Paul Ford marks two decades of publishing on his own site.
Some days I want to erase this whole thing—much of the writing is sloppy and immature, and I was, too. But why bother to hit the red button? The path of the Internet has seen fit to do that for me.
A print & web comic series about 90’s kids making life-threatening decisions over the early internet.
The first issue is online and it’s pretty great.
Simon has revived his blog …and he’s importing his writings from not-his-blog too.
Great advice from Jen on writing a book:
- Write emails to Ted. Try to find a little comfort zone inside the larger uncomfortable task.
- Don’t write a Book. Write Chapters. Break a large chore into smaller tasks and focus on one at a time.
- Trap yourself. Set up a workspace that limits distraction and procrastination.
- Don’t despair the zero-word-count days. Give yourself credit for behind-the-scenes work, even self-care.
- Get amnesia. Keep your eye on the prize.
We’re getting rid of advertisers and digging back to our roots: community-based, community-built, and determinedly non-commercial.
I approve!
A List Apart has given me so, so much over the years that becoming a supporter is quite literally the least I can do.
This looks like a really nice writing interface. It currently exports to Medium, Tumblr, and Twitter …but it would be really nice if it could post to a micropub endpoint.
George Lucas, Ted Chiang, Greg Egan, Stanley Kubrick, Tom Stoppard, William Shakespeare, and Ridley Scott are all part of Matt’s magnificent theory that the play is the thing.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are replicants.
Characters look like people, except they exist for only the duration of a movie — only while they are necessary. They come with backstory and memories fully established but never experienced, partly fabricated for the job and partly drawn from real people known by the screenwriter. At the end, they vanish, like tears in rain.
Three authors pick their favourite book by Philip K Dick:
Every newspaper has an obituary of Brian Aldiss today, but this heartfelt reminiscence by Chris feels very special to me:
Jeremy got Brian for the panel alongside Lauren Beukes and Jeff Noon - the result is still probably the single best author event I’ve ever attended.
Author = Laura
Guy = Erik Spiekermann
All’s well that ends well in this tale, and it prompted my entry for the subtweeting Olympics.
The ability of the physical world — a floor, a wall — to act as a screen of near infinite resolution becomes more powerful the more time we spend heads-down in our handheld computers, screens the size of palms. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see the visual patterns — the inherent adjacencies — of a physical book unless you deconstruct it and splay it out on the floor.
Craig gives us a walkthrough—literally—of the process behind the beautiful Koya Bound book.
Deciding to make any book is an act of creative faith (and ego and hubris, but these aren’t all exclusionary). But before Dan and I sold any copies of Koya Bound, we walked atop the pages that would become the book, not really knowing if there existed an audience for the book.
Given my experience publishing Resilient Web Design as a web book, I think I should take a good look at this nascent spec.
What we envision for Packaged Web Publications is similar to the goals and techniques of Progressive Web Apps: breaking the boundaries between web sites and mobile apps, an emphasis on “offline” paradigms, and so on. The time is right to broaden the scope and power of the web to include publications.
Improbable Botany is a brand-new science fiction anthology about alien plant conquests, fantastical ecosystems, benevolent dictatorships and techno-utopias.
This is the book plants don’t want you to read…
The illustrations look beautiful too.
Language is a technology. It’s a particularly strange one that’s made of squiggles and sounds and maps of meaning, but like any other technology, it’s hackable.
Good advice on reducing unintended stress via email.
Negativity bias is a tendency for negatives to have a greater effect than positives on our emotional state.
For email this can have radical effects: positive emails seem neutral, neutral emails seem negative, and even slightly negative emails can lead to actual, measurable pain.
Even with the best of intentions we can come off distant — or just plain mean.
I can’t remember the last time I was genuinely surprised, delighted, and intrigued by an online story like this.
Here’s a fun premise for a collection of sci-fi short stories:
Flight 008 through a temporary wrinkle in the local region of space-time. What these passengers will soon find out as they descend into SFO is that the wrinkle has transported them 20 years in the future, and the year is now 2037.
Read the stories of the passengers from Flight 008, imagined by the world’s top science fiction storytellers, as they discover a future transformed by exponential technologies.
Authors include Bruce Sterling, Madeline Ashby, Paulo Bacigalupi, and Gregory Benford.
Here’s the website for Alla’s forthcoming book. You can sign up to a low-volume mailing list to get notified of updates.
Alla’s book is going to be a must-have (I know because I’ve been reviewing it as she’s been writing it). Pre-order it now. It’s out in September.
When I did my 100 days project, I found it really challenging. I’m so impressed that Amber has managed to do this: she wrote exactly 100 words every day for 100 days.
10,000 words, 10 megawords, 100 h-entries of hand-written HTML:
I can’t believe I have written ten thousand words. If I were to read everything out it would take me almost an hour. Yet, one hundred words seems like such a small amount. An amount that only takes a few minutes to write.
This is a really intriguing book that combines design theory and programming—learn about contrast, colour, and shapes, with each lesson supported by code examples.
It’s still a work in progress but the whole thing is online for free. Yay for web books!