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The Glorious Dirt Trench of the Kilbourn Park Plant Sale

Premium post · May 23, 2022

I moved into this house in 2016, and in 2017 I found myself with a raised bed in full sun, some really good soil, and a desire to grow food for my chosen...

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Alinea is overrated and you know this, but I'm writing text about it anyway

May 20, 2022

One of the final things to return in my life is tech conferences. I keynoted one a few weeks ago. It went well. I missed the people, the conversations, the...

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Tropical fruit

Premium post · May 18, 2022

In planning this past winter’s snowbirding, I lamented to my friend Theresa, long experienced with all of the yogic parts of Costa Rica, that I was having a...

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Spread text

May 17, 2022

It is time once again to write a brief update on the state of text. If you are here for regular text and not metatext, you may ignore it. This doesn’t count...

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Bad Shovel

May 16, 2022

There comes a point where one has to acknowledge that they’re working with software that has become very old. Workflows stay fixed for years, coming to...

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Some notes on flashlight people

Premium post · May 13, 2022

One of my favorite things about the internet is that rare moment when I stumble upon a community that has gone so deep down a rabbit hole of gentle...

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Kaikado

May 11, 2022

I know, I know: I have a fondness for a designed object. Bear with me and there’ll be a payoff. Kaikado are special. They sell, predominantly, tea canisters....

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The grammar

Premium post · May 9, 2022

Two years ago, a bunch of stuff happened in the world and I found myself stuck inside all spring, at the beginning of the harvest, with access to a lot of...

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Only optimize for pandemics

May 6, 2022

I am generally against what Jia Tolentino has called “optimization culture”. I do not wear the best underwear; I do not own the best desk lamp; I have never,...

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A bad calculator that calls people

Premium post · May 4, 2022

When I need to quit life, I have the phone. The phone does two things: it places & receives phone calls, and it sends & receives text messages. It does not...

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Unrecommendable

May 2, 2022

I follow a handful of humans who probably make most of their money on recommending stuff. I’ve already written about Blackbird Spyplane, which has a huge...

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One Week

Premium post · April 29, 2022

The hedonic treadmill is real, you own too many things, you accumulate too many things, and you can work with what you already have, most of the time. New...

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One tote

Premium post · April 27, 2022

Tote bags meant well, didn’t they? Positioned as an eco-friendly alternative to one-time-use bags, we all grabbed one and headed to the market. Then we...

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The flying car of a tiny dog

April 25, 2022

I got into cooking in 2003 when a 1st-generation Hong Konger taught me how to make Sichuan stirfries in my tiny college apartment. I bought three things: a...

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Two Faces

April 21, 2022

For the past 15 years, I’ve used two typefaces in most of my work: a serif for text, and a sans for headers & interface. Here is the chronology, for those...

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Malibu Stacy has a new hat

Premium post · April 18, 2022

Probably half because I bike, half because I travel, and half because I exist during apocalypse, I am into what could broadly be called “everyday carry.” In...

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nickd.org's Redesign: A Postmortem

April 15, 2022

Over here at Draft, we recently unveiled a new, revolutionary, ground-up rewrite of our personal site, nickd.org. This is our first rewrite in a few years....

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Leveraged

April 11, 2022

Donella Meadows was a systems professor who worked at MIT & Dartmouth. Her work, especially her posthumous book Thinking in Systems, has been wildly...

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Trinidad Sour

Premium post · April 8, 2022

There was a request for more cocktails, and so now we have this. The ritual involves popping the top off a bottle of Angostura in defiance of god. It’s the...

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Three ingredients, thirty minutes

April 6, 2022

We need to discuss butter sauce. I have ripped it off wholesale: first from Salt & Fat, who I later learned ripped it off from Marcella Hazan. Still, people...

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