Hey cool kids, happy Friday and welcome to the latest edition of the Friday grab bag. It’s another peak behind the curtain: what do I have in my open tabs this week?

  1. The Louisiana Channel’s Knausgaard material has been open on my tabs for weeks. Nominally this is a video interview with Karl that I want to watch as a warm up for finding/signing up for a writing workshop. Maybe this weekend is the week; I’m not getting any younger.
  2. Two articles on philosophers: the wrong kind of nostalgia and our weird feeling world summed up in one word. Both angles tickled my interest. I’m not saying I’ll actually manage to read both or all of either. The nostalgia one in particular sounds very much up my alley; it’s about misunderstanding our interpretation of the world. I’m all about that!
  3. The Justif library, via The Federalist Reader via KDO. Some of you readers may know this, but I am a huge fan of quality typesetting; so when I landed on the Federalist site, I noted the quality typesetting and was even more pleased to see a colophon page linked at the bottom. Someone has brought Knuth’s typesetting algorithm to the web. Pity it didn’t always work on my iPad Safari browser.
  4. The Book Prize Index, by Robin Sloan because nonfiction books are the anti-slop. I don’t really need more books in my anitlibrary,12 but these are going to be such good books in here!
  5. An article on deadpan photography and a couple of YT videos. I think deadpan is one of my main styles. I thought it was New Topographics, and maybe it is at times, but it sounds so sophisticated. “Deadpan” is much more mundane and approachable sounding. So, when a new term turns up, a deep dive.

That’s it. I mean, there are loads of other tabs open. But that’s all I’m writing up tonight.

Here’s a picture from earlier this week.

Textured black and white cloud formations filling the sky with contrasting dark clouds and bright patches.
This week, with the help of the bots, I built a custom e-mail alert based on Github actions, the Open-Meteo api, and Resend. It emails me when the forecasts suggest we’re going to have cool clouds (like in the picture), and maybe good cloudy sunsets, and also sun dogs. Also lenticular clouds. Those are all rare around these parts, so I wanted extra opportunity to notice them.

Happy Friday, everyone!

jg

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footnotes

  1. I wanted to call it “unlibrary”, but no one has invented that word yet. Search engine kept trying to steer me to the UN Library. “Unlibrary” might be cooler. ↩︎

  2. Oh dope, Umberto Eco’s personal library just opened to the public last month! ↩︎

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