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There Is No Antimemetics Division audiobook

Audiobook cover of There Is No Antimemetics Division, A Novel by qntm. It features a large dark cube/monolith emerging from a cloudy forest against an orange hued sky

I just finished up listening to the audiobook version of There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. Can safely say that I really enjoyed it and would highly recommend. That said, I loved This Is How You Lose The Time War, loaned it to a few people and don’t think any of them finished it.

I came across the book a few months ago via a Bluesky post by Erin Kissane, and put a hold on it at the library. The audiobook loan popped up first. Figured I’d likely end up returning it, since I hadn’t finished one in years, but found myself sucked in. The narration by Rebecca Calder is absolutely brilliant. Also thought that the redacted parts were handled well in this format.

I’ve read a decent amount of sci-fi, but not a ton of horror. My best mental comparison for this book in terms of weirdness, gore and mental exercises, is Embassytown1, by China MiĂ©ville. So, if you liked that one, I’d add qntm’s book to your reading (or listening) list for the year.

  1. Originally had The City & the City in here but misremembered. Seems appropriate. ↩︎

Requiem For Early Blogging

From Requiem For Early Blogging:

[I]f you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. […] 

I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face. Before social media, if someone wanted to engage with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you’d give them the time of day or let them in.

This made me laugh, but it’s true.

I used to have comments enabled here back in the day, and often had interesting discussions with people. It became a lot to maintain though. I sort of regret completely nuking that database table at one point, mostly because I’d like to see some of those conversations again.

Have considered adding some sort of Bluesky, AT Proto or other indieweb commenting, but not really active enough anywhere at the moment to warrant it. Edit: Seems like I can just add an Autoblue comments block to the post and it will render replies, but might need to stick it directly in old templates.

Complete CSS

I bought a copy of Complete CSS from Picalli.li a few weeks ago, with the intention of upping my CSS game. It’s old territory for me, but my layout techniques pre-date flex… floats, clear fixes and IE hacks. Looking forward to learning some new techniques as I update the site.

Go beyond syntax expertise and reach a level of skill that’s usually only achieved after years of experience. Embrace a more efficient method of extremely maintainable, organised and flexible CSS, rooted in core skills with this expansive, inclusive course by Andy Bell.

It’s on sale at the moment, so worth going and picking up a copy if you’ve got that itch at all. He also has parity pricing, so helped with the weak dollar here.

Theme of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s Paradox, is a paradox and common thought experiment about whether an object (in the most common stating of the paradox, a ship) is the same object after having all of its original components replaced with others over time.

I’m playing around with ThemeSwitcher Pro from WebDevStudios. It’s an interesting approach to WordPress development that reminds me of the Ship of Thesus. It sort of upends the traditional theme as the base-unit of the site, allowing different parts of a site to run different portions of a theme.

For agencies and freelancers pitching theme development work, the plugin is potentially a game changer, as it allows you to start with a small budget, rebuild part of a site, establish a relationship and work towards rebuilding the whole ship. It could also lead to pure chaos if a project isn’t managed well.

I’m subscribing to the pure chaos approach, as this is a personal site. I’m also sort of curious if I can dig into the archives and make some 15+ year old themes work again.

Make your own website

Meant to post this article a year ago when I first read it, For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website.

This almost reads like me in my early teens:

Browsing the internet used to be a hobby of mine. Ever since my dad got us a modem when I was around ten, I spent hours at a time just looking at different websites. The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now, despite how many more people use the internet, I usually end up at the same three or four websites, and I end up a lot more bored.

Part of the appeal of the internet when I was young was making your own website. I taught myself HTML as a tween to facilitate that desire. Free web hosting on sites like Angelfire or Geocities was abundant, and you could waste an entire day just looking at the dumb things people put online. 

This year marked the 25th anniversary of starting a blog, then a few months later buying my first domain.

To celebrate the blog’s anniversary in May, I started a new theme, but never finished. Then considered working on it again around the domain anniversary in August, but never got around to it.

After a week or two of yak shaving (video example), I’ll activate my 90s style construction banner plugin and starting messing around again in public.

Colours: where did they go? An interesting look at colour grading in cinema over the last twenty years or so.

If you watch a lot of movies and TV shows, you might have noticed that over the last few decades everything has gotten a lot more … gray. No matter the kind of story being told, a sheen of cool blue or gray would wash over everything, muting the colors and providing an overall veneer of serious business.

Trinity College Dublin begins project to relocate vulnerable books

Three hundred years after the first foundation stone was laid, the 250,000 ancient books and manuscripts – including the ornately decorated ninth-century Book of Kells – printed on vellum, paper or silk are to be moved one by one, along with 500,000 others, to make way for the restoration of the building.

It is a monumental task that will take the best part of five years and cost €90m (£75m).

“Moving 750,000 vulnerable books is quite an undertaking, so we are having to pilot everything to see what is involved,” says TCD’s librarian and archivist Helen Shenton, who is leading the daunting project involving a 50-strong team.