The Book of Shaders is a nice introduction to fragment shaders. Like Toby Schachman’s Pixel Shaders book, it isn’t complete, but it has promise. And the accompanying shader editor has breakpoints.
Blog
I enjoyed Kenneth Ormandy’s essay on efficient web type circa 1556.
Speed
To help me with my thousand-words-a-day goal, I’ve been using a tool I wrote called Speed. It’s a desktop app, written using Electron, and it looks like this:
As you can see, it’s fairly simple. The code is on GitHub.
Sahidic Coptic alphabet chart
Today I’m releasing a Sahidic Coptic alphabet chart and worksheet. The chart:
And the worksheet:
Back on December 3, I made a goal to write a thousand words of fiction a day, every day (skipping Sundays). I made up a chart with sixteen weeks on it, ending March 19, printed it out, and taped it on the headboard of our bed.
And that chart is now full. I’ve written exactly 100,000 words since December 3 (I wrote a little extra each day), which is crazy considering that I used to be unable to get myself to write at all. I don’t know what actually made the change, but I’m writing every day and it’s great.
Today I tried doing my daily writing via phone dictation, and it went surprisingly well. I had to correct a fair amount of mistranscribed words, but there weren’t as many as I had expected. And I think it might have actually been faster than typing on my phone (considering that I often have to fix autocorrected text when I’m typing).
I’ll say, though, that I’m not at all used to writing things by speaking out loud. Very different. I suspect it may grow on me, though.
I’ve been working on a piece called “To Fulfil All Righteousness,” on the baptism of Christ. My initial attempt ended up a little too representational:
I decided to reframe the painting, ditch the windows of heaven (simpler is better here), and redo the dove shape. Here’s the current sketch, which I’ll paint soon:
(Using Kyle Webster’s Pencil 4H Photoshop brush, from the Ultimate Megapack.)
Lighting and background removal
Yesterday I came across this good tutorial by Max Ulichney on removing unwanted color tints from scanned artwork:
Lifter is “a lightweight query engine for Python iterables.” Looks nice. One of their examples:
# vanilla Python
results = [
user for user in users
if user['age'] == 26 and user['is_active']
]
# lifter
results = manager.filter(User.age == 26, User.is_active == True)
The state of the novel: avoiding outlining.
I ended up shelving the Cria/Iresha storyline (it’ll be its own book) to focus on Makrannan’s, which then made it clear that Makrannan’s storyline was weak and problematic. So I threw most of it out. The worldbuilding was flimsy as well, leading me to spend the last month fleshing it out (magic systems, history, surrounding cultures, etc.), and I now have a much more solid grasp on the world. I’ve also been learning more about Makrannan’s character and backstory.
All that prewriting has gotten me to the point where the next step is writing the full outline. I’ve done an amazing job avoiding that, however, because I don’t have a good ending yet and the middle is completely vague and muddy — nonexistent, really.
My goal this coming week: figure out a better ending, and plan out the overall structure of the novel. Once I have the boundaries and shape of the forest in place, so to speak, planting the trees should be much easier.
One of the things I’ve run into is that there is an overwhelming infinity of choices at almost every step of the plot. Having a solid structure will, I believe, help with making better design choices in plotting the book.
Sidenote: yesterday marked thirteen weeks solid of writing a thousand words a day. A lot of those words have been prewriting or random freewriting, but establishing the habit has finally given me the confidence that I can manage the day-to-day writing load necessary to finish a novel.