Adam Norwood

A nice essay on the “boring” Internet, a reminder that the veneer of walled garden social platforms is recent and will come and go, but the early network’s protocols and distributed nature is still alive and humming, and ready for new invention: boring, a…

The conclusion to Anil Dash’s recent follow-up blog post after his NY Times Magazine interview for their article on “the end of computer programming as we know it” resonates with me: I’ve come to the personal conclusion that the only way forward is for mo…

I failed to link to this anecdote when it was making the rounds earlier in the year, but this is a legitimately bonkers story about a fun/maddening debugging session (you know it’s a good sign when you’re breaking out strace to diagnose a yarn script).

Trying to describe and qualify contemporary aesthetic trends isn’t new, even in our hyper-online era (I first heard about product designers’ obsession with blobjects in the pages of Artbyte circa 1999, RIP to both that magazine and to me ), but like the t…

I finally carved out the time this weekend to watch Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein.

In the current era of concerns about generative AI / LLMs substituting for creative work, this anecdote about the first magazine cover to be generated by a computer (a DEC PDP-1 in this case, which apart from other hacker lore is also remembered as the ha…

I only barely understand the basic concept of time crystals (a material comparable to normal crystals except that instead of breaking symmetry in space like a salt crystal or diamond, they grow and pulse on their own accord in time without needing external

I’ve been a long time lurker to local Austin, Texas indie game showcase Fantastic Arcade and its offshoots Juegos Rancheros and Games Y’all, and it’s exciting to know that some of their very special (and unusual) custom arcade cabinets are finding a good…

Don’t ever feel like genius emerges fully formed out of a vacuum, y’all.

In The New York Times, With the Em Dash, A.I.

Early 17th Century painter and etcher Hercules Segers (also spelled Seghers) made some ghostly, shimmery prints in addition to his landscape paintings that seem to prefigure the Romantics and their sublimity by a good hundred years.

Dang, this guide by Allison Parrish is a great example of technical documentation: easy to read assuming you know at least a tiny bit about the subject of how software talks to hardware, while still being thorough in its scope and links to more reading (t…

I can’t really speak to whether their findings will help anyone chop onions better (I feel attacked that they discourage the horizontal slicing technique, my preferred way of getting tiny dices before my eyes start watering up), but look at this web desig…

There’s a new book out that collects some of Daniel Johnston’s voluminous doodling, and it sounds great.

This interactive visualization of the history of the Latin alphabet from a team at the Urban Complexity Lab at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (wow, they have some other really interesting looking work on their Projects page!)

From the New York Times review of Mike Mignola’s new comics collection Bowling with Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown, this paragraph celebrating the relationship between text, illustration, and fantasy mapmaking resonated with me: The book…

I’ve never read any of his novels (I know I should!)

A nice piece from writer Elizabeth McCracken (The Giant’s House; Thunderstruck & Other Stories; and most recently The Hero of this Book) on the great services and values our public libraries provide here in Austin and across Texas.

A couple of weeks belated, but happy 30th birthday to the release of Netscape’s 0.9 public preview, which in many ways signaled the birth of the popular Web (yes, the WWW had already existed for a few years, and Mosaic was the first browser that brought a…

I’m currently reading Christopher Alexander’s (et al.)