Learning Log, Feb 2024
Learning blackletter calligraphy
In honor of Austin Kleon’s “29-day Practice and Suck Less challenge”, I decided to try learning blackletter calligraphy once and for all—specifically Textura Quadrata, the earliest and simplest form of blackletter calligraphy, dating back to 11th century Europe.
As a lefty, any form of calligraphy has not been very accessible to me; lefthanded people generally push their pen across a page, whereas the pull motion is key to calligraphy. I thought it might work out ok if I made my strokes backwards, i.e. right to left and bottom to top. I came across this video and was happy to note I appeared to be on to something!
After looking at a few different resources, I decided to use Jake Rainis’s learning blackletter guides to pick up the Textura style.
I definitely didn’t practice all 29 days of February—had a week of work travel amongst other goings on—but I’m feeling pretty solid with miniscules (lowercase letters) now. I’m just starting to work on majuscules, or uppercase letters. I admit I feel much more intimidated by these!
I’m having fun deploying blackletter calligraphy in my journal for any little thing. And I love how quickly my Pilot Parallel pens use up fountain pen ink; between Diamine’s Inkvent calendars and Pilot Iroshizuku’s huge bottles, I need some help in that department.
Urban Sketching
I joined Urban Sketchers Seattle for a sketch outing in Greenwood. I’ve only been to an outing twice, but I always have such a wonderful time going out and drawing on location with other hobbyists. The trick is to push past the “I suck at drawing, this looks like 💩” phase, to get to the fun mindfulness phase.
This time around I revolted against these grey February days with some obnoxious colors:
In any case, I hope to make it out to more outings this year.
More robust screen time rules
In February I downloaded the AppBlock app, which offers more fine-grained configuration of mobile app blocking and screen time than does Apple’s built-in features.
For example, I have Slack on my phone but don’t want to open the app after work hours or on weekends, so I have a block set up for that. I’ve also set up social media app and website blocking on Sundays, and honestly it’s been such a relief to just not have access to these for one day out of the week.
🌱 Digital Gardening
Added two books to Lit Tapes: one I’d read recently (Daisy Jones & The Six, it was ok) and another I’d read a few years back (Wow, No Thank You).
On the Internet
- The Journaling System that changed my life: a video with a hyperbolic title that actually delivered on its promise
- This little story about love and feelings via a co-worker. Poignant, just need to ignore the speaker gesturing with an open cup of coffee (I can confirm no coffee is spilled for the duration of the video!)
Reading
Product
- utility eats value for breakfast
- ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything
- Enshittification as Overproduction in Software, Part 1: Seeing Overproduction
- Enshittification as Overproduction in Software, Part 2: Overproduction in the Product Lifecycle
- Setting the Right Input vs Output Metrics
- Input Metrics vs Output Metrics
- 15 Important Product Metrics You Should Be Tracking
Web
- Tailwind vs. Semantic CSS
- Screen Reader User Survey #10 Results
- Where I’m at on the Whole CSS-Tricks Thing
Work & Productivity
- A Unified Theory of F***s 💯
- Why we should take time to read at work
- After Many Years Holding Down a Corporate Job to Get Health Insurance, I’ve Finally Found a Better Way to Make Ends Meet and Do My Art: I’m a Crossing Guard.
- How to Be More Agentic
- One Big, One Little
