Category Archive: “Uncategorized”

Word Alert: Kraken

I just read China Miéville’s Kraken. The pages were packed with exact vocabulary, both real and aptly concocted. Some of the novel terms I looked up:

  • horripilation: goose bumps! (The shared root with horror is the bristling of hair, as with dread.)
  • atrament: an inky black substance – such as cephalopod ink.
  • plastination: a specimen preservation technique whereby certain tissues are replaced with plastics.
  • oneiric: dreamy.
  • nous: reasoning, inner purpose, or capacity for perception; common sense.
  • aleatory: depending on luck or chance.
  • fylfot: a bent-arm cross symbol; a swastika.
  • alterity: otherness; the state of being “altered.”
  • maundered: wandered aimlessly (on foot or perhaps in speech).
  • hecatomb: a mass sacrifice, especially of 100 cattle. (Gruesome related bonus word from an unrelated Wikipedia rabbit hole: tauroctony, the sacrifice of a bull as depicted as a religious icon. Humans are weird!)
  • shabti: Egyptian statuette intended to act as a servant to royalty in the afterlife. (My favorite character in Kraken was Wati, the revolutionary union-organizing body-hopping shabti.)

Kraken is an obvious work of fan service to word nerds like me. The magic of ink and paper and words is literalized through the nonstop mayhem and imagination of the plot.

Posted on Friday, December 19th, 2025. Tags: .

Words of the Week

A few spells I overheard in recent wanderings through the hinterlands of the written world:

  • sepultured: buried. (Alternate spelling of sepulcher.)
  • brio: vigor, vivacity, verve. (Thanks, MW, for an alliterative definition.)
  • tath: manure, or a field enriched by it.
  • condign: deserving or appropriate.
  • rhyton: a horn-and-animal-shaped drinking vessel/funnel from antiquity.
  • parlous: perilous.
  • psaltery: a harp-like stringed instrument.

Stand by for another quiver full of freshly-fletched vocabularrows soon: I’m reading China Miéville’s Kraken right now, and it’s rich with specific diction.

Posted on Friday, December 12th, 2025. Tags: .

Crossword: Letter References

Posted on Monday, December 8th, 2025. Tags: .

November Word Alert

Eight new-to-me words I recently encountered:

  • hebdomadal: “a rare and curious term” for weekly; a hebdomad is a group of seven [days].
  • descanted: to descant is to sing or play a musical counterpoint.
  • hortatory: of prescriptive or persuasive speech; language that exhorts.
  • meed: an old term for one’s pay or due.
  • fils: French for son; appended to a name to distinguish a son from a father, similar to junior (but perhaps in cases where no such suffix is given as part of the name).
  • entente: a shared understanding or intent, especially in a geopolitical sense. (See also the more familiar détente.)
  • apopthegm: alternate spelling of apothegm: an aphorism or wise saying.
  • ambit: scope or extent; perhaps literally describing the route of a patrol but today more likely to denote the jurisdiction of an office.

Posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2025. Tags: .

Firefox

After years of using Google Chrome as my default browser, I’m switching to Firefox. Why? Firefox now has native vertical tabs. In other words, you can choose to list tabs in a sidebar rather than smushed together across the top of the screen. I am not a person who typically keeps dozens or hundreds of tabs open, but 10 or 15 is typical. Even with this few, the titles are far more legible in the sidebar since they aren’t truncated by the variable width of traditional tabs. I find it easier to utilize tab groups in this view, too.

To be clear, side bar tabs are not a new invention. They have been available as plugins, extensions, or features of various browsers for years. What’s new is their availability as a built-in feature of a major browser.

As a secondary benefit, Firefox better supports uBlock Origin, an ad-blocking extension that also just reduces the amount of junk data transferred with each pageload. I haven’t scrutinized its impact in detail, but anecdotally I can report it doesn’t seem to be overly aggressive: I haven’t noticed any interference with legit content, including “artisanally edited” ads and integrated sponsorships on various indie sites I visit. Mainly it just feels like combing some of the spammy cruft from the footer of corporate sites.

Like Chrome, Firefox supports syncing across devices and platforms.

Last but not least, if you’re a cranky ol’-timer like me who begrudges the disintegration of interface standards, a tip: you can re-enable the menu bar and the window title bar via checkboxen in the toolbar customization panel.

(As I write this, I see that native vertical tabs are coming to Chrome, too, but I’m content with this small move to extricate myself from Google’s grasp regardless of features.)

Posted on Friday, November 21st, 2025.

Print Media (cross-posted from Patreon)

This post originally appeared on my Patreon.

I discovered a couple printmaking podcasts recently. To help get excited for the PGNY print fair, I listened to a lot of back catalog episodes while reprinting and packing prints.

Platemark Podcast

On the web at platemarkpodcast.com and on YouTube at youtube.com/@platemarkpodcast.

Platemark is hosted by Ann Shafer. The podcast is loosely organized into thematic seasons. The earlier episodes about curation, criticism, and art history are a bit stuffier and of course more academic, but the “season three” interviews with practicing artists and printmakers are great. They pack a lot of knowledge about printmaking techniques (including esoteric steampunk methods like the hydraulic-press-and-lead-plate-based Woodburytype), intricate projects (like Lothar Osterburg’s photogravures of miniature replicas of historical places), and a recurring theme of the role of the print shop (from shared kitchens to factory-size fab labs) as cross-pollinating problem-solving spaces.

Hello Print Friend

On the web at helloprintfriend.com and on YouTube at youtube.com/@helloprintfriend7464.

Hello Print Friend is a bilingual podcast hosted by Miranda Metcalf and Reinaldo Gil Zambrano. Episodes alternate between English y Español, respectively. (I’m not quite able to follow the Spanish, but at 80% playback speed I can catch the gist, so it’s good practice.) Platemark and Hello Print Friend sometimes coordinate with tag-team interviews, as with Tom Hück. The interview with FAILE was interesting for asking why more visual artists don’t adopt musicians’ practice of forming named bands to perform with particular identities and styles. Hello Print Friend also produces short documentaries; check out Grabando Oaxaca for a look at the print shop scene in Oaxaca, Mexico (there’s a Vimeo link and password on that page).

Pressing Matters Magazine

On the web at pressingmatters.com

Appears to be a swanky full-color print magazine about printmaking, appropriately enough, with some issues and articles available for free as downloadable PDFs.

Posted on Monday, November 10th, 2025. Tags: .

Vocabulary Harvest

I haven’t been diligent about recording new words in the past couple months, but here’s a batch of goodies from books I read late last year and earlier this year.

Him, by Geoff Ryman

I’m not including a lot of Greek and Hebrew terms that appeared in the book, except for a few that occur most frequently or as modern loanwords.

It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis

New Adventures in Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan

From Morrigan in the Sunglare by Seth Dickinson:

From A Voyage to Queensthroat by Anya Johanna DeNiro:

New Edge Sword & Sorcery #3, edited by Oliver Brackenbury

From the flash fiction:

  • Sister Soldier, by R. L. Summerling:
    • purulent: containing or consisting of pus (gross!)
  • Against the Witch-Prince of Emdal, by W. O. Balmer
  • High Water, by James Estes:

From Jirel and the Mirror of Truth, by Molly Tanzer

The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks

Twelve Trees, by Daniel Lewis

  • entrepôt: trading post
  • griot: storyteller; bearer of an oral tradition
  • congener: member of the same genus; one level up the taxonomic tree from the more familiar term (to me) conspecific, which denotes a member of the same species

Blacks on John Brown, edited by Benjamin Quarles

From the excerpt of John Brown—Hero and Martyr by George Washington Williams:

From the excerpt of a December 5, 1909 address by Francis J. Grimké:

  • helpmeet: a wife, in a blatantly patriarchal biblical sense
  • prate: to prattle or babble

Various

  • From Playing with Popups, by Helen Hiebert:
  • From Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey:
    • moiety: kinship group; here, used to subjugated divisions of an imperial society
  • From Battle of the Nine Waters by Dariel R. A. Quiogue in New Edge Sword & Sorcery #4:
  • From James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon, by Julie Phillips:
  • Miscellaneous:
    • wayzgoose: a printmaking celebration!
    • vly [vlei]: seasonal lake

Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2025. Tags: .

So Long and Thanks For All the Tweets

I joined Twitter on July 16, 2007. For the next seven or eight years starting in 2008, I posted pretty frequently and did enjoy the internet water cooler culture of following various authors, makers, scientists, and of course comedy accounts. I wrote my babbling commentary about bikes, science fiction, 3D printing, and art for my own amusement. My posting tapered off after 2016 and 2017, and although I continued to log in occasionally to look around, I hadn’t posted anything in over a year.

Today, I downloaded my data and finally deactivated my account.

Here’s a graph of my complete Twitter usage history, via Ian Johnson’s Twitter Archive viewer on Observable:

I have started accounts on a few of the new Twitter alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky, but none of them have really clicked. This has more to do with how I now allocate my time and attention than it does with the design of those sites or the state of social media today. I do post art (and bask in the algorithm) on Instagram, and sometimes I post detailed project reports on Patreon. If I were to write more anywhere, I’d prefer to focus here on my own site, starting with nerdy book lists and eventually nerdy book reviews.

Posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2025.

Breeding Bird Survey Visualization

Here is a sample plot of Breeding Bird Survey data, embedded from an Observable notebook I wrote. View the complete notebook in context at Observable for interactive species filters, more explanation, and the ability to fiddle with the code.

Posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2025.

PICO-8

I recently discovered PICO-8, a fantasy console for making and sharing simple video games. It’s a big dose of nostalgia for the days of typing BASIC code into our Tandy or Chipmunk Basic (except the PICO-8 language is Lua). The “fantasy console” concept is clever: it presents as an emulator for a vintage arcade machine or microcomputer with very limited resources — except no such machine ever existed. It’s a great example of creative constraints which even has me tempted to dabble in making silly little games again.

The full console (complete with editor modes) is a commercial download, but you can play the cartridges online, too.

Posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2025.

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