Look Alive

It’s spring in the northern hemisphere. In 2014, two months before logging off Twitter forever 😔, Teju Cole is requesting that international “florespondents” (you, me, people with cameras) file our flower reports: pictures of whatever is blooming around them at the moment. This is one of the most beautiful graph mind phenomona I ever encountered. Not powerful, not lasting; just good, like the flowers. I became a part of the idea as soon as I was aware of it. “Florespondents” were a momentary group project, but I never turned in my card. It is one of the inspirations for the #mnwx page on my site, where I regularly post photos of local weather conditions.

April 9 — If you use any of my Racket packages, you should be aware that I’ll soon be changing the license for my code — read about it in How I License on my site.

Maybe you’re not a Racket programmer, but: do you write code for other people for fun? Or make anything for other people for fun? That post might interest you as well.

Meaning in life comes from infinite games; one of my infinite games is “cultivating unreasonably lucky connections by making things and talking about them.” I have a theory that a software license can help improve my gameplay, so I’m going to try it out.

Speaking of unreasonably lucky connections: the last issue of this newsletter earned a mention from Robin Sloan (fiction author, creator, tinkerer) in the April edition of Trespassers. Thank you, Robin!

(If Robin subscribes to your newsletter, you might not find out until he actually replies to one of your issues.)

This elder millennial could not be more pleased with the newest Homestar Runner toon: a web 1.0 anthem, Back 2 a website, just released on April 17.

March 27 — Annotation Mono is a new handwriting-style monospace font by Qwerasd, one of the contributors to the Ghostty terminal app. (The Ghostty Discord has a “Fonts” thread inside its #tech channel where Qwerasd released betas of this font. The place can be a little acidic, but may be worth a lurk.)

May 2025 — If you, like many of us website-havers, would like a little communal nudging to help you post more or at all, consider the IndieWeb Carnival. This month the topic is “small web communities” hosted by Chris Shaw. It’s not something you need to commit to. But whenever you do have something to say on the topic of the month, you can post it to your site and email the organizer to have your post included in the month-end roundup. I participated in January’s carnival, the topic of which was the importance of friction, by dusting off and adding to an old post titled Friction in Publishing.

April 12 — 🤯 Eric Barone presents THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999). This is an event which has already happened. It was in Seattle, which is not near to me, so I wasn’t able to attend. But I love knowing that it happened.

It’s a worlds-colliding type of thing: Eric Barone (aka ConcernedApe) created Stardew Valley, beloved by millions (and me, to the tune of 200+ hours of gameplay, and probably more than that many hours listening to the soundtrack with my kids); The Straight Story is one of my all-time favorite movies that no one’s ever heard of. That Mr. Barone should be getting in front of people to talk about it…well, it’s a twist! If you like one of those two things, consider this your signal from the universe to check out the other one.

April 15 (but also ???) — If Edward Tufte designed and printed a book about computing and networks, it would probably look a lot like Bootstrapping Computing, a beautiful hand-made book by Alexander Obenauer, and published by his brand new company Buddy Bindery & Press.

This came to me via an algorithmically-served tweet from Kasey Klimes, who writes “it’s a phenomenally well-written introduction to how computers work, building up from 1s and 0s”. He also posted a photo of the table of contents as well as of a few other spreads that aren’t shown on the main website.

I was excited to share about this book in the newsletter. As I was preparing to send this issue, though, I was dismayed to find the book’s second run had already sold out, so the value to you is less than it might have been (I did get mine ordered in time 😮‍💨). You can sign up to be notified when more become available.

April 29 — I did write one other thing in April: a rant about em-dashes now being viewed as radioactive AI markers. I did not have a great feeling about this post when I published it. It’s strident and rough. But I also know I tend to sit on things for too long, and have been trying to re-bias in favor of action. And something needed to be said. I don’t know! If I edit the post, you’ll be able to tell.

That’s all for now! More soon, but not sooner than a month from now.

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