Joel Dueck ·

Port Watchers № 7

If you’re an internet elder, you are familiar with a certain category of literature which has no name.

These works are extremely good reading. However…

I have long been tempted to just take these works and republish them myself. Even the lightest application of good typography would render them infinitely more pleasant to read. I would also love to have the certainty and convenience of a print edition to keep on my bookshelf. Even a flimsy, cheap paperback with a plain cover.

And they’re just sitting there: to all appearances, abandoned by their authors, protected only by a thin plastic casing of copyright protection (and my own darned ethics).

Big Ball of Mud: There is “software architecture”, and then there is the software you find in the real world: haphazard, incremental, barely presentable, and, somehow, frustratingly… effective?! This site explains that phenomenon — the Big Ball of Mud software project — and its attendant emergent patterns, bringing clarity to an area which is usually clouded with frustration and gallows humor.

Learn Tarot (card pages): Here’s how I do a tarot reading: a few times a year, I take my deck (which I never shuffle), I deal four cards from the top and lay them in order left to right, then I load up this page in my phone and look up each card in order. Yes, the site is ugly, and using it on a phone requires a bit of dextrous pinch-to-zoom. But it loads instantly. There is no begging for subscriptions, no advertising. Just esoteric knowledge summarized concisely.

Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: This one may not really fit in this list — it’s available in a beautiful print edition and is very popular — one of those books that has invisibly affected your lived experience even if you never heard of it. It’s intensely interesting for its subject matter, but there’s a rich substrate of concepts underlying everything that other writers have mined and expanded upon. (I think of Sarah Perry’s guest blogs for Ribbon Farm — she draws on Alexander and pattern languages in most of her articles.) Anyways: the online version is an absolutely hideous crime of design, particularly for a book whose format is so well-suited to hypertext. It’s like the work is self-immolating in protest of something. Pay me to redo this, please!

Oh yeah, that reminds me — Sarah Perry’s guest blogs in Ribbonfarm: If you read one, read Deep Laziness. But they’re all really good. They deserve a more permanent, more elegant home.

Patterns for Personal Websites: Another Pattern Language descendant, for things you publish yourself online, outside of social media. Personal websites have been in retreat for a few decades now, but as gardens for public thought and personal expression they remain unrivaled. This particular work was always going to be written by someone. Mark Irons got there first, and he has made a great start, but you can see how it would benefit from Github-style collaboration and iteration.

Textism: The blog of Dean Allen, who passed away in 2018 (I wrote about it at the time). There was talk — by people who knew him better than I did — of republishing Textism in some form; but no action was ever taken. I have a few times started planning to do it myself, to cut the Gordian knot of copyright and next-of-kin discussions and present the Internet with a fait accompli; only the fact that there are always better uses of my time has so far prevented me.

A brilliant poem left as a comment on a blog in 2003: Of course, since I made a tool specifically for republishing poems, I can republish this one pretty easily.

That’s all for now! More soon, but not sooner than a couple weeks from now. I had some stuff to include here about republishing really old printed works with AI that I am punting on for now. That should probably come next.

If you know of someone who likes this kind of thing, feel free to forward this email to them!

If you have anything to say or share, just reply to this email — or find me on Mastodon (@joeld@tilde.zone) and Bluesky (@joeldueck.com).

— Joel