Blog: #recent-reads

Welcome to Prints volume 1, issue 5.

Table of contents: Reading • Watching • Making • Links • Thoughts

Reading

Recent nonfiction reads

• 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:

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.

Links

Alain Galvan’s review of shader languages. Covers HLSL, GLSL, MSL, and WGSL.

Worldle has been fun. I prefer playing with the map turned off. I’ve also enjoyed Globle and Quordle.

Matt Webb on Project Daedalus. Especially loved the pulsar aside at the end.

Roy Scholten’s and Martijn van der Blom’s letterpress prints with Lego bricks. Mmm.

Martin Treiber’s online traffic simulator. Created a traffic jam pretty easily.

Matt Cambion on personal websites as self-portraiture. I sometimes feel like my site has gotten a little less personal, but the recent typeface/color change has helped with that.

The Yesterweb zine. Enjoying this.

Disney Animation on their filmmaking process, using Encanto as the example. (I still have We Don’t Talk about Bruno stuck in my head.)

Hidreley Diao’s AI-generated photographs of cartoon characters. Some of these are pretty good.

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.

Atlas Obscura’s map of unique restaurants. Can’t wait to start exploring some of these.

Zadie Smith on writing. Reading this made me think that maybe I’m really just not an outliner.

Chris on how to make MPAs that are as fast as SPAs. Some interesting ideas here.

Wikipedia page on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So sad.

Rust 1.59.0 has some nice inline assembly support. (I say that as if I use assembly all the time. I don’t. I’ve hardly done anything with it. But maybe someday!)

The Liminal Librarian blogs book reviews from a fictional point of view. Love it.

Timothy on how to read the ECMAScript/JavaScript spec. Something I keep meaning to get to.

Interview with senior JS dev. Hahahahaha.

Tom MacWright on the indie web and books. My reading list is still my favorite page on this site.

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.

Thoughts

None this time! An empty skull bids you goodbye.

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Welcome to Prints volume 1, issue 4.

Table of contents: Reading • Watching • Making • Links • Thoughts

Reading

Recent nonfiction reads

• 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:

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.)

Green Fairy Book: On hold until I finish Morte.

Links

Marcin Wichary on bug fixes in Figma. In reading this, I realized I probably like fixing bugs even more than writing new code.

Lauren Budorick on implementing shadow spread in Figma. Nice deep dive.

Clive Thompson’s weird old book finder. I’ve wanted something like this ever since reading his piece on rewilding your attention. Clive also wrote about why he built it.

Baldur Bjarnason on keeping up with web development. Good advice.

Artificial tear glands in a dish that can cry. Now hook that up to some realtime sentiment analysis of Twitter trends or something.

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.)

Etymology of crescent. Ha.

Kori Michele’s infinity zine. Cool idea.

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.

Wood you can fold and mold. A potentially more sustainable alternative to plastic.

CadQuery, a Python alternative to OpenSCAD.

Words better known by men than by women and vice versa. Also, a similar table for the US vs. the UK.

Thoughts

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.

Ran across this chilling quote on the Wikipedia page for scurvy:

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.

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Welcome to Prints volume 1, issue 3.

Table of contents: Reading • Watching • Making • Links • Thoughts

Reading

Typos in books used to bother me a lot. They don’t anymore. (Unless it’s an utter avalanche of them.) Still can’t read books with bad typography, though. Relatedly, I’ve begun reading physical books again, for typographic variety.

I used to like thrillers with secret conspiracies making for amazing plot twists. Now, though, I see how a conspiracies-behind-everything worldview can really mess people up, with dire ramifications for society. Seems like at least some of that worldview stems from stories about conspiracies. I have no evidence for this assertion — it’s just an idle thought — but to me it feels compelling enough that I feel uncomfortable reading conspiracy thrillers even though my story-eating brain loves those tasty plot twists.

One of the delights of having loads and loads of books in your house is forgetting you have some of them and rediscovering them later.

Lately I’ve been thinking about books as software updates for my brain, a way to inject a load of training data into my neural net. (I think I’ve mentioned that before. It’s still something I’m thinking about.)

Recent reads

Nonfiction:

• Jordan Mechner’s The Making of Prince of Persia journals, 1985 – 1993. (I have a thing for makings-of.) Interesting to see what’s changed since the ’80s and what hasn’t.
• Anthony DePalma’s The Cubans, about life in Cuba since Castro took power. My grandfather was born in Cuba. While he left around ten years before the revolution, I still have cousins living there. The conditions are not great. The sinking of the 13 de Marzo was horrifying. This book, though, was really good.
• Eric Gill’s An Essay on Typography. There’s a fair amount of social commentary here, which I bounced off of the first time I tried to read this, years ago. Now, though, the critique of industrialism resonated with me. Some strong typographic opinions here, too. More and more I’m of the mind that even word spacing is more important than an even edge, so ragged right is probably the future for any books I typeset going forward. This book was set in Gill’s Joanna, and I was intrigued by the left single quote (riding low at x-height) and the running heads (italic lowercase with Roman initial caps, which was how italics were used long ago but you don’t see it much these days) (also, this book was published in the 1930s). While reading this I kept itching to run to my laptop and design some type. Gave in a couple times.
• John Boardley’s Typographic Firsts: Adventures in Early Printing (the edition that just barely came out). It’s all about innovations in printing — the first printed books, first time printing in gold, first printer’s marks, first time printing music, etc. Right up my alley. Things I learned, in no particular order:
  • Blockbooks are a thing (using woodcuts for the text as well as any decorations or illustrations).
  • The word miniature comes from minium, the Latin name for a red form of lead oxide.
  • The shape of T-O (orbis terrarum maps). I think I may have seen this before but had totally forgotten about it.
  • Loved the conical-projection Ptolemaic map from the Nuremberg Chronicle, though I’m not sure why.
  • The atlas was named by Mercator after a Mauritanian king, not the Greek Titan.
  • Criss-cross comes from Christ-cross. (Which seems blindingly obvious in hindsight.)

Fiction:

• Martha Wells’ Exit Strategy, novella, fourth in the Murderbot series. Enjoyed it. (This was after bailing on two other novels after reading around 400 pages across them both, so it was nice to come back to a comfort read.) Looking forward to reading Network Effect.
• P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout. Also a novella, one that felt as substantial as a novel. It’s about hunting down monsters that are disguised as Ku Klux Klan members, and wow, I really liked it. More fantasy like this, please.

Books acquired since last issue

• Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China — Leslie T. Chang
• What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World — Sara Hendren
• Embassytown — China Miéville
• Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century — John B. Thompson
• How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention — Stephen Richard Witt
• Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World — David Sheff
• Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia — Robert Lacey
• The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time — Jeffrey D. Sachs
• The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty — G. J. Meyer
• The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization — Vince Beiser
• Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty — Dan Jones
• Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour — Barbara W. Tuchman
• Where Good Ideas Come From — Steven Johnson
• Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream — Conor Dougherty
• The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding — Robert Hughes
• Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe — Nancy Goldstone
• Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers — Daniel Ellsberg
• Mythology — Edith Hamilton
• How Money Became Dangerous: The Inside Story of Our Turbulent Relationship with Modern Finance — Christopher Varelas
• Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War — Stephen R. Platt
• Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age — Stephen R. Platt
• The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building — David J. Peterson
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t — Nate Silver
• The World: A Brief Introduction — Richard Haass
• Certain Dark Things — Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 — Michael R. Beschloss
• His Master’s Voice — Stanislaw Lem
• In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language — Arika Okrent
• In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony — Darren Byler
• Paradox Bound — Peter Clines
• No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram — Sarah Frier
• Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire — Brad Stone
• The Body: A Guide for Occupants — Bill Bryson
• Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos — Priyamvada Natarajan
• My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey — Jill Bolte Taylor
• Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance — Michael R. Beschloss

Wordhoard

Words I’ve come across lately:

• jointure
• donnybrook
• banditti
• sus
• hopepunk
• chrysography
• neume

Unicode corner

An experimental new section, where I a) read part of the Unicode spec and b) jabber about it to y’all. Years ago I read the first few chapters and generally enjoyed it, and I like the intersection of tech, type, and languages, so here we go.

Decided to start with chapter 21, on notation systems. I’ll only talk about the points I found interesting.

Unicode doesn’t specify physical dimensions for Braille, which makes me wonder how many different standard sizes of Braille there are, and whether large-print Braille would be easier to read or harder/slower. (From some cursory research it looks like each country might have its own size standard, but international Braille is a thing so maybe sizes are more uniform.)

I didn’t know Common Musical Notation (CMN) was the name for what I think of as standard Western music notation. The Unicode characters for music are focused on inline use (which makes sense), so there’s no pitch encoding. Nice use of combining characters, though of course there is a small set of precomposed characters as well. Also interesting that the accidentals are in a different block — I ran into that with Coptic, which re-uses characters from the Greek block. Apparently RTL music at least some of the time mirrors the clef sign — but not the note heads. Ties and slurs and such are encoded with just beginning and ending markers, which makes sense because ties and slurs and such have variable length. I’m less familiar with the 18th-century ornamentation but it looked interesting.

Watching

Just BYU volleyball, both women’s (last season) and men’s (this current season). I haven’t seen Tenet yet but want to.

Making

Minor epiphany this past week: for me to care about a project I’m working on, it has to feel innovative in at least some small way. While I don’t know that I want innovation to be the sole lens I look at my work through, it matters enough that I need to make sure I account for it going forward. (By consciously acknowledging what the innovation is on each project, that is, and culling the projects where I can’t come up with anything new.)

I haven’t done a good job at bringing innovation into my writing, however, and I suspect that’s one of the reasons I’ve struggled to produce much there. Still thinking through what might work for that. I should add, by the way, that it doesn’t have to actually be innovative in the world, it just has to be something I personally haven’t seen before.

Reading about printer’s marks in Typographic Firsts made me realize I hadn’t said anything on here about my initial attempt at a publisher’s mark, used on the title page of my recent Historia Calamitatum edition. It’s nothing special, and I suspect I’ll rework it soon, but it was fun to make. (By the way, it wasn’t technically an initial attempt. I’ve used a couple other publisher’s marks in the past, back when I was making books under my Riverglen Press and Quillfire Studios imprints.)

Current projects

Salviana (working title): Figured out who the narrator needs to be and got the outline finalized enough to start drafting. With the voice change, it made more sense to start from scratch (though I hate doing that, which is why I want to get good at outlining). Five pages written so far, and it’s going well. I need to resurrect that create-before-consume idea (already abandoned! I like reading!) to put more time in on this, though, because it’s slow going when I only spend a few minutes a day on it.

Charts: Haven’t done anything here yet. Still thinking about making that Latin ending lookup chart, though I worry it might always be incomplete enough that it wouldn’t be useful. (I’ve also been out of the Latin-study frame of mind for a long time.)

Marks: The main update here is that I’m now seeing this as a DSL not only for purely generative art, but also as a DSL for modifying input paths — e.g., pass in an SVG or a font glyph, modify it, and then re-export it. A slightly more concrete example: take in a font glyph, split its paths into small segments of equal length, move each segment’s start point along its normal (out if it’s odd numbered, in if it’s even), and union random small circles to it along the way as well. This all comes from my interest in making digital things look analog. Also, as far as going with a DSL instead of a library in a general-purpose language: while a DSL might not be able to do everything a general-purpose language can do, it can make certain tasks easier; and you can always use a general-purpose language to create the DSL code. Anyway, I’m still writing up explorations for how this Marks language should work. Nothing worth showing yet.

Bend: Still slow progress here, haven’t spent much time on it. Decided to decouple cursor movement from moving the current selection. I need to come up with more user stories to guide the language design.

Hinterlight: I’ve done a couple of revision passes. Type design is still hard, and I still haven’t produced anything I’m happy with, but I think I’m getting a little bit better at making curves look smooth and not janky. (I need to look at existing fonts in FontForge to see how their curves are set up. That should help.) The new proof setup (Paged.js to generate, iPad to proof) is nice. FYI, my focus with Hinterlight has been to design a typeface that looks like it’s been printed with traditional processes — ink spread, rounded, less sharp and clear, more in the vein of the IM Fell fonts. But I’m starting to think it might be better/easier to design a digital font and then use Marks to modify it to get the look I want. Still deciding. Also, I’ve been running into posture-based neck pain issues both with proofing and with the type design work itself. Need to figure that out.

Journal PDFs: I added Paged.js to my Leaf journal app so I can easily export annual journal PDFs for any of the years I have journals for. It’s working fairly nicely, except that sometimes the last line on a page will disappear. I haven’t managed to figure out yet if it’s Paged.js or Chrome dropping the line, but either way, it’s problematic. (There was a similar issue related to hyphenated final lines, with a fix in the comments, but this one is still unsolved for me.)

Morte d’Arthur. I’m planning to make a Middle English edition of Malory’s Morte, for fun. If I can figure out the Paged.js issue I may do a PDF, but at this point I’m leaning toward doing just an EPUB. Originally I was going to first write Caxton, a shiny new replacement for my md2epub script, but I realized that md2epub works fine and I don’t actually have a real need to replace it. (I’ve thought about using pandoc instead, but the same principle applies.)

Andrew Lang’s Green Fairy Book, to go along with the first two books in the series. This’ll just be EPUB. (Getting Kindle books to look good outside of Amazon’s enhanced typesetting ecosystem is a losing battle, so I’ve given up on that.) Also, I’m looking at Green and Morte as a way to figure out better, more sustainable ways for me to make books — avoiding RSI, mainly. This will probably take the form of a text processing DSL ala Fledge, possibly with a more verbose and more user-friendly replacement for regular expressions.

Projects I’ll probably never do

• A self-contained wireless plotter, basically a DIY Logo turtle. Probably with a Raspberry Pi Zero W running it. Maybe with Legos for the chassis and motors. An arm to hold the pen, and some kind of DSL to control the movement.
• Paper speaker (copper tape) that can somehow read its audio data from printed marks on the same sheet of paper. (No idea how this would actually work.)

Links

Ploum on a computer built to last fifty years. I like the offline-first idea, and the peer-to-peer idea is intriguing.

Steve Lord on the hundred-year computer. Similar idea. Permacomputing is my jam.

Collapse OS. Even if an apocalypse like this never happens, these projects fascinate me.

The Manager’s Handbook on giving feedback. Good suggestions.

SimulaVR on why VR computers are better than PCs/laptops. Whether it’s AR or VR, something in this vein feels like the future and I want it.

Matt Webb on social gradients. This was good. I need to read A Pattern Language, too.

Joe Pinsker on not apologizing for being slow to respond. Food for thought.

Tracy Durnell on writing metrics. I think she’s on to something.

Lincoln Michel on writing the right words, not the most words. Also good.

Lincoln Michel on the plotting vs pantsing false dichotomy. Useful.

Charles Brooks’ photos from inside musical instruments. Lovely and a little haunting.

Tom Watson’s wiki trivia game was fun.

Brian Potter on why skyscrapers are so short. I don’t know that I agree with him that we should build taller, but I’m also super afraid of heights.

Natashah Hitti on the Norimaki taste synthesizer. I’m assuming at some point I’ll have to mute smells on Zoom calls.

Ryo Tada’s Fulu project, a haptic fingernail. I’m still not entirely sure how it works, but it looks interesting.

Alise Fisher on the Webb telescope arriving successfully at L2. Yay!

Janelle Shane with some New Year’s resolutions generated by AI. These are great.

Jason Fried on presence indicators in apps like Slack. Agreed. After reading this, I set my Slack status at work to always be away (with my manager’s blessing and with letting my team know).

Lincoln Michel on why you need to read fiction to write fiction. Yup.

Max Böck on making free stuff (on the web). I am clearly in favor of this. Sidenote: I am becoming less and less of a capitalist as I grow older.

Merriam-Webster on what ‘sus’ means. I haven’t heard it in the wild yet but I’m looking forward to!

Paul Karasik on studying something you love in depth. This is good.

Thoughts

I made Siri fast on my phone again (it had gotten incredibly slow) by turning off content suggestions. Also sped up the Reminders app by turning it off in iCloud and back on again, and moving all my items to a new list.

I totally forgot about macOS Monterey and still haven’t upgraded yet. I used to be a day-one adopter on these OS upgrades but in recent years I’ve gotten burned too many times. Still trying to decide if I want to chance it.

Some of the career paths I wish I could have tried in addition to the one I have, in no particular order: writer, editor, journalist, graphic designer, illustrator, 3D animator, artist, typesetter, lawyer, professor, detective, private investigator, architect, city planner, publisher, think tank researcher, archaeologist, anthropologist, physicist, biologist, geologist, astronomer, civil engineer, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, aerospace engineer, materials engineer, roboticist, cartographer, lexicographer, set designer, technical writer, carpenter, blacksmith, sculptor, geographer, historian, baker, tailor, potter.

When I see other people behaving badly, I now tend to think of them as having gotten their mental software into a glitchy state. I don’t yet know all the ramifications of thinking about people this way, or whether I’ll continue with it, but one advantage I’m finding is that it dissociates the behavior from the person. (When I say state, I’m thinking of software state while a program is running — temporary and not innate. And yes, rebooting humans is harder.)

For my website, I’m now leaning toward sticking with my Linode instead of moving everything to Render. Running my own VPS is more hassle, sure, but it feels more indie to me…and apparently that matters. I do plan to start over soon with a new Linode where I can keep on top of upgrades more regularly, though.

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Welcome to Prints volume 1, issue 2.

Table of contents: Reading • Watching • Making • Links • Thoughts

Reading

After reading four nonfiction books at a time, I’ve dropped back down to one at a time (along with one fiction at a time). Reading more books concurrently felt like a way to get through the slow more easily, but I think it made it worse. I definitely wouldn’t have finished Bede’s Ecclesiastical History any time in the next month or two if I hadn’t focused on it. One at a time also has the advantage of being cognitively easier, which feels better on my brain.

I predominantly read books written in the past fifty years, but as I’ve mentioned, I’d like to read more books written before that narrow sliver of time. (Thus the Bede.) To that end, I’m hoping to try to have every fourth book (or so) be an old book. Planning to try some Roman historians next, and maybe some English chronicles as well.

Goodness, there are lot of books I want to read. Mount TBR’s growth is certainly more than linear. Hopefully not exponential yet, though.

With my (extremely meager) writing, I tend to measure my output by the number of words written. Getting one or two thousand words down marks a really good day for me. Well, for comparison: last year I read approximately 9.4 million words — around 25,000 a day. (While the comparison interests me, it is of course not fair. Creating is usually more time-intensive than consuming, something I need to remember more often.)

Recent reads

Nonfiction:

• Kassia St. Clair’s The Golden Thread was fascinating. More wide-ranging than I expected, across both time and space. I absolutely want to read more about textiles — very open to recommendations.
• As alluded to above, I went full Bede and finally made it to the end of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People a few days ago. If you care deeply about what day Easter is observed on, this is the book for you. Slow reading at times, but I liked it and I’m glad I read it. Also, the old place names were delightful. A small sample: Infeppingum, Ythancaestir, Streanaeshalch, Paegnalaech, Lyccidfelth, Cerotaesei, and Adtuifyrdi.

Fiction:

• As with the first in the series, I liked the anthropological/linguistic angle in Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace. My brain found it very reminiscent of C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner — so much so, in fact, that my imagination kept replacing the Teixcalaanlitzim with Cherryh’s atevi aliens. (This reminds me that I need to continue the Foreigner series sometime.)
• I enjoyed Martha Wells’ Rogue Protocol, third in the Murderbot series. The novella length is perfect for me. These are light, easy reads, too.

Books acquired

A new experimental section, inspired by David Allen’s book posts. It’ll be embarrassing (I buy a ridiculous amount of books) but I like books enough to want to include it. Keep in mind that I mostly buy ebooks on sale, and I also work at a company that has an unlimited books benefit, which I am clearly putting to full use.

Books acquired since last issue, in acquisition order:

• The Black Coast — Mike Brooks
• The First Clash: The Miraculous Greek Victory at Marathon and Its Impact on Western Civilization — James Lacey
• Termination Shock — by Neal Stephenson
• The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV — Robert A. Caro
• Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 – A World on the Edge — Helen Rappaport
• The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped — Paul Strathern
• Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy — Margaret Sullivan
• Win at All Costs: Inside Nike Running and Its Culture of Deception — Matt Hart
• Betsy Ross and the Making of America — Marla R. Miller
• Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States — Jonathan Levy
• Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe — Thomas Ligotti
• Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition — Buddy Levy
• They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents — Neda Toloui-Semnani
• The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy — Charles R. Morris
• The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear & Volokhonsky translation) — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier — Benjamin E. Park
• The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone — Brian Merchant
• How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization — Mary Beard
• A Practical Guide to Conquering the World — K. J. Parker
• Ember Rising — S. D. Smith
• Ember’s End — S. D. Smith
• China in Ten Words — Yu Hua
• Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House — Rachel Maddow
• The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985–1993 — Jordan Mechner
• Leonardo da Vinci — Walter Isaacson
• The Cloud Roads — Martha Wells
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds — Michael Lewis
• Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure — Michael A. Lupoff
• Facebook: The Inside Story — Steven Levy

Wordhoard

Another new experimental section: words I’ve come across in my reading that caught my interest.

The polite thing to do here would be to include definitions, but looking words up is half the fun, right? I’m also leaving out the language — some of these are from a French dictionary, for example — and I’ll leave the list unsorted to boot. (If you think I’m just being irresponsibly lazy here, you’re not wrong.)

• maltote
• IOOF
• chapfallen
• gage
• marivaudage
• rodomontade
• mulct
• flitch
• electuaries
• on eyre
• condign

Watching

I don’t feel like I watch enough of anything to warrant a section here, but that’s probably not as true as I think, so here we are.

Enjoyed Encanto (still have the music stuck in my head), Ron’s Gone Wrong, the Loki series (so weird), and the Assembled documentary series (I love love love making-of documentaries).

Tried The Book of Boba Fett but I really struggle to enjoy Star Wars at all anymore. Back when The Mandalorian came out, I bounced off it as well. (Guess which streaming service we subscribe to, by the way.)

Lately we’ve started watching BYU volleyball games, which has been fun.

Making

This past run (as in a run of days, which is what I’m calling the time period between issues, at least for now) my back has been worse, which makes some type of work (like art) more painful/difficult. My day job has also been very busy, leaving me with fairly little energy left over in the evenings. End result: not much project work.

Current projects

Salviana (working title): I’m close to finishing the new outline. It incorporates a lot of what I already have in the first draft (which is a nice change; usually my revision outlines end up changing everything). Hoping to finalize it soon so I can dive in and make the revisions.

Retzi (working title): On hold while I finish outlining the Salviana story.

Religious art: My Their Work and Glory piece is in a new exhibit, The Sacred Feminine in LDS Art & Theology at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts Gallery in New York City, open January 14 through March 6. (It’s in under the alternate title Their Work and Their Glory.) I’ve tried a few ideas for new work but haven’t come up with anything I’m happy with. I suspect I may have reached the end of my time exploring this type of art; a pivot to some other kind of art is probably best. Also, in case anyone’s curious about scale here: in 2019 I sold 15 prints, in 2020 I sold 183, and in 2021 I sold 196 (all on-demand through Society6). I haven’t done any marketing and don’t care to.

Other art: I played around a little with Procreate 5.2’s new 3D painting functionality. Itching to do more with that and realized I need to get better at modeling in Blender first. (I did end up playing around with geometry nodes a little. Nothing to show for it yet.)

Charts: I’m thinking about making a Latin endings chart. It would show -ae, for example, and then list out all the grammatical possibilities for that suffix. Not sure yet if it’s actually a good idea; still in the exploratory phase. (Still haven’t actually done anything beyond writing down the idea, to be fully transparent.)

Bane: Backburnered for now. I’m not sure designing a general-purpose language interests me enough right now to continue with it — at least not one that’s basically just an amalgam of other languages. If it was innovative enough, though, then perhaps.

Marks: I’ve decided to go with making this a DSL instead of a VM. Random ideas for it that I haven’t really thought through yet:

• Leaning towards declarative instead of imperative (ala POV-Ray, Lilypond, OpenSCAD, etc.)
• Special focus on path manipulation (iterating through paths, moving points around, filters for roughening paths, etc.)
• CSG/Boolean support
• Not sure if this is purely generative or if modifying existing SVGs (for example) would also be part of it
• Custom brush strokes defined through functions, with controls for falloff, opacity, etc.
• Paths and points as primitives, along with being able to define new primitives (just functions, really)
• Not sure yet how much will be vector vs. raster
• Reference implementation built in JavaScript

Bend: I’d been trying to figure out the curve-editing commands more abstractly, but it was hard to latch on to and I didn’t get anywhere with it. Recently, though, I tried writing user stories — e.g., “I place a point, pull out a control point, and then place another point up and to the right with its control points extended” — and already it’s helping anchor things enough that I’m making (slow) progress again.

Hinterlight: A typeface, previously known as Hinte. I started it months ago (designing it in FontForge) but abandoned it because I am not at all good at type design yet. Recently I resurrected the project, with a few new process ideas that will hopefully help: using Paged.js to generate proof PDFs and then proofing those on my iPad (in Documents, using my Apple Pencil to make annotations). I feel like it’ll still take a long time before I get any good at type design. Baby steps.

Projects I’ll probably never do

• A protocol (parallel to HTTP, Gopher, Gemini) that lets you broadcast one word per day. An exploration of the idea of really slow communications. This would possibly lead to some suspense (“Which way is this sentence going to go? I won’t know for weeks!”), but more likely it would just be insanely boring. Still, smaller, simpler protocols for alternate nets interest me. (I do still plan to get a Gemini server up at some point.)
• Take a medieval chronicle and publish it in blog format. Probably posted all at once, but possibly in “real time” with a contemporary day for each year in the chronicle. Someone has probably already done this.

Links

Brandur on using Docker for local development. Reproducible deterministic environments are worth it, I think. But I’m all for getting rid of complexity where possible.

Mapbox on their adaptive projections for interactive maps. Loved this.

TinyGo, a Go compiler for embedded and WebAssembly. (A stripped hello world gets down to 10k.)

Where Is Webb, a nice info page showing the current status of the Webb telescope.

James Padolsey’s Break the Bubble escape chamber. A recommendation service for books you probably haven’t read by people who read books like you.

Tom Scocca on how long it takes to caramelize onions. From 2012 but still good.

Dinwar on how geologists think. Found this fascinating.

Moxie Marlinspike on crypto. For whatever reason I’ve had zero interest in blockchain/crypto/NFTs/etc., but this seems a level-headed take.

Molly White on blockchains. Also a level-headed take.

PrinceJS, a web-based recreation of Prince of Persia (which I played as a kid). Works on mobile, too.

Stanford Carmack on subordinate that usage in the Book of Mormon. His research into the Early Modern English syntax of the Book of Mormon is fascinating.

Christopher Moore on a meteor that hit Tall el-Hammam 3,600 years ago. More particularly, it’s about how they deduced that this happened.

Women in Type, a research project showcasing women’s contributions in type history. (Fonts, that is.)

Patrick Tanguay’s list of friendly indie micropublishers. I love lists like this.

Kevin Kelly on ideas wanting to be shared. This resonated with me.

Kevin Kelly’s 99 additional bits of unsolicited advice. Also, I wish I’d had the foresight to register bc.net back in the early days of the web.

Julio Merino’s EndBASIC project. A web-based interpreter modeled on QuickBASIC with a DOS environment. Nostalgia! (It’s not quite the same as what I programmed with as a kid, but still nice.)

Anthony Warner on botulism and Botox. The stats toward the end blew my mind.

Thoughts

On that iOS keyboard bug I mentioned last issue: if I open Safari, go back to Home Screen, and then reopen my PWA, the keyboard returns. A little quicker than killing the PWA, though still obnoxious.

Some random small horological musings on advantages analog clocks have over digital. Analog is spatial: time takes up space, so you can see the size of it at a glance, along with relationships between intervals. With digital, you have to do some basic math first and it’s still more abstract. Also, analog clocks make me less concerned about the exact time — within a few minutes is usually acceptable. (These thoughts bubbled up when I decided to change my watch face from digital to analog.)

Realized I’ve had this website for over half my life.

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Welcome to Prints volume 1, issue 1.

Table of contents: Introduction • Reading • Projects • Work • Personal • Links • Miscellanea

Introduction

In my recent (failed) attempts to get back into blogging, I’ve been aiming for a frequent stream of small blog posts. It hasn’t worked.

Enter an experiment from stage left, one that will veer in the other direction: longer, less frequent posts. More specifically, I’m taking the weeknotes idea and fleshing it out even more, effectively turning this blog into a cozy little magazine. (How is this different from weeknotes? For me, in this model all posts are part of the zine, rather than having other posts alongside the weeknotes. Does this matter to anyone but me? No.)

I anticipate issues going out every couple weeks, but let’s leave that open and flexible. The name, Prints, is an allusion to both printing/publishing and footprints/tracks. It all feels a bit pretentious, to be honest, but I’m doing it anyway.

Reading

I recently got a Kobo Libra 2, to explore the ereader ecosystem outside of Kindle. It’s…a lot better. Better typography, better page turns, better lighting. I much prefer the Libra to my Paperwhite. (That said, I still do almost all my reading on my phone. Hoping to branch out a bit, though, because I can get larger fonts on the Libra and that’s nicer on my aging eyes.)

The quest to read more old books continues. I’m a third of the way through Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and it’s taken me two months to get this far. I’m not giving up!

Lately I’ve started making time to read from dictionaries, and I love it. So delightful. So many good words. (I’ve also started making time to study maps.)

Recent reads

Nonfiction: I ate up Robert A. Caro’s Working and can’t wait to read both The Power Broker and his LBJ series. David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon was sad and riveting. It was fascinating reading about Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen from the KGB side in Victor Cherkashin’s Spy Handler.

Fiction: K. J. Parker’s Siege series really clicks with me and How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It was a delight. Also enjoying the Murderbot books. Sam Hughes’ There Is No Antimemetics Division was mind-bending but ultimately not particularly enjoyable for me. I did like Naomi Novik’s The Last Graduate, though, along with Orson Scott Card’s Duplex.

This year’s reading stats

92 books finished. 55% of those were nonfiction (51 books) and 45% were fiction (41 books). 19 books abandoned mercilessly.

37,634 pages read (103 pages per day on average). By page (which includes abandoned books), 44% of my reading was nonfiction, 34% was fantasy, 19% was science fiction, and 3% was other.

Of the fiction, 14 books were standalone, 9 were the first book in a series, and 18 were subsequent books in a series.

Projects

My interest in different types of projects tends to rotate on a near-daily basis. I used to trim my list of current projects each time that happened (convinced that this is the time that I really do focus just on writing forevermore), but lately I’ve realized that it’s better to just leave everything in place for when my interests change once again.

Also, I feel like I haven’t really been great at finishing projects lately. Not sure why. (Could be my back issues, or the pandemic, or switching jobs. Or maybe I’m just losing my touch.)

Current projects

Salviana (working title): A story I’ve been working on for a couple months. Thirty pages written (discovery written, I should say) and the first draft is very close to done. Figuring out revisions and hoping that helps with figuring out the ending.

Retzi (working title): A story I’m outlining, in the hope that I can make myself into an outliner and become at least a little more prolific with my fiction. I got an initial high-level outline finished and then decided I want to take the story in a different direction.

Bane: A programming language I’m designing, mostly just to play around in that space and see if it’s something I want to spend more time on. I don’t know yet if I’ll actually build a compiler/interpreter for it. Some silly and unorganized sample code (all subject to change):

export printName
import lookup from utils

fn add x:i16 y:i16 -> i16 = x + y

fn printName name:str {
  print "{name}"
}

// conditionals
x > 5 {
  printName "Bob"
  y = add 42 x
  z = fn count:i32 -> str { count.str }
} else {
  print "Too small."
}

person = lookup "Jane Doe"
match person {
  firstName.length > 10 {
    print "{firstName} is too long!"
  }
  firstName./^Ro/ {
    // regex match
    print "Probably Robert or Roger"
  }
  firstName./^Sa(?<rest>.+?)/ {
    // regex match with named capturing group
    print "Hello, Sa{rest}"
  }
  phone[:3] == "801" {
    // slice
    print "Utah"
  }
}

// basic loops
loop 0..10 step 2 {
  print "Counting by twos"
}

loop until x == 0 {
  x -= 1
}

loop while x < 10 {
  x += 1
}

// loop through a list
loop names as index, value {
  print "Name {index}: {value}"
}

// loop through regex capture groups
loop nameString./Name: (?<name>.+?)/ {
  print "Found name: {name}"
}

// error handling
{
  // .. some code ..
}.trap error {
  log error
}

I’m sure there are inconsistencies there and things that aren’t well thought out yet. It’s a rough draft.

Marks: A VM for generative art that I’ve been planning, though I’m beginning to think it may turn from a VM into a DSL. Either way, the idea is to establish some primitives that make it easier to make some kinds of generative art. Is this better than just making a good library for an existing language, though? That’s the question.

Bend: An exploration of what a UI for editing curves entirely via the keyboard might look like. (Vim for Illustrator, I guess?) I’ve got a basic prototype built that can do straight lines; now I’m figuring out how the editing language should work for curves, selection, all that. (With this project, the design appears to be the hardest part.)

Cast: The engine for this site. I got most of the way done building Cast as a static site generator but then stalled out, and in the past couple days I’ve realized that it’s almost certainly because I don’t really want to use it. So I’m pivoting it to something I hope will fit me better (probably integrating it with Slash, my blog engine).

Religious art: After taking a break for several months, I did another abstract religious piece. I’m not sure if I’m back in the saddle there or if it was a one-off, though. (Up until this last piece, I’d tried several times to come up with new ideas but the well was dry.)

Generative art: Back in October I played around with forming lines out of small circles, for a marker-like effect:

Recently I took that code and used it to make some random-walk art (textured afterwards in Affinity Photo, which I realize could be considered cheating but it is what it is):

I’m hoping to play around with Blender’s new geometry nodes soon.

Charts: I’m thinking about making a Braille alphabet chart and maybe more Latin charts. I’m particularly intrigued by the idea of doing them in HTML and CSS or in SVG (and thus being far easier for other people to modify, since PlotDevice is Mac-only).

Work

I’ve started going through Josh Comeau’s CSS course, and so far it’s good. Still planning to dive deep into the actual CSS specs, though. (When I get time. Ha. There is so, so, so much to study and learn, and so little time to do it in. But baby steps make a real if small difference.)

In our engineering team book club we’ve been reading Martin Fowler’s Refactoring and I’m liking it a lot more than I expected to. Haven’t yet adopted the overt refactoring steps, but I plan to try it out.

Personal

Since the last weeknotes I posted back in March: my wife and I have gotten fully vaccinated and boosted, and our three oldest kids have also had their second shots. We’d hoped our youngest would be able to get vaccinated soon but it’s looking like it’ll take at least several more months. Because of that we’re still not hanging out with people or going back to church or into restaurants or movie theaters, but we’ve started doing in-person grocery shopping again.

As far as my back goes, it hasn’t gotten better, even with physical therapy. So that’s fun.

Links

Liz Stinson’s oral history of Processing. Enjoyed this even though I’ve barely used Processing itself.

Mary Soon Lee on The Sign of the Dragon, her novel made from 300+ poems. Intriguing — particularly the way the poems are all self-contained and yet combine together into a larger story. Maybe it technically isn’t a novel, but either way, it has hooked my interest.

Alvar Carto lets you make phone wallpaper from maps. My lockscreen is currently a view on York, England.

Justin Etheredge on twenty things he’s learned in twenty years as a software engineer. Some good points.

Matt Mikalatos on the problem of Susan in the Chronicles of Narnia. Loved this.

Natalie Wolchover on why the Webb telescope matters so much. I actually hadn’t heard about it at all until a few days ago, which is mildly embarrassing.

Parimal Satyal on rediscovering the small web. Nostalgia!

Oliver Burkeman on treating your to-read list like a river, not a bucket. A decent strategy for those of us where we’re adding to the list faster than we’re finishing books.

Ahmad Shadeed on defensive CSS techniques. Some good suggestions.

Dave Rupert’s RSS club. Posts that only show up in RSS readers. Intriguing.

Alex Chinneck’s art installations. Love these so much.

East Asian age reckoning is something which I a) didn’t know about till recently and b) found startling, in a good way.

Bruno Simon’s homepage. I love the 3D take on a homepage along with the aesthetic.

Lynne Olver’s food history timeline is fascinating.

Paul Salopek’s 24,000-mile walk from Africa to South America is also fascinating.

Vertiwalk, an invention for moving between floors without needing to use stairs.

Bartosz Ciechanowski does it again with an interactive tutorial on curves and surfaces.

Aram Drevekenin on the anatomy of a terminal emulator. Love the aesthetic here, too.

Miscellanea

iOS 15 has been more miss than hit for me. Particularly the Reminders app (it takes five to ten seconds for items to update once I’ve checked them off, and they frequently come back even after that) and PWAs (when I tap on a textarea, the keyboard comes up except all the keys are missing, so I have to force-kill and restart the app, and if I switch to another app and then switch back, the keyboard disappears again; it’s bothersome especially because I use a handful of personal PWAs extensively).

We enjoyed watching the Hawkeye miniseries.

I switched the font on my site to self-hosted (used to be Google Fonts), which brings the third-party tracking down to nothing, finally. Also moved to an IM Fell font for more of an old-book vibe.

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Nonfiction

As far as A Distant Mirror goes, I spoke too soon. Mired in the uninteresting-to-me Battle of Poitiers, I ended up abandoning the book once more. I now expect this to be a tome I read over several years, a hundred pages here and a hundred there. Which is something I’ve come to terms with.

I just finished John Seabrook’s The Song Machine, which I read in the hope of learning more about the process behind creating hit songs — anthropologically, not as something I intend to try myself. The dissonance between the hits the book covered and my own taste in music (film scores, some Broadway, hymns), however, ended up being strong enough that I didn’t really care for the history. Probably should have bailed early on. People who like pop and rock and hip hop, though, would probably like this book. (I hate earworms. So. Much.)

And mere minutes ago I began Madeleine Albright’s Madam Secretary, about her time as U.S. Secretary of State. Memoirs sometimes irritate me — overall, I think I’ve found that I prefer biographies — but I’m hoping this one doesn’t veer in that direction. And apparently this is the curmudgeon post where I get all my kvetching in.

Fiction

Shimmerdark ended well. Enjoyed it.

After that, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. The haunting Arthurian atmosphere was delicious, though I wish there had been more actual Arthurian elements. (Which just means I need to go find those sorts of books. This book doesn’t actually need to change.) Lovely prose, lovely character voices (or voice, rather — they all felt somewhat the same to me, but in a wonderful way that felt appropriate to the storytelling). And the boatman metaphor! Whew. I read The Remains of the Day just over a year ago and loved it, and I’m looking forward to Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun.

Lastly, I picked Cryptonomicon back up again and am now a third of the way through. Definitely earthy. Also, I knew that Stephenson is notorious for what you might call info dumps, but they’ve turned out to be fascinating, and the writing is so compelling and readable that I actually look forward to them almost as much as I do the story itself.

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The issue in which we drop the bullets. (In the lists, that is.)

Nonfiction

Eyes in the Sky was good but didn’t click with me as much as I’d hoped. I’d still recommend it to anyone interested in aerial surveillance, though. Or anyone who wants to be a little creeped out.

Next I read James Gleick’s Genius, a biography of Richard Feynman. A bit slow in places thanks to the physics details (which I should have expected if I’d thought about it at all), but overall I very much enjoyed it. History of science is my jam. (I should mention too that a few years ago I read and liked Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.) Looking forward to reading Gleick’s books on chaos and information theory.

After a six-month hiatus, I’ve again picked up Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and it is deliciously good. Perhaps not the right choice of words given that the section I returned to was all about the Black Death, but in a bizarre plot twist the book now feels like a cozy comfort read. I do not understand myself. At any rate, what I’ve found lately is that A Distant Mirror rewards a slower, savoring pace, which I wasn’t prepared to commit to six months ago. With eight hundred pages left, I suspect I’ll be reading this one for months.

Fiction

The City of Brass was great — fantasy novels set in the djinn-haunted deserts of the Middle East are apparently my thing. I can’t remember if I’ve actually read any others (The Phoenix and the Carpet, maybe? I was a kid at the time and don’t remember anything about it except that there was a lot of sand), but I want more. Recommendations, please.

Next I read Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Quirky typographic pseudohistory is also very much my thing. Robin’s newsletters are always a delight, too. Looking forward to Sourdough.

I started Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon but shelved it after twenty or thirty pages because it was too similar in time period to Genius. It’s daunting because of its length, but I hope to get back to it soon.

After that I read Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne. Bizarre postapocalyptic biotech with a three-story-tall murderous flying bear. Great writing. Weird as heck. (Which is refreshing once in a while. I particularly like it as a reminder that a string of words on page or screen can conjure incredible magic in the mind.)

Next: Will Wight’s Skysworn, fourth in the Cradle series. These have workmanlike, windowpane prose ala Sanderson, which lately does not spark much joy for me. But the action is compelling enough that here I am four books in and still planning to read the rest.

And now I’m just over halfway through Sarah Mensinga’s Shimmerdark, which came out a couple weeks ago and is great. It didn’t hook me until about a third of the way in, but then things got much, much more interesting in several ways. (Back in September I read Sarah’s novel Currently and really liked it. Shimmerdark is even better.)

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Nonfiction

• I finished Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin. Great biography, studded with interesting detail that was new to me. (Which is no great surprise. I believe I read Franklin’s autobiography when I was young, but that’s it.) The bits about invention and science and the forging of America caught my interest as expected, but the feeling that lingers for me is melancholy, rooted in Franklin’s distance and coldness toward his wife and children. Heartbreaking.
• After that I read Ken Kocienda’s Creative Selection, about his time at Apple working on Safari and the iOS keyboard. Not heartbreaking at all. Enjoyed the history. (Books about how particular pieces of software were developed are right up my alley.)
• Just yesterday I finished Will Hunt’s Underground, about caves and cataphiles and the Mole Man of Hackney. Fascinating throughout, but claustrophobia had me wanting to get it over with as quickly as I could. Not joking. Still recommended, though.
• I’m twenty pages into Arthur Holland Michel’s Eyes in the Sky, about satellite surveillance and Gorgon Stare. Good so far. Gorgon Stare is an amazing name.

Fiction

• Finished The Bone Shard Daughter. Enjoyed it. Some good twists I didn’t see coming.
• Also read Robert B. Parker’s Ceremony, part of his Spenser series. I try to occasionally read other genres to expand my palate, but more and more I’m finding that realistic, gritty crime is very much not my thing. This book turned out to be seedy and disturbing and a bit past my comfort level, but completionist tendencies made me finish it (admittedly with liberal skimming). I’m done with the Spenser series, though. And somewhat dumbfounded that I made it this far into it.
• As a palate cleanser, I read Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. It was good! My favorite stories were “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, “Exhalation,” “Omphalos,” and “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.” I wish Ted Chiang were a faster writer with dozens of books already in print. (But that would probably shatter what I like about his work.)
• And I’m now halfway through S. A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass. Enjoying it. The real-world geographical references continue to throw me — my brain remains utterly convinced the book takes place in a secondary world — but it’s not a big deal.

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Nonfiction

• Finished How Asia Works. The third section was on finance and…it turns out I don’t really care about finance. Maybe someday that’ll change, but I’m not there yet. That section was a murky slog through which I forced myself in the misguided hope that perhaps I’d pick up enough contextual clues to, you know, have a clue what it all meant. Overall, though, the book was excellent. The manufacturing section is still my favorite of the bunch.
• I’ve resumed reading Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin biography, which I’d put on the backburner when I started serializing my reading. About a quarter of the way in, and wow, it’s eminently readable. Loving it. By the way, I have a profound weakness for books about inventors and scientists and (less common) printers, so if you have any good recommendations, please send them my way.

Fiction

• Finished Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and liked it very much, even though there’s basically no magic and it’s pretty much fantasy Rome. Glad I still have most of K. J. Parker’s books left to read. (Shadow is the only other of his that I’ve read. And some short stories years ago.)
• I’m a quarter of the way through Andrea Stewart’s The Bone Shard Daughter. It’s hitting a lot of good, intriguing points for me (in the vein of mysterious things happening) and I’m looking forward to the rest.

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• Here we are again, two months later. Aiming to get back into the weekly habit, but this may end up being a more sporadic season.
• I bumped my daily reading goal back up to 100 pages, and I also serialized my reading so I only read one nonfiction and one fiction at a time. Without that, I’ve found that I ignore the harder books and keep returning to the easier ones. Serialization forces me to make progress with books I might otherwise abandon (but that I still want to finish).

Nonfiction

• It’s been a while since I read The Ghost Map, but it was quite good. Not as much about maps as I’d been hoping for, but that wasn’t a problem.
• After that I read Seven at Sea by Erik and Emily Orton, about their family taking up sailing and spending a year or so living on a boat. My wife read it with her book group and, with one of my friends embarking on a similar journey with their family around the same time, it caught my interest. The book was a mixed bag for me, but I’m still glad I read it.
• Next up: Jennifer Steinhauer’s The Firsts, about several of the women who were elected to Congress in 2018 (AOC, Ilhan Omar, etc.). Really liked it.
• And then there was Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day. I had high hopes for this book, expecting to glean some good, actionable productivity advice. I was disappointed. About the only thing I got out of it was this passage: “The chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. Which fact is very gratifying and reassuring. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. Therefore no object is served in waiting till next week, or even until tomorrow. You may fancy that the water will be warmer next week. It won’t. It will be colder.” Which is great. The rest, not so much (for me).
• I read Coretta Scott King’s autobiography, Coretta. Loved it. The first half was much more interesting to me, but I’m still glad I read the second half (post-assassination).
• Thanks to serializing my reading, I finally finished Morris Hicky Morgan’s translation of Vitruvius’s The Ten Books of Architecture. This book was much more delightfully wide-ranging than I’d expected, with commentary on astronomy and machines and art, among other things. (Vitruvius had it out for non-realistic art, let me tell you. Fantasy was not his thing at all.)
• I’m currently almost halfway through Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, an economic analysis of why some Asian countries have taken off economically and others haven’t. It’s a bit slower going for me since I haven’t read much economics yet, but still quite readable and overall I’m learning a lot and loving it (especially this middle section on manufacturing, though the agriculture section was also fascinating).

Fiction

• The Gameshouse turned out middling for me, which was a mild surprise since I’ve really liked the other books by Claire North that I’ve read (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and Touch). I loved the Venetian setting, though.
• After that I read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Borders of Infinity, a novella in her Vorkosigan series. Well done as usual.
• I also read Andrew Rowe’s On the Shoulders of Titans, second in his Arcane Ascension series. Definitely popcorn gamelit for me, which I like as an occasional thing but I can’t read too much of it in close succession.
• And then James S. A. Corey’s Babylon’s Ashes, sixth in the Expanse series. It was okay, I think, but I don’t know that I liked it as much as some of the earlier books in the series. Not sure why. I do, however, like seeing how drastically things in that universe have changed since the first book.
• After that I read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Mirror Dance. Glad I still have eight or nine Vorkosigan books left. (I’ve been metering them out so they last longer. Ditto for Discworld. Which reminds me, I’m about due to start Guards! Guards!)
• Also read Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth. I loved it, and in thinking about it afterwards, that’s pretty much entirely because of the voice. Looking forward to reading everything Tamsyn writes. (As is usually the case with these novels, by the way, I would love the book even more if it were free of objectionable content. I don’t know why I feel the need to disclaim that, but there you go.)
• I got partway through Matt Larkin’s Darkness Forged and then bailed since it got a little bit too explicit for me, and the voice wasn’t really doing it for me. I do look forward to reading more Norse-inspired fantasy, though.
• I’m now a fifth of the way through K. J. Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and it’s great so far. More engineer protagonists, please.

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