Notes, blog posts, etc.

Definitions

“Influencer” and “creator”: I figured them out!
June 2022

Defending inflation

Somebody’s got to do it
May 2021

Reading Frank’s Corpus

An uncommonly interesting piece of writing
March 2021

Advice for newsletter-ers

A tiny bit of forethought, some cautionary design
November 2020

Orthographic media

A view without perspective
August 2020

Two nice databases for Ruby

YAML::Store and Daybreak: both underrated!
May 2020

Chasing a ghost

What causes this particular vintage optical printing effect?
April 2020

An integration loop

Its origin is a mystery. All we know is how it sounds: stately and nostalgic
March 2020

The thing about blogging is

you can just write about the things you love
March 2020

Reframing inflation

People need money; let’s exorcise the ghost of the 1970s
March 2020

Notes from a week

I never imagined a world without cafés
March 2020

Writing and lightness

Every way of writing can work, and every reason for writing can work
March 2020

But/and

An essential new conjunction
February 2020

Fortnite pastoral

They rebooted the world
October 2019

Don’t take the money

Boom, bap
August 2019

News from the Republic

A map of a small town; a collection of great newsletters
June 2019

Notes from the quest factory

Tools and techniques related to AI text generation. I wrote this for like twelve people
June 2019

Reckoning with Detective Comics

I want to talk about a creative act of reckoning and, maybe, redemption
January 2019

Voyages in sentence space

A new machine learning project
March 2018

How to think (dangerously)

Describing a standard
October 2017

Writing with the machine

It’s like writing with a deranged but very well-read parrot on your shoulder
May 2016

How to end on the internet

All the conventions of print feel false: the neat summary, the mild prediction, the kicker quote
April 2016

Shmuplations across space and time

Translations across languages and through decades
February 2016

The Decagon House Murders

This was a weird one. I loved it
January 2016

Alien signals

Memories of long-ago Sunday nights on the road
January 2015

The primes of the story

This is an idea I swiped from Zachary Mason
December 2014

Dancing the flip flop

A particular creative and technical process that fascinates me
December 2014

Making culture for the internets

It’s us, the internet culture makers, who are behind
February 2013

The prime mover

One of the people we lost in 2012 was Jim Naughton. He had an outsized influence on me
December 2012

Making progress, sure and steady

An encounter in the fog
May 2012

Penumbra has a posse

You know those heist movies, where half the fun is watching the team come together?
June 2011

Inventing the book

Notes on The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree
May 2011

Further reading for Penumbra fans

So you read Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and now you want something similar
May 2011