what i'm reading: November 8

Have spent more time on home-improvement projects than article-reading in the past few weeks, but it felt like time to pull the plug on the current list of stuff-to-read. It has been hard to focus on tech stuff during the tension of the US election. Coming up in the next few weeks I expect to be distracted by Desert Bus For Hope and the Worldbuilders end of year fundraiser, so I shouldn’t get my hopes too high about a reading resurgence until the holidays.

Just learned about libro.fm as a non-Amazon source for audiobooks, but I also just used up a big cache of Audible credits so may take a while to really make use of it.

Books

• Started the audiobook of Radical Markets: Uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just society, but can’t quite remember what compelled me to add it to my shopping cart. I’m not big on economics, and I’m not certain I’ll be able to follow the arguments being made in audio format, but may as well try. Not sure I’m sold on the premise.

• I tend to hopscotch around in O’Reilly books when I’m looking for bed-time reading and not stick with one book for long, but I might dig more into Eben Hewitt’s Technology Strategy Patterns. It’s not precisely riveting reading, but I’ve been able to at least vaguely follow along even though I mostly only read it as I’m preparing to fall asleep.

Short fiction

• Intrigued by Sumana Harihareswara’s project to post short fiction recommendations every day, I went through the list and read a bunch of stories when I was supposed to be doing something else.
  • Veronica Schanoes The Regime of Austerity was fine, but not particularly memorable.
  • Zen Cho’s The Four Generations of Chang E was more melancholy than I expected after reading Cho’s other works.
  • Claire Humphrey’s Four Steps to the Perfect Smoky Eye left me feeling unsettled. Hardly speculative at all.
  • T. Kingfisher’s The Dryad’s Shoe was my favourite of the stories. I love quirky, funny fairytale retellings.

Articles

• Em Lazer-Walker released her highly-anticipated (at least by me) breakdown of the design considerations that went into the custom virtual social space for Roguelike Celebration, which is highly relevant to my upcoming birthday plans.

• I quite liked this list of thoughtful questions to ask in a job interview, one of the many aspects of interviews I have never been any good at.

• Pat Kua’s post about the power of community in determining a good tool crossed my path at about the same time as a conversation about why MySQL became so popular when it’s not the best free database, which seemed serendipitous.

• Stefan Judis points out a side-effect of new browser privacy protections: the benefit of third-party CDNs for caching Javascript libraries and other resources will mostly disappear.

• I immediately clicked through on Pam Selle’s post on how she stopped overcommitting to projects because I have been extremely feeling this problem lately. Guess I need to start making Gantt charts instead of just lists in random text files.

• Thanks to Allie Jones I now know that you can use OBS as a camera input in Zoom, allowing all the fancy Twitch streamer setup I’ve done to have another use.

• Julia Evans introduced a tiny build system called ninja, and manages to make build systems seem approachable and like a think I can learn more about, instead of a foreign wizard mystery.

• Brian Hicks' post about discovering what state-transition tables are taught me what state-transition tables are!

• Malte Skarupke has some fascinating data visualizations of electoral fraud, contrasting the original graphs using Russian data (which display obvious fraud) with new graphs of US data, which does not show fraud, but instead indicates voter suppression.