Ryan Dahl on JavaScript containers. While the post itself is so-so, the idea of web-specific containers intrigues me. Feels like there’s something useful in that space. (I’m mostly coming at this from the perspective of wanting to simplify running apps on the web.)
Tania Rascia on building a web accordion with the WebAudio API. Cool! Makes me want to build something like that. I’ve been avoiding it lately because the web is ephemeral and I’d prefer to spend my time on things that have a chance at lasting longer, but that argument doesn’t always matter.
DALL•E 2 from OpenAI. This and Midjourney are getting crazy good. It’s a weird new world we’re entering. I’m intrigued by the idea of using output from these as reference for other art. (Still on the waiting list for both.)
Hugo Landau on mildly dynamic websites. This. For the last few years I’ve been craving something server-side like PHP (intertwined, no separate running process needed) but with a better language.
2022 Nommo Awards shortlist. I’d never heard of this (or the African Speculative Fiction Society) before, but I’m glad I have! Looking forward to reading some of these.
Duotrigordle, a 32-at-a-time Wordle. I initially thought it was completely mental, but once you get to ten or so guesses it’s mostly downhill since you have so many guesses to work off of. (I say this as if I play it regularly. In reality, I tried it once and probably won’t play it again, because I’d rather spend my leisure time reading.)
Before the World Was VI. Another take on the celestial yin & yang version.Follow Me. I really like the bolder colors here. One of my favorites.I’ve a Mother There III. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do another negative space piece but decided to go for it.In Their Own Image. Finally branched out to some other scriptures for my Heavenly Parents pieces. Initially this one looked too much like a restroom sign. Also, I don’t know that I’ve found the simplest way to represent this idea yet.A Beloved Daughter. I was reading Elder Renlund’s conference talk and realized I hadn’t done this yet.Prodigal Son II. Fairly close to the first iteration but without the unnecessary ground.
Other art
Lately I’ve been playing around with making meaningless decorative pieces in Blender, using displacement maps with (for the most part) procedural heightfields. For these I’ve generally textured the heightfield in Affinity Photo and sometimes also textured a separate color map. Looking forward to doing more work in this vein.
Pattern 001. This is the one that wasn’t procedural; I made the heightfield in Figma. While I like the way the sun lamp lights things evenly, it still feels maybe a little too harsh to me. I think of this piece as some kind of vintage fabric.Pattern 002 A. Kind of going for a Central American archaeological feel here. For this I wrote a Python script that generated rectangles on a grid in SVG for the heightfield. Switched to a spotlight lamp, and added some fog. I added the green in post.Pattern 002 B. Same script as 002 A, this time with different textures and lighting. Going for a Middle Eastern archaeological feel. I also added a slight bit of rippling and rotational blur on top to make it feel a little magical.Pattern 003 A. New script. Fairly pleased with how this turned out — all the different varieties that come out from random circles. (Since that’s all the heightfield is, really.) I added the lower-level squares on a last-minute impulse and I’m glad I did.Pattern 003 B. Same script as 003 A. I love love love the way the heightfield texture makes it look like things are growing, in a creepy way. Added depth of field to make things look more underwater. I’m happy with the old-photograph feel, too.Pattern 004. It still blows my mind that I can take a black-and-white heightfield and use it to generate art like this. Kind of cool how several of these look like they’re bowls even though the interiors aren’t actually rounded.
The Puzzler, by A. J. Jacobs. A fun book. I don’t really do puzzles myself anymore (my brain doesn’t like it), but I enjoyed reading about all the different kinds.
Recent fiction reads
The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Loved it. It took me a little while to warm up to it, but once the fantasy elements were introduced, I was there. Glad that there are two more novels and a lot of Penric novellas to come. (Plus the remaining Vorkosigan books I haven’t yet read, and the Sharing Knife series.)
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire. Novella. Mixed feelings. It was unexpectedly sad to me, but the world seems interesting enough (portal fantasies are my thing) and I liked Middlegame (looking forward to picking up Seasonal Fears soon), so I think I’ll still try the next in the series.
Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor. Novella. Loved it. I really like Afrofuturism. Looking forward to the other Binti novellas and Okorafor’s other work.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. Novella. I almost gave up on this a couple times early on, but it got more interesting once things started happening and I’m glad I stuck with it. Fairly philosophical. The permacomputing was nice to see, too.
A Warning to the Curious, by M. R. James. Basically a novella. Published in the 1920s. I don’t know that I felt particularly engaged (or scared) by the stories, but it was good to read something older.
A Spindle Splintered, by Alix E. Harrow. Novella. Really liked it, especially the voice. And the intersection of fairy tales and modern people? Also my thing. (Which reminds me that I want to reread OSC’s Enchantment sometime.)
Books acquired since last post
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story — Michael Lewis
A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich — Christopher B. Krebs
Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire — David Remnick
Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past — Andrew Albin et al.
Skyward Inn — Aliya Whiteley
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City — Andrea Elliott
Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion — Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Bob Andelman
Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy — Tim Weiner, David Johnston, and Neil A. Lewis
The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism — Dean Starkman
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath — Heather L. Clark
Black Stone Heart — Michael R. Fletcher
The Sisters Brothers — Patrick deWitt
The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community — Mary Pipher
After this issue, I’m going to split Prints up and go back to more of a normal blog format. I’ll still be posting the same content, just not consolidated into a single issue. (Though I do look forward to using the issue format again for something in the future.)
Reading
Recent nonfiction reads
Saints, volume 2. This took me a year or so, reading just on Sundays and only a few pages at a time. (I wanted to take it slow so that I’d finish around the time the third volume came out.) Loved it. Great series. Can’t wait to see how it ends!
The End Is Always Near, by Dan Carlin. I’m not a podcast person and haven’t listened to Hardcore History, but a couple people recommended this to me. Really liked it. This is the kind of thing I think about frequently. Also, the pandemic part was bittersweet (okay, mostly bitter) reading in light of Covid. (The book was published in October 2019.) That said, while Covid is certainly awful, I’m glad it’s not as graphic as some of the other plagues humanity has experienced.
Scotland’s Merlin, by Tim Clarkson. A look at the historical evidence for Merlin being from Scotland instead of Wales. (Spoiler alert: there’s fairly little evidence for anything at all from the sixth century A.D.) Enjoyed it, even if it felt occasionally repetitive. Also, did you know there’s a Myrddin programming language?
Recent fiction reads:
Vita Nostra, by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Another weird, mind-bending novel, this one in a Russian magic college of sorts. I think I liked it, maybe? (Though I wouldn’t say it was among my favorite magic school novels.) Sergey died two days ago, by the way.
Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson. Some parts I could do without, but Stephenson’s writing really clicks with me. Looking forward to reading the rest of his books (even if most of them are on the long end).
Books acquired since last issue
City of Bones — Martha Wells
The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life — A.J. Jacobs
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America — Carrie Gibson
Reign & Ruin — J. D. Evans
The Atlas Six — Olivie Blake
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx — Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia — Orlando Figes
The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution — Barbara W. Tuchman
Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures — Bill Schutt
Montaigne — Stefan Zweig
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers — Tom Standage
Empire of Cotton: A Global History — Sven Beckert
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction — Alec Nevala-Lee
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century — Steve Coll
Young Stalin — Simon Sebag Montefiore
Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman—from World War to Cold War — Michael Dobbs
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less — Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness — Russell D. Roberts
The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton — Jefferson Morley
The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert — Shugri Said Salh
The Business of Tomorrow: The Visionary Life of Harry Guggenheim: From Aviation and Rocketry to the Creation of an Art Dynasty — Dirk Smillie
Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture — Emma Dabiri
Here Is Real Magic: A Magician’s Search for Wonder in the Modern World — Nate Staniforth
On Assignment: Memoir of a National Geographic Filmmaker — James R. Larison
Cage of Souls — Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Devil You Know — K. J. Parker
The Last Witness — K. J. Parker
Miracles — C. S. Lewis
The Man Burned by Winter — Pete Zacharias
Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms — Charles Hudson
Seasonal Fears — Seanan McGuire
Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across North America — Jack Nisbet
Making
Releases
New story: “A Past Not Yet Forgotten.” This is the Retzi story I’ve mentioned before. Fantasy, about ten pages long. The form is a little experimental — for me, anyway.
And we have more art, this time a handful of illusions and a Blender piece. (Sidenote: for my non-religious art, I’ve decided to only post it here and not to Instagram or Facebook anymore.)
Penrose A. I wanted to take the SVG techniques I’ve been using lately and try them on a Penrose triangle. Voila. With this variation I was going for more of an inky look.Penrose B. With this one, I was aiming for a more chaotic watercolor look. The lighting is intentionally different from that in A and C.Penrose C. With this I was trying to get an old-book feel.Café Wall A. Another illusion piece, for fun. Whenever I’ve seen illusions like these, by the way, they’ve almost always been in black and white with crisp linework. I’ve enjoyed making more artistic versions. If you know of any other illusions you think might work with my style, let me know!The Floating City. Not an illusion! Made in Blender with some lightweight Python scripting to generate the meshes. Used a random Gaussian distribution for the location and height of the buildings, which are just five-sided cylinders. Applied the texture in a postprocessing pass. (The fog was in the original render, though. Mmm. Instant drama.)
Current projects
Dagh (working title): Another fantasy story. I originally started writing this five or six years ago, but this iteration only shares a couple characters’ names. The outline is done and I have four pages written.
Religious art: Feeling blocked at the moment.
I’m figuring things out re: other projects. My back and neck haven’t been great lately, and I’ve still been dealing with eyestrain issues and resultant headaches. (I want to draw, for example, but my neck issues have made that prohibitively painful.) This may end up being a season mostly for writing and reading, since those are comparatively painless at the moment.
Tom Critchlow on triple-entry blogging. I still need to move my site over to a fully static site. (It used to be. I’ve gone back and forth over the years.)
Thoughts
Found last week that I’ve been pronouncing ophthalmologist wrong all my life, by saying “opp” at the beginning instead of “off.”
The live view in Find My [Friends; leaving it objectless makes my brain sad] in iOS 15 feels like magic. I somehow hadn’t heard about it when it came out and ended up accidentally discovering it when my wife upgraded her phone recently. We’re living in the future. (Though I’ve been reading This Changes Everything lately and I don’t know if the future is worth the cost we’re paying for it.)
We’ve started watching Old Enough on Netflix and it’s adorable.
The Last American Aristocrat, by David S. Brown. Confession: I went into this thinking it was about Henry James. No. It’s about Henry Adams (grandson of John Quincy Adams), who I knew nothing about beforehand. It ended up being a much slower read, I believe because its prose was dense and less scannable. There were also some mildly confusing time jumps. Overall, though, I liked it and I’m glad I read it. Learned a lot about the late 1800s and early 1900s. Also picked up the word filiopietistic.
Recent fiction reads:
Network Effect, by Martha Wells. The full-length Murderbot novel. Really liked it. It was more horror in some ways, but still a comfort read. I’m going to be sad when I read Fugitive Telemetry and run out of Murderbot.
Books acquired since last issue
Shakespeare: The Biography — Peter Ackroyd
The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco — Marilyn Chase
First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance — Annie Jacobsen
Heir to the Empire — Timothy Zahn
Dark Force Rising — Timothy Zahn
The Last Command — Timothy Zahn
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death — Caitlin Doughty
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate — Naomi Klein
A Victorian Lady’s Guide to Fashion and Beauty — Mimi Matthews
Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power — James McGrath Morris
Emerson: The Mind on Fire — Robert D. Richardson
Part-Time Gods — Rachel Aaron
Night Shift Dragons — Rachel Aaron
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities — Craig Steven Wilder
An Eye for an Eye — Carol Wyer
The Puma Years: A Memoir — Laura Coleman
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America — James Bamford
The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens—and Ourselves — Arik Kershenbaum
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found — Suketu Mehta
The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth — Richard Conniff
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence — Christian Parenti
The City We Became — N. K. Jemisin
The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal — Simon J. Knell
Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation — Anton Howes
Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle — Clare Hunter
Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages — Dan Jones
Making
Releases
Some religious art:
When Our Heavenly Parents We Meet II. More in the zoomed-in negative-space vein. I like how it feels more intimate and personal.Why Weepest Thou? II. I know, I know, it also looks like a) an old floppy disk or b) a headphone-wearing creature with an open mouth which bears resemblance to my Nom Nom painting. Turns out these negative-space pieces end up looking like other things half the time.By the Laying on of Hands III. Going back to full bleed. In hindsight, this maybe feels a little too zoomed-in to me.By the Laying on of Hands IV. This is basically the same as the other. Felt like doing it at the time, now second guessing that decision. If it’s not yet clear, I have a complicated relationship with some of the pieces I make.I Am a Child of God III. Inordinately pleased with the painterly look of the background. The mult-layer SVG technique is a new favorite for sure. This piece also looks to me like a crazed fox wearing a white-collared shirt and red robes. These are the perils of negative-space art!
Current projects
Retzi (working title): Ten minutes a day is still working spectacularly well, and I’m making good if slow progress. The first draft of this story is done (it’s only five pages), just need to do a final editing pass. Expect it next time!
Religious art: Got burned out on this and planned to take a long break, but that didn’t last. Thinking about using Blender more for texturing, like I did with Within the Walls of Your Own Homes, using both displacement/bump maps and sculpting. But I also really like the SVG techniques I’ve been using lately, so we’ll see.
Picture book: Haven’t really done much of anything on this (soon to be a common theme). Thinking about using the multi-layer SVG technique for the art.
Shadow art: Nothing to report.
Type design: Nothing to report.
Musical: I think I have the basic idea and some initial song ideas.
Jim Nielsen on ordering CSS declarations. Agreed. I’ve been using alphabetical declarations for a while and it’s worked well (and any exceptions are then obvious).
China in Ten Words, by Yu Hua. More personal than I’d expected going in, but I also didn’t know much about the book before starting it so that’s more on me. Fascinating, regardless. Learned a lot about the Cultural Revolution I hadn’t known before.
Recent fiction reads:
The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins. I’d heard that it was a bit weird, but I had no idea. What a batty book. Disturbing, too. (Consider yourself warned.) Outside of the disturbing parts, though, I liked it — loads of creativity and imagination, which is one of the things that draws me to fantasy.
Books acquired since last issue
Prosper’s Demon — K. J. Parker
Inside Man — K. J. Parker
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia — Orlando Figes
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — H. W. Brands
Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justice — Noah Feldman
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain — Maria Rosa Menocal
The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World — Jeff Goodell
Longshot: The Inside Story of the Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine — David Heath
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales — Oliver Sacks
Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary — Timothy Snyder
Brave Companions — David McCullough
The Tiger and the Wolf — Adrian Tchaikovsky
Kill Shot: A Shadow Industry, a Deadly Disease — Jason Dearen
Terrible Swift Sword — Bruce Catton
The Imaginary Corpse — Tyler Hayes
Soulbrand — Andrew Rowe
The Hungry Dreaming — Craig Schaefer
Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man’s Tour of Duty Inside the IRS — Richard Yancey
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400–1066 — Marc Morris
The Druid — Jeff Wheeler
Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life — Sutton Foster
Lion’s Blood — Steven Barnes
Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence — Bryan Burrough
Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution — Iain McCalman
A Skinful of Shadows — Frances Hardinge
The Bird King — G. Willow Wilson
New York Times Complete World War II: The Coverage of the Entire Conflict — The New York Times
The Third Reich: A Chronicle — Richard Overy
War: A History in 100 Battles — Richard Overy
The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict — Donald R Hickey
Conqueror’s Blood — Zamil Akhtar
Making
Releases
Pleased to announce the release of the first new story in way too long “Never to Return.” This is the Salviana story I’ve been working on for what feels like forever (though in objective terms I think it’s only been a few months). It’s a fantasy story and is about 15 pages. And it’s done! For real! Finally!
Some new religious art:
I Will Give You Rest III. An attempt to use the new negative space style with the I Will Give You Rest idea. Personally, in hindsight I wish I had kept it monotone, but that’s just me.Annunciation. I’d been wanting to do an Annunciation for a while. I know it’s super minimal, but I like it.A New Star. Another idea I’ve had stewing for years. The concentric circles (borrowing from the mustard seed piece I did recently) are what finally made it work.The Lord’s Passover III. I wanted to do a bolder, starker take on the idea. On this I also experimented with layering multiple rasterized SVGs, each with different random seeds, and ended up with the more painted look around the edges. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I recorded a process video for most of the making of this piece, just need to edit it and post it.I’ve a Mother There II. Lately I’ve mostly been doing the Heavenly Parents together on this type of piece, but I wanted to do one with just Heavenly Mother surrounded by her children.As the Stars. Also a piece I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Part of me wonders if it needs a better center of visual interest.As the Sands. Companion piece. Basically the same thing.Love Your Enemies. I started with this as a generic prayer piece using the negative space style, along with zooming in more than I usually do. Then I was reading the beatitudes in 3 Nephi and it became really clear that I needed to change the title (from The Soul’s Sincere Desire II) and also change the background color from pale blue to a more intense red. Of all the art I’ve made, this piece is one of my favorites. Especially the bold, imperative teaching in the title.
Current projects
There’s some churn here as I’ve been trying to figure out which projects I want to work on. The new projects listed below are generally in areas I’ve wanted to work in for a while; some won’t stick, but I won’t know which ones till I try.
Retzi (working title): I’ve finally figured out a writing process that seems to be working. (Namely, aiming to spend at least ten minutes a day working on writing. It’s not much, but it’s a decent minimum that I can do every day, even on the days when everything is crazy. Also, outlining. I think I’ve got the hang of it now and can now stick with an outline enough to finish the work.) Now that I’ve finished the Salviana story (squeeeee), I’m worldbuilding/outlining this new Retzi story. This time I’m trying (limited) worldbuilding first, because I suspect that may be a better fit for how I come up with story ideas.
Religious art: I’m no longer worried about running out of ideas. For now I’m back to metering releases one at a time instead of releasing three or four at a time, to try to create a steadier stream of work. Should have several more pieces released by next issue.
Picture book: The only picture book I’ve made was more for infants and I’ve long wanted to do something that had an actual story. So this is that project. No idea what it’ll be yet.
Shadow art: An attempt to figure out what kind of art I want to make outside of the religious art I’ve been doing for years (which I plan to continue doing). I love the interplay of light and shadow, and this is a series where I paint just the shadows of different objects. (My Laying on of Hands piece is on the wall in my kitchen and to my eye it looks a little like a spotlight on someone from above, and I’ve wanted to do more pieces that really are that.)
Type design: I’m giving up on Hinterlight and starting a new typeface with simpler curves, which seems like a better idea during this stage where I’m still figuring out proportions and spacing and all that. Better to focus on the bigger picture first, rather than getting fixated on microscale point placement that doesn’t matter as much. I can always distress the curves programmatically later if I want, too. (The idea with Hinterlight was to create a typeface that looked like it had been printed by letterpress.)
Musical: Possibly a short musical, not sure yet. Planning to write the songs along with the book (the play). Something that feels like The Secret Garden intrigues me, but beyond that I have no idea yet what it’ll be about. It’s been a very long time since I wrote a play or a song and I’m excited!
Short film: To be more precise, a very, very short (30-second) animated film. Over the years I’ve picked up a small amount of Blender knowhow but I’ve wanted to actually dive in to rigging and animation to make something real. Also looking forward to scoring this and doing the sound.
A couple weeks ago I updated my to-do list app (Liszt) so that late every night it moves everything from my daily to-do list to my “someday” list. Each morning I review the someday list and move any items back that I plan to do that day. This change has been quite effective at getting me to stop avoiding my to-do list. (Before this, my list would accrete and become so long that I’d basically stop looking at it. Whereas now it’s wonderfully short each day.)
I recently checked out Standard Ebooks again and was pleased to see that they’re still going strong. I’m going to try reading older books exclusively on my Kobo, to see if that helps me finish them at all.
Recent nonfiction reads
Stretching the Heavens, by Terryl L. Givens. I heard about this biography of Eugene England via my friend Liz’s blog. Great book. Loved it — especially the theological parts — though England’s difficult relationship with the Church and with BYU was sad, particularly the end of the book.
On All Fronts, by Clarissa Ward, an international correspondent at CNN. I hadn’t actually heard of her when I saw her memoir on sale, but I love reading about journalism. This did not disappoint.
Recent fiction reads:
Last Argument of Kings, by Joe Abercrombie. Earthy and gritty (content warnings galore), but dang, this man can write. A satisfying conclusion to the First Law trilogy. I’ve already bought all his other books and look forward to them.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo. A novella. This was initially harder to read, but once I slowed down it was fine. I liked the attention to the material world with the descriptions of items at the beginning of each chapter. Overall, though, it wasn’t compelling enough for me to want to read the next in the series.
Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Also a novella, with an interesting dual point of view (sci fi from one, fantasy from the other). Liked it. Looking forward to reading the rest of his books, many of which I’ve already bought because I liked Children of Time.
Books acquired since last issue
The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America’s broken education system—and how to fix it — Natalie Wexler
Hitler: Downfall: 1939–1945 — Volker Ullrich
The Historian — Elizabeth Kostova
The Broken Room — Peter Clines
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley — Jimmy Soni
Daughter of the Wolves — K. S. Villoso
Jaeth’s Eye — K. S. Villoso
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America — Annie Jacobsen
Gridlinked — Neal Asher
The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer — Neal Stephenson
Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas — Stephen Harrigan
Writing Your Story’s Theme: The Writer’s Guide to Plotting Stories That Matter — K. M. Weiland
Conquering Writer’s Block and Summoning Inspiration: Learn to Nurture a Lifestyle of Creativity — K. M. Weiland
Deepsix — Jack McDevitt
Polaris — Jack McDevitt
Zodiac — Neal Stephenson
House — Tracy Kidder
The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies — Ben Fritz
The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law — Antonin Scalia
Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom — Carl Bernstein
The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World — Gay Talese
Empire of Silence — Christopher Ruocchio
Tolstoy: A Russian Life — Rosamund Bartlett
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien — J. R. R. Tolkien
Letters from Father Christmas — J. R. R. Tolkien
Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth — J. R. R. Tolkien
The Book of Lost Tales, Part One — J. R. R. Tolkien
The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two — J. R. R. Tolkien
The Return of the Shadow: The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part 1 — J. R. R. Tolkien
The Treason of Isengard: The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part 2 — J. R. R. Tolkien
The War of the Ring: The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part 3 — J. R. R. Tolkien
Sauron Defeated: The End of the Third Age: The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part 4 — J. R. R. Tolkien
The Children of Húrin — J. R. R. Tolkien
Beren and Lúthien — J. R. R. Tolkien
The Fall of Gondolin — J. R. R. Tolkien
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary — J. R. R. Tolkien
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo — J. R. R. Tolkien
Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles — Beth Pickens
A Madness of Angels: Or The Resurrection of Matthew Swift — Kate Griffin
In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin — Lindsey Hilsum
(In case you’re wondering, there was a sale for Tolkien Reading Day yesterday.)
Making
Releases
Heart, Might, Mind, and Strength II. I’d been wanting to do a new version of this idea, and the new style seemed like it would be a good fit. The white cross of negative space at the center was unintentional but I like the extra symbolism.He Is Risen II. I wanted to do this idea in the new style as well. I like it, but I worry that it looks too much like “CO” (I should have had the left circle go all the way round, I think).Faith, Hope, Charity II. Confession: my brain always makes me think of an owl when I see this piece or its predecessor.Tree of Life III. I’ve done other Tree of Life pieces in the past but not quite like this, and I liked the idea of doing a new one in this style — making it bright instead of dark.One Eternal Round. I’d been wanting to do a one-eternal-round piece for years and it finally clicked. Quite happy with how this turned out, both conceptually, texturally, and color-wise.
Current projects
Salviana (working title): I’ve been making slow progress on the rewrite. Lately I’ve been aiming for 20 minutes of writing a day, and while I haven’t always hit it (especially the last few days when I’ve been on call at work), this seems to be the only way I really make progress on writing. Also, I need to finish this piece and start something else, seriously.
Religious art: I have a couple pieces I’m working on. Lately I’ve mostly been rehashing earlier work, which certainly has its place, but I’d like to come up with more original ideas that I haven’t done before. At the same time I feel like maybe there isn’t much room left for exploration in this space. I’m probably wrong in that.
Other: I’m thinking about doing another picture book, probably all black and white this time. Also thinking about doing a series of some kind in Blender, though I have no idea what yet. Still planning to do more alternate geography pieces. Typesetting old books (like the Letters of Cortés project) no longer seems like it’s providing all that much value, since the books are already out there and fairly easy to access. And work has been intense enough the past couple months that spending even more time building software after hours (projects like Bend and Marks) isn’t super appealing. I don’t expect that to last forever, though.
Stephen Kell on some being meant for C (PDF). I admittedly haven’t read all of this yet, but it was interesting seeing an argument in favor of C since usually it goes the other way round.
Lincoln Michel on the one rule of fiction writing. Liked this. Remembering that you can do anything in fiction is hugely liberating and tends to make me excited to write. (Someday I will actually finish a piece again, I hope.)
iOS 15.4 fixed the issue with the keyboard going missing in my PWAs! I was beginning to think it would never be resolved. The issue has admittedly resurfaced twice since I upgraded, but rebooting my phone fixed it each time.
I removed the watching section because it really isn’t that interesting to me.
With the recent news about the Moderna vaccine for kids under five, it’s looking like we might be able to get our two youngest vaccinated by mid-May instead of mid-July like we were expecting after the Pfizer delay. Alleluia.
Less reading than usual this time, thanks to work-related eyestrain and headaches that started a couple days after the last issue. Reading still hurts my eyes a little. Hoping it clears up soon! (If it doesn’t, I will of course be getting myself to an ophthalmologist.)
Recent nonfiction reads
I read about half of Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August but then the headaches latched on and started shredding my reading life. What I’ve read of the book so far is good, though the minutiae of troop movements did not hold my interest very much. I’m not sure if this is because I haven’t read much military history or if war books aren’t my thing. Haven’t decided yet if I’ll pick the book up again after my eyes feel better.
My Broken Language, by Quiara Alegría Hudes. I’d never heard of her before buying the book, but the combination of Puerto Rican heritage and theatre intrigued me. (My grandfather was from Cuba, and around fifteen years ago I wrote a number of short plays, got several of them produced, directed a couple, and took all of BYU’s playwriting classes.)
Recent fiction reads:
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler. Whew. Post-apocalyptic books stress me out more than I want to be stressed out when reading. (I didn’t know this was post-apocalyptic when I picked it up. But I figured that out pretty quickly and yet kept reading, so…yeah.) It was well-written and compelling, at any rate. I still need to go back and continue the other series of Butler’s that I’ve begun.
Books acquired since last issue
Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World’s Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom — Jack Weatherford
Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House — Peter Baker
Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History — Tony Perrottet
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS — Joby Warrick
The Honours — Tim Clare
Warship — Joshua Dalzelle
Winston’s War — Sir Max Hastings
Gulag: A History — Anne Applebaum
The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas — Ursula K. Le Guin
Wireless Wars — Jonathan Pelson
The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World — Porter Fox
Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat — Bee Wilson
The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of The Indian-American Elite and The Fall of The Galleon Hedge Fund — Anita Raghavan
Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters” — Kim Todd
Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man — Dale Peterson
Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 — Jim Donovan
The Expert System’s Brother — Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Expert System’s Champion — Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements — Sam Kean
Say Her Name — Dreda Say Mitchell, Ryan Carter
Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home — Boyd Varty
Juniper Wiles — Charles de Lint
The Wind in His Heart — Charles de Lint
Memory and Dream — Charles de Lint
Jack the Giant-Killer — Charles de Lint
The Little Country — Charles de Lint
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann — Ananyo Bhattacharya
Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future — Pete Buttigieg
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life — Megan Marshall
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World — Steven Johnson
A Spindle Splintered — Alix E. Harrow
A Psalm for the Wild-Built — Becky Chambers
Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World — Thomas F. Madden
Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping — Matthew Salesses
Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts — Matt Bell
Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower — Roseann Lake
Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life — Steven H. Strogatz
On Stranger Tides — Tim Powers
A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America — Oscar Martinez
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement — Tarana Burke
Toscanini: Musician of Conscience — Harvey Sachs
Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? — Robert Kuttner
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography — Simon Singh
The Cunning Man — D. J. Butler & Aaron Michael Ritchey
Watching
We watched Rob Gardner’s Lamb of God concert on BYUtv. Enjoyed it — it’s similar to his Joseph Smith the Prophet, which I also like a lot. Realized during the end credits that the woman who plays Mary (the mother of Jesus) is a college friend from my undergrad years.
We’ve also been watching more BYU volleyball (huge surprise, I know) and the new season of Relative Race. And last night we saw Turning Red. Really liked it. The making-of documentary was also good. (I am such a discerning and nuanced and detailed media critic, if you haven’t noticed.)
Because of my eyes, I ended up spending more time than usual watching movies. Free Guy was popcorn for me — kind of fun, but the implausibility of software acting that way may have left enough of my disbelief on the ground to make the overall impression a little meh.
I don’t remember much of No Time to Die (already! it’s been less than a week!) but I think I liked it?
A Quiet Place Part II was another post-apocalyptic that was too intense to be enjoyable. Decent catharsis at the end, though. (I guess that’s the point. Still, it’s not something I really want to subject myself to very much. The premise of Old sounded interesting, for example, but then I watched the trailer and lost all interest in seeing the actual film.)
Making
The eyestrain and headaches put a damper on things here as well.
Releases
A designish/artish thing:
Africa I. My first attempt at doing an alternate geography map. Used Inkscape to draw the new outlines, then blurred and thresholded to make it look more analog.
Current projects
Salviana (working title): Making progress! I gave the characters some unique traits which had the unforeseen but in hindsight very understandable effect of bringing them to life in my imagination. It’s making all the difference. I’m tightening the outline and trying to make sure each scene is interesting and compelling. (And bemoaning how long this is taking me. I really need to reinstitute a daily quota goal, either word count or time. Without a goal, I never end up writing.)
Religious art: On hold for now. (Trying to keep my brain in writing mode.)
Linus Lee on his Monocle personal search engine. Right now I’ve got several apps that each have their own searches (journals, notes, reading log, etc.) but consolidating search into a single unified place sounds very appealing.
In the Camps, by Darren Byler. A look at the Uyghur concentration camps in China and the surveillance technology that enables them. A sad, maddening read, but an important one. Pretty short, too.
Recent fiction reads:
The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey. I actually read this before last issue but didn’t realize I’d forgotten to include it until the day after the issue. Which may have been my subconscious at work, since I don’t know how I feel about this book. Well written, interesting enough, just not my favorite. Maybe it had to do with the characters? (It wasn’t the biological aspect of things.)
The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark. A novella. I liked Ring Shout more, but this was still good (I love stories set in the Middle East) and I’m looking forward to reading A Master of Djinn.
Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi. Another novella. Liked it a lot. It was sad and frustrating and rough (in the sense of difficult, not in the sense of poorly crafted, because it wasn’t) but important. One of the reasons I read is to vicariously live lives very different from my own, to try to expand my empathy for others. Felt like this helped with that.
Books acquired since last issue
The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme — John Keegan
A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology — Toby Wilkinson
Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific — Robert D. Kaplan
Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth — Rachel Maddow
Pandora’s Star — Peter F. Hamilton
Nice Dragons Finish Last — Rachel Aaron
The Gathering Storm — Winston S. Churchill
Their Finest Hour — Winston S. Churchill
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters: Stories — Ursula K. Le Guin
The Grand Alliance — Winston S. Churchill
Closing the Ring — Winston S. Churchill
Triumph and Tragedy — Winston S. Churchill
Ambergris: City of Saints and Madmen; Shriek: An Afterword; Finch — Jeff VanderMeer
Dead Astronauts — Jeff VanderMeer
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process — John McPhee
American Tempest: How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution — Harlow G. Unger
At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War — Michael Beschloss & Strobe Talbott
My Broken Language: A Memoir — Quiara Alegría Hudes
Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine — Thomas Hager
News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media — Juan Gonzalez & Joseph Torres
Proof of Life: Twenty Days on the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East — Daniel Levin
Fortune’s Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt — Arthur T. Vanderbilt
Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic — Scott Gottlieb
Who Fears Death — Nnedi Okorafor
Wakers — Orson Scott Card
Lagoon — Nnedi Okorafor
The Justice of Kings — Richard Swan
Haiti: The Aftershocks of History — Laurent Dubois
The Body Scout — Lincoln Michel
Flintknapping: Making & Understanding Stone Tools — John C. Whittaker
The Nothing Within — Andy Giesler
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader — Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli
Einstein: His Life and Universe — Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America — John M. Barry
Bloodrush — Ben Galley
Queens of the Crusades: England’s Medieval Queens Book Two — Alison Weir
On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist — Clarissa Ward
And yes, I am so, so painfully aware that I’m acquiring books far faster than finishing them. I’m more and more aware, too, that when I inevitably die someday, I’ll leave behind me thousands of books that I really wanted to read but never got the chance to.
Watching
More volleyball. We also enjoyed Nate Bargatze’s two standup comedy specials on Netflix.
Making
I upgraded Chrome (which I use in coordination with Paged.js, because Firefox doesn’t support different page sizes yet) and the case of the missing lines seems to have cleared up. I also checked Historia Calamitatum and it thankfully wasn’t missing any lines. Still something to watch out for, but I’m glad it’s not happening all the time.
I’m thinking about building a small system called Ink (a name I’ve used before for other projects that didn’t materialize) for bookmaking, where I can have a single canonical source for each book and easily export both EPUBs and PDFs. Still mulling it over, nothing serious yet.
Releases
Le Morte d’Arthur, by Thomas Malory. Available in EPUB. This is the original Middle English text and orthographically it’s a trip. I’ve been wanting to publish this for a while, though I haven’t even read it yet. (It’s around 1,400 pages, by the way.) At any rate, I’m happy with how the cover turned out — I used one of the IM Fell fonts, then blurred and thresholded it in Affinity Photo to get some faux ink spread.
And some more art:
Narrow Is the Way. A horizontal take on my Choose Ye This Day piece. In hindsight it looks a little too much like a flag to me.Neither the Day nor the Hour. On this I was trying for something more abstract than Oil in Their Vessels. I have some ideas for how to improve it further.For the Remission of Sins. I originally had three panels but realized I can probably get away with just the two. I like the light aesthetic here, which I think led to some of the later pieces in this issue.Before the World Was V. Aiming for more of a woodblock print feel here. Used Cirque to generate the circles, edited the SVG to add some turbulence/displacement filters, exported it to an image with Inkscape, then blurred and thresholded it in Affinity Photo to simulate ink spread before adding some final light texture. I’m excited to explore this method more.As a Grain of Mustard Seed. I’d long wanted to do a mustard seed piece, but putting a single small circle on the canvas didn’t seem like enough. Finally got the concentric circles idea, and then it all came together.Pillar of Light II. Exploring the new woodblockish style some more. Overall, I’m happy with how this one turned out.Ninety and Nine III. Fun fact: just after I posted this everywhere, I realized I’d accidentally put 100 circles in the group of sheep. Whoops. (Fixed it, at least on here and on Society6. You can still spot the extra sheep on Instagram.)
Current projects
Salviana (working title): I’ve mostly been avoiding this, though I did start yet another new draft. I feel like I’ll be writing this story the rest of my life and I don’t even care about it all that much, which seems like maybe a good indicator that something needs to change. Hoping to figure out a new angle that’ll help me care more about the story, and hoping to hurry up and finish it so I can move on to another story. But if that doesn’t happen soon, I’ll just backburner it and try something else to try to get some momentum back.
Religious art: Planning to explore the woodblock style more. (I’m using that term loosely here, but it’s how I think of it and basically what I’m aiming to achieve.) Also, I’m thinking about putting together a handful of small scripts that’ll automatically add turbulence/displacement filters to SVGs, render the SVG to PNG via headless Inkscape, and handle the blur/threshold bit via Imagemagick.
Pack: I wrote this in Python with a different algorithm and it’s ridiculously slow. Sigh. On hold for now; I may just keep using/modifying Cirque.
Letters of Cortés: Felt like doing this next instead of The Green Fairy Book. (Itching to do more history.) I’m basing my edition on the 1908 Francis Augustus MacNutt translation, though mine strips out everything but the five letters themselves. Planning to do both EPUB and PDF. I’ve typeset an initial version of the PDF (using Paged.js) and I’m about 4% of the way through proofing it.
The Princess and the Goblin, by George MacDonald: I remember a wonderful numinous feeling when reading this when I was younger, and I’m hoping to recapture that feeling a little (while fully expecting to fail). Also planning to do both EPUB and PDF. Just started on this, so I’m prepping the text and getting basic formatting in place.
Distressed PDFs: Lately I’ve been playing around with taking clean PDFs typeset with crisp digital fonts, exporting the pages to images, and distressing the type through a combination of techniques (to make it look older or printed with letterpress), then tracing it again (with potrace). This admittedly obliterates the copy-and-pasteable text inside the PDF and is totally inaccessible, but for things intended to be printed (as opposed to used digitally), it’s probably okay. Getting decent results so far, just exploring the process. Hopefully I’ll have something to show next time.
Lincoln Michel on genre as story engine. This resonated a lot and will hopefully help me get my writing act together (by figuring out which engines I’m using to power my stories). His LitHub article was also good.
Ink/Stitch, machine embroidery software based on Inkscape. Intriguing. I’ve never done embroidery but have been thinking about trying it (by hand), or maybe crochet or cross stitch. I have no idea what the difference is between these three. [Googles it.] Oh, cool. I’m interested in trying to execute some of my art using hand embroidery. Also interested in knitting and crocheting for making textiles. I have no idea how well my back and neck will do with any of these, so it may just be wishful thinking, but here’s hoping.
Dealers of Lightning. A great history of the glory days of Xerox PARC. Very much up my alley, the kind of book that makes me itch to do original barebones computing research. PARC having to build their own computer first before they could start on their research was wild. I didn’t know Alan Kay’s wife wrote the screenplay for the original Tron. Or that people thought for a time that the stegosaurus had two brains.
The Dawn of Everything. Amazing book about social organizations in prehistory and social inequality and more. All meat, no fluff, too. The schismogenesis idea is convincing. I somehow hadn’t heard of Nostratic before, or of skull portraits (creepy!), or a lot of other things in here. I especially liked the Mesoamerica parts (which I hadn’t realized were covered).
A Collection of Sacred Hymns, selected by Emma Smith. Read as part of proofing. Some of the textual changes between this text and our current hymnbook were interesting, like “the Lord will come” instead of “the Lord has come” in “Joy to the World.” Also, there are a handful of hymns that really haven’t aged well.
Recent fiction reads
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Ishiguro’s writing works well for my brain. That said, of his books that I’ve read so far, I think this was probably my least favorite, but I’m still looking forward to reading the rest of his works.
Books acquired since last issue
Nikoles — Rachel Neumeier
Tarashana — Rachel Neumeier
Keraunani — Rachel Neumeier
The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream — Charles Spencer
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 — P. Djèlí Clark
The Black God’s Drums — P. Djèlí Clark
A Master of Djinn — P. Djèlí Clark
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz — Erik Larson
Practicing History: Selected Essays — Barbara W. Tuchman
The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes — Scott Wallace
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 — Taylor Branch
Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive — Carl Zimmer
Black Sun — Rebecca Roanhorse
Crime and Punishment (Pevear & Volokhonsky translation) — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe — Laurence Bergreen
Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation — Ken Liu
The Wizard Hunters — Martha Wells
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al.
The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets, and Looking for Hope Along the Way — Diana Marcum
North to Paradise: A Memoir — Ousman Umar
Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II — Jennet Conant
Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern — Jing Tsu
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America — Clint Smith
Notes on a Nervous Planet — Matt Haig
Wilson — A. Scott Berg
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law — Mary Roach
Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation — Peter Cozzens
It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump — Stuart Stevens
Rage — Bob Woodward
Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could — Adam B. Schiff
Wheelock’s Latin, 7th Edition — Frederic M. Wheelock and Richard A. LaFleur
Rejiggering the Thingamajig: and Other Stories — Eric James Stone
Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism — Terryl L. Givens
Fugitive Telemetry — Martha Wells
Sourdough — Robin Sloan
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America — Greg Grandin
Fantasy Worldbuilding Workbook — M.D. Presley
The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 — Alan Taylor
In case you were wondering: I have a dedicated allowance specifically so that I do not blithely empty our family bank account buying books. (My idea.)
Wordhoard
ruche
tettix
anadromous
corvée
peonage
fracasado
cocles
impercussus
nanus
gelasinus
gausapatus
Nilotic
amphictyony
tumuli
metropole
Watching
Mostly BYU volleyball. Some Olympics. The Assembled episode on the making of Hawkeye. And Tenet. (Mind-bending as expected.)
Making
It’s been a lot of survival mode the past couple weeks, but somehow I still managed to get a few things finished.
Releases
A Collection of Sacred Hymns. The first hymnbook of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, compiled by Emma Smith. Available in EPUB. I got this ready for Project Gutenberg five or so years ago but never did anything with it till now. Nice to finally get it out the door.
I somehow got back into art mode last week and finished a handful of new pieces:
In Remembrance II. For this one, I wanted to take the square and circle sacrament idea and render it in black and white.In Remembrance III. An exploration putting Christ and us in the piece as well, though not overlapping like I did with Of These Emblems II.In Remembrance IV. Same idea as with III but in the lined style, and a little zoomed in for visual interest.Loaves and Fishes II. I wanted to do a new loaves and fishes piece in a more standard format (my first was very wide-format). Figured I should also include Christ this time, too. Wrote a quick Python script to place the small circles in concentric rings. What I didn’t do this time but what I’ve just realized I want to do soon is add a little random jitter to the circles so they look slightly more organic.Christ Visits the Nephites IV. Revisiting this in a more monochromatic style. I like the subtle thin concentric circles, and the white-on-grey look.To Fulfill All Righteousness II. Also aiming for a more monochromatic take. This time I moved the dove triangle partially off the image, to symbolize more of an open connection to heaven.Hearts of the Children III. This was an idea I’d had sitting around for several months. Modified my Cirque app to make it. I’m not sure if the lines are as legible as they could be, though, so I’ll probably be iterating more on this idea later on.Before the World Was IV. My goal with this was to do a rendition with both the interlocking circles and a more monochrome color scheme (as opposed to the yellow/gold I’ve used in the past). I like how the end result feels soft and cuddly.Their Work and Glory IV. For this, I wanted to take Their Work and Glory but do it with circle-and-triangle figures instead of just the triangles. I really like how the earth turned out. I plan to do another of these with interlocking circles for the Heavenly Parents.Till We Meet Again II. I love the colors on this one, and I wanted to have one with both Heavenly Parents included. Still not sure how I feel about the composition, though.First Vision XV. Wanted to try a light, pastel triangle First Vision.Thou Shalt Be Clean. Finally, a piece that isn’t just an iteration on earlier ideas! My take on the Naaman story. This might be the first time I’ve used overlapping shapes to represent passing time. With these red circles, by the way, I always worry that they’re starting to look too much like slices of pepperoni.
Current projects
Salviana (working title): I’ve fallen off the wagon on this, other than deciding to revise the outline yet again (to make the story shorter; it was more novella-length before). I also keep running into existential crises about writing fiction, which isn’t helping at all. Hoping to conquer that.
Retzi (working title): Figured out the central concept. Mostly on hold while I figure out the Salviana story, though.
Religious art: I’ve got several more ideas I’m working on.
Pack: A new Python library for circle packing that I can use for these art pieces. (I’ve been modifying Cirque for each piece that needed the circles, but I want something more sustainable and ergonomic.) More to come once I’ve gotten into it more.
Marks: On hold for now.
Bend: On hold for now.
Hinterlight: On hold for now.
Journal PDFs: On hold for now.
Morte d’Arthur: Decided to do this as an EPUB after all. There’ll be some lightweight editing to do but I think overall it should be a pretty quick project. (I’ll be trusting the source edition, which means I don’t plan to check each word against a printed edition to guard against typos. I feel a little bad about doing that, but proofing books in other languages is so, so much slower. I’ll still do a quick skim through the book to look for obvious errors, though.) Planning to write a script to download the source text, split it into chapter files, and do whatever global transformations need to happen. (I used to do that mostly by hand in Vim, but on the hymnbook project I found that writing a Python script is not only more mentally interesting but also much better on my wrists as far as RSI goes. Automate all the things.)
The making of the new LOTR series title. Much as I love CG, these analog effects make me happy. (At least until I think about how much it costs and how many people don’t have enough to eat or clean water to drink.)
Chemists can now turn carbon dioxide into a solid. I know this isn’t what they actually did, but I’m just imagining someone breathing out and a black lump of carbon dropping to the ground, over and over again.
My kids and wife have been sick this week. Thankfully tested negative for Covid but — atrocious surname pun incoming — positive for corvid. One of the kids also got a minor concussion, which was scary, but luckily they’re doing okay now.
Found out this week that I’m actually a staff engineer, one level higher than I thought I was. Ha. (I knew the level number I was at and thought it was on our new career ladder, but it was on the old one.) Shortly thereafter I got slammed by a wall of impostor syndrome. Whenever that happens, by the way, I find that studying my craft almost always helps. So I’ve been reading the React source code. Nice to see that it’s all just code, and code I can understand, too.
Bought Warbler Text and Fern Text from David Jonathan Ross’s Font of the Month Club. Mmm. A few months ago I bought FF Clifford, Whitman, Sirba, and Aluminia (Electra), and I’m realizing now that I haven’t yet done anything with them. Time to fix that! Also, I’ve been thinking about typesetting a Jane Austen novel using Fanwood Text. I don’t think I can overstate how much I love text typefaces.
Recently learned that I can set a keyboard shortcut in macOS to toggle the menubar. I usually leave it hidden, but I often check the time and this makes things a little easier.
During the Age of Sail, it was assumed that 50 percent of the sailors would die of scurvy on a major trip.
And these stats later on the page, from Jonathan Lamb:
In 1499, Vasco da Gama lost 116 of his crew of 170; in 1520, Magellan lost 208 out of 230; … all mainly to scurvy.
The reason I was reading up on it, by the way, was curiosity about what people in Europe did to avoid scurvy in the winter, when fruits weren’t as available. The answer:
Apart from ocean travel, even in Europe, until the late Middle Ages, scurvy was common in late winter, when few green vegetables, fruits and root vegetables were available. This gradually improved with the introduction from the Americas of potatoes; by 1800, scurvy was virtually unheard of in Scotland, where it had previously been endemic.
Finally, unrelated to scurvy, a quote from The Dawn of Everything which has stuck with me:
One of the things that sets us apart from non-human animals is that animals produce only and exactly what they need; humans invariably produce more. We are creatures of excess.
