ben Macintyre (2007). A history of Edward Chapman, a double agent for Britain and Germany during WWII. My main takeaway, as is always the case when I read books about espionage: I am so not cut out to be a spy. Anyway, this book was interesting enough but felt like it lacked a bit of pop and zing, which I apparently crave when reading spy history. Still worth reading, though. I have most of the rest of Macintyre’s books and plan to read them.
Fiction
- I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith (1948, general fiction). Absolutely delightful. Loved it. The voice is so good and the book is funny and charming and I just really, really liked it. More books like this, please. (Recommendations very welcome.)
- The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie (2011, fantasy), second of the First Law standalones. Dang, that man can write. It’s an extremely violent, visceral, and fairly earthy book, so there’s your strong caveat, but aside from all that I really, really liked it. (Quite a bit more than I liked Best Served Cold, by the way.) It’s a very well crafted novel, in my view — surprising plot twists, characters doing interesting and unexpected things (while staying in character), compelling voices (with zing! with pop!), and wry, funny prose with hardly a sentence out of place. The POV hopping during the first part of the battle was quite effective, too. Also, war: awful.
Just added a guestbook to the site. (I came across Manu’s and nostalgia kicked in a bit. Figured it might be fun.)
Links #102
Diana Kimball Berlin on no more forever projects. This. The forever projects I’ve done (thinking primarily of Mormon Artist and Mormon Texts Project) were fun, but I don’t think I’m made for that type of work. The closure from one-offs feels better to my brain.
Jason Rodriguez on how tech will never love you back. I’ve felt similarly, and that’s why I don’t spend a ton of time writing software outside of work these days.
Emily Miller on free indirect speech in Jane Austen’s works. Fascinating.
Sean O’Neill on Melly Shum Hates Her Job. Ha.
Jim Nielsen on AI being like a lossy JPEG. “It follows that, as Paul notes, you end up with not only a tool whose output is akin to the lossy, visual artifacts of a JPEG, but a tool whose output introduces into the world the cognitive and social equivalent of those big blocky compression artifacts of a JPEG.”
Tom Holt interviews K. J. Parker about writing. Enjoyed this. (And note that while it’s on a Chinese site, the interview is in English.)
Jason Kottke on Bill Braun’s trompe l’oeil papercraft paintings. These are awesome.
Jennifer Ludden on places in the U.S. that are piloting basic income programs. Yes! Delighted to see this. I realize this is America so it probably won’t catch on everywhere, but having it here and there is better than not at all.
John-Clark Levin’s Gen Z translation of Beowulf. Amazing.
Roger Pimentel on grace. This is good. “These explanations also invite another interpretation of this verse, which does speak to the undeserved, unmerited definition of grace that we find in other faiths. If we are, in fact, saved despite all we can do, that means all we can do, good or bad. This is a little bit counterintuitive, because we think of grace being a reward for those who do good works. But in addition to being saved despite our good works, it also means we are saved despite our constant mistakes, our frequent failing to love God and our neighbor, and our seeming inability to change for the better. Despite all we can do to stop it, grace still flows to us.”
Josh Collinsworth on the quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend dev. I think there’s something to this.
Rejected Icelandic female names and male names. I had no idea only approved names can be used. Wow.
JSON Canvas, an open file format for infinite canvas data. Cool.
Dead Simple Sites, a catalog of minimalist websites.
Jim Nielsen on following links on the web. “Discovering things via links is way more fun than most algorithmically-driven discovery — in my humble opinion.” Yep!
Rebecca Toh on reading people’s blogs. “I feel connected by our common humanity. We’ll never meet, but I can picture them sitting on their sofa writing on their laptop or using the computer in their kitchen, writing when the kids are asleep, writing in the morning, writing when the first snowfall arrives, writing about their new job, about losing their job, about moving to a new city, about this film they just watched, about their husband who died a few years ago. A blog is a small and beautiful thing and I am grateful it exists.” Love this.
Links #101
David Epstein’s interview with Cal Newport about slow productivity. This was good and has been in my thoughts the past few days. For me, the part that stuck out most was the idea of obsessing over quality. I often default to more of a utilitarian “get it out the door, it’s good enough” mode, which is often fine, but I like the idea of slowing down and spending time obsessing over quality.
Elie Mystal on how the Supreme Court is antidemocratic. “The Supreme Court must be made to pay a price—a political, institutional, professional price—for its ongoing political thuggery lightly disguised as jurisprudence. Its members will never stop acting like the only nine Americans who matter until we stop them from doing that. And the only way to stop them is to limit their power, their budgets, and their unearned belief in their own supremacy.” I’m no SCOTUS expert, but I agree. The current state is not ideal.
James on how blogging, as a format, encourages incomplete stories. I like this idea. Messy, WIP, thinking in public, iteration. To me, that’s more interesting than only publishing pristine, polished perfection. (Apologies for the alliteration.) (Oh snap, I did it again. In spite of the foregoing sentences, I usually try to avoid using consonance and alliteration.)
Chris Haynes on streaming HTML out of order without JavaScript, using Declarative Shadow DOM. Intriguing, especially now that both Safari and Firefox have added support for Declarative Shadow DOM.
The opening paragraphs to Goodstein’s States of Matter textbook. Ha. More dark humor in textbooks, please.
Infographic on who lived when. Found this interesting, especially across different areas.
@Hugo_Book_Club on dystopian fiction. There’s…a lot of truth to this.
Per Brinch Hansen’s memoirs of programming. Haven’t read this yet but it looks interesting.
Matt Webb’s Galactic Compass app. I finally installed this and have used it a couple times, which has been fun. I love how it takes something ordinarily invisible (at least during the day and in the city) and makes it accessible. For example, I hadn’t ever thought about how it changes over the course of the day. Obvious in hindsight, sure, but now I have a better, more grounded sense of the earth’s rotation than I did before.
A handful of new art pieces. There He Preached to Them:
