Saturday 17th June, 2023 - Don’t Missout on Magic (Issue #119)
The sometimes haphazard nature shipping, the subtleties and nuance of expressive changes and the changing landscape of digital tools for creators
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
[Note: originally published incorrectly as issue #120, I have updated it to the correct issue #119. Oh what a week it’s been…]
It’s been an eventful week, lots of things I could write about today, almost too many to be honest. Now that I’m here writing, it’s feeling like a bit of a traffic jam spiritually. The world is both the roads and the houses. It’s saying hurry up, but then as soon as I try to do anything it’s saying wow wow wow slow down. And so it goes sometimes.
Well, I have an issue title, it’s one from earlier in the week. I don’t remember exactly the context in which I wrote it down. Oh well, it will have to do. I just want to get something, anything strung together. Sometimes you just got to get the absolute minimum done and ready to ship. That way the world can go on about it’s business.
The big change for me this week has been an update to how I publish the linkblog. If you’ve been following along you will have noticed that the text accompanying the links now has various HTML markup. Primarily it’s been bold text, italics but also hyperlinked text. The reason is that I’ve updated the linkblog item component to support rendering both markdown and EJS. This means the links can be much more expressive.
It’s quite a big change, even if it might not seem like it at first glance. As I’ve discovered while implementing this feature, there is a lot of subtlety and nuance to it. Maybe that will be something I’ll cover in a future blog post. For now I’ll just say that I’m enjoying the new, somewhat more expressive and colourful links. I hope y’all enjoy them too!
By the way you can follow the linkblog here:
https://markjgsmith.com/links
I wrote a blog post yesterday. I’m pretty happy about it. It’s part about the past and nostalgic and part about the future. It’s not perfect, but this is blogging. It’s ok not to be perfect, get something written, move forward, write a bit more tomorrow. Anyway maybe you’ll like it:
Fragments of Capital FX - A short nostalgia induced archeological digg into the past, looking for traces of Capital FX, one of the pioneers of London‘s feature film visual effects scene. From splicing film and Steinbecks to fancy software and storage area networks, they worked on some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters, getting them ready for international markets. https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2023/06/16/fragments-of-capital-fx
Given the ‘worldly pressures’ I’m facing as I write this, and the rapidly approaching publish time, the podcast and link selection is a bit reduced this week. I thought about just not bothering to include anything, but that didn’t feel quite right, so I’ve included any podcast links that I already linked to during the week.
Podcasts
Apple's Web Apps, Meta Quest and Vision Pro, and Missing Sticky Headers Ep#569 (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - Lots of interesting webdev bits and pieces but the highlight is clearly Chris and Dave getting into some proper web developer Vision Pro dev talk. We are at the very beginning of the roller coaster. That's when folks are slowly realising how awesome and cool this might turn out to be. I love this bit of the journey. http://shoptalkshow.com/569
Links
In the interest of the world being able to go about it’s business, and for me to be able to go about getting some breakfast, for the links this week, please just checkout the linkblog, there’s a load of truly great links there:
https://markjgsmith.com/links
That’s all from me…
Best reguards,
Mark
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Have a great weekend and a fantastic next week!