text

One case

$ · March 13, 2025

A friend of a friend has a habit of saying the word psychopath a lot. You describe something that someone does that feels a little confusing or off-brand,...

WTF

March 11, 2025

On my business’s mailing list, I talked a little about the new CEO of a fancy design consultancy who walked around with two notebooks. One was a plain black...

Malibu Stacy has a monochromatic hat

$ · February 20, 2025

I have spoken, frequently, of the stupid ding dang camera, the thing that instantly becomes part of your personal brand once you buy it. On the one hand,...

Japan & batteries: the two genders

February 17, 2025

PSA: We don’t really have text if I’m not living. And while winter in Chicago is a great time to hunker down & do bigger projects, it’s not so great for the...

We pray for good weather

$ · February 13, 2025

One of the less-discussed things about me is that I am good at refreshing for tickets. I have a wireline fiber connection, I am fast at computers, I keep a...

How to buy paint online

February 11, 2025

You bought a hole and created, then deleted, another hole, and now you must paint over the deleted hole in order to make it look like the rest of its wall....

Sometimes you have a busy enough week that you list good objects and call it text

$ · February 7, 2025

Spiritually related to our text from the other day, here’s a brief list of some things that I’ve used a lot and have, despite this, lasted in a way that...

Surviving (annoying v. apocalypse)

February 5, 2025

Two fun things I’ve read lately are Survive the Tyrant! and the CIA’s guide for citizen sabotage of fascist regimes, which are spiritually related but quite...

One frame of a Detroit Tigers outfielder completely upside-down, vaulting over a bullpen wall, as a cop rejoices instead of helping

$ · February 3, 2025

The problem with knowing a lot of people and being known for good parties is that, when you throw a big one, it is sometimes an overwhelming & terrible...

Hole store

January 30, 2025

I bought a hole recently. We have already discussed the range, which is so high-powered that it needed a commercial-grade hood to ventilate the thing. So I...

Meaning v. practice

$ · January 28, 2025

The tagline for text is a durable canon of wonder. Given the current apocalypse, how does one embrace wonder while not giving into corrosive “good vibes...

We need to become literate with software

January 24, 2025

In my first book, I talked a little about how people parse technology. Fifteen years later, I think people still pay attention to technology, but they do so...

Hidden

$ · January 22, 2025

There are no secrets anymore. Everything is on every travel platform. Post about it, it’ll pop off. The convenience this affords also creates sameness....

Five paragraph essay (is it useful?)

January 14, 2025

I’ve been heads-down on a bigger project that is just beginning. There are good bones to it, but it needs work, the kind of work where other people poke at...

J1B-GT, one year

$ · January 8, 2025

We now return to the jacket. I promised this after one year. It has been one year and one week. The jacket is not a year old. It is two days old. It is two...

Home range

January 6, 2025

By my senior year of college, I hated dining hall food, resented the expense of eating out, and loved food in general, and so wanted to learn how to cook....

Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate

December 19, 2024

We will now enter two weeks of deep rest, but first, per tradition: 2024’s Oblique Strategies power ranking. (Previously: 2022, 2023.) 10. Do something...

An apocalypse-proof boiling frog

December 17, 2024

We have talked a lot about buying the object, but not enough about tossing it. I tossed a bunch of objects over the past month, and text needs to occur about...

The Brand and not The Brand

$ · December 10, 2024

There is a category, within the category are a bunch of brands, and one of them is The Brand. You know some examples of The Brand. The Brand is overpriced to...

Yeast tamagotchi

December 6, 2024

You’re handed the starter by someone who later confesses to being antivax, is called in, then called out, then banned. Presumably there are no viruses in the...

Fruit salad stimulant, as a treat

$ · December 2, 2024

So when you make coffee, you start with a cherry, remove the pit, end up with a green bean, and then ship that to a roaster. Between the removal of the...

Dopp, again

November 26, 2024

The human I’m dating has begun following these, and someone else just signed up because of a post I wrote 400 years ago about my dopp kit. Materially...

How to do nothing

$ · November 22, 2024

I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks protecting my field. This has involved removing something like 9/10 of the contacts from my phone, going...

The sun blinked

November 15, 2024

Last year, I wrote some text about Shohei Ohtani. I tried to make it clear why this person is important, and why sports’ general penchant for hyperbole is,...

Hope & not hope

$ · November 11, 2024

On November 09, 2016, I mauled enough dumplings to stun a yak and trundled my hollowed-out psyche two miles west to watch Nicolas Jaar tour one of the...

Intermission text (almost over)

November 5, 2024

Intermission is going well. It’s been a month. I’m grateful for your patience. It won’t be much longer. I’m done many things with text, and you have seen...

Finding ideas v. writing about them

$ · October 9, 2024

Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t always just sit down here and write stuff. I’m often hard up for ideas, staring at the blank page like anyone. In...

America’s Team

October 7, 2024

Intermission began and so did October baseball. I’ll write about the former in a little bit, but for now you need to know about America’s Team. In 2015, the...

They all said the concessions would be better, and they’re not wrong

$ · September 27, 2024

Well, well, well, look what we have here. A few weeks ago I summarized baseball for you, and one thing I stated is that the Chicago White Sox, shockingly a...

The price isn’t the price

September 24, 2024

I was in Paris during Fashion Week – I know, I know – and the whole town, unshockingly, was popping. I poured myself out of an airplane into my Airbnb,...

In person, not optional

$ · September 20, 2024

One of the darker moments in Draft’s history involved a prospective client who ran a fragrance brand, who kept talking about how challenging it was to smell...

Snow Leopard intermission

September 16, 2024

15 years ago, noted computers company “Apple” released an operating system that they proudly touted as having no new features. Instead, they focused entirely...

They’re writing about travel adapters, which is maybe cursed, but we kind of have to do it so let’s at least try to make it entertaining

September 12, 2024

Now that we have, as a society, moved on to USB-C, it is time to discuss travel adapters. Of course, the power adapter must be exclusively USB-C, because we...

Say design without saying design

September 10, 2024

We wrote twice about the Kaweco, cursorily, and now it’s time to go deep into the text with it. Kaweco is a weird brand. It’s now owned by a big...

Unfortunately, the cake isn't made out of bear

September 6, 2024

Well, it only took 190 years, but someone finally decided to make a cultural artifact about the city of Chicago. There’s a TV show called The Bear, and I...

National union

September 4, 2024

Like any creative person, I sometimes sit down to a blank window and wonder what to write here. And then, like a bolt of lightning: Illinois has decided to...

What to do when your flight is eternally delayed

August 29, 2024

You know the rain will pass because you have a radar app, but it’s going to take five and a half hours, so your flight is delayed by five and a half hours,...

Front pocket

August 27, 2024

You wear it on the front, see, under your jacket, like you’re a paranoiac kangaroo. It is as oddly shaped as your body is, and it is thin, so you can really...

Go Somebodies

August 23, 2024

Literally tens of thousands of people have been clamoring for a baseball update, and like look, I don’t know what to tell you, my team is bad and they’re...

Doing tech (framework, questions)

August 21, 2024

I think often of the practice of doing tech. What are the norms? What is allowed? What is venerated? What is looked down upon? What are we conscious to? What...

CAP0.5, two days

August 19, 2024

Like its two siblings, CAP0.5 is distinctive, retaining character in name only. Like the best families, each one has a personality, an approach, and only...

Office hours

August 15, 2024

“Come by whenever,” you say. “We’ll be around 10a–3p.” The semiotics of open hours. You don’t need-need to be there at any given time, but eventually a more...

RAW is whatever you want to make it. Tell your own story, why not

August 13, 2024

JPEG is a rendered photograph and RAW is camera data. You’re never actually looking at a RAW file, but rather some software’s interpretation of a RAW file....

côte&ciel Isar, 2 years

August 9, 2024

What is the geometry of carry? Usually a grid. Objects are knolled, thrown in cubes, then thrown next to other cubes inside of larger cubes. The objects...

The supercut (handball, speed climbing, etc)

August 7, 2024

Go to NBC Sports’s YouTube channel. Filter by the past two weeks. Sort by popularity. Skip any sports that are remotely popular. Skip any sports that are...

Backpack text, again

$ · August 5, 2024

I went to the best coffee shop in Chicago recently and plunked down next to a guy who had a backpack that I had never seen before. This is an event, y’all. I...

🍅

August 1, 2024

It starts slowly and then all at once and now you have 43 pounds of tomatoes. Five days ago, you had nothing. You forgot you planted tomatoes, and now you...

Ten years of lunch

July 30, 2024

In July of 2014, I went to a retreat in Seattle with a few other designers. On my way to the airport, I stopped in a bookstore, but it was closed, because...

Five check-ins

July 26, 2024

J1B-GT, 9 months Is it possible to fall in love with a jacket? One for therapy next week, I suppose. I was nervous for a long time about getting a J1B, and I...

Calendarin'

July 24, 2024

I met a new friend. This happens. We hang out, it’s fun. One day, after a few months, I have them over, we have a great time, and I ask when we can hang...