Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie
More cover art for publications with my stories.
First is the July issue of Nowa Fantastyka, in which appears the Polish translation of “The Algorithms for Love.”
Next is the cover for the upcoming novella-only anthology, Panverse Three, from Panverse Publishing. The anthology is due to come out in September. My novella, “The Man Who Ended History,” is in it, and it is by far the work I’m most proud of.
You can read an excerpt of the novella here, and preorder it from the same page.
Matt Neuburg’s Programming iOS 4 is among the best programming books I’ve ever read. I’d rank it right up there with Programming Perl.
I’ve tried several Cocoa / Cocoa Touch books before, and generally found them wanting. Many of them share a common problem: they take a breezy tone and try to get you to put up your first “Hello World” application as soon as possible, without sufficient explanation of the fundamentals. After a few chapters of cutting-and-pasting code, I usually gave up because I’m the sort of person that needs a solid foundation in the low-level details before we jump off into putting up pretty pictures.
Neuburg, on the other hand, takes an approach that I favor. He explicitly states near the beginning that he’s seen many iOS programmers leap into development via copy-and-paste coding without understanding the fundamentals. His aim is to remedy that. Without a good foundation, it’s impossible to develop the necessary intuition for the system that is critical for good design and assured debugging.
To that end, Neuburg spends more than a hundred pages going over the foundations of Objective-C before even telling you to open Xcode, and when he does, he does so methodically, explaining to you the philosophy behind Xcode’s design, how its makers envision a project workflow, and exactly what the various buttons do. (This is also one of the only good guides to the radically new interface of Xcode 4 I’ve found.) By the time you put up your “Hello World” app, you actually feel that you have a good intuition of the system as a whole.
Neuburg’s book covers the fundamentals of iOS programming as well as some advanced topics, so intermediate coders and beginners alike will find the book useful. I really think there’s something in here for programmers of every level of skill and experience.
(If you buy it through the Amazon link above, I get some kickback.)
“Take a picture of a picture from the past in the present.”
It’s brilliant. Wish I had thought of it first.
Reminds me of the art project I describe in my Simulacrum script.
Jhumpa Lahiri says what I feel, but did not know how to express:
My parents’ refusal to let go or to belong fully to either place is at the heart of what I, in a less literal way, try to accomplish in writing. Born of my inability to belong, it is my refusal to let go.
I heard her read once in Cambridge. I’m so glad I went.
Lisa just got me this:
I have the best wife ever.
Or “de gustibus non est disputandum.”
Recently, while I was talking with a few writers, the idea that there’s no such thing as “good” writing came up. It’s all subjective.
Why get critiques then? Shouldn’t one just trust one’s own subjective taste?
Well, no. If your goal is to be published and be read by others, you do have to see if your taste matches that of others. We assume that editors know the tastes of their readers, so this makes their opinions worthwhile if you want to reach their readers. But their opinions aren’t “right” in an objective sense, just in the sense that it might be a good explanation of their taste.
I see the merit of this view, and indeed, I think it’s helpful, in general, to be receptive to feedback without treating them as dictates for how things “must be done.” But it feels slightly unsatisfying.
I’ve been obsessed, for years, with the idea that our appreciation for art is tied to our biological machinery — to the way our brains are wired. What colors we find pleasing, what tones we love, what emotional arcs we yearn for — I think these are deeply embedded in our biological selves. Human biological diversity is limited, which limits the range of cultural diversity, which limits the range of artistic responses (or “tastes”).
If we could understand how art affects us at that deep biological level, might that not provide an “objective” way to measure what art is good? The story that moves the most people most deeply because it touches our shared biological urges in an effective way is better, artistically, than other works that don’t move as many people as much, is it not? The song that resonates the most with most brains’ innate yearning for symmetry, rhythm, novelty, and most bodies’ instinct for movement is better, artistically, than other songs that don’t, is it not?
It may be that by the time such fundamental biological signals are abstracted up to the level of “artistic appreciation” the system is so complex that analysis is impossible. It may be that even within the limited range of human diversity, the range of difference is so great that effectively there are no useful universals that can guide artists.
Still, I think such a way of approaching taste objectively would be very interesting.