April Review

Wiresong May 01, 2024 #Review

Books

Not a lot of reading this month. I haven't been reading new things often enough in general for this to stay a prominent category, I think; I might remove it, we'll see.

I reread Grand Central Arena, which is essentially just a Space Opera done rather well. I also reread Soulforged Dungeoneer, a story with dungeons and a rather reflective protagonist. I'm not quite sure how to summarize it. Finally, I reread New York Magician; if there's one book I would recommend this month, it would be this one. It's not really finished-it's a collection of short stories, essentially, and I believe it was supposed to be a part of a series which never happened-but what there is is very good.

I did do a fair bit of nonfiction. I've recently been thinking about trying gamedev again, and LÖVE seems like quite the clean little engine. Consequently, I've been learning Lua, from Programming In Lua. It's one of the better programming language books I've read; it's pedagogically strong, and I found it rather easy to read. I've also been reading Haskell Programming from First Principles, which is also good, but I personally don't like this much. in terms of pedagogical clarity, I've also found A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms to be very very good for learning algorithms; it's written very simply and there are lots of diagrams.

Music

the love affair with Brakence continues, although this month there's more variety in the list. I've been finding some very good Tamil music-Tamil/Malayalam/South Indian music in general seems to combine modernity and a local cultural touch in a very pleasing way.

  1. Brakence - Favors//Mess
  2. Brakence - Clouded
  3. Alaipayuthey
  4. Elay Makka
  5. Dark Star, by The Greatful Dead
  6. Ki Honda Pyaar
  7. Time Traveler

Misc

  1. X86-64 C compiler in Rust, interesting in its own right, but also interesting because of the resources it links to.
  2. Rust Binary Analysis, Feature by Feature
  3. Triskaidekaphobia, the new word I learned this month.
  4. A rather fun Hackernews Comment
  5. You can't reach the brain through the ears, talks about the inability to transmit actual experience via language, fun little post.
  6. A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux, my favorite favorite thing this month.
  7. Hello World under the microscope, goes from Hello World in Python to the GPU/display representation.
  8. Dizzying but invisible depth, a somewhat more abstract look at the tower of abstraction.
  9. 60 years ago, Francis Crick changed the logic of biology, mostly interesting for detailing how the popular "DNA->RNA->protein" dogma isn't quite correct as stated (but also a nice historical article in its own right).
  10. A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
  11. Catch as Catch Can, an old, humorous article on exception handling.
  12. Old CSS, new CSS, an unofficial history of how CSS developed over the years.
  13. Obituary for a Quiet Life
  14. Hask, an implementation of several Haskell features in pure Python. Stare at this in awe; horrors wonders like these are not oft born.
  15. Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?