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This week's summary
It's still tiny steps, but I'm getting closer to building a sustainable business around the things I care about and try to share here. More on that in the upcoming weeks.
Another Say Hi/Video Chat page popped up in the wild!
(thanks to Shawn from Good Enough for sharing the find)
Having less time to write this week made it much easier for me to stick to the challenge set in the previous one: smaller, sharing messier, less essay-like notes (Say Hi, How I Use Analytics With My Indie Projects). OK, this approach feels uncomfortable, but so was writing daily when I started.
Job search and Say Hi (not work-related) calls took up most of my free schedule, so I didn't have a chance to push any experiments, but I'm expecting more breathing space next week. Stay tuned!
Next week
- keep posting smaller articles/dev notes instead of essays
- share one experiment
- fix and re-publish one of my old games
Favourite project
The Good Time Garden — "Explore a throbbing pink world full of strange naked creatures to gather food for your friend in this short, surreal experience.", by Coal Supper. The visual style of the game feels like it was designed just for me.
A Mortician's Tale — a death-positive narrative-driven game where you learn about running a funeral home (takes ca. 1h to play).
Favourite site
RIBOSE | clay — excellent claymation and beautiful dithered graphics. Their index page looks like a Microsoft Bob remake for Window 98 (so, retro²).
Carciofi alla Romana | Recipes for Food — a small recipe platform and community by Nazlı Ercan and Eric Li. It's not particularly big or full of Serious Eats level recipes. It doesn't stand out. It's just a small community of friends, open to others. It has a few decent recipes. It feels normal. I want to see more stuff like this.
Another reason I'm sharing it: not that many recipes use early 20th century abstract art in their instructions (Jean Fautrier, Artichoke, ca. 1926, Oil on canvas, 35 x 27 cm).
Favourite piece of tech
Embark: Dynamic documents for making plans - In the past I wrote about choosing smaller composable apps over programs-as-silos. Embark takes a different approach to coordinating works across different environments by replacing them with dynamic documents. This feels timely: more people are spending time in both "soft" LLM-powered conversational interfaces and interactive notebooks like Jupyter or Observable. I'd like to explore this idea a bit further in the upcoming months.
Interesting articles
Asemic Writing and the Desire for the Esoteric — Asemic writing is a form of abstract writing without any specific semantic content. It looks and feels like traditional writing but it doesn't convey any fixed meaning. Check out Mirtha Dermisache for more examples. (found in this birdshite thread)
I still wonder if this reed on one of the beaches of the Baltic was practicing asemic writing or nastaliq calligraphy. Read more here.
A Manual of Orthographic Shorthand | Orthic Shorthand — a much faster way to write. I'm sharing it here because it's the complete opposite of asemic writing (despite looking somewhat similar.)
Watching and reading this week:
- The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again (Rolling Stone)
- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — homework from a Say Hi call.
- The Body Keeps the Score (audiobook, ⅓ done)
- Annihilation (book, almost done)
Things I wrote last week that people liked
Thanks for reading! See you on Monday!
P.S.
*I told you it was all downhill from there!*
See you next week!
