Molly White on the good old days of the web. Life outside the walled gardens is nice and relaxing.
Terence Eden on what a blog post is. Yep. Makes me wonder what other forms of posts are out there in the possibility space.
Ash Huang on how she drafts a book. Something like this might be a good fit for me.
Rachel Kwon on technology. “Sometimes it feels like being able to take photos so easily means we also end up creating a lot of lower value photos that don’t take up much physical space but do take up mental energy to delete, deduplicate, etc.” Managing family photos: something I feel is super important but I am also not very good at it. (Currently using a folder for each month, and I rarely dedupe or delete photos. I back up [not regularly enough] both to local external hard drives and to Backblaze B2.)
Stephen Band on typesetting responsive sheet music with CSS Grid. Interesting.
Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on rewilding the Internet. Late to the party on this one, but it’s good and still very much worth reading.
Oliver Burkeman on generative AI and human connection. This is good. I agree.
Cory Dransfeldt on personal websites. I don’t think I ever get tired of reading about personal websites, to be honest.
Rachel J. Kwon’s collection of articles about personal websites. “A collection of articles that to some degree answer the question ‘Why have a personal website?’ with ‘Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.’”
Evan Bush on new research suggesting that birds and mammals are probably self-aware, and several invertebrates, too. I don’t know how well-established this all is (perhaps it’s been debunked), but vegetarianism certainly does sound a bit more appealing now.
Richard Holman on doing something daily. The times I’ve actually finished writing stories have almost always been when I’ve had a daily regimen, whether that’s a word count goal or a set number of minutes. Without the daily, I don’t write.
Alan Jacobs on rational choices. “The intellectual/political monoculture of the modern university leads to an intellectual/political monoculture in the major media companies, and when you combine that with the many ways the internet has disrupted the economic models of all the arts, you get a general environment in which interesting, imaginative work is not just resisted, it’s virtually prohibited. All the incentives of everyone involved are aligned against it.”
Henrik Karlsson on thinking through writing. Some useful advice.
Veronique on blogging frequency. “There’s this part of me that always feels like I’m bothering people if I blog every day.” Same here. I also liked the quote from Winnie Lim: “instead of always feeling so hesitant because i feel so weird, i am just going to focus on being the fullest version of myself.”
Rachel Andrew on her aphantasia. Fascinating.
Aaron Francis on doing literally anything. I’ve found this to be true. Spending even a single minute on a project is often enough to get momentum to keep going.
Microsoft has open sourced MS-DOS 4.0. Ah, nostalgia. I can’t remember if I started with version 4 or 5, but it was around that time.
Robin Rendle on displaying language-specific quotes in CSS. Cool. I didn’t know about this.
Ben Abbott (a friend from high school) on stewardship of the Earth. “The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else. As it happens, this is not unlike the first of God’s laws.” Agreed.
Étienne Fortier-Dubois on colonizing other planets and cultural diversification. Enjoyed this.
Jay Hoffmann on what he calls the analog web. “These websites don’t exist with any necessary agenda. They are handmade, and at times, even a bit weird. But they represent a person in some way; an interest, an ideology, a hobby, or nothing more bold than a point of view. Because they are distinct and imperfect, these sites can resist the wave of generated content heading our way.” I really love the analog web (or the indie web or the smol web or whatever you want to call it).
Andy Allen and Thomas Williams on sound design in software. Fun. Working on the web, I don’t usually get to do anything with this, but I think I’d like to.
Jason Kottke on Francine LeClercq’s cross-stitched CCTV footage. Love this. I’ve long wanted to play around with doing a cross-stitch implementation of some of my symbolic religious art.
Jules Bernstein on a new vaccine strategy from UC Riverside that looks promising. Oh, I hope this works out.
Henry Oliver on smartphones not being the source of all social ills. An interesting counterbalance, worth thinking about given humanity’s general reaction to new technologies over time. I love that I can read books on my phone and keep track of my to-do list and stay in touch with family and friends. (And of course I also recognize that it’s healthy to not be on screens all the time.)
myNoise (via swissmiss) has nice ad-free soundscapes (Irish coast, Japanese garden, distant thunder, white noise, etc.).
Eleanor Konik on maintaining sane task lists. Some useful tips here.
Barry Hess on how blogging doesn’t require writing perfect essays. Good reminder. Having standards is good, but an obsession with perfection can be debilitating if it means you never finish things.
Jeremy Keith on hanging punctuation in CSS. I had no idea hanging-punctuation exists. Browser support isn’t quite there yet, but someday!
Hans Zimmer: Hollywood Rebel documentary on Netflix. Enjoyed this. The thing that resonated with me the most (har har) was Zimmer’s relentless experimentation.
Massimo’s disturbing video of a komodo dragon swallowing a goat in one long extended bite. I don’t know why I’m sharing this.
Anna Havron on grief.
Kevin Wammer’s review of the Boox Palma. I am so tempted. (The phone form factor is a better fit for one-handed reading, which is mostly what I do.) So tempted.
Julianne Pepitone on a smart contact lenses that generate power from blinking, built by a team at the University of Utah. Cool. I don’t know how I’d feel about actually wearing smart lenses myself, though.
Martin Heinz on how to make your shell history more useful. Some good tips here.
Piano Music Bros. on the evolution of Mozart’s music, from age five to age thirty-five. Fun to see. (Though I also think the adulation of geniuses isn’t super healthy for all of us normies, so here’s your grain of salt with this.)
Henrik Karlsson on reading serious literature to his kids. “It is about figuring out a rich reading experience that both parties are excited about. Books that pull you in and open a space for deep conversation.” I think I want to try this.
Michael Flarup’s list of 40 things he’s learned being a creative entrepreneur. I like several of these — shrink the first step, make a lot of things, and practice daily completeable to-do lists, to name a few.
David Jonathan Ross on Indoor Kid, a variable font for lettering comics. Cool.
Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp on how AI training sets like LAION are constructed.
Hillel Wayne on syntax highlighting being a waste of an information channel. Super interesting idea. To his point at the end about highlighting conflicts, I think being able to easily rotate through highlighting modes might help. And to generalize that idea a little more, toggleable analysis overlays seem like they could be useful in several other contexts too, like writing fiction or making digital art.
Susanna Clarke has a new book coming out! It’s going to be released in October this year. Very much looking forward to it.
Jason Becker’s public letters project, with the first of four rounds of letters as an example from February 2023. Interesting idea. The introvert part of me isn’t so sure about posting correspondence publicly, but if someone wants to try this out, email me some possible topic ideas.
Susam’s Guess My RGB game. Fun.
C. J. Chilvers (not to be confused with C. J. Chivers) on why he went back to buying CDs. Food for thought. I’m intrigued by his statement that “physical media is making a comeback, including innovations in the hardware that plays physical media” — curious what those innovations are. (I should add that I don’t stream music very often. Most of the time I listen to music I bought years ago in iTunes Music on my laptop or phone.)
Andrew Kersley on how people hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one. I’m all for reducing car usage. Out here in suburbia, though, it seems nigh impossible. Maybe someday.
Garry Ing on a view source web, an essay in the
The HTML Review. The hover effect on desktop is interesting albeit a tad distracting. I like the idea of surfacing page source more, though ideally not in an obscuring way.
Deborah Copaken on a new study that shows drinking even a little bit of alcohol drastically increases risk of cardiovascular disease for women of all ages.
Alastair Johnston on hello pages, a way to list your preferred contact methods. Cool idea. I’ve added my own hello page.
Monkey gang violence in Lopburi, Thailand. Whew.
Manu Moreale offering to be a first reader for anyone who starts a blog. Also a cool idea.
The Wall Street Journal’s front page a week ago. Some powerful white space, that.
Colin Fraser on generative AI being a hammer and nobody really knows yet what is and isn’t a nail. Good essay, worth the read. Seems to me like there are lots of tasks where what you want is determinative logic rather than probabilistic guessing. (Which I think is at least partly why I don’t have much interest in doing AI engineering — I like building determinative things where I can understand how it works. And yes, state machines are totally my jam.)
Ohm, a JavaScript library for building parsers. Looks interesting.
Invisibility shields are kind of real now. Cool. And unsettling. More the latter, I think, given all the malicious ways this could be used.
Jacek Krywko on new developments in active shielding against space radiation. A good-sized chunk of this went over my head (har har), but fascinating nonetheless.
Lincoln Michel on productivity. Which reminded me of Austin Kleon’s post about the quantity vs. quality parable. I feel like I’ve been doing okay at this with art, but not so great at it with writing.
Joan Westenberg on why building on someone else’s platform is a dead end. Hear, hear. After reading this, I decided to stop posting my individual art pieces to Instagram and instead post batches (four or more), with the caption just linking to my art page.
Twelve hymns from the new hymnbook are coming in May, including “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Sweet. I especially love that the new hymnbook will include hymns from all over the world and not just Western hymns.
Amit Merchant on text-emphasis in CSS. I had no idea. I don’t know when I’d use it (is there a typographic tradition where emphasis is done this way?), but it’s interesting.
Manu Moreale on growth being a mind cancer. “We celebrate when Apple becomes the first trillion-dollar company but we don’t celebrate when someone says ‘You know what? I think I have enough.’” Very much agreed. Not a huge fan of growth capitalism.