It’s hard to be a person this morning. I find myself tired and angry, unsure of what to type, read, or do. My brisk early morning walk around the block is usually enough to jolt me awake as there’s ample time for a dazzling podcast or a blog post read in line waiting for coffee. Then—bam! The day has begun; it’s...

If you’ve yet to play The Case of the Golden Idol then here’s another, louder reminder: go play it! It’s a fabulous detective game made up of a series of puzzles in which you have to figure out who is who, how they got murdered, and then why. You investigate murder weapons and fraudulent keys, you dive into the...

Jenny on the relationship between your job and The Good Work™: I love work, by which I mean I love the feeling of focusing my energy toward a particular goal and watching the nebulous mist between here and there slowly thin to reveal wobbly, winding stepping stones. I love the satisfaction of a certain type of...

When readers in Western Europe turned their eyes to printed books, around the middle of the 15th century, handwritten books became old-fashioned, unwanted, and ultimately obsolete. Bookbinders began to disassemble medieval manuscripts and recycle their strong parchment leaves as binding materials. Thousands were...

Marcin’s upcoming book about typewriters, Shift Happens, now has a glorious website where you can see what the finished thing is going to look like: Shift Happens is full of stories – some never before told – interleaved with 1,000+ beautiful full-color photos across two volumes. This edition features an extra...

The new year is upon us! As I’ve lounged around the Christmas tree and drunk as much mulled wine as humanly possible (alas not that much because I am weak), I’ve been wondering if this was a good year for writing. What did I get done? Did things slip or was progress made? So I’m introducing a new tradition here:...

Ya know something I’ve never played with before? SVG filters. Sure, I’ve taken a look at the tutorials and clicked around a few Pens here and there, but I’ve never fully invested in them as I didn’t ever see the point—I’m never going to work on big illustrationy stuff so eh, it’s just not for me. Thankfully however,...

A couple of months ago I moved my day-to-day internet life to Mastodon and you can find me here: fonts@sfba.social It almost, sort of, kinda feels like the fowl place back in 2008 or so when folks shared pictures of cool daffodils and micro-blogged the heck out of their coffee run instead of pandering for likes and...

Ahmad Shadeed wrote a fantastic thing about style queries the other day that I’m still trying to wrap my head around: Recently, the Chrome team released experimental support for a new proposed CSS spec, style queries. In short, they let us query the style of a container, rather than the size only. So the idea is...

For a start, when we consider rules, we have to ask: whose rules? That’s Cecelia Watson writing about punctuation and grammar in the fabulous little book I read last night called Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. It is excellent and you should go read it but Watson’s argument can be...

Note to self: this week you need to sit down and play around with IndieKit, a tool that lets you publish things to your website. Here’s Paul Robert Lloyd writing about why he built this thing and what it does: Today I’m formally launching Indiekit, the little Node.js server with all the parts needed to publish...

Ya know when a book might not be the best thing ever written but it’s the perfect book for you at that very moment? That’s what Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation was for me this weekend. I read this thing with righteous fury as for the first time in years I sat in a quiet room—from a cabin perched on a bluff...