Bram de Vries

The word resilience has been taken from us

A poster with a tree on it, a ninety minute workshop, and the staffing number nobody wants to print on a wall. Also what resilience means to engineers.

Marcus Aurelius at four in the morning

How the Meditations read on a night shift. Book 5.1 is written for people who choose when their day starts. 8.36 is the one that gets me to five in the morning.

The walls of Pompeii were mostly people being annoying

One graffito turns up on three Pompeian walls and it is a complaint about graffiti. Real CIL numbers, bad spelling, and why I take the walls into class.

Justified text on the web is a lie we agreed to

A browser fills one line and forgets it, then pays for the mistake in word spaces. Worked examples, what hyphens and text-wrap pretty really buy, and what I set.

Seneca was extremely rich

Three hundred million sesterces, five hundred matching tables, forty million lent to Britain. Taking the hypocrisy charge seriously instead of enjoying it.

Instrument Serif is doing something clever

I opened the font file first. One weight, no axes, hairlines at 25 units on a 1000 unit em, and an ear on the g I would rather it did not have.

Amor fati is not a coping mechanism

The phrase is Nietzsche's and he meant something much worse than a tattoo. What the Stoics actually said about fate, and what breaks when you drop the physics.