Ben Crowder

Blog: #prints-2.2

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Links — Prints 2.2

#links #prints #prints-2.2

Global histories of the Church. Mini-Saints, basically. Looking forward to reading through these once I finish volume 3.

Nicholas Rougeux’s digital edition of J. G. Heck’s Iconographic Encyclopædia of Science, Literature, and Art. So cool.

Nicholas Rougeux’s making-of for his digital edition of A Dictionary of Typography. Also very cool.

Nicholas Rougeux’s digital edition of Byrne’s Euclid. Mmm. I really love those diagrams.

Mark Simonson on the thinking that led to his new Proxima Sera typeface.

Josh Comeau on pixels vs. rems in CSS.

Rest of World’s 2022 international book list. Looking forward to reading several of these.

Ryan Donovan on reading academic computer science papers. Reading papers was one of the highlights of my master’s degree, actually.

Papers We Love, “a community built around reading, discussing and learning more about academic computer science papers.” Lots here.

Katherine Cowley on how many hours it takes her to write a book. This inspired me to start tallying how much time I’m spending on my writing.

3D rendering of the earth without its water. I don’t know how accurate it is, but as art, it looks cool.

Nikhil Vemu on iOS’s built-in flight tracker. Didn’t know about this either.

Tom Critchlow on subterranean blogging. I prefer the subsurface discussions.

Seth Godin on the smallest viable audience. An intriguing idea.

BYU’s detailed 3D model of campus. Fun to explore.

Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy, from computer scientists, technologists, and developers. Signed it.

Eric Barker on peer pressure. I finished reading this and immediately bought his new book.

Bert Hubert on reverse engineering the source code for the Pfizer Covid vaccine. So, so, so cool.

Matt Webb on DALL-E 2 and prompt engineering. I got access to the Midjourney beta a week or two ago and tried it out. It’s a weird, uncanny new world. Some of the outputs are incredible. (Hard to know how much is actually new vs. pulled straight from existing images, though.)

Phillip Isola with an interesting DALL-E 2 result.

Craig Hockenberry on IconFactory’s new WorldWideWeb app. Serve a folder up on iOS, accessible on your local network. Worked like a charm — I added a simple index.html to an iCloud Drive folder and started the server on my phone, and my wife was able to access it right away. This is great.

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Reading — Prints 2.2

#books #prints #prints-2.2

Recent nonfiction reads

  • This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein. An unexpectedly pivotal book for me. I hadn’t paid much attention to climate change before this, other than noticing more frequent extreme weather events. I wish things weren’t the way they are. I wish we had a healthier relationship with the earth. I now have even less patience for unregulated capitalism. (Selfishness is supposed to save the world? Sheesh.) Anyway, the book was occasionally slow reading but overall it was good and important.
  • Building Ligatures, by TypeTogether. A pleasant history of TypeTogether and some basics of type design and typography. Nice overviews of some different scripts, too. The overall theme was working together to make things better, which was a nice followup to the suggestions in This Changes Everything.
  • The Last Nomad, by Shugri Said Salh. What a wildly different life she’s had. (She was a Somali nomad, though that’s only the first third or so of the book.) It definitely expanded my horizons and was worth reading. The FGM part was infuriating and so, so sad.

Recent fiction reads

  • All Our Wrong Todays, by Elan Mastai. Loved it. Some parts I think could have been glossed over or removed, but as a whole, I thought it did several interesting things with the time travel conceit. Especially near the end. Whew.
  • The Imaginary Corpse, by Tyler Hayes. The POV character is a stuffed yellow triceratops. At first the setting wasn’t really working for me and I almost gave up, but once it got into the mystery, I was fine. A little weird. (Which is what fantasy is good at.)
  • Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells. Novella. Sad to come to the current end of the Murderbot series, but she’s under contract for a couple more novellas and another novel, I believe (according to a recent AMA on Reddit), so that’s nice.

Books acquired since last post

  • Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell
  • Dispatches — Michael Herr
  • Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind — Alan Jacobs
  • Verdigris Deep — Frances Hardinge
  • The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House — John F. Harris
  • The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together — Heather McGhee
  • Spirits of Vengeance — Rob J. Hayes
  • Smoke and Stone — Michael R. Fletcher
  • Queenslayer — Sebastien de Castell
  • Crownbreaker — Sebastien de Castell
  • Subway: The Curiosities, Secrets, and Unofficial History of the New York City Transit System — John E. Morris
  • More Songwriters on Songwriting — Paul Zollo
  • Dark Sea’s End — Richard Nell
  • James Baldwin: A Biography — David Adams Leeming
  • The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir — Steffanie Strathdee, Thomas Patterson
  • The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization — Paul Strathern
  • Bone Swans: Stories — C. S. E. Cooney
  • The God Is Not Willing — Steven Erikson
  • Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest — Stephen E. Ambrose
  • A History of Food in 100 Recipes — William Sitwell
  • The Restaurant: A 2,000-Year History of Dining Out — William Sitwell
  • The Infiltrator: The True Story of One Man Against the Biggest Drug Cartel in History — Robert Mazur
  • The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity — Nancy Gibbs, Michael Duffy
  • How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir — Hans Rosling
  • The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong — Eric Barker
  • Hild — Nicola Griffith
  • Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature — Zibby Owens
  • The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire — Francesca Cartier Brickell
  • Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England — Amanda Vickery
  • The Field of Cloth of Gold — Glenn Richardson
  • The Elements We Live By: How Iron Helps Us Breathe, Potassium Lets Us See, and Other Surprising Superpowers of the Periodic Table — Anja Røyne

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