Bookshelf, my reading tracker, which I’ve been using pretty much daily over the past fifteen years to keep track of which page I’m on in each book and also (via the automatically generated stats) as strong motivation to reach my per-day and per-book page count reading goals. I love it. No plans to move to something else.

Cast, my static site generator, used to build this site for the last year and a half. Glad I finally put in the time to make this happen, because I love static files and having fewer moving parts, and I’ve been very happy with Cast itself. No plans to move to a third-party SSG like Origami or Hugo. (Nothing against those, to be clear.)

Codex, my notes app, which I use daily to track which books I want to read, notes on house and car maintenance, tracking progress on my journal transcription work, story outlines, genealogy research notes, blog drafts (I’m writing this post in it), and more. I like it a lot, but lately I’ve gotten back into taking notes by hand in my Field Notes and other pocket notebooks (as mentioned in the last links post, and probably in other posts before that), and I’m now figuring out when I want to use this app vs. paper notes. Long-lived notes that I modify a lot over time still seem like a better fit for digital, for example. Anyway, no immediate plans to move to something else, though I imagine more types of notes will probably move to paper over time.

Digest, my static RSS reader. It’s been six months so far, and this way of reading feeds still works really well on my brain — the self-contained nature of bundling posts by day is soothing, and instead of feeling anxious that I need (“need,” I should say) to keep up with an endless stream of new posts, I feel like I can read at whatever pace I want to, which usually ends up being every few days instead of daily. I love that each day is its own static HTML file that I rsync up to my server. I also have really loved reading posts on their original sites instead of in a homogeneous design of my own make. Feels much more human and more delightful.

Gate, my quick entry app. I use it dozens of times a day to send to-dos to Liszt and journal notes/entries to Leaf, and it’s working really well. No plans to move away from it.

Leaf, my journal app, where I keep my daily journal and my project logs. While it’s tempting to write paper journals again, I’ve been transcribing my older journals and it’s nice being able to read older entries and search through all of them to find out when something happened, and I don’t see myself wanting to give that up. The app automatically exports each day’s entries to a day-specific text file for extra preservation beyond the database itself, which I love and plan to do in other applicable apps of mine. No plans to move to something else, though I do write some types of entries in my Field Notes.

Liszt, my to-do list app, which I use dozens of times a day, and it’s working well. I love being able to quickly add items via Gate, including multiple items at a time (each on its own line). I love the text-based annotations. (Write that blog post ! #writing 5m marks it as important, tags it, and indicates I should spend five minutes on it.) I love having my daily routine autopopulated in the list each morning. All of that said, however, I do find myself thinking about going back to pen and paper for to-do lists, because I don’t know that I strictly need any of the extra functionality the app is giving me. Also, for the past few years I’ve been using a plain text Markdown file on my work laptop for my work to-do list, and that same model could easily work for my projects where I’m almost always working on them mainly on my laptop. In fact, as I write these words I’m now remembering that when I was younger I used to keep my to-do lists as plain text files. (Part of these thoughts, by the way, come from wanting to move more analogward, and part come from wanting fewer dependencies, fewer moving parts, fewer things to maintain on my server.) Not sure yet what I’ll do.

Momentum, my time tracker, which I use daily to track time (go figure) for scripture study and conference talk study and, primarily, to make sure I’m walking enough each day (for my back pain). It’s nice being able to just tap a button to start or stop tracking, and to see the recent history of how much time I’ve spent per category, but I’ve also been thinking I could probably do this via pen and paper, or via the stopwatch on my phone. We’ll see.

Saturn, my quick launcher web page, which I use daily for fast access to notes and other bookmarks and as a quick search entry point — I type in a query and then choose where I want to search (my journal, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, eReaderIQ, my library, etc.). Works great, love it, no plans to move to something else.

Scroll, my ebook reader. An absolute win in my book. It’s been almost two years now and I still love it and use it almost every day and wish I’d made the move earlier. I love having full typographic control, bleedthrough and paper backgrounds, autoscroll (and scrolling in general, instead of swiping), and the lightweight feel of knowing it’s just static HTML files with some JavaScript. There are admittedly some things I still want to fix — changing pagination from percentage-based (which is unstable across font changes) to statically built in (which has the extra advantage of being usable in other apps and devices, like the Xteink X4) (which I got for my birthday, by the way; been meaning to post about it), and using publisher styles instead of overriding everything like the madman that I am — but overall I’d say it’s perhaps my favorite among all the things I’ve built.

Storybook, my fiction writing app. It’s working fine, though I don’t use it often enough — and wish I did, so I would be finishing stories more often. The daily word count tracking is nice. Per that Neal Stephenson link earlier today, though, the idea of writing more by hand has intrigued me, and if I do that (and even if I don’t), I think plain text files are fully adequate for story drafts. (As opposed to using a database in an app.) So…we’ll see.

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Neal Stephenson’s advice on writing by hand. I’ve wanted to do more of this. Just need to put in the time to get my cursive hand to a place where I’m happy with how it looks, and I need to figure out how to avoid hand cramps, since unlikely Neal I do get those every time I write by hand for more than a minute or two. (Maybe I’m writing too small or holding the pen too tightly.)

Jess Zafarris on rebracketing (words that got broken in the wrong place). Fascinating!

Alan Jacobs quoting John McWhorter on why “h” is pronounced “aitch.” Also fascinating and unexpected.

The Godox C100 screenless camera and the screenless Camp Snap 2 both look interesting.

ReadBeanIceCream on only working at their desk. “I have a toolbox. I do not carry it around with me. I do not bring it the grocery store, on vacation, or anywhere else. It sits on a shelf until I need it and I treat my digital tools the same way.” Intriguing. I already do this for work but hadn’t thought about doing it for personal projects as well.

Petra Stock on a species of jellyfish, turritopsis dohrnii, that is kind of immortal. Crazy. Though having to turn back into a kid and grow up all over again seems like it might be more of a curse.

The Virtual OS Museum. “Want to see the earliest resident monitors? The ancestor of all modern OSes (CTSS)? The earliest versions of Unix? The first OS with a desktop metaphor GUI (Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint)? Early versions of mainstream OSes? If you want to explore historical OSes and platforms without having to worry about configuring/installing emulators and OSes or corrupting emulated installations, you’ve come to the right place.” Cool.

Video of Ancient James making a DSLR adapter mount out of an LCD. Mesmerizing.

vga256’s northern perspective. “When technology breaks down in the north, there isn’t a tech support number to call, or dealership or mechanic to take it to. You’re on your own. This encourages you to care for your tools, and make repairs using whatever knowledge and resources you have on hand. People who live on the land only take with them what they can maintain, upgrade and repair themselves. Big, complex, fragile, expensive, high-performance, high-maintenance stuff is left at drydock.” A good philosophy.

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Classics: A Very Short Introduction, by Mary Beard & John Henderson, published 2000, history, 98 pages. It was good for its length and scope, with the temple at Bassae as the entry point for several of the topics. My favorite parts, I think, were those showing what types of discussions classicists often engage in. I also have not thought nearly enough about how slavery in Greece and Rome affected the ancient world.

Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, by Eric Foner, published 2002, essays, 249 pages. Foner is a historian of Reconstruction (or at least started as one) but these essays cover more ground — social Darwinism, South Africa, freedom in the U.S., originalism and the Supreme Court’s racism in recent decades, the historiographic weakness of the final episode of the Ken Burns Civil War miniseries, etc. I liked it. A couple passages that stuck with me:

We can forget the past, but the past, most assuredly, will not forget us. The experience of dead generations, Karl Marx once wrote, “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

And:

The price of maintaining freedom, as an Irish judge commented two centuries ago, is “eternal vigilance.”

Biography: A Very Short Introduction, by Hermione Lee, published 2009, nonfiction, 140 pages. Focused mostly on literary biography. I very much enjoyed it and emerged with many more books added onto my to-read list. (Though one that did not get added to my list was Boswell’s Johnson, because I’m already reading it. Around 10% of the way in and I’m loving it. It’s so good.) Also, I did not know that Henry James and Edith Wharton toured France together in 1907.

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Eamon Caddigan on hating AI in 2026. “Some people find chatbots useful and I can’t argue with their opinion, but nobody is doing anything with them that remotely justifies their socialized costs.”

Johannes Link and Jakob Schnell on the ethical use of generative AI. “Convenience, speed and entertainment are then weighed against numerous damages and risks to the environment, the state and humanity. In this sense, the ethical use and further expansion of GenAI in its current form is not possible.”

L. M. Sacasas on how AI is not a tool. “But AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are using it carefully and intentionally. The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run.”

Samis Talwar on how LLMs can’t program. “At no point have I ever met something generated by one of these tools that I didn’t detest. Articles are obsequious, vacuous, and typically boring. Length is a virtue (Pascal would have cried). Poetry reads like the stuff I wrote when I was 14. (I didn’t get better, I stopped.) Ask an LLM to generate short fiction, and you’ll quickly learn it was trained on the worst of internet fanfic.”

Tante on AI as a fascist artifact. “Modern ‘AI’ systems of any relevant capability exist because of violence, are based on violence. Violence is more than just hitting people. Taking away people’s agency is violence, exposing people to suffering is violence. Violence has many shapes and forms. And ‘AI’ needs an acceptance of endless amounts of violence (I will not be able to list all forms of it, this is just a selection).”

HMMZ on AI. “I have no idea how to manage AI at present except by curtailing use, because a tool producing a cheap reward with minimal input and no friction can only be a liability, and achieving that realisation is probably the only real contribution of AI to date.”

Henry on how it doesn’t matter if it works. “The widespread deployment of AI/LLMs constitutes an existential threat to labor whether or not it is an adept move by the adoptive industries. Thus it is essential for workers to stop asking whether or not AI works and start asking who ultimately benefits from its deployment.”

W. Evan Sheehan on how AI is everywhere foisted upon us. “This is not to say that I think that the environmental harms from resource extraction associated with computer chips and battery technology, nor the exploitation of labor in countries like China is in any way acceptable or excusable simply because some electronics have infiltrated our lives to the extent that they are practically indispensable. We can do better — and we should. My point is that we have not yet reached the point with ‘AI’ that we must continue to use it as we demand better. We can instead refuse to use it until it is ethical to do so.”

Dave Karpf on how data center activism is a bankshot. “It can trigger a reset of the status quo, and has the potential to make a lasting impact on the digital future.”

Matthew Butterick on extinction-level capitalism. “AI is inherently political technology. If AI works as intended, it will gradually corrode our liberal democracy, risking an irreversible shift into another political and economic configuration. Among AI risks, this one deserves more consideration, because it requires no additional conditions like malign actors or AI malfunction. AI only needs to amplify existing trends, especially around concentration of capital. This damage will occur even assuming that in the near term, AI will broadly improve material well-being.”

Sylvia quoting Dave Eggers on AI. “This is the first time in history when a whole generation is being told or tempted to have a machine write for them. You are one of one, unprecedented in the history of human evolution. There’s only one of you. So to give your voice to a machine to say speak for me, I’m going to be silent, and I’m going to tell a machine to express myself or to tell my narrative, is such a crime against yourself. It’s so dystopian, beyond anything I could do in a dystopian novel, and I did a lot.”

Ky Decker on burnout. “AI had hooked its tendrils into every corner of my work life. Even if I, personally, abstained from most AI usage, I was steeped in an environment which made it impossible to avoid. Pushing back felt futile.”

Tom MacWright on accidental anonymity. “If you want people to connect with you as a person, you can’t hide behind a machine.”

Nolen Royalty on legibility of effort. “What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort — the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.”

Benjamin Hollon on people asking what he thinks about AI. “I’m really, really tired of having the conversation. Because it’s the same conversation over and over and over again, usually with no actual signs that the person I’m talking to cares enough to change their mind.”

James Zhan on no-AI statements. “You’re never expected to be able to tell handmade ceramics from machine-made ones, so why should anyone be expected to be able to tell human-made content from AI-generated ones?”

Simon Sarris on resisting AI. “I suspect careful thinkers do not gain a mastery of mystery, or attention to detail, by scrolling Reddit or listening to current event podcasts or asking ‘AI’ to summarize anything. Instead I imagine they spend their time with primary sources, correspondence, stories, engaging with their own senses in one way or another, or some other form of exploring the world in detail.” And: “It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms. Narrative resists compression.”

Rutherford Craze on using our human hands. “When we turn design over to generative AI, we remove the human element from the process. When we ask Midjourney to draw an ox, it does not think of home. ChatGPT will never invent a new calligraphy technique, because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.”

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Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published 1841/1844 (in two volumes), nonfiction, 502 pages. Lots of interesting ideas. I’m glad I read it, but by the end his manner of stating things very confidently became grating and I was equally glad to be done. It might have been better if I’d spaced the essays out over time instead of gulping them down all at once. Still, worth reading.

Days of Shattered Faith, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2025, fantasy, 659 pages. Third in the Tyrant Philosophers series. Really liked it, as always. The world continues to be compelling and these books are among Tchaikovsky’s best, I think.

Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by Ruth Scurr, published 2006, biography, 533 pages. As the subtitle indicates, this is a worthwhile look at the French Revolution by way of Robespierre. Before reading this (and I haven’t read much about the French Revolution, to be clear), my perception of Robespierre was heavily on the villain side of things, but the book provides a more three-dimensional view while also avoiding turning into an apologia for murder. For example, I hadn’t known that in his younger days Robespierre argued against the death penalty and defended the poor. I also hadn’t realized he was guillotined at only thirty-six years old. So young! Unwilling to admit he was wrong, unable to separate himself from the Revolution, it’s a sad story.

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Havana: A Subtropical Delirium, by Mark Kurlansky, published 2017, nonfiction, 202 pages. I went into this having liked Kurlansky’s Cod, but alas, this one didn’t work as well for me. (I stuck with it because one of my family lines is from Cuba and I want to know more about the history and culture there.) I did enjoy reading about Cuban post-embargo constraint-driven creativity and ingenuity, and I didn’t know the sloppy joe originated in Havana, nor that Habaneros apparently hate the sea, because loved ones leave by it and because new people (invaders, historically) arrive by it.

Bunner Sisters, by Edith Wharton, published 1916, fiction, 117 pages. About two sisters, Ann Eliza and Evelina, and Mr. Ramy the clockmaker. Darker than I expected going in, with some unexpected choices by the characters. Liked it. My plan right now, by the way, is to finish up Wharton’s novellas first and then read her novels in chronological order.

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, by Amy S. Greenberg, published 2013, history, 461 pages. Quite good. I read this because one of my ancestors fought in the war and I realized I knew almost nothing about it. It would, I think, do most Americans good to learn more about the war (whether through this book or elsewhere), to better understand some of the costs of manifest destiny and the annexations that led to the geography we have today. (Saying this as someone who lives in territory seized during the conflict.) I agree that it was a wicked, unjust war, and for me there were several echoes with our current war du jour — a war of aggression sparked by lies, for example, and weak-willed people in Congress mumbling that we simply have to support the president’s war if it’s already been started (balderdash). I have no strong feelings about this, clearly. In the book it was also fascinating to see how the Mexican–American War functioned as prologue to the Civil War, and Lincoln’s part in protesting it. Recommended.

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HellMood’s 16-byte Sierpinski triangle demo. Sixteen bytes!

Derek Sivers on being a netizen. I’ve been online since 1991 and that same early ethos was instilled in me, too. I believe it makes for a better internet.

Harry Roberts on the new No-Vary-Search browser cache control header.

Ally Piechowski with some helpful git log commands for getting familiar with a new codebase. Bookmarking these.

Nishant on Earth’s radio wave bubble, which is only 240 light years across. One of the most compelling answers to the Fermi paradox I’ve seen so far.

Tracy Durnell on human-oriented online posts. Some interesting ideas here. The analog parts made me think of Robin Sloan’s printing projects: “In the years since, the Kindle has matured and curdled … the web has become an even more brutal arena … and only one realm has remained truly, reliably apart. Only one realm has remained reliable, period. That’s the realm of the physical, of course.” Making and shipping zines (or some other printed matter) is tempting.

Asher Cabrera on adding UI for reply posts on a blog. I like this. Lately I’ve defaulted to these batched link posts with a smidge of commentary per link, but maybe I’ll get back into the habit someday of responding more fully, at least some of the time.

James Goldberg on how Mormon literature is arriving. Unrelated to the link: hard to believe it was almost twenty years ago when I first met James and got involved with New Play Project (writing, typesetting playbills and scripts, helping run auditions, selling tickets and concessions, a little bit of directing). Good memories. And that means it’s been eighteen years (18!) since I started Mormon Artist (may it rest in peace). Sometimes I find myself missing those days of working on larger collaborative projects. (On a related note, withdrawing from social media has absolutely been good for my mental health, but it’s come with the undesirable side effect of feeling far more disconnected from other people doing creative work. I haven’t yet figured out how to balance this.)

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The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, published 1610, play, 66 pages. This was the Shakespeare play I’d been looking forward to the most, because I’d never read it before but had seen several references to it over the years. It did not disappoint. (Though Julius Caesar remains my favorite, I think.)

The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, by Jeffrey Rosen, published 2024, history, 382 pages. Delighted to read that many/most of those involved in the Founding were voracious readers, though in hindsight I suppose it could be more surprising that any were not. Regardless, my main goal in reading this book was to come out with a list of older books and authors I want to read next, like Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, and I now have that list. But do I have sufficient time? Aye, there’s the rub.

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, by Joseph J. Ellis, published 2000, history, 418 pages. Fascinating detail into different parts of the Founding — the Hamilton v. Burr duel, the postponing of discussions about slavery, Washington’s farewell address, the troubled friendship between Jefferson and Adams, the split between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian views of government that still causes issues today, etc. This won the Pulitzer. Really liked it — on its own merits, not because of the award — and recommend it. And no, I didn’t read either of these last two books because of the 250th, though the timing certainly looks suspect.

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Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam, by Brian VanDeMark, published 2018, history, 763 pages. Really liked it. It’s a history of Vietnam up until LBJ leaves office, including a bit at the beginning on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis (useful context for the early decisions both Kennedy and McNamara were making), looking in particular at the various cognitive blind spots that led smart people to make poor decisions throughout the war. Recommended. Also: war is evil.

Père Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac, published 1835, translated 1890s by Ellen Marriage, fiction, 383 pages. My first time reading Balzac. Shallow society, lots of unhappy marriages and surface-level affairs. And yet in spite of all that (which to be fair is only a small part of the novel), I quite liked the book and found myself looking forward to picking it up again each day. I don’t know that I’ll read his whole Human Comedy — there are a lot of volumes — but a few more, certainly.

Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, published 2007, biography, 684 pages. Quite good. Compelling and readable. Bronson was an odd character, egotistical (“my genius is epic” — who says that?!) and weird (the whole Fruitlands episode, for example), with some obsessive journaling on parenthood. “Bronson desperately wanted to cure Louisa’s seemingly innate violence. In his records, he fretted endlessly over her fierce will and volcanic temper.” She was two or three at the time, if I recall correctly. Ha. Emerson and Thoreau show up fairly often, which was fun. On the less fun side of things, I hadn’t known about Louisa’s disability and health issues that seriously affected her last couple decades. Another casualty of the Civil War. And of course it was interesting to see which parts of Little Women were more autobiographical. Speaking of that and, more candidly, of the trail of deaths of her family toward the end of the book: biographies often leave me with a feeling I don’t get from any other kind of book, the feeling that a friend has died.

The Life of Charlotte Brontë, by Elizabeth Gaskell (who was six years older than Charlotte and was her friend), published 1857, biography, 684 pages. So good. Tragedy after tragedy, though, with her mother dying at age 39, her two oldest sisters dying at ages 11 and 12, and then, later on, Branwell, Emily, and Anne all dying within eight months of each other at ages 31, 30, and 29, and Charlotte herself dying a few years after that at age 38 while pregnant. The father outlived them all and made it to age 84. A family haunted by death. My wife’s ancestors, by the way, were from Keighley and Haworth, and we visited Haworth as a family a few years ago, so it was fun to read about it. Except that Haworth back then was a bit of a death trap: “And thus we find that illness often assumed a low typhoid form in Haworth, and fevers of various kinds visited the place with sad frequency.” The autobiographical elements of Jane Eyre were striking — I didn’t realize Helen Burns was basically her older sister Maria. Or how her father’s near-blindness and her own extreme nearsightedness surely led to all the references to sight and eyes. The biography includes lots of letters, which I found very effective in drawing me into Charlotte’s world. Some passages that give a feel for the book, and the first two are Charlotte’s words:

A bereavement of this kind gives one a glimpse of the feeling those must have, who have seen all drop round them—friend after friend, and are left to end their pilgrimage alone.

And:

For my part, I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence, their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it; now I dare not read it, and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion, and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget. Many people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency, but I think these have not watched them through lingering sickness, nor witnessed their last moments: it is these reminiscences that stand by your bedside at night, and rise at your pillow in the morning. At the end of all, however, exists the Great Hope. Eternal Life is theirs now.

And:

Some one conversing with her once objected, in my presence, to that part of Jane Eyre in which she hears Rochester’s voice crying out to her in a great crisis of her life, he being many, many miles distant at the time. I do not know what incident was in Miss Brontë’s recollection when she replied, in a low voice, drawing in her breath, “But it is a true thing; it really happened.”

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Typographica Library’s specimen books of metal and wood type. Lovely. I occasionally dream of using some of these specimens as inspiration for new rough, wobbly fonts in the same vein as the IM Fell fonts, but I don’t know if it’ll happen — I’m beginning to suspect that maybe, just maybe, I might not have the right temperament for doing type design.

Marissa Lingen’s book reviews (twice a month). Enjoying these. So much so, in fact, that I’ve gone back and have been reading through the entirety of her blog archive.

Robert Birming on stories hiding in plain sight, and how perspective determines what’s interesting. This is in context of blogging and perhaps creative nonfiction as well.

Samuel Arbesman’s Microcosm Industries, a register of simulation games like SimCity, Factorio, and Dwarf Fortress. Fun. My brain doesn’t like playing computer games anymore, but when I was younger I would have loved these.

Worse on Purpose. “Corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what’s still worth buying.” I think the world would be better off with more rigorous regulations for mergers and acquisitions, and also for private equity.

Andrea Wulf’s recommendations for biographies of 18th-century figures, including Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, which I’ve been looking forward to. And this reminds me that I’ve been itching to read Wulf’s other books, since I really loved The Invention of Nature by her.

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