Links: Optimism Edition
Last week I was cautiously optimistic about something, and it worked out. Well done world. Thing is, it mostly does. Or at least, we mostly believe it does, which is more or less the same thing probably.
Fixtures by Angles Morts, who always writes such beautiful, intriguing stuff, taking a less-usual approach discussing formal logic and Sappho and poetry:
poetry is a kind of magic, cast so often by flying in the face of tautology, reveling in contradiction, playing the forms.
Elmcat's spectacular map of the TTRPG blogosphere is an amazing project and a heartwarming result.
Different maps, Will Barth has a fascinating in-depth post on the torrid zone, with ancient maps and geography, Cicero to Colombus.
The middle ages were always global, you always need to look at the whole world by Emily Spinach:
The idea that you can draw a circle around an easily definable part of Europe and ‘be clever’ based on just knowing about there is a convenient fantasy.
Manuel Moreale is launching Dealgorithmed:
A newsletter about the small web, the poetic web, the quiet web, the web many say we lost years ago, yet it's still here, ready to be rediscovered by those who care.
Not dissimilarly, This time it’s not fatigue, but disconnection from Ricardo Mori discussing their personal tech history, and tech burnout, and what is to be done.
How to stay hopeful from Mike Monteiro’s Good News, about dystopias, and cities, but in an optimistic (and funny) way:
It’s impossible to achieve a utopia with people because people love problems and messes. It’s kind of our thing. And we’re good at it! It’s easier to picture a dystopian future because all you have to do to get there is nothing, while a utopia seems unrealistic.
Things could be better is a series of amazing studies by Adam Mastroianni about how humans like to think about things being better, rather than worse.
Having thought about how ebooks should work, this was so interesting to me: Self-publishing an eBook as a developer by Madeline Millier about just how tricky some of this stuff is, and a valuable comparison with app publishing.
Another biography for me to buy, Jane Austen's first biographer from the Common Reader.
For weekly optimism I recommend Fix the News, sharing stories of social and scientific progress.