Tags: writing

An Interview with Nick Harkaway: Algorithmic Futures, Literary Fractals, and Mimetic Immortality - Los Angeles Review of Books

Nick Harkaway on technology in fiction:

Humans without tools are not magically pure; they’re just unvaccinated, cold, and wet.

SF is how we get to know ourselves, either who we are or who we might be. In terms of what is authentically human, SF has a claim to be vastly more honest and important than a literary fiction that refuses to admit the existence of the modern and goes in search of a kind of essential humanness which exists by itself, rather than in the intersection of people, economics, culture, and science which is where we all inevitably live. It’s like saying you can only really understand a flame if you get rid of the candle. Good luck with that.

And on Borges:

He was a genius, and he left this cryptic, brilliant body of work that’s poetic, incomplete, astonishing. It’s like a tasting menu in a restaurant where they let you smell things that go to other tables and never arrive at yours.

“It turns out” « the jsomers.net blog

It turns out that “it turns out” is a handy linguistic shortcut for making an unsubstaniated assertion.

The World’s Writing Systems

What a lovely timeline of civilisation. This site makes for a nice companion piece to that database of dimensioned drawings—they’re both delightful to explore.

Signal v Noise exits Medium – Signal v. Noise

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

How I write conference talks. — Ethan Marcotte

I can relate to Ethan’s 16-step process for writing conference talks.

Step 14 is the most important.

The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected | WIRED

Craig writes about reading and publishing, from the memex and the dynabook to the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, all the way back around to plain ol’ email and good old-fashioned physical books.

We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

Oh Hello Ana - Blogging and me

A personal history of personal publishing from Ana—it’s wonderful!

When I was feeling low and alone I would recall how happy I used to be before I was working in tech. I would remember my silly fan sites, my experiments, my blogs and everything that I loved so much that made me become a developer.

What I Learned in Six Years at GDS ◆ 24 ways

Blogging about what you are working on is is really valuable for the writer because it forces you to think logically about what you are doing in order to tell a good story.

It’s also really valuable to blog about what you’ve learned, especially if you’ve made a mistake. It makes sure you’ve learned the lesson and helps others avoid making the same mistakes.

Mistletoe Offline ◆ 24 ways

They let me write a 24 Ways article again. Will they never learn?

This one’s a whirlwind tour of using a service worker to provide a custom offline page, in the style of Going Offline.

By the way, just for the record, I initially rejected this article’s title out of concern that injecting a Cliff Richard song into people’s brains was cruel and unusual punishment. I was overruled.

Great Leap Years - Official site of Stephen Fry

I just binge-listened to the six episodes of the first season of this podcast from Stephen Fry—it’s excellent!

It covers the history of communication from the emergence of language to the modern day. At first I was worried that it was going to rehash some of the more questionable ideas in the risible Sapiens, but it turned out to be far more like James Gleick’s The Information or Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (two of my favourite books on the history of technology).

There’s no annoying sponsorship interruptions and the whole series feels more like an audiobook than a podcast—an audiobook researched, written and read by Stephen Fry!

Essays « Object Lessons

Fax machines, pop-up books, radioactive televisions, writing boxes, microfilm readers, nuclear bomb cores, cupholders, bidets, jet engines, index cards, wiffle balls, oil barrels, lightning rods, playing cards, air conditioning, hair dryers, wheelchair ramps, handbags, diving bells, slippers, laundry chutes, sewing machines, pockets, skee-ball, safety pins, chalkboards, tote bags, holograms, hearing aids, dollhouses, billboards, airports, flash drives, cardigans, beer cans, stethoscopes, text editors, mugs, wallpaper, towel dispensers, bumber stickers, staplers, microscopes, fingerless gloves, wire hangers, toast, and more.

I’ll be in my bunk.

᚛ᚈᚑᚋ ᚄᚉᚑᚈᚈ᚜ and ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜ - YouTube

When is a space not a space?

Tom talks about ogham stones and unicode.

What do you want to do when you grow up, kid? • Robin Rendle

Publishing on the web really is quite marvellous:

…an endless thrill, a sort of everlasting, punk-rock feeling and I hope it will never really go away.

Use the words normal people use

When you’re struggling to write something that sounds clear and sounds human (two of the essential basics of a good blog post, I’d argue), just use the words normal people would use.

John Spencer: “There’s no bullshit like design bullshit” - Design Week

If we use jargon, we reveal our insecurity. If we use pretentious language, we expose our arrogance. But if we use language that anyone can understand, people are much more likely to value what we do.

Form Design Patterns Book by Adam Silver

Oh, this will be good! Adam has been working on, thinking and writing about forms for quite a while and he has distilled that down into ten patterns. You just know that progressive enhancement will be at the heart of this book.

By the end of the book, you’ll have a close-to exhaustive list of ready-to-go components, delivered as a design system that you can fork, contribute to and use immediately on your projects. But more than that, you’ll have the mindset and rationale behind when or when not to use each solution, which is just as important as the solution itself.

The power of self-publishing - HankChizlJaw

This is something I struggle to articulate to friends who are suffering because they feel tied to silos like Facebook and Twitter:

What self-publishing does is provide me a choice, which makes me feel good. I feel like I can step away from platforms at will and I don’t feel as shackled as I have done previously.

Weaknotes 1

I really like Alice’s updates.

I think I’ll do weaknotes. Some collections of notes. Sometimes. Not very well written probably. Generally written with the urgency of someone who is waiting for a baby wake up.

Daring Fireball: Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service

I know many people love Medium’s editing interface, but I just can’t believe that so many writers and publications have turned toward a single centralized commercial entity as a proposed solution to what ails the publishing industry. There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.

Your “thread” should have been a blog post…

I’m telling you this stuff is often too important and worthy to be owned by an algorithm and lost in the stream.