Something changed in me earlier this week. One drop made the bucket spill, and suddenly I’ve lost all appetite for weird and dark stories. When I look at the news, I see nothing but darkness; why should the stories I consume and create be the same?
I need a break, and so I want to shift my focus on reading and writing stories and content that is hopeful — more noblebright, less grimdark?
Quick bit(s)
- The hallways in my apartment building got painted in the most uninspiring beige, and the fresh paint is also already peeling off — after only days. Everything about this screams low-quality sadness.
Small site changes
My web site is continuously evolving. Here are some of the recent changes:
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I started using LanguageTool for proofreading my weeknotes for now. It seems to work quite well!
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There now is an AI policy in place. I’ve also added support for the human.json protocol; It’s niche and might remain so, but I really like the idea.
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I replaced cssnano with Lightning CSS and that shaved almost two seconds off my site’s cold compilation time.
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The JSON-LD should be more sensible now. I’m not fond of this mystery markup that is never visible and easy to mess up.
No improvements to Nanoc this week, though.
Fiction writing, incrementally?
My writing projects top out at a few thousand words. I’ve only ever written short stories. I have sketched out longer stories (novellas or even novels), but never gotten to the point of actually writing them.
Part of me is deeply afraid of committing to a big project like a novel or even a novella. What if it doesn’t work out? What if it’s all a giant waste of time?
One could argue that the process of writing itself is meaningful. Nobody writes a first draft that just works.1 I’ve heard writers say that the first draft is for yourself only, not to be shared; that it’s the draft that, once finished, makes you realize what the story is really about. The existence of the second draft is crucially and obviously predicated on the existence of the first.
On the one hand, it’s nice to know that the process of writing and re-writing so much is simply part of what a writer needs to do. That’s a freeing thought. On the other hand, I am terrified at the idea of “wasting” so much time, and only really knowing at the end whether it’ll have been worth it. Will it have been worth it?
I don’t think I even am that good of a writer. My line-by-line writing isn’t great. My dialogue feels stilted.2 Why spend time on crafting good words when the overarching story isn’t even great? For big writing projects, so much has to come together. It’s intimidating.
The irony here is that I have worked on big projects — software projects, that is. I’ve been working on Nanoc for almost 19 years and I still find ways to make meaningful improvements to it. But I used a very different approach with it: it started out tiny, and gradually grew more powerful and faster and more flexible, but crucially it was useful from the very beginning.
I wasn’t planning on maintaining Nanoc for so long. It just sort of happened. Piece by piece, it evolved; each change was small and had an immediate impact. I’ve never3 had long-term projects where I knew I’d see the fruits of my labor only months down the line. It’s all been incremental.
So I’ve been wondering: is there a way in which I can use this incremental approach with fiction writing? Write chapter by standalone chapter? Write standalone episodes? The latter definitely has been done (think of the short stories in the world of The Witcher, or Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes), and I happen to quite like episodic storytelling over long (let alone never-ending) storylines.
With episodic storytelling, I’d also sidestep the problem of having to restart world building and character development from zero for every short story I write.
Anyway, just thinking out loud.
Entertainment
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Sirât4 is a surreal trek with on hell of a hypnotizing soundtrack (Kangding Ray!); an experience with hints of Snowpiercer and Fury Road.
It’s not all great, though. The first 33 minutes are sublime; after that, it doesn’t quite reach the same level, and gets needlessly and off-puttingly violent later. But the first 33 minutes? Hell yes.
Links
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The Most Unhinged Spider-Man Adaptation Ever Made (Nerdstalgic): WHAT
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Map Men vs Geoguessr 2: Mark's Revenge? (Map Men): Well played.
Tech links:
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Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark? (Cade Diehm, The New Design Congress)
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Put the ZIP code first. While this is fairly US-centric, there’s a general lesson to be taken from this that applies to Germany as well — and probably many other countries.
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Generative AI vegetarianism (Sean Boots)
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JPEG compression (Sophie Wang): Nice visualization!
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Unless you are Stephen King, perhaps. ↩︎
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I often skip dialogue for that reason! It’s an easy way out. ↩︎
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Never — with one exception: a long time ago I began a failed attempt at writing Nanoc version 4. This standalone rewrite diverged so far from Nanoc 3 that it became frustratingly difficult and time-consuming to maintain them both. I eventually gave up on that Nanoc 4 project, and the real Nanoc 4 that arose from its ashes was a remarkably small incremental improvement based on Nanoc 3, and this improvement that has proved itself as fertile grounds for enhancements to this day, over a decade since its original release. ↩︎
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Sirât, directed by Oliver Laxe, written by Santiago Fillol and Oliver Laxe (Filmes da Ermida, El Deseo, Uri Films, 2025). ↩︎