Ann Arbor, MI developer and designer striving to make the internet better.
Made a try square based on plans from Rex Kruger. Shockingly, it’s pretty and pretty square!
Walnut and cherry from Urbanwood. Aluminum rod for the pins from Home Depot, who looked at me like I was off my rocker for wanting brass rod. Epoxy to hold in the pins. Finished with shellac.
The Ann Arbor District Library is hosting an Role-Playing Game Fest on September 14th at 1-5pm at the downtown branch! I’ll be running a table there as will Andy Rau, my cohost on Roll for Topic, and John Corey, one of recent guests who actually came on to talk about running games at cons.
Please come and play!
It makes me sad that will not have time to personally play in any other games because the lineup looks fantastic:
I keep on referencing Dark Forests and realizing that people don’t know what I mean, which is fair because the only place I talk about them is in dark forests.
The first place I heard about this was from George who brought it up in one of several dark forests that we interact on. Whenever I go looking for a post to link to as an explanation I usually grab Kottke’s post: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet because the original piece by Yancey Strickler that kicked this off is published on Medium, which is the worst.
For posterity, here’s a link to Strickler’s piece: The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet – OneZero
Below is the main quote from it that I think defines our term the best:
“Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent….
This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.”
And here’s why I’m increasingly finding myself in these forests:
“These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.”
Global public social media is a trainwreck for most forms of communication. Humans just cannot handle the ability to respond to anyone anywhere about anything they’ve tweeted. And in pursuit of Engagement Metrics the algorithms are working overtime to make us angry, bewildered, and extremely in tune to celebrity gossip. I don’t really care who was cast in what movie, but twitter sure thinks I should! Because of that focus it also does an increasingly poor job of community building. If I want to talk about, say, local Ann Arbor and Ypsi whatnot it’s much better to do that within a space designed to do that so we’re not constantly defining our terms.
In response to the general toxicity and business practices of the major players many people (like me!) have opted out and moved their online interactions to smaller, more controlled, venues. Private or semi-private online spaces like slack teams, discord channels, mastodon communities, forums, instant messenger, DMs, email newsletters, and (my favorite one!) personal blogs. Twitter and facebook at one point consumed all of the above. It did an okay job and I like that it was centralized; however, good enough is no longer good enough. Rather than subjecting myself to various algorithms I’m instead finding life in dark forests.
A friend asked me whether he needed both a miter saw and a circular saw for a project he’s working on. As we were chatting he told me “this should be a blog post” so here we are.
Important Note: when we think of tools I think we should focus on access rather than ownership. Borrowing and lending tools is vitally important to a healthy society. Tools are meant to be used not acquired to sit on shelves.
Everyone should have access to a circular saw. It will empower you to do lots of projects you might otherwise think are beyond you.
Not as many people need access to a miter saw, but goodness, is it the right tool when you need it.
Regardless of which tool you’re using it’s worth using the right blade for the material you’re cutting. Not all blades are good at all things!
The motorized version of this is a very useful tool for making quick repeatable crosscuts on widths less than about 8 inches (more if it’s a sliding miter saw) and miter (angled) cuts. You can get non-motorized versions which use your arm as the device to move the saw across the work piece instead. This is tiring for more than a few cuts, but is cheaper.
Where miter saws really shine is with angled cuts. Most of them these days are compound miter saws, which let’s you set the angle of the fence as well as the angle of the blade. This is very useful for trim work.
A circular saw is a portable saw that is designed to be operated with one hand and excels at making cuts that are perpendicular to the surface of the work piece. You can freehand your cut (usually while following a penciled line), or run the edge of the saw plate alongside a straight edge.
“oh, btw: I’m working at the workantile exchange today…seems to be very nice”
I showed up to Workantile after a year of working from home. To say I was feeling isolated is an understatement. I’d moved to be closer to my then-girlfriend now-wife who was in the midst of a PhD program. She was tremendously busy. I was tremendously not. Days would pass where I didn’t leave the apartment or, honestly, talk to anyone. It was a bad scene.
Eventually she convinced me to get out there and try working from anywhere other than my apartment. I did, and it helped. Even going to a coffeeshop for an hour a day was a breath of fresh air. On a whim one day I poked my head into Workantile and it was like coming home.
I sent her the following message the next day:
“Working at the workantile exchange makes me feel like I’m not alone. “
Being in your 20s in a new place, unmoored and rootless is tough.
In 2019, most people at least get the general idea of “remote work”. In 2011 you had to explain it whenever it came up in conversation, and your choices for getting out of the house were either: rent an office, or huddle at tables in coffee shops or the library. Be sure to pack everything up when you have to use the bathroom or make a call! And good luck with the wifi situation. I didn’t even know what coworking was until I wandered in the door, but quickly realized that it needed to be part of my daily routine.
On day 2 I sent this message to a friend:
“everyone here understands what it’s like to telecommute…they’ve created a telecommuters paradise”
I sent this note to our email list at the end of my first week. I spent far too time worrying about sending it.
Was it coming across too strongly? Too eager? Will they kick me out for being honest?
Reading it 8 years later I’m extremely glad I clicked send:
Everyone’s willingness to [invite] some guy who wandered in off the street was incredibly refreshing. Quite a different experience than working from a too-quiet isolating house. You all know this already, but the Workantile Exchange is a pretty special place.
We’re thankfully more diverse than in 2011; however, the aspects that attracted me to Workantile are still the same. Everyone here is still curious and friendly. Our coffee comes from Hyperion instead of Zingerman’s now. We have a different name, new chairs, more monitors, people have different laptops. We’ve weathered budget crises and are working towards becoming a non-profit. For my part, in 2013 I changed jobs, but stayed at workantile. My boss and I met at Workantile and still keep memberships here along with our ever increasing number of coworkers.
It’s good, it’s constant, it’s foundational to so many of our lives.
The physical space on main street is ancillary to Workantile’s purpose of bringing remote workers together. Heck, most of my friends in Ann Arbor are former or current members. And it’s not an overstatement to say that without the community here my wife and I wouldn’t have chosen to settle down here. It’s made opportunities and decisions possible for us that flat out wouldn’t have been the case if it didn’t exist.
10 years is an extremely long time in business years and no matter what happens in the future we should celebrate that it made it that long. I’m personally hopeful we make it another 10 (and another 50 after that). For now though I’m just proud and excited.
As I type this we have two folks doing trial memberships with us this week. There’s also a social lunch going on downstairs (pizza and salad), and later on this week we’ll have an open house and a party to celebrate.
Here’s to Workantile’s 10th birthday! I’m going to go downstairs and talk to one of the new members and see if there’s any pizza left.
A few days ago I finished The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber. Here’s a quick review:
If you’ve ever wondered why your boss is the way they are, or why you feel like your job is confusing, or that you’re being pulled in all sorts of directions at work you should read this. Even if you have no desire to start a business it’d be worth reading to understand how a successful small business could be setup and run.
Heck, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t read business books (hi, this was me until recently) I’d still recommend it. If you read it and still don’t want to run a business it will help you understand why someone might want to start, run, and sell their business. Plus, chances are there’s advice in here that if you implement would bring clarity and purpose to your current role even if you’re at the bottom of the org chart.
The book does present a platonic ideal of a business that will rarely match reality; however, in reading it you’ll wonder why more businesses don’t at least try. The core idea is that every business, no matter the size, should be organizing itself to work as a franchise. Or, to put it another way, if you’re the boss, you should organize your business so that it can work without you there. Same for every position in the company. Systematize everything and continually test those systems to maximize their effectiveness. Write down actual scripts and standard operating procedures for how to handle everything and train people on how to stick to them so they can be successful.
This approach requires making a billion decisions and writing them down rather than relying on information that can so often be trapped inside of people’s heads. In the rosy view of the book what you’re left with is a company where everyone understands what they’re doing and why and has all the tools available to them to do it well and efficiently.
It’s an intoxicating thought: imagine if you had perfect clarity of purpose–and the support to execute on that purpose–for your daily tasks? What if everyone in your company had that too?
This is edited to be appeal broadly to business-y business people. It repeats itself often and is full of anecdotes. The executive summary of it could fit in 10 pages. I think you’d miss some of the impact of it if you did that version, but do know that if you’re a reader of literature you will likely start rewriting sentences in your head on the fly.
Rely on inspiration for creative work at your own peril.
In this case, inspiration means one or more of the following:
Inspiration, if it comes, will come in fits and starts and rarely completely. Instead of waiting for it do the following foundational and structural work instead: clean the shop, organize your desk, purchase supplies, sharpen the pencil or the saw, set up your website, turn off your phone.
Prepare and show up.
And then?
What if inspiration doesn’t arrive whipping you into a creative frenzy and drawing brilliance from a deepness within that shocks with raw powerful realness and Truth?
Then you do what you should have been doing all along: you practice. Your art–your craft–requires practice. In plucking out a scale your fingers might wander. In sawing a dovetail you might wonder about trying a different angle. In copying a sentence you might tweak the syntax. Produce something and you’ll find that somewhere in there an iota of inspiration snuck in.
Matt, who is wise, refered to the above as perspiration. To get the result you must show up and do the work. This is extremely difficult. Secreting time and mustering energy is nothing to be trifled with. And in many stages of life will be impossible. Fight for it though! It’s necessary.
“I think you’ve just got to do it consistently, repeatedly, and you’ve got to be undeterred by the time it requires and the inconvenience in your life that it generates. But mostly you have to do it in a way that continually stirs your personal passion.”
6 months ago I did not have a 6 month old podcast. Not every minute of it is good. In fact, most are mediocre although listenable and sometimes there’s a spark of there that could be called inspired.
3 years ago I did not have a blog that was 3 years old. Not every sentence on it is good. In fact, most are mediocre although readable and sometimes there’s a spark there that could be called inspired.
etc.
Show up, do the work, practice, and produce. Enjoy the flashes of inspiration although never rely on them.
Repeat and repeat.
This post started as a tootstorm. That Tootstorm was inspired by Austin Kleon who is one of the clearest thinkers about creativity out there.
Over on the Scope Creep Studios dev blog I posted about an recent update to our game You Can’t Win But You’re Still a Good Person. We recently pushed an update to remove ads and in-app purchases and made it a dollar instead of free.
Read a lot more about our reasoning
Or just go buy the game:
This post started as a tootstorm
Computers excel at logging statistics. The upshot is that it makes it trivial (for certain values of “trivial”) to get numbers about how many people are accessing your projects and products and blog posts. This is, on the whole, considered a good thing; however, I’m not so sure it is.
Recently, whenever I start a project I’ve been trying to define why I’m doing the project and what are my measures for success. That makes me sound like the world’s bro-iest business guy, but hear me out! I do this because I’ve found that if I don’t I’ll default to The Numbers. And, friends, numbers are pernicious when trusted without skepticism. Measuring the “success” of a project based on charts without other goals in mind leads to poor decision-making. You quickly forget why you started your thing in the first place. Worst of all, if you’re not disciplined the numbers can leads you down the path of “monetization!” even if that was never the primary intent.
I recently started a podcast with a close friend and I’m intentionally not looking at analytics for at least 10 episodes (although it’s so tempting!). When we talked about our goals “maximizing the listenership number” didn’t even come up in the original list.
It’s been freeing not chasing metrics and instead focusing on my actual goals, which are:
When it comes time to glance at the analytics my hope is that it’ll be because there’s a specific question about a goal that statistics can help answer. Everything else is noise.
This is a tangential quotation, but one that I think is worth sharing from Molly Conway’s The Modern Trap of Turning Hobbies into Hustles:
“You don’t have to monetize your joy.”
Don’t let statistics lead you directly into that trap. Never let a number without an attached goal shape why you do something.
Kyle tweeted the following recently:
all text is hyper-text
all canon is head canon
In response I made a bad joke and then mentioned:
I think I subscribe to authorial intent way more than you do. Not like there’s one true canon, but there are some that are interpretations we can and should agree on.
To expand on that somewhat the questions I use to interrogate media (and art) are as follows:
What I’ve found is that this helps me approach the work on the author’s terms. Afterward I can decide if that approach and result was something I subjectively liked. If I don’t ask these questions it’s easy to default to simple descriptors like “terrible” or “awesome”. This also has the advantage of helping me appreciate work I might otherwise choose to interact with and find that, yeah, I did like how it accomplished its goals!
A subset of the first question is “Who was the audience this work was created for?” If you’re not the target audience then it can be helpful to understand that up front. You might not have the capacity to understand what the work was trying to do because it relies on shorthand experiences you don’t have. Alternatively–and this is most of my life right now–you might not be a toddler so the repetition or low stakes just don’t work for you, but would work for your toddler.