Links: Fun projects, joy, hope, community, and more
The internet continues to be cool and fun with several projects I've come across, people grappling with questions of joy, community, and, importantly, how to get imaginary friends to kiss.
The Paradox of Romance (and How to Solve It) by Charlie Jane Anders:
This forced me to think about the central paradox of romance. On the one hand, it's hard work making two characters feel irresistibly drawn to each other, and you can't just snap your fingers and create romantic chemistry. But on the other hand, audiences will frequently see romantic chemistry where the author did not intend any.
James talks about What made you happy today? in Catch a Bird (or, Happiness). Also, Websites in artistic contexts is giving me the urge to put Corinthian columns on the blog.
Hat tip also to James for The problem with telling people the world is ending from The Guardian:
The sense of impending doom is nothing new. And what we have learned from the past is that doomerism can lead to paralysis. If everyone freezes, then nothing changes
More about joy by Ross Wintle in The search for joy:
There’s a lot of shit going down. And I confess, I have been wallowing in it a bit. Not intentionally. It’s just been very hard to see the good stuff because the bad stuff is drowning it out.
Luke Davis has his inspiring creatives of 2026 list and I really want to write one this year.
A lovely story about a sleeper train by Bungle in the Jungle, There go 200 of my closest friends.
Why Are So Many Contemporary Novelists Not Naming the Narrator? from Literary Hub via This Is My Last. I've recently read a couple of the examples listed and I get it.
Very interested in Olu's thoughts on the price of community is not inconvenience:
ease is not the enemy of social progress. it’s actually kind of weird to put them in direct opposition like that; making things easier can often be good for people and the planet. the ways people have gone about chasing ease might be (and have been!) shitty but doesn’t mean that the concept is bad.
molly's guide to cyberpunk gardening on the uncool cool curve you're not allowed to talk about being ahead of if you want to stay cool (cool is overrated) on the 'no followers trend' and trends in general.
UK people might be interested in the petition to Make all UK Government websites free to access without mobile data charges found via Pete Ashton.
Peige has decorated their blog for Halloween. I love when people do this!
Some very fun projects:
- An extremely cool Morse code project in Stephen Ball's Cabinet of Curios. Type and play messages, and learn more about Morse code.
- Average people in paintings by Will Meyers looks at over 370,000 paintings to find the average face, how many paintings have people in them, poses, and all sorts of fascinating data.
- Wonders of Web Weaving is complete and James has written a behind-the-scenes retro.
- Dostoynikov's Virtual museum for my wife's artworks. I'd love to do a virtual museum for aspects of my city, but it would not be half this shiny.
- I'm very late to Reports From Unknown Places About Indescribable Events by Ninn Salaün.
- Weird Web October is almost over and this stuff is sensational people are so clever and creative. Sweetfish's Collage, Richard Nyxon's Branching, Jenn's Origami, to name only a few.
I knew Marisabel's Pages prompt for the IndieWeb blog carnival would be a great one. They are all fantastic so far and I especially enjoyed VH Belvadi's Overlooked pages:
I love the intentionally blank page for reasons I cannot explain. I remember being so fascinated by one the first time I came across it that I stared at it for several minutes. It was sheer brilliance, leaving a page there without any text. It made me pause, at first confused, and then thoroughly impressed. A couple of decades later I still cannot explain why I like this page.
Thank you to the internet for yet again being full of weird and wonderful stuff.