Pictorial sources in books

Nerd alert. I was reading a (modern classic) book about medieval costume in different centuries. The book was written in the 1960s, when pictorial evidence was hard to come by. “The British Museum has published a photograph postcard of the tomb effigy, which is rather good.” Now, the book mentions manuscript & effigy sources for …

Ossy: a maintainer’s CLI tool

ossy is a new release, by Piotr Solnica. Solnica releases a lot of software packages, most of it, as Rubygems. Doing that, in the small, one package at a time, is not very time-consuming, and can be wonderfully automated on places such as GitHub: author a Release text in a textarea, press a big green …

The short stories of Alistair MacLeod, and the difficulty of communication

Having read a handful of Alistair MacLeod short stories on the plane: he describes a hard life of the people of Atlantic Canada’s fisheries, mines and farms. Some of these stories hit you right in the feels. Literature is wonder. On the way to Canada, I read the very meta novel The Hour of the …

Bryan Cantrill rereads Soul of a New Machine and has excellent comments

I talked to people about blogging this weekend. Words like The Golden Age of blogging were used. (That era passed, if you hadn’t noticed.) Is it quizzical to want to have the kinds of slow, async conversation blogging can offer? Is it tilting at windmills to just do it anyway? Even if my interlocutor group …

Fantasy Cartography

The conference, oh unconference, had sessions on diverse topics such as “Phone nerding”, “Death Café” and “Coastal preservation”. These were proposed during an agenda session, placed in a matrix on the wall, and ta-da, that’s our schedule. The second day (today, Saturday) will have the DO theme. In a spirit of sharing, and stressing the …