Andrew Bird wins the award for coolest person who has a Substack Newsletter.

Here he is writing in accompaniment to The Andrew Bird Jazz Trio – Live at the Green Mill:

For the last 20 years, I’ve tried to play my violin like a tenor sax. Instead of choppy articulation, I go for a fluid phrase that a lung full of air could create. The pressure of the bow on the string is like forcing air through the reed, pushing that threshold between a full tone and noise. Lester Young is my guy, as are Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and Don Byas. I favored the 5-string violin while recording Sunday Morning Put-On, as it got me closer to that tenor sax sound. The low C string has the richness of a tenor, and you have to move more air to get it going, sometimes producing that skronk that is too strident on the higher strings.

Funnily enough, when I play sax, I often times have the sound of a violin in my head. Joshua Bell played on repeat for me as I studied phrasing and buoyancy.

This isn't uncommon. No matter the instrument, I've talked to musicians who have moments of trying to imitate another in their tone and timbre for certain moods. Euphoniums imitating a cellist, clarinetists imitating flutes, a sax section imitating electric guitar, etc.

It seems like Andrew Bird and I were both aiming for the same fluidity and warmth of sound, just with different reference points. Maybe there's a mystical instrument in the middle of the two, yet to be invented, that has the best of both.

Daniel Murray (aka Melon) has an inspiring post explaining in broad terms what the Web Revival is. Readers familiar with Digital Gardens and Indie Web will find resonance here, as well as shoutouts partway in!

The Web Revival is one name for a wider internet-based movement! The name itself is derived from the Folk Revival of the mid-20th century. The Folk Revival promoted a feeling of humanity, creativity and equality at a time of rapid mechanisation; whereas the Web Revival promotes these values in the face of the rapid digitisation that surrounds us today.:

I'm appreciative of the connection to Folk Revival! Folk music is a metaphor I've previously made to creating online. It seems to fit because it implies a couple of things: closely tied to culture, and organically being maintained by a community.

The answer to "What's in it for me? Why make a site?" is sublime:

That's a fair question, why should you invest your time and energy in the Web Revival? Maybe you relate to some of the ideals listed above, or maybe you're not sure; ideals are nice, but life is not about ideals. I challenge you; don’t think about the Web Revival as a resource for you to exploit; instead, it's an offer; to play, to explore the unknown, to do something just for fun; not for money, status, or because it's trendy.

Maybe you’ll get nothing out of it, but I think you will! Like many others, I think you’ll find peace, freedom and relief from stress in creating your own digital world and owning your own space. Play is not about passing time, it's about inventing and becoming who you are and who you wish to become. You deserve to experience a web where you are free to be who you wanna be and do what you wanna do; one where you decide how to spend your time, not an algorithm that exploits you for profit. The Web Revival can't fix everything wrong in the world, but we can make it better, one little homepage at a time.

Beautiful.

A great case for practicing any art, from drawing to knitting to site making. What's wonderful about web revival is integration. We live in a phenomenal time where creativity can be supercharged by the tech at our disposal. It's as much a shame to only fit that creative energy into the neat rectangular box of a commercial app as it would be to step away from creating online at all, throwing the baby out with the bath water. The spirit of the Web Revival and all similarly spirited movements is to take the best of what we have available to us and create something authentic from it.

Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks gave me a pick-me-up in my evening creative shenanigans the other day:

In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive; he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit... It's fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them... to pursue an activity in which you have no hope of becoming exceptional is to put aside, for a while, the anxious need to "use time well."

Play the countermelody. Do something for the whimsy of it!

I have an annual ritual of playing through Super Mario 64. I'm super familiar with the game proper.

A delightful new discovery has been the original CGI renders developed to promote the game. This one takes the cake for me.

Another fun crate that I've been digging in is Render96's texture libraries. (The Bakku no Oni collection is particularly fun.)

They specifically archive texture collections that were used for games like Mario 64. Now knowing how the sausage is made, looking through these really gets the imagination going. In both directions: Trying to see if I recognize a pattern, or imagining what type of model a texture could be applied to.

Watch on Youtube

Thinking of Neil Gaiman's commencement speech this morning:

And Fifthly, while you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

The things I’ve done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.

That's extra reassuring if you are someone whose interests span multiple disciplines, crafts, and mediums. Heck, if you blog from a code editor, I'd say you're one of those people! Making that which only you can.

After having spent many years squarely fitting into a genre, I have to say that the work is all the more meaningful when it's such a unique combination of skills. When, truly, it's something only you can make. There's a mission there. There are ideas looking to come into the world where only a select number of skills can get them there.

Make genre pieces. Make math rock, haikus, and landscape paintings, sure. But, also, make math rock music videos where the lyrics follow haiku structures with a landscape painting as the album art.

Listen on Youtube

Miyamoto:

Kids today have sports clubs after school. They go to tutoring. They are pushed by their parents. Their time is limited.

Yet, even at school, kids are thinking about video games.

When they think about games that are not in front of their eyes, their sense of fantasy is at work.

Even if one doesn't consider this a form of education, it is usefult to have as one becomes an adult.

I think that is very good.

Very quickly becoming a big fan of Lynda Berry's work.

Listen on Youtube

From an interview with NPR:

One of the things you'll hear people say, when they tell me they wish they could draw, is, "I see it in my head, but I can't get it onto the page." And then I have to remind them that what they're seeing in their head is not a drawing. Drawing is something that has to come out of your body. And that horror they have is the same horror they might have if a bodily fluid was suddenly released, like suddenly they got a bloody nose or started drooling. It's that same shame about this thing that's out of their control that seems to be coming from them.

My task — and it can be done within 30 minutes — is to get them past that. ... The easiest way to do that is to have them close their eyes and draw. ... The trick is to show them that there's another kind of drawing that is very different than representational drawing.

There are different goals.

Sometimes the drawing that's left over is not as important as the fact that it can transform your mood. You can transform the way that you feel about something. You can crack you up. I mean, you can crack yourself up with an index card and a letter pen. I think it's pretty interesting.

I watched a fascinating exploration of Library music's influence on modern music artists by Bandsplaining. My favorite bit:

The fact that library music was consumed subconsciously, building models of how you think, makes it an exceptionally powerful tool — Lulling you into a decades-old state of mind.

When talking to an artist about their influences, the most enthusiastic will drop specific names and bands.

(Allow me to over romanticise commercial music for a moment:)

There's something, though, to being influenced by a time and a place. That subconscious introduction — the music taken for granted, where you don't know the composer and you're not aware that you're listening to a song — in a way that sort of music can be more powerful because it's not relying on its own merits for impact and communication.

Some opinions would put music-for-music's sake on a pedestal as the truest form of the medium. Perhaps so. However, I seem to find myself drawn more and more to the music that played just a part in a greater whole of creating a mood and atmosphere.

Even if it was weather channel music.

Watch on Youtube

Absolutely fascinating hearing the constraints on developing games and software in the early PC era. Linked above is Rand Miller discussing the way Robyn Miller would have to stack rendering 3D images for Myst back to back while he would go grab dinner.

The whole interview is great for more of those nuggets. The memory constraint of CD ROM read speeds is one I hadn't expected.

Amazing that, even with all the resources and speed available to us today, performance constraints remain a top-of-mind consideration for engineers. Albeit, now for optimization, rather than "will this even run at all?"

Harrison Chase with LangChain released a walkthrough of an AI app that handles email triage. For those who have already gotten their hands dirty with the Lang ecosystem, the structure of the graph is most interesting.

On a high level, there's a succinct handling of tool calling. First, A message is drafted in response to an email. From there, a tool may be invoked (find meeting time, mark as read, etc.). Then, the graph can traverse to the appropriate tool.

draft_message seems to be the heavy lifter. Tool calls often return to the draft_message node. Not unlike other software design, a parent component is ultimately responsible for multiple iterations and linking between child components.

A few other observations:

1. The graph entry point is through a triage node. Their example uses an LLM to determine the next steps based on message context. This can be error-prone, but is likely mitigated by the fact that this app uses human-in-the-loop.
2. There’s a pattern for recovering from bad calls from the LLM. In this case, there is a bad_tool_call node that is responsible for rerouting to the draft_response node in the event that the agent hallucinates a tool. Another point of recovery!
3. Rewrite Node: Message generation follows two different passes to an LLM. One to write an initial draft (“What do I need to respond with?"), and then a rewrite node. (“What tone do I need to respond with?“) A useful pattern for message refinement.

You can find the graph code here. And here is the walkthrough, starting at the explanation of the graph structure.

Everything about The Cotton Module's future space travel concept album "The Greatest Remaining Hits" is just... cool.

I have to point out, in particular, the domain name: ooo.ghostbows.ooo. You're probably familiar with cheeky uses of country domains. "Chr.is", for example. It's lovely to see a general top-level domain in action (and an onomatopoeia, no less!)

Do treat yourself to the tap essay. It's a delight.

Elisa Gabbert in The Essay as Realm:

I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm. It’s a place where all my best thinking can go for a period of time, a place where the thoughts can be collected and arranged for more density of meaning.

Any art is a portal. A painting, a song.

Wonderfully, any creative space is a portal.

The portal of all portals may just be the World Wide Web, where you can create solitary spaces as well as communal ones.

Clint on LGR gave a deep dive on Jim Sach's work with the famouse Marine Aquarium screensaver. What cought my attention is this beatiful predecessory, a cover art piece for the Amiga Brilliance paint program:

More of Jim Sach's art for the Amiga on the Amiga Graphics Archive.

Robin Sloan makes a case for finished works, even while nurturing a feed:

Sometime I think that, even amidst all these ruptures & renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, & those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms & institutions that support the finishing of things, & those that don’t...

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent. (Again, think of the Green Knight, waiting on the shelf for four hundred years.) Posterity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a book, an album, a video game: at least you are TRYING...

Time has the last laugh, as your network performance is washed away by the same flood that produced it.

Finished work remains, stubbornly, because it has edges to defend itself, & a solid, graspable premise with which to recruit its cult.

The ol' Stock & Flow. Can't have one without the other.

In music, it's etudes and jams vs recitals and recordings.

Or perhaps you prefer keeping a sketchbook while working on paintings.

The secret I see working the best for folks is when they can gather up their flow and make stock out of it.

I can't help myself from watching episodes of The Computer Chronicles. These are just tremendous time capsules.

Here's a particularly fun one: Audible has been around longer than you might have though. Below is Stewart Cheifet introducing the service in 1999 (from the Y2K special!):

Amazing to see the sophistication of the player. Not too different from how the iPod handled automatically downloading and clearing your subscribed podcasts.