Hey friends,

Seven days without a pun...

makes one weak.

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

Last week I wrote about a theory of intentionally developing your own opinions and thinking by reading, writing, and reflecting.

It's hard to talk about reading without thinking of my late mom. When I was very young, she often took my sister and me to the bookstore to pick a book or two. It was one of my favorite things—I remember walking up and down the coffee-and-paper-scented aisles, spending a long time finding just the right book. My mom herself read voraciously, and there was a hutch full of all her castoffs we called her 'bone pile'. I must have read hundreds of books as a kid, facilitated by my mother's insistence that we always have a book to read.

So I grew up with a love of reading, but it's much harder to read as an adult! After I graduated college, I hardly read at all. Maybe a book or two a year if I was lucky. I didn't have money to go to the bookstore, or time to go to the library or to sit down and read for hours like I did when I was young.

But I did have the time! It was just being stolen by things that felt easier and gave me less in return: social media feeds, YouTube, reality shows (don't get me wrong though, I still like a good reality show). Now with things like LibbyApp, pulling up a book is as free and easy as pulling up social media.

So I started reading over my lunch breaks on my phone. Or while waiting in line at the pharmacy counter. Before long, those minutes of free time started adding up, and I was reading regularly again. It takes more effort than scrolling through feeds, but when I had books and topics I was interested in, it wasn't hard to pick up a book instead of the feed. Goodreads, despite its quirks, can help you find good books (my criteria is mostly anything over a 3.5; an upper 3 means it's probably pretty good!).

Here are some of my favorites from the last few years:

• The Clackity by Lora Senf
• The City We Became by N.K. Jemison
• All Systems Red by Martha Wells
• A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
• A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge
• Red Rising by Pierce Brown
• A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
• The Will of the Many by James Islington
• Nyxia by Scott Reintgen
• The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
• Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio

If you haven't read in awhile, try it out! Get a library card and sign up for Libby!

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• Welp. Tailwind gets acquired by Shopify, joining the ranks of Remix, React Router, and others in a long list of Shopify's open source projects.
• jQuery is 20 years old now.
• Shopify is ditching React Native for Native (Swift and Kotlin) apps citing LLMs as what made it easier to build two apps instead of one.
• Edoardo Lunardi release Kugiri, an alternative to GSAP SplitText for animating text enter transitions.
• Jyn reminds us that simple does not mean small.
• Cloud in a Bottle is working to make self-hosting easier for everyone. I'm curious to see where this goes!

Other Stuff

• Jim Neilsen validates all of us who still have a big box of cables...

👽 Weird, 📺 Watch, and 🎮 Play

• 👽 An interactive parody on working with AI agents.
• 👽 A little ionizing radiation helps detect fractures in helicopter blades.
• 👽 Watch LA get built building by building.
• 👽 For when you just want to model space/gravity/time.
• 🎮 A sudoku-like logic puzzle: Amaze Kings.
• 🎮 Fly a biplane, pop balloons and avoid most everything else!