Matthew Howell dot net

0012 — West 83rd Street

2026-01-10T00:00:00Z

There was a person crossing to the north side of West 83rd Street in Manhattan, a few car lengths from the intersection with Central Park West who, for the brief moment that the shutter on my camera was open, appears to stand motionless in the center of that street.

I did not know this person. And I don't remember noticing them as I looked through the viewfinder of the camera, more focused on the perspective offered by the rocky trail at the edge of the park that lifted me two or three stories off the ground.

To live in New York City, as I fondly recall it, is to live among millions of strangers who routinely form tiny, essential, corporeal parts of your daily life by making the place so incredibly vibrant that you, years later, can occasionally find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of love still in your heart for a city full of people who you never met and will never know.

0011 — Chrysler Building

2026-01-08T00:00:00Z

There is a building, designed by an architect named William Van Alen, made of brick and steel on the corner of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. It was completed in May of 1930 and was, for about eleven months, the tallest building on Earth. The land under the building was endowed to a private architecture, art, and engineering college in lower Manhattan that, since its founding in and until 2014, provided free tuition to all of its students.

2025 in Favorites

2026-01-07T00:00:00Z

Reading

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden and Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan were my favorite books that I read in 2025.

Other books that made my 2025 shortlist include:

All Fours by Miranda July
Mina's Matchbox by Yōko Ogawa
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Under the Mountain by Maurice Gee
The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

Related: everything I read in 2025.

Listening

Instant Holograms On Metal Film by Stereolab was my favorite record that I listened to in 2025. I'm both giddy and grateful that, in 2025, we get to listen to such a lovely new record from Stereolab.

Other records that I enjoyed in 2025 include:

Neon Grey Midnight Green by Neko Case
Straight Line Was a Lie by The Beths
Sinister Grift by Panda Bear
Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan by The Mountain Goats

Web Generalist

2025-12-05T00:00:00Z

Below is a list of job titles that I've held in my (nomadic, privileged) career:

Webmaster
Web Developer
Web Developer (again)
Engineer
Technical Lead
Technical and Design Lead
Software Engineer II
Software Developer
Software Developer (again)

The job titles changed, the companies changed, the years changed, and the Web sure has changed. One thing didn't change, though. Through the two decades that I've been working: the work has been building websites.

Like most jobs, building websites is not just one kind of job. For most folks, that work regularly includes responsibilities like:

building and maintaining web servers and infrastructure to host websites
building web applications with server-side languages and frameworks
building web applications with front-end languages and frameworks
designing and building APIs for web applications
designing database schemas (or not) and writing, optimizing, and debugging queries
porting web applications between different technology stacks and languages
wire-framing and designing websites
building and maintaining design systems and component libraries for websites
on-call shifts and incident management for web applications

That isn't an exhaustive list, it's just nine items so that it matched the number of job titles. When I reflect on the titles and responsibilities above, I can't help but feel disappointed that (after 34 years) we don't a proper, agreed-upon term for a person who builds websites.

It's not like we haven't been trying.

Webmaster was fun, but silly. And it belongs to a different era.

Web Developer is not bad, nice and broad. This is probably the simplest and most accurate title for web folk, but it seems to have fallen out of favor.

Technical Lead and titles like it are very specific to organizations.

Software Developer is fine, but doesn't imply anything to do with the Web, more a career description than a specific role.

Front-end Developer and Back-end Developer are efforts to segment responsibilities (good!), but (in my experience) these jobs always bleed into one another. I've never had a front-end role that didn't require an understanding of back-end technologies (APIs, caches, job queues, application frameworks, databases, etc). I've never had a back-end role that didn't require an understanding of front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, design systems, component libraries, etc). And in the post JS-on-the-server world, these distinctions have become less clear.

Full-stack Developer, perhaps, arose from this exact problem: it's unrealistic to keep our responsibilities pinned to a predefined area. But, this title is surely too broad. No one can develop the full stack? We are all partial-stack developers, I reckon, swimming around an ever-growing, ever-shifting sea of technologies.

Thoughts on Engineering

And then there is engineering.

Feel free to ↓ skip my thoughts on engineering.

I have never loved the title Engineer for software work (though, I'll concede that some dictionary definitions do map well). But, the term (in many countries) is loaded with specific legal definitions and requirements.

That said, I do think software engineering is an okay fit for some kinds of software work. There are people writing software in certain critical industries and applications who surely have excellent reasons to call their work software engineering.

My goal here isn't to get into an argument about the definition of words. And my goal is certainly not to gate-keep the title Engineer. No, ma'am or sir. If you're a software engineer and feel good about that term accurately defining your work, you'll hear no argument from me. Carry on.

I, though, am not such a person. Despite having held the title — even having lead "engineering teams" — I am rather uncomfortable calling myself an Engineer.

Most of the software work that I've done did not seem like Engineering. Most software is inherently elastic and fuzzy and fungible in ways that traditional engineering disciplines simply are not and cannot be. Using the word engineering for software often reads (again, to me) like an attempt to assign a certain weight to our jobs, trading on everyone's assumptions about what kind of work can be called Engineering.

But, as Fred Brooks would say: programming is pure thought-stuff.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures…

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself.

— Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

We (the collective we, the software people) are over here popularizing terms like vibe coding and prompt engineering, and calling everything we do delightful and blazing fast, and it all seems a far cry from having our work inspected by regulatory bodies to ensure that bridges and buildings don't collapse.

Okay, moving on.

Searching for a Better Title

So, then what to call oneself when writing an (admittedly low-stakes) About page on a personal website? Other folks have been thinking about job titles and finding themselves looking for similar answers.

Rach Smith on comb-shaped developers: "So then after some more research on this topic, I discovered the comb shaped developer: who has the breadth of a generalist and multiple specialisations that they’ve gravitated to throughout their career. Finally, this feels right. I am a comb. I am also, most definitely, overthinking this job title thing altogether."

Brad Frost on full-stack developers: "Are there people out there that feel equally comfortable designing a flexible, performant, accessible card component UI, and also wiring up the API that will feed content into that card component? I have no doubts. But is that skillset a common occurrence? I doubt it."

Adam Stoddard on generalists: "The idea of a job that’s nothing but drawing boxes in Figma interspersed with meetings about the boxes you draw in Figma fills me with dread. Humans are hardwired for novelty. We wither when we emulate robots. Working as a generalist is the more human way to work."

Martin Fowler on expert generalists: "The characteristics that we've observed separating effective software developers from the chaff aren't things that depend on the specifics of tooling. We rather appreciate such things as: the knowledge of core concepts and patterns of programming, a knack for decomposing complex work-items into small, testable pieces, and the ability to collaborate with both other programmers and those who will benefit from the software."

Konstantin (from Design Technologist) on generalists: "In real life, generalists have interdisciplinary knowledge, which boosts creativity and understanding of how things work. They understand better a problem and can perform better in second-order thinking in different conditions than the specialist can."

Tim Brown on I-shapes and T-shapes: "Most companies have lots of people with different skills. The problem is, when you bring people together to work on the same problem, if all they have are those individual skills-if they are I-shaped-it’s very hard for them to collaborate. What tends to happen is that each individual discipline represents its own point of view."

Wikipedia on generalist and specialist species: "A generalist species is able to thrive in a wide variety of environmental conditions and can make use of a variety of different resources (for example, a heterotroph with a varied diet). A specialist species can thrive only in a narrow range of environmental conditions or has a limited diet. Most organisms do not all fit neatly into either group, however."

Archilochus on foxes and hedgehogs: "A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing."

And sure, Archilochus probably wasn't thinking about the Web when he wrote that. Right? Probably not.

So, after probably too much thought, I've decided that I am a web generalist.

I am a person primarily focused on the web and its core technologies. A person who designs, builds, and makes websites. A person who does that work in many different shapes, with many different tools, on many different kinds of teams.

A person who is more of a fox than a hedgehog, but is comfortable hedgehogging in different areas when the work calls for it.

I quite like the idea of defining ourselves as a generalists within our chosen scope. It helps us speak honestly about our work and accept that the world is too complex for everyone to actually be a full-stack engineer. There is value in pursuing breadth and in understanding the wider context of our profession.

Specialization exists and it is both fine and necessary. Generalists, in my experience, thrive when they can work alongside experts and specialists. But, not everyone is or should be an expert or specialist.

People are rarely one kind of person.

I make websites and I'm a web generalist.

Do you make websites? You might be a web generalist, too.

Feeds Are Nice

2025-12-05T00:00:00Z

Feeds are nice. Here is an incomplete list of reasons why feeds are nice:

Feeds have specifications (RSS, Atom, JSON Feed)
Feeds are finished technology, they want for no features
Feeds are easy to create and maintain
Feeds are fast and scalable
Feeds can be downloaded for offline reading
Feeds are chronological lists, not algorithmic lists
Feeds do not track or surveil their readers (usually)
Feeds contain no advertising (usually)
Feeds contain no JavaScript
Feeds are infrastructure: they can be built upon
Feeds are links and links are nice

2024 in Favorites

2025-12-04T00:00:00Z

Reading

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo was my favorite book that I read in 2024. It was published in 2023.

Other books that made my 2024 shortlist include:

Audition by Pip Adam
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
The Puppets of Spelhorst by Kate DiCamillo

Related: everything I read in 2024.

Listening

Weird Faith by Madi Diaz was my favorite record that I listened to in 2024.

Other records that I enjoyed in 2024 include:

Only God Was Above Us by Vampire Weekend
People Who Aren't There Anymore by Future Islands

htmgets.js

2025-12-01T00:00:00Z

htmgets.js

0010 — Pōhutukawa

2025-12-01T00:00:00Z

There is a nearly-twelve-meter-tall steel sculpture of a hawk that sits on a hill, which is actually a scoria cone of an extinct volcano, in a 75-hectare park in a central Auckland suburb. In early December, as the weather warms, the pōhutukawa trees on that hill begin to bloom. The hawk does not move.

0009 — Orange Sky

2025-12-01T00:00:00Z

There is a mid-rise apartment building in a central Auckland suburb, located a short walk from both the city's largest hospital and the tallest of the city's fourteen ancestral mountains. In one of the flats, one of the north-facing bedrooms contains a small balcony. Off that balcony, on a warm evening in May, the sun sets behind the buildings, the bright orange retreating, giving way to purple and gray.

Deploying Static Sites on Netlify without Github

2025-08-15T00:00:00Z

Until today, every previous deployment of this website was initiated by pushing code into a GitHub repository.

It recently became a priority to move my git hosting to a different service (happy with Sourcehut so far) while continuing to deploy the site on Netlify. Unfortunately, Netlify's continuous deployment only supports git hosting from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps.

With a bit of work, we can decouple our git hosting from our deploys. Here, I will detail the straightforward process of deploying a static site on Netlify without using GitHub.

Note: I'm building this tiny website locally, pushing to my git repo manually, and finally running the deploy command. There is a lot of room to automate and improve this workflow, today's goal is limited to removing the dependence on GitHub.

Before these changes, the deploy process was:
build static site → git commit → git push (to Github remote) → Netlify does some stuff → site deployed

Now, the deploy process is:
build static site → git commit → git push (to Sourcehut remote) → netlify deploy → Netlify does some stuff → site deployed

And for sites that rely on other Netlify features or have more complex build and testing processes, this will be more difficult, but still eminently doable. Trading convenience for choice is sometimes a reasonable decision. You can decide for yourself and your project.

0. Prerequisites

Install Netlify's command line tool

Netlify offers a command-line interface, which it turns out, is necessary for our goals here. It can be installed through npm with npm install -g netlify-cli

Netlify CLI documentation

Next, we authenticate our Netlify account by running netlify login

1. Unlink the Github from the Netlify project

The major change here is we need to unlink our project from our Github repository.

Caution: we don't want to run netlify unlink from the command line, because this command unlinks our local folder from the Netlify project, which is not what we want. Although, if we accidentally do this, it's cool, we can run netlify link and relink the local folder.

We can only unlink a project's GitHub repository from the web interface at Project configuration > Build and Deploy > Manage Repository > Unlink [github-url]. Netlify warns us that we will lose our continuous deployment settings, which is expected.

Or create a new project

Alternatively, we can create a brand new project rather than risk breaking our existing deployment.

We can make a copy of our project folder and, from our new project directory, run netlify sites:create which creates a new, manually deployed Netlify project without linking any remote repository, perfect.

2. Update netlify.toml

Next, let's configure which directory to deploy.

We want to ensure that we're deploying the correct directory from our local folder, we can set this in the project's netlify.toml file, which contains our build settings. If it doesn't already exist, we create a new netlify.toml file in our project directory.

In that file, add the publish key in the [build] settings table, which stores the local path (from the root of the project directory to the public site, often the output directory of our static site generator).

netlify.toml documentation

TOML documentation

Example netlify.toml file

[build]
publish = "_site"

3. Test the deploy

That's really everything. If we're using Netlify's build services, we'll need to set up our build command (Netlify build documentation). In this example, we're building the site locally before deploying.

If we run netlify deploy --no-build now, our site will be deployed to a randomly-generated URL for testing, Netlify calls these draft deploys.

4. Production deploy

Once we've tested, we can run netlify deploy --no-build --prod to deploy to our production URL. We can now deploy our static sites with Netlify without depending on any particular git host.

Note: Even though we're manually deploying, we can still use Netlify's deploy rollback features and we can even add custom deploy messages with the deploy command:
netlify deploy --no-build --prod --message "Production deploy 00000001"

Here's two lines from my deploy script that append the most recent git commit hash to the deploy message:

Deploy script in bash


GITHASH=$(git rev-parse --short --verify HEAD)
netlify deploy --no-build --prod --message="Production deploy ($GITHASH)"

1024 Pomelos

2024-04-12T00:00:00Z

1024 Pomelos is a small, citrusy generative art project bound for the public domain.

1024 Oranges

2024-04-12T00:00:00Z

1024 Oranges is a small, citrusy generative art project bound for the public domain.

1024 Limes

2024-04-12T00:00:00Z

1024 Limes is a small, citrusy generative art project bound for the public domain.

1024 Limes

2023 in Favorites

2023-12-31T00:00:00Z

Reading

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami was my favorite book that I read in 2023. It was published in 2020.

Other books that made my 2023 shortlist include Auē by Becky Manawatu, Kindred by Octavia Butler, Matrix by Lauren Groff,
Normal People by Sally Rooney, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.

Related: everything I read in 2023.

Listening

Javelin by Sujfan Stevens was my favorite record that I listened to in 2023.

Other records that made my 2023 shortlist include Jenny from Thebes by The Mountain Goats, Joy'All by Jenny Lewis, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski, and Sorry I Haven't Called by Vagabon.

Playing

80 Days from inkle was my favorite game that I played in 2023. It was published in 2013 and is available in most of the normal places, including the GOG.

Other games that made my 2023 shortlist include Kero Blaster by Studio Pixel and Papers Please by Lucas Pope.

reasonable.html

2023-09-01T00:00:00Z

reasonable.html

40

2023-05-10T00:00:00Z

Today is May, 10th 2023. Which means that I am now forty years old. Each decade, I toss another 10 items onto this list from 2013.

As always, presented as advice to my younger self, exactly ten more things that I (think I kind of) know:

If and when you’re able, walk more. Walk more frequently and walk longer distances. If possible, walk everywhere.
Spend one moment outdoors each day, preferably while sitting.
Wear pants with zip-closure side pockets. In reasonable circumstances, nothing falls out of a zippered pocket.
Raising children is a very efficient way to be confronted, each day, by the naked reality of the person who you actually are.
Time is a wonderful editor. When possible, allow work to sit for a while before revisiting and finishing it.
Don’t move house too often, as it can be hard and expensive. But, don’t overestimate how hard it is: it is possible. You can and sometimes should try living somewhere new.
Experiment with caffeine enough to understand exactly how it makes you feel and then decide how to consume it. Maybe even deciding not to consume it at all.
Find a way to regularly think of your life that allows you to remember that it is both finite (definitely) and long (hopefully). Thinking in years (40/77) is probably too abstract and thinking in days (14,600/28,105) is probably too stressful. Try weeks (2,080/4,004), months (480/924), or even seasons (160/308).
Write more. Write more for your present self, for your future self, and sometimes for others.
Read more books and less of nearly everything else.

0008 — String Lights Across a Blue Sky

2023-02-20T00:00:00Z

There is a town in southern New Jersey, across a river from Philadelphia. The river is narrow enough, at points, to stretch four bridges and a train from one side to the other. At night, the train lights float above the river. The train stops in the town, just off its small, main avenue. And that avenue is narrow enough to stretch a thick, black cord of string lights from one side to the other. At night, the lights float above the town.

0007 — Four Lamps in the Evening Fog

2023-02-19T00:00:00Z

There is a statue of a horse that sits in the center of a well-traveled square in New Orleans, a block from the Mississippi River and in the shadow of a historic church.

This sculpture is the second in a series of monuments depicting a lifelike, rearing horse, beautifully balanced on its hind legs. That extraordinary balance, without the aid of any support, was novel enough in 1856 to draw thousands to the statue's unveiling.

Outside that square, on a warm, damp winter night, the four large, glass lamps perched above the park's main gate illuminate the water droplets that linger in the air and the glow reflects off the wet street. Lamps lit once with oil, then later gas, and now with electric. Progress. Slow.

0006 — Roller Coaster Track Lights

2023-02-05T00:00:00Z

There is a small amusement park located just off the end of the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. Inside the main building that houses the antique carousel and a few games, there are a pair of wide doors that open to the outside, to the larger rides in the courtyard. Just outside of those doors there a small child, asleep in his stroller, tired from spending the day at the beach with his grandmother, unbothered by the people screaming behind him, putting their arms into the air, as they roll down the tracks.

0005 — Train Tracks Looking North

2023-02-05T00:00:00Z

Originally from Alt Text 0005.

There is a small train station in Wilmington, Delaware a few blocks away from a community college and a few more from the city's regularly redeveloped waterfront.

The station, a Frank Furness designed, brick and terra cotta building that was completed in 1908, was restored in 2011 and renamed for the then vice president. A man who was well-known, at least locally, for departing on the southbound Acela service every morning and returning home each night.

That train station and the tracks that run through it have played an unexpectedly outsized role in my life. Most often, Wilmington served as the southern terminus of my regular Amtrak trips from New York City.

Visiting family in Delaware meant waiting in Penn Station's crowded concourse, watching the clock, listening for departure announcements, and then descending down the escalator to the tracks.

Returning home meant waiting in a smaller concourse, watching the clock, listening for departure announcements, and then ascending up the escalator to the tracks.

An email search reveals that, during my seven year residency in the city, I made that trip more than 50 times.

The train tickets themselves are a throwback to a simpler world, mostly before ubiquitous computer phones. The earlier trips all depended upon physical paper tickets. Many printed at the FedEx-Kinkos on 80th and Broadway. Some printed on the 15th floor of the an H-shaped financial district skyscraper. Some printed in a harshly lit basement cubicle in Morningside Heights. Some printed on the 5th floor of a SoHo office building, originally built for John Jacob Astor. Some printed in a very forgettable 7th Ave tower with oddly ornate elevators.

Those tickets were such a corporeal piece of my life that I still occasionally find a paperback Vonnegut novel, pages yellowing, holding on to a makeshift bookmark that reads New York, NY - Penn Station to Wilmington, DE.

The tracks that carry those trains to Wilmington press farther south, arriving later in Washington D.C. and Baltimore. They run through the university town where I spent four years in the early 2000s. And one of their arteries branches farther down the state until it passes my parents' hundred-year-old farm house so closely that the vibrations from the track gently rattle the decorative, wrought iron window on the opposite wall.

Those passing freight trains were an ever-present part of my childhood. Their horns announcing themselves several times each day of my early life. I have crossed those tracks on foot, scooter, bicycle, or car, conservatively, thousands of times. I can feel their smooth, rounded steel under my sneaker.

Those tracks that, decades before I knew them, had once carried passenger rail service rather than coal and stone. The nearby town's train station (now a museum) functioned as a hub, allowing riders to head further east toward the beach or continue south, down the peninsula, toward a little sliver of Virginia.

And some of those passengers, surely, were headed north, toward Wilmington. Toward New York City. Passengers who might have seen an earlier version of my second-floor bedroom window as they rolled through southern Delaware.

A bedroom that I left to go north, toward Wilmington. Toward New York City. The bedroom that I can still find by following a particular set of train tracks.

0004 — Moss on Stairs in a Cemetery

2023-01-22T00:00:00Z

There is a cemetery just outside of a small mountain town in southern Japan. The stone pathways, shaded by large trees, even on warm summer days, remain cool enough for the bright green moss to grow and thrive. The sunlight peeks through the leaves, dappling the ground.

0003 — A Sunrise in Rehoboth

2023-01-15T00:00:00Z

The world's best french fries are sold in large paper cups from a small shop window a few hundred feet from a boardwalk, in a beach town in southern Delaware. Seagulls mill around, searching for dropped, abandoned potatoes. It is unclear if they prefer the ones doused in malt vinegar.

0002 — A Butterfly Above a Pond

2023-01-08T00:00:00Z

There is a pond located in a state park in southern Delaware, originally formed by dam built to power a sawmill, more than two-hundred years ago. The state park, which is the first state park in Delaware, created in 1951, sits on the remnants of a wetland, surrounded by whatever bald cypress trees were lucky enough to have ancestors outlive that sawmill. Near the water there is a small playground, on that playground there is a very large bright, red ladybug, with two small seats and just enough space for two small children to sit inside. And perched on the flowers and plants throughout the park, sometimes flying over the water, there are butterflies of normal sizes.

0001 — Hills Near Tortola

2023-01-01T00:00:00Z

Originally from Alt Text 0006.

There is a tiny international airport on a very small island just off the east coast of Tortola.

On its north end, this airport's single airstrip slices through the tree-covered landscape, pushing across the sand and out into ocean as it becomes part of the shoreline itself, a boundary of concrete and moved earth forming one edge of a small, U-shaped bay.

Passengers arriving on this very small island can exit the airport terminal, flag a taxi, and take the short car ride over the bridge to the bustling capital city of these islands.

They can also, if they choose, walk past those waiting cabs and continue east for about a half-mile along the narrow road until they find the shallow beach that wraps around the southern perimeter of that small, U-shaped bay.

On that beach there are a half-dozen wooden docks that extend out into blue water, as if pointing the way to the awaiting, accidental fleet of idling ships, anchored, gently rocking in place, shielded from the stronger ocean currents by the small peninsula to the east and that runway from the tiny international airport to the west.

Those ships will, eventually, return to more open water. The bay unrolls into the greater Atlantic Ocean, dotted with drops of green land.

Out on that water, from particular angles, the local islands begin to stack on top of one another. The clear horizon, full of peaks and minor elevations that look as if they're part of a larger, connected whole rather than a scattered archipelago.

Green hills behind green hills behind green hills, water between, but from this vantage, invisible.

2022 in Favorites

2022-12-31T00:00:00Z

Reading

I finished Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series this year. The Other Wind was my favorite book that I read in 2022. It was published in 2001. Earthsea, I think, is my favorite series of fantasy books. It's bittersweet to finish a beloved story, knowing that it's over as soon as you turn the last page, understanding that there will be no more.

I also quite liked The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow. It was published in 2020. Imagining witchcraft sitting alongside other American struggles (suffrage, civil rights, bodily autonomy, etc) made this story feel more practical than one might expect. It was also just very fun to read.

Related: everything I read in 2022.

Listening

Expert In A Dying Field by The Beths was my favorite record of 2022. This small, New Zealand band released a collection of huge, guitar-driven, power-pop anthems. Elizabeth Stokes lyrics are full of clever turns and keen observations. The melodies are bright. It's a fun, joyful breakup album.

Also, surprising no one, I loved Big Time by Angel Olsen, which was probably my second favorite record of the year.

Playing

A Short Hike by Adam Robinson-Yu was my favorite game that I played in 2022. It was published in 2019 and is available in all of the normal places, including the wonderful itch.io.

Traveling

This summer our family took two trips to the Atlantic Ocean. In early August, we spent a few days in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware: a small, seaside town near where I grew up. I loved eating at the large outdoor tables at Dogfish Head. We had really lovely weather, managed to catch a sunrise, and I even briefly used a bodyboard in the ocean without sustaining any injuries.

The real highlight, though, was taking the kids to Funland, which continues to be perfect.

This was my favorite trip of 2022.

Nearly by default, On Collecting Music was my favorite piece of writing of 2022.

Related: everything I wrote in 2022.

A photo of the sun rising over the beach in Rehoboth, Delaware was my favorite photograph of 2022.

2022 at Reasonable Company

2022-12-31T00:00:00Z

Reasonable Company was formed in January of 2022. At the end of each calendar year, I will take time to revisit the company's goals, reflect on its successes and failures, and define my expectations for the next 12 months.

Defining Reasonable Company

First, each year, I want to revisit the company's purpose and definition. In 2022, I wrote: Reasonable Company is the values-led design and creative practice of Matthew Howell.

Ok. This is still both aspirational and accurate, so onward to the next year.

Goals from 2022

I wrote down eight goals for 2022, completing five, detailed below.

1. Create the company

Complete. Reasonable Company LLC was formed in January.

The company is in good standing and financially viable for 2023.
The company acquired everything that it needs at the moment (bank account, credit, payment processing, domain name, email, hosting, etc).
The company brand and logo marks were designed and finished.

2. Launch the company website

Complete. reasonable.work was launched in February. It's a small static website, generated by Zola, and hosted on Netlify.

shop.reasonable.work was launched using Big Cartel to sell art prints
A Ko-fi page was set up to explore sponsorship and other revenue
Plausible Analytics was used for while, but ultimately abandoned for lack of need

3. Release one open-source project

Complete. Reasonable Colors, an open-source color system for building accessible, nice-looking color palettes, was released in April. However modest, this was the most successful and prominent open-source project that I've ever built.

The code is available on GitHub and GitLab.

No.

This didn't happen and after some initial thought, I decided against pursuing it. Until I have more time to dedicate to maintenance and can feel confident about responding to issues and pull requests, I don't think sponsorship makes sense.

5. Release one piece of art

Complete. 1024 Lemons was released in May.

6. Sell one art print

Complete. As of today, Reasonable Company has sold 3, physical 1024 Lemons art prints to customers (and one digital lemon, which was generously purchased by my partner).

I will mark this as the company's biggest success to date. Not to overstate the situation, but selling a piece of art is the fulfillment of a long-held creative dream.

7. Release one video game

No.

But, also, kind of. I did not release a video game this year. I did finish a small video game, but it was a gift and not released publicly or sold.

8. Sell one video game copy

No.

No game released, so no game to sell.

Goals for 2023

In 2023, Reasonable Company hopes to continue making things and slowly growing itself into a machine capable of making more things.

Release five pieces of art
Sell five art prints
Release two open-source projects
Release one video game
Sell one video game copy
Release one video game soundtrack
Sell one video game soundtrack copy
Release one book

1024 Lemons

2022-05-03T00:00:00Z

1024 Lemons is a small, citrusy generative art project bound for the public domain.

1024 Lemons Website

Selling Lemons

2022-05-03T00:00:00Z

Today, I released 1024 Lemons, a small, citrusy generative art project bound for the public domain. Here, I'll detail how it's being sold and explain why I'm giving it away.

What is this?

1024 Lemons is a generative art project that works like this:

I wrote a piece of code that generated 1024 small, unique lemon illustrations
1024 art prints, comprised of those illustrations, are available for purchase
Each time a print is sold, one lemon illustration is released into public domain

Lemon Illustrations

The first eight lemons look like this. The next 1016 lemons look quite similar, but no two are alike.

The shape of each lemon is unique and was generated by an algorithm written for the project. Each illustration was constructed within certain constraints to guarantee that it was unique, lemony enough, and felt a part of the larger set.

Art Prints

There are exactly 1024 art prints for sale. The lemons within the print are all unique and the prints are all identical. They all look like this.

View larger preview →

How are the prints being sold?

The prints are available for $44 and ship free anywhere in the U.S.

Each time a print is sold, one of the 1024 lemon illustrations will be released into the public domain. Eventually, all of the illustrations will be re-licensed into the commons. Anyone will be able to download, print, or adapt the art in whatever way they might.

Why give away the art?

This piece of art and this project were designed as an experiment with alternative methods of funding for creative work. Can we find better ways to do art within capitalism?

Unlocking the Commons

A few years ago, I read this article by Tim Carmody, in which he describes an emerging funding model for creative work. Tim called this "unlocking the commons" and I'll over-simplify it as: make something, then sell it, in order to give it away.

Tim detailed the wonderful Kottke.org's membership program, which was giving away access to its website content. But, couldn't this be our model for all kinds of creative work? Doesn't it feel better to create abundance rather than artificial, digital scarcity?

An integral piece of the idea is that the supporters insist on giving away the work. It's part of the deal. Folks are buying access for themselves, and in doing so, financing open access for everyone.

Let's take this idea further: in addition to giving away access to a creative work, could we give away the use of a creative work?

1024 Lemons is an experiment in unlocking common use. A small community of contributors can unlock these illustrations for everyone to use, for anything, forever.

Maybe this is how we build things? Artists can make art and get paid for it, while the wider culture can benefit. 1024 Lemons sets out six goals for itself.

Produce beautiful, physical art prints
Release itself into the public domain
Offer contributors public acknowledgement, thanking them for their support
Raise money to help mitigate climate change
Raise money for NSC, a local immigrant and refugee aid organization
Find enough profit to fund future projects

Contributors to the Commons

Each person who buys a print is helping contribute a small piece of art to the commons (the public domain). These contributors are publicly thanked (anonymously by default, by name if they wish).

There is a list of publicly available lemons illustrations. It notes the moment that each was released into public domain and thanks the person who made that possible.

Questions

How are the illustrations being released into the public domain?

The illustrations will be released into the public domain using the Creative Commons CC0 license. After re-licensing the illustration, it will be available to anyone in the world to use in any way.

Have any been released yet?

Yes! You can view and download all of the public illustrations here.

What if folks don't want a print?

Maybe some people have no interest in acquiring a physical print, but would still like to support the project?

Use the discount code NOPRINT at checkout and you will not receive a physical print. The cost of NOPRINT support is $25 (the production and shipping cost of each print is removed).

How about folks that can't afford $25?

Anyone who can't afford to support the project (because of a financial hardship or any other reason) can use the discount code 7DOLLARLEMON

This code will remove the print cost and my artist revenue, dropping the cost to $7. This will still cover contributing a lemon to the public domain, the two donations, and the payment processing costs.

Can we just do it for free?

Sure! If you'd like to support the project, but don't want to spend any money, send me an email and we'll do it for free.

Are there any non-financial ways to support this?

Yes! Sharing the project page (reasonable.work/1024-lemons) or this post (matthewhowell.net/notes/2022/selling-lemons) with others who might want to support it is always appreciated.

Another great way to support the project is to make something with the public illustrations!

The Three Common Benefits

I think there are probably 3 ways to apply the idea of unlocking creative work: unlocking common access, unlocking common copies, and unlocking common use. Let's call these the three Common Benefits.

These models will only make sense when the unlocked benefits are cheap to replicate and scale. The creator's cost for these benefits must approach zero.

Unlocking common access

Supporters pay for access to the work and unlock access for everyone. Example: a website that has a membership program, but has no paywall to read.

Unlocking common copies

Supporters pay for a copy of the work and unlock copies for everyone. Example: a book that sells copies (physical and digital), but also offers a free digital copy.

Unlocking common use

Supporters pay for a use of the work and unlock use for everyone. Example: a piece of art that sells physical prints, but is released into the public domain.

And?

Maybe I missed one? Or several? Please reach out with ideas or questions.

On Collecting Music

2022-01-04T00:00:00Z

Last week, I spent $11.72 to purchase a CD and have it mailed to my house. Here, I'm writing down some thoughts on why I collect music and why, in 2022, I still buy CDs.

To start, three verifiable facts about myself.

I enjoy music. I find joy in music.
I have small children and want to share music with them.
I live a privileged life that includes a bit of disposable time and income, which I can use to do things like collect music and write about it.

Ok, but why buy music?

Yes, we could stream it. Our family shares an Apple Music subscription and it's fine. But, purchasing a physical CD helps me accomplish three things that streaming music does not.

1. To Support the Artist

Buying a physical copy of music is an effective and straightforward way to support a musician.

There are not always simple ways to support creative work, but buying it is usually a good bet. With direct economic support, we can reward artists for making the art that we love.

Money for joy, seems a fair transaction.

The economics of streaming services are not as clear. They may be good for the music industry, are probably not great for individual artists, and seem especially bad for artists with smaller followings.

Tiny thoughts on streaming: Streaming music subscriptions are wonderful for discovering music and for making it portable and convenient. I found an appreciation for subscription music after I stopped viewing it as an alternative to collecting, but as a complementary tool.

Stream first and widely, collect sparingly.

2. To Own the Music

It's probably obvious that we do not own the music that we stream from Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever else. Cancel that subscription and watch the music evaporate from your phones and devices.

What's not as obvious, is that we don't own the music that we purchase digitally, either.

Purchasing and owning a digital good is precarious, at best. Often, as consumers, we make these purchases that would be better described as complex licensing agreements that can be ended, unilaterally, by the licenser.

Examples of poor behavior involving digital purchases: Amazon can remove "your books" from "your Kindle," Google Play Music no longer allows downloads of "your music," and you never really owned "your movies" from Vudu. All of these large companies routinely lose interest in selling digital goods or supporting the ones they've already sold.

Our shared understanding of ownership just doesn't transfer honestly to digital purchases.

For certain records, I want more than that conditional, temporary access.

Owning a physical copy of music provides privileges that streaming does not. I can listen to a CD indefinitely, with no Internet connection, and without a monthly cost. I can make a copy of it. I can sell it. I can donate it. My children can inherit it, have a quick laugh, and then donate it themselves.

For the records that bring me joy, I want to live with them, find them space on our shelf, and share them with my family.

3. To Collect Artifacts

Also, owning a physical piece of music is fun!

I can hold an object in my hand that was made by another person. There is an emotional heft to that connection.

I love the simple, tactile ritual of opening the digipak, removing the disc, placing it on the tray, watching it disappear into the machine, hearing the mechanical whirl of motor, and waiting for the laser to assemble the song from the landscape of the plastic and push it through the speakers.

How CDs work, kind of: CDs are made by encoding music into digital data and physically pressing that data into the plastic disc. The data is arranged in a single line that begins in the center of the disc and spirals out toward the edge.

To play the music back, the disc is rotated and those indentations (called pits) are read by a laser and a lens to reconstruct the original data. That data is then handed it off to a DAC (digital-to-analog converter), which converts it to an analog waveform, which is sent to an amplifier, and finally to a speaker.

Music becomes data written onto a disc, the data is read back and becomes the music again.

Read a lot more at Wikipedia

And this physical experience is easily shared with my children. They regard CDs with wonder and interest that aren't present when they're poking at shapes on a screen. Humans understand physical objects.

Why not vinyl?

The large, round elephant in the room at this point is: why not collect vinyl records?

A few years ago when I decided to return to CDs, I did spend some time considering vinyl. Below is my personal reasoning for choosing CDs and not an argument against vinyl.

Regardless, I am happy that vinyl is finding more popularity in recent years. Yay for supporting artists, owning music, collecting artifacts, and having choices!

1. Vinyl records are less robust than CDs

Vinyl records require more care and more careful handling, which just isn't possible to explain to my 3-year-old son. For us, taking care of vinyl doesn't seem like a good use of our energy.

2. CD production is more reliable

Read enough reviews of vinyl records online and you will find more than a few complaints about the "pressing." The vinyl manufacturing process seems prone to inconsistency that isn't as common with CDs.

3. CDs are cheaper than vinyl

I just paid $11.72 for a brand new CD and used CDs are easy to find and cheaper still. Most new vinyl records go for $20 to $25 and are often priced even higher.

This price difference amplifies concerns about the robustness and reliability of vinyl. It also illustrates the clear value of the next point.

4. CDs are user-replaceable

If I break or lose a CD, I can produce a new, perfect copy of it in my own home, for very little money.

This is an absolutely beautiful accident of capitalism. CDs are a well-supported, high-quality digital media format that manage to retain a lot of the freedom of simpler analog formats. We were lucky to have this!

How CDs happened: Sony and Philips jointly developed the format so that they could sell CD players. Record labels embraced CDs to monetize their back catalogs. Later, personal computers and cheap hardware allowed consumers to pull high-quality music files from purchased discs and then make their own copies and mixes.

In 2022, it's unlikely that a new physical music format will be developed. Even if it were, would we ever get another universal format supported by plentiful and cheap hardware, embraced by record labels, and endowed with as much freedom and utility as CDs?

More thoughts on this below.

5. CD players are cheap and sound great

The CD player in our home was purchased a few years ago for less than the cost of a good Bluetooth speaker. It has AM and FM tuners, Bluetooth, analog input and output, and two very nice stereo speaker boxes made of real wood. It also has a large volume dial, clicky buttons for most functions, and even came with a remote.

A comparable quality record player, with an amp, and a pair of bookshelf speakers would almost certainly cost quite a bit more. And it might, on occasion, need a new stylus.

6. CDs are smaller

CDs take up less space on the shelf, and they're easier for young children to handle.

This was a big deal when CDs were released and positioned as an improvement on cassette tapes. No more fast-forwarding.

Plus, kids love to put songs on repeat. Just try to stop them.

Why vinyl?

Vinyl is popular and it's not without reason. For folks choosing it, a few points stand out to me:

That big, beautiful, best-in-class album art
The undeniable romance of placing the record on the turntable and carefully dropping the arm
That warm, weathered sound profile that many people just prefer over digital music
Some folks enjoy the experience of only listening to entire albums, no skips

Also, maybe cassettes!

Cassette tapes are also, oddly, available again from a lot of independent sellers, often as a limited run or special release. This strikes me as mostly nostalgia?

But, cassettes did have some nice characteristics. They are smaller and more portable than CDs. Mixtapes were really fun. And golly, that Sony Walkman was an iconic piece of design.

An Ideal Format

I'm happy to have CDs, and they fit my needs well, but they are surely not perfect. My ideal music format might be something like a large, ultra-durable SD card. An unbreakable, game cartridge-sized music whatsit that can be packaged alongside album art and other niceties.

A great, modern physical music format might have these attributes:

Lossless music encoding
Robust and durable
Small and portable
Unencrypted and accessible data
Easy to copy, reproduce, and make your own
Attractive and beautiful as an object
No reliance on the Internet or a cloud service

Wait. Am I just describing Sony MiniDisc? Maybe I'm sad that MiniDisc never found its market. Yes, I am sad about that.

There are some folks working on things like this, but nothing that I found looked very promising.

There are some neat DIY projects using a Raspberry Pi and an NFC reader. This one looks nice. But, a DIY solution isn't accessible to very many people.
Muse Blocks are NFC music cards that look nice, but they're just a link to streaming services.
Sharetapes, also, look like an NFC card that links to streaming services.
TrackRhino is an NFC card and maybe allows music file downloads, but it's linked to a cloud service.
USB Music Cards (which really need a better name) look OK, but they're selling an analytics product along with it. "Know when (day, month, year) and where (City, State, Country) your fans are listening to your music." Yuck and no, thank you.

So, for the foreseeable future, collecting music means CDs on our shelf.

Reasonable Colors

2022-01-01T00:00:00Z

Reasonable Colors is an open-source color system for building accessible, nice-looking color palettes.

0021 Tree

2021-07-04T00:00:00Z

There is a temple near the top of a mountain in northern Thailand. At the foot of that mountain, there is a city founded in the thirteenth century.

Surrounding that city’s center, there is nearly-square moat. Tucked inside the perimeter of that moat is a thick wall made of red brick. And along that wall there is a series of wide, fortified gates. Near one of those gates there is a tree that casts its midday shadow on the flower bed and the square, concrete bench beneath it.

There is a friend from years and places ago who lives in this city now. A friend who gets into her car and drives to your hotel, pulls over on the heavily trafficked road and patiently waits for you to settle into the passenger seat. A friend who navigates onto the highway, then leaves it, following another road farther out of city.

A friend who turns down a narrow path toward a large house that sits behind the trees. Attached to the front of that house there is a wide, wooden porch and on that porch there is a long, rectangular table.

The house is a house, but it’s also a restaurant. Your friend has been here before, often.

You sit and eat a meal. And talk. And laugh. No one wants to leave.

The sun sets before you get up from that table, step off that porch, and walk down the steps. The air is cooler now, the sky is dark, and the trees are just outlines.

Your friend drives back toward the city and all of its lights. The house disappears again.

With a mountain behind you, the car crosses over a moat, past a tree, and back through a gate. It stops, again, outside of your hotel and you linger there for a moment to say goodbye and thank you.

Thank you.

Alt Text

2021-07-01T00:00:00Z

Alt Text was a small photography and writing project that concluded in 2021. Photographs were obscured and paired with longer, descriptive essays.

Each week, usually on Sunday, a small piece of writing is accompanied by a photograph. The writing focuses on the physical subject of the photo, gently pulling at its context, and finding some part of a larger whole. Sometimes the photos are new, but often it’s a good excuse to go digging in the archives and pull out interesting shots.

The work is meant to be something of an inverse of the HTML img element’s alt attribute. In practice, the image’s alt text is an accessibility consideration, describing the image, that for any number of reasons may not be viewable by the reader.

Here, the alt text is offered first, the photograph second. This project influenced my current /photos collection, which all include alt text and occasionally, small descriptive essays like the ones shared here.

0021 Tree 2021.07
0020 Lawn 2021.06
0019 Two Apartment Buildings 2021.06
0018 Koyason 2021.05
0017 Cape 2021.04
0016 Dill 2021.04
0015 Pilots 2021.04
0014 Thunderbird 2021.04
0013 Giant 2021.03
0012 Triangles 2021.03
0011 Bridges 2021.03
0010 Please 2021.03
0009 Ferry 2021.02
0008 Beams 2021.02
0007 Candyland 2021.02
0006 Hills 2021.02
0005 Tracks 2021.01
0004 Airplane 2021.01
0003 Moss 2021.01
0002 Glass and Steel 2021.01
0001 Sprouts 2021.01

0020 Lawn

2021-06-29T00:00:00Z

There is a castle in the middle of Central Park. It's not a real castle, but it's built of real stones and displaces real air just the same. It's never been anyone's home or been stormed by any ragtag bands of heroic outlaws. Its construction was completed in 1872 and until renovations made it a more pleasant attraction, it lived most of its life as an unnecessarily grand warehouse for the park's meteorology equipment.

This castle overlooks a small pond. Its windows offering views of the water and the surrounding park.

North of the pond sits a small, open-air theater. Since it hosted its first performance in 1962, its 1800 seats have faced south, mostly, toward the stage, and the pond, and the pretend castle. A surreal, perfect backdrop befitting the thrill of watching Cymbeline under an open sky.

Beyond the theater there is an expansive, oval-shaped lawn. Its pillowy, green grass, still wet with dew, stretches out past the sand and dust of the ballfields. On an early summer morning, the sun rises behind the tree line.

The birds have the infield all to themselves as a quiet line of New Yorkers wait patiently for a free ticket to a play staged at a theater, under the gaze of a folly perched on a hill, overlooking a pond.

0019 Two Apartment Buildings

2021-06-20T00:00:00Z

There is a small bakery on a corner in center city Philadelphia. Each morning, its shelves are filled with warm, fresh croissants, most of which are gone by the afternoon. Unmarked black awnings extend out from the windows. Above the door sits a large black sign with ornate, gold letters that follow a gentle curve.

One block north, there is a square that is named for a family of German immigrants who became some of the first papermakers in the United States. One of the city's original public squares and one of its finest public spaces, the park is dotted with quiet, shaded, peaceful places to sit and enjoy a croissant. Tall, aged trees shelter six acres of wooden benches, fountains, sculptures, and gardens.

On the wide street between the bakery and the park there are two large apartment buildings and an alley of blue sky that slices between them. Apartments whose windows, when open, pull in the smell of freshly baked breads and the sounds of people sharing a city.

0018 Koyason

2021-05-02T00:00:00Z

There is a train that leaves Osaka, carrying passengers south and eventually making its way to a station just across the Kinokawa river.

There is a cable car, which leaves from that train station, that slowly climbs the mountain at an unlikely angle, until it reaches a smaller station.

There is a half-empty bus whose driver deftly navigates winding, narrow roads as it enters a town and begins to make more frequent stops along a wider road, dotted with temples, vans, and small trucks.

One of the temples has an entranceway about seven, large stones wide, pitched at a slight incline toward the back gate and an open, gray field of meticulously raked gravel. Bright green trees and shrubs line the perimeter along a path to the door.

There is a smiling, soft-spoken fellow at the front desk to greet you by name and explain everything that merits an explanation before leading you to the stairs that give and creak under the weight of three people, two carrying modestly-sized backpacks.

And then there is the room where the floors are silent and the tatami mats are soft underfoot. On the far end, there is a wall that is also a door, made of wood and paper, that slides open and reveals a smaller sitting area with a well-polished wooden floor. There is a table that sits between two large, low chairs made of wicker and bent wood.

The two chairs face each other, as if in a conversation, somehow ignoring the view from the window behind them.

And there is that window behind those chairs: a sprawling, four-panel window that looks out over a courtyard and draws your eyes higher up the mountain, chasing the tree lines as they rise toward the sky.

0017 Cape

2021-04-26T00:00:00Z

There is a hotel a few miles north of Palm Beach that is sandwiched between a couple of sprawling Florida highways. There is a large office park within walking distance, but otherwise, the hotel is an island surrounded only by other hotels and access roads.

To the east, after crossing a highway named for the Confederate States of America, smaller, sandier, and less problematic roads lead to Juno Beach and a state park.

Go west, up the ramp onto the interstate, and drive north for three hours, skipping dozens more beach towns as the palm trees stream past and there will be a small causeway to Merritt Island.

Follow signs, enter the enormous parking lot, exit the car, and walk back towards the long line that winds its way out from the turnstiles that sit in the shadows of rockets.

With a couple of hours to spare, walk through the gift shop and the large, open cafeteria that doubles as a small space museum.

Another line, a shuttle ride, and short walk reveals a cluster of bleachers looking east. In the distance, past the trees, over the water, find what might appear to be a tall, narrow building.

And wait.

Wait until the sky begins to turn from bright blue to pale orange. Wait as the other onlookers filter in and begin to fill the seats.

Wait for the loudspeaker to come alive and listen to dozens of strangers begin to go through the prelaunch checklist, item by item, result by result.

Wait for the launch status check. Go.

Wait for the launch readiness check. Go.

Wait for the senior staff check. Go.

Wait for the payload readiness check. Go.

Wait for the safety check. Go.

And then wait for the weather check. And hear the pause. And don’t exhale just yet.

No go.

Now, breath. Sit for a few minutes and stare at the clear sky and wonder.

Then a short walk back, another line, a shuttle ride.

Meander through the small space museum that doubles as a large cafeteria, and through the gift shop, and reverse a turnstile that sits, now, in the longer shadows of rockets. Motionless rockets.

Find the rental car in the enormous parking lot, now half-empty, and drive the three hours back to a hotel near an office park a few miles north of Palm Beach, still never having seen anything leave the Earth’s orbit.

And remember that you were fortunate enough to spend an afternoon in the warm sun, looking past the palm trees at the still, quiet water and the clear, blue sky. And hope for better luck for the anyone who might sit on those bleachers tomorrow.

0016 Dill

2021-04-18T00:00:00Z

There is a particular narrow alleyway in a neighborhood on the outskirts of a large city in Japan that is dotted with small restaurants and bars. It’s all but empty on a warm Thursday afternoon in August.

There are four dark brown doors that each frame a single, large window painted with gently arched gold and black letters. The doors, well cared for, slide readily along their metal tracks, parting with little effort or noise.

Past the large copper still in the front corner and beyond the pile of discarded silver kegs on the floor, there is a long, dark, wooden bar. The doors are closed again, but light leaks in from the windows and mixes with the glow of the pendant lamps that are suspended from the ceiling by thick, black cords. The light reflects off the richly lacquered wood and brightens the room.

A few menus rest on that bar, the pages handwritten on card stock, wrapped in thin sheets of crinkled plastic. Small, rectangular wicker baskets hold stacks of paper napkins.

And there, after a sip of a wonderfully bitter, wheat-colored ale, appears a bright, white plate piled with golden yellow chips. The flecks of finely chopped dill, lightly sprinkled on top, are the only green found in a nearly empty, brown and gold room on a warm Thursday afternoon.

0015 Pilots

2021-04-10T00:00:00Z

There are a pair of parallel bridges in downtown New Orleans that cross the Mississippi River, connecting the business district to Algiers and the neighborhoods that lie east.

In 1958, when the Greater New Orleans Bridge first opened here as the longest cantilever bridge in the entire world, it was only a single span.[^1] When second bridge was completed thirty years later, the two would still be the fifth-longest cantilever bridges on the planet.

[^1]: After a contest held in 1989, the bridges were officially renamed the Crescent City Connection. The sizable Vietnamese American community in New Orleans refers to them as Cầu Con Cò, the Pelican Bridge. Read more at Wikipedia.

Like most functioning infrastructure, a bridge that does its job can be safely ignored by most of the people who use it, almost all of time.

Some folks, though, driving over that newly opened length of steel and concrete more than sixty years ago must have been aware, in that moment, that they were on the world's longest bridge as it crossed the world's fourth-longest river.

And maybe that knowledge made a repetitive commute a little more thrilling. Maybe their hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter as their car left the solid ground. Maybe the view from the midpoint, out over the water, seemed more significant.

For a while, at least. Novelty can evaporate quickly in the warmth and comfort of routine.

On an overcast, winter day awash in grays and blues, the red hull of a ship pushes through the water. A river pilot navigates the familiar bends after years of training and apprenticeship, and countless journeys up and down that river. On the early trips, before the newness wore away, maybe they, too, were thrilled to be piloting a ship that just passed beneath what was once the longest cantilever bridge in the entire world.

0014 Thunderbird

2021-04-04T00:00:00Z

There is a metal and glass display case in the lobby of a motel in Savannah, Georgia. This display case is surrounded by other items that one might expect to find in a well-kept motel common area: two insulated coffee pots, bins of sugar packets and single-serving containers of creamer, a napkin dispenser, and a few, assorted boxes of Bigelow tea bags.

The large, silver, metal case is the most substantial object on the counter. Its two clear, glass doors are the size of small windows. Windows whose views are best in the morning when the case is full, brimming with a variety of donuts from a well-known North Carolina donut company. The case's four shelves crowded with fried rings of dough, topped with sprinkles, filled with cream, finished with pink icing, dark brown chocolate, and frosted glazes.

As the summer sun rises, guests begin to trickle into the lobby empty-handed. They walk out, minutes later, with steaming paper cups of coffee and breakfasts that can be stacked into small, cylindrical towers.

Most continue on, returning to their rooms to eat and drink and begin their day. Some, though, may stop and look up to admire the multicolored neon sign that hovers above the building. Their eyes trained on the two enormous, stylized birds, that stand on its edges.

The sign looks different in the daylight: subdued, dormant, only an outline of its nighttime self when the current flows through the noble gases trapped in the glass tubes and those two birds glow so bright that their light spills out across the parking lot, multiplying in dark car windows.

The reds, golds, and blues crawl all the way to the green doors of the motel rooms, climbing up the brightly painted panels beneath the windows until some finds its way through cracks in the perimeters of closed curtains. And there, in quiet rooms, the colors might land on an empty, damp paper cup or a plate that was once filled with donuts from the metal and glass display case, in the lobby, under that sign.

0013 Giant

2021-03-27T00:00:00Z

A few blocks from a little restaurant that perhaps invented the hamburger[^1] and a short walk from another restaurant that probably created the white, clam pizza[^2] there is a rectangular 12-story residential tower.

[^1]: There are competing claims to this invention, but this one appears to be in good faith. Read more at Wikipedia

[^2]: A pie topped with olive oil, oregano, cheese, garlic, and littleneck clams, is sometimes called New Haven-style. Read more at Wikipedia

On the top floor of that tower, there is a small apartment with a large, northwest-facing window. Being a relatively tall building in the comparatively short city of New Haven, Connecticut, the view from that window does not find much competition. On clear days, limited only by the curvature of the Earth, the visibility stretches out past the parking lots and the centuries-old university offices.

Some days, in fact, it's easy to find views of a state park that sits about ten miles north of the this large, northwest-facing window. A park named for its most prominent land feature, which from a certain angle, resembles a very large person lying down.

But, not from this angle. No, this angle only offers a glimpse of those hills, without humanizing them. From here they are simply a sloping, green foreground for the blue midday sky and the bright orange sunsets.

A colorful backdrop for a slice of canonical white, clam pizza.

0012 Triangles

2021-03-21T00:00:00Z

There is a well-used pedestrian triangle in New York City, just before Broadway meets Fifth Ave, across the street from Madison Square Park.

When the weather cooperates, the metal chairs and tables that speckle the concrete fill up with people sitting, eating, drinking, and talking. People coming and going, spending lunch breaks and investing in friendships.

This little triangle is a quintessential New York City street feature. Find a shaded seat and look south at an iconic profile of the city’s most famous three-sided building, another perfect triangle.

The view from the west side of that building, though, will forever be my favorite. The afternoon sun lights it with such purpose and uniformity. Stand at the foot of the foundation, look straight up into the sky, and find the absolute symmetry of the facade.

The details are made mortal by the dots of air conditioners hanging from the windows. A common, modern wart that older buildings cannot seem to avoid. But, the buzz of those rectangles and the water dripping from their edges is a signal that the weather is cooperating in the other triangle across the street.

And maybe, too, in the irregular concave pentagon of the nearby park.

0011 Bridges

2021-03-14T00:00:00Z

There is an ice cream shop near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, a few steps from a pier that offers some very nice views of the Manhattan skyline over the East River.

The river, at this point, is about a half-mile wide, but the buildings on the other side feel immediate, as if placed on that island with the intention of becoming a backdrop for photographs of handheld ice cream cones.

And that backdrop, looking west over the water, is just fine. There’s a pleasant and interesting Frank Gehry apartment building over there. One World Trade Center stretches out into the sky, perched behind an array of smaller financial district office towers. It’s a perfectly sufficient slice of NYC architecture.

Look north, though, and find a better resting place for eyes and cameras. On clear nights peering under the Brooklyn Bridge and over the Manhattan Bridge in the distance, the familiar tiers of the Empire State Building peak out, towering above its puny, midtown surroundings.

At any moment, at least a few people are standing on the 86th-floor observation deck of that building and looking south over the river. Their eyes following the straight lines of the bridge over the water towards Kings County.

And there, at the base of that bridge, on the pier that juts out into the water, a few steps from that ice cream shop, fellow tourists, or perhaps neighbors, mill around taking photos, leisurely eating vanilla ice cream cones, and looking back at them.

Looking back, past the two bridges, at those beautiful lights.

0010 Please

2021-03-07T00:00:00Z

There is a slide, near a playground, in a park in the middle of a town in southern New Jersey.

The slide isn't on the playground, it is near it. It rests closer to a small, unnamed pond, on large patch of grass about 200 feet away from the orderly mulch and paved pathways that mark the borders of the recently upgraded play area.

There, within those boundaries, park-goers will find newer slides with fewer metal edges, softer corners, and a consistent thematic design.

It's fair to assume that, at some point, before this playground was updated, the older slide was relocated to its current home. Perhaps it was always alone. Or maybe it was surrounded by other aged pieces of equipment that found less peaceful ends.

Sometimes, the old slide still manages to entice curious, little visitors to walk over to the patch of grass near the small, unnamed pond. They climb its stairs, their feet strike the firmly packed dirt at the bottom. And sometimes they stay for a while before they leave.

But, this slide remains. Stationary in its repose, within clear view of the children scaling the miniature rock wall that is attached to the play castle with the two red towers. The red towers that are each topped with a rigid, blue flag that points, motionless in the wind, back toward that old slide.

And not far from those immovable flags, near a winding entrance road, sits a small, wooden sign on a sturdy post. Its white paint, which is beginning to chip, is covered in stenciled, black letters detailing the park's regulations.

Three words on that sign were able to break free from the confines of that stencil and are painted in a beautiful, imprecise script. At the top, a Please unfolds, stretches, and pleads. And a small Thank You, near the bottom, stacked onto itself, crowds into the only available space.

The sign, like the slide that is no longer on the playground, shows its age. Both, though, still labor, capable of their tasks.

0009 Ferry

2021-02-28T00:00:00Z

The Cape May-Lewes ferry makes four round trips each day between the two ocean-front towns.

My childhood was dotted with occasional rides on these steam ships with my sister, parents, and grandparents. I remember waiting on cushioned chairs in the Lewes, Delaware terminal, staring out the tall windows, watching the ships dock and travelers disembark. And all the time wasted in the small gift shop, looking at keychains and miniature lighthouses.

Once, a few years ago, after attending the wedding of two very good friends near Cape May, I found myself in the New Jersey terminal. It's something of a south-facing, funhouse mirror image of the building in Lewes. A generous friend shuttled me from my motel. I purchased a one-way foot passenger ticket, and sat, waiting for my boat, in the cushioned chairs, staring out the tall windows.

An hour or so later, we departed. The ship pointed square into the beautiful, clear, September afternoon. I stood on the deck for ninety minutes as we glided through the water under pristine, cotton clouds, floating in the rich, blue sky on the way home, toward Delaware.

0008 Beams

2021-02-21T00:00:00Z

There is an old, unremarkable apartment building in Manhattan on the south side of West 77th Street, near the corner of West End Avenue, that has an odd little duplex apartment on the first floor. A few blocks north, on the other side of the avenue, there is another, equally nondescript, building with a tiny studio apartment on the third floor.

Another block north, on the corner of 86th street, there is an old Methodist church with an ornate bell tower that casts a long shadow beside the crosswalk on sunny afternoons.

Each fall, that church opens its heavy, wooden doors and serves as one of the neighborhood's larger polling places.

During my sojourn in the city, living for years between those two apartment buildings, I cast ballots in that church in at least four different elections. Each time, each cold November Tuesday morning, voters would wait in the pews while volunteers, mostly children, walked up and down the aisles, carrying small paper cups full of coffee and hot chocolate.

Leaving that church, vote cast, throat warm after gulping the steaming drink, I would walk to the corner of Broadway and down the stairs into the train station. I'd wait there, on the grey concrete of the platform, near the bright yellow line, sometimes leaning on the thick layers of dark blue paint caked onto the steel beams.

That local 1 stop is where I started and ended most days, not many as satisfying as those that began in that old Methodist church, sitting in a pew with hundreds of warm, friendly New Yorkers.

0007 Candyland

2021-02-14T00:00:00Z

There is a piano in the dining room of a restaurant that occupies the first floor of an oceanfront hotel in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. That dining room's very large windows look out onto the weathered boardwalk, past the reeds and grasses that cover the dunes, over the smooth sand of the beach, and into the gray-blue Atlantic Ocean.

The boardwalk's worn, wooden planks extend south toward the city's main avenue, the hotel perched near its the northern end.

On the corner of that avenue, in an old YMCA building, sat a candy shop that had been making and selling salt water taffy there for more than ninety years. In the hotter months, that shop's door was always propped wide open, welcoming the humid, ocean air. Local kids with enviable summer jobs leaned out the windows handing bags of caramel corn and rectangular boxes of taffy to tourists. But, not only to tourists.

And above that candy shop there was a large, orange sign, pushing into the sky, taller than everything around it, visible up and down that boardwalk and across the avenue.

That sign soon came into view for anyone walking south from the restaurant that occupies the first floor of that four-story hotel. The restaurant with the piano in the dining room.

Even in the winter, when the city was quiet, and the candy shop's doors were often closed, the sign was still bright and the color still warm.

0006 Hills

2021-02-07T00:00:00Z

There is a tiny international airport on a very small island just off the east coast of Tortola.

Passengers arriving on this very small island can exit the airport terminal, flag a taxi, and take the short car ride over the bridge to the bustling capital city of these islands.

Those ships will, eventually, return to more open water. The bay unrolls into the greater Atlantic Ocean, dotted with drops of green land.

Green hills behind green hills behind green hills, water between, but from this vantage, invisible.

0005 Tracks

2021-01-31T00:00:00Z

There is a small train station in Wilmington, Delaware a few blocks away from a community college and a few more from the city's regularly redeveloped waterfront.

Visiting family in Delaware meant waiting in Penn Station's crowded concourse, watching the clock, listening for departure announcements, and then descending down the escalator to the tracks.

Returning home meant waiting in a smaller concourse, watching the clock, listening for departure announcements, and then ascending up the escalator to the tracks.

An email search reveals that, during my seven year residency in the city, I made that trip more than 50 times.

A bedroom that I left to go north, toward Wilmington. Toward New York City. The bedroom that I can still find by following a particular set of train tracks.

0004 Airplane

2021-01-25T00:00:00Z

There is a train line that crosses the Delaware River, running along the edges of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

On the east bank of the river, eastbound trains descend underground before eventually reemerging and climbing onto elevated tracks that carry commuters through the small towns that dot the increasingly suburban landscape of southern New Jersey.

From one of those small, drowsy towns, those trains can be heard clearly as they pass. The whine of the electric motors and the rush of the passenger cars cutting through the air makes a repetitive, comforting addition to the acoustic rhythm of the place. The train sounds like the town. The town sounds like the train.

High above this town, which lies just a few miles northeast of the Philadelphia International Airport, there is a particularly busy strip of troposphere. The planes flying overhead are sometimes low enough to make their own contribution to the soundscape, with their softer, slower hum.

On clear nights, the methodical blinking lights that announce those planes creep across the dark sky, past the faint stars and the distant Philadelphia skyline.

And on clear days, the afternoon sunlight sometimes reflects so perfectly off of those aircraft that their outline appears carved from the blue of the sky itself. The body of a plane, shimmering in the warm sun and the underside of the wings, a deep black. It pulls a shadow behind it that will cross those train tracks, leave that small town, and float over the river, in want of no bridge.

0003 Moss

2021-01-17T00:00:00Z

A charred piece of wood, cracked and decomposing, sat for months in a slowly rusting fire pit on a concrete slab in a small back yard. It sat there through summer heat and rainstorms. It sat there through the cooler fall days and into this winter.

This small, square fire pit collected the water from those summer storms. It collected leaves, dropped from an oak tree in a neighbor's yard, branches outstretched over a wooden fence. The leaves dried and broke.

It collected the season's first snow on an overcast day in December. That snow melted in the low, warm sun a few days later. Its water dripped though the metal mesh, blending with ease into the cold pool below.

That water, the leaves, and the charred piece of wood remained, undisturbed, until a sunny day just before the new year. And when the heavy, screen lid was removed from that small fire pit, it revealed a soft, damp, thick carpet of unexpectedly bright green moss.

The piece of wood and the moss now sit, without complaint, in a window box hanging off of a small shed in that small yard. The only of bit green in an already long, grey winter.

0002 Glass and Steel

2021-01-10T00:00:00Z

There is a building in center city Philadelphia, made of glass and steel, perched over the east bank of the Schuykill River with a large, open courtyard at its base.

This courtyard, a seemingly-public space, expands past the building itself and sprawls out an entire city block. In the warm days of summer, the pavement is thick with the remains of spotted lantern flies that met their violent ends under the sneakers of frustrated Philadelphians.

Both the north and south sides of the building offer stairways, winding up into the air until they meet at opposite ends of a second courtyard, this one with views of the water and a steady, cool breeze. There are picnic tables, benches, shrubs, small trees, flowering vines climbing on wire lattices, and even more open space.

Open space that, in any city, can be hard to find. Open space that gave my daughter enough room to ride her bicycle for the first time, gliding down what, to a 3-year-old, must have seemed like an absolutely endless car-free corridor of smooth concrete.

Open space that gives way to the South Street bridge on its north end. A bridge that crosses over the river toward the western edges of the city. A bridge that, before crossing, splits into a ramp that descends toward a boardwalk, running along that river, leading north until it winds inland just enough to branch off again. This time, reversing back up another ramp onto a pedestrian walkway that overlooks a crowded dog run and a pair of basketball courts that my infant son spent hours watching on summer evenings, joyfully yelling some barely intelligible version of the word basketball, over and over, at strangers.

The end of that walkway settles into the middle of Schuykill River Park. A park that, with its open lawn, well-maintained playground, expansive community garden, and narrow walkways, can seem both empty and crowded at the same time.

But, before that, just after the ramp rises from the boardwalk, there is a place that, on humid summer mornings offers a tiny, perfect retreat from the weather. This place, close enough to the water to feel its cool air and watch the barges inch past, is thoughtfully hidden from the sun and tucked into the narrow shadow of another building, made of glass and steel, that cuts into the grey-blue sky and glows yellow in the early light.

0001 Sprouts

2021-01-06T00:00:00Z

A few days ago, while I was tidying up a large plant pot full of garden miscellany, I happened upon a small, empty paper envelope. Or, what I initially thought to be a small, empty paper envelope.

If it had actually been empty, it wouldn't have been sitting in that large, metal plant pot in that small shed in southern New Jersey. It probably wouldn't have. It would have been, after being tossed into a recycling can in an unremarkable, midwestern city, carted up to the regional paper recycling plant in St. Paul, Minnesota. The envelope would no longer exist. It would have been transformed into something else. Maybe a sheet of paper or maybe something more interesting like an egg carton sitting in a grocery cooler or a thrilling page of a paperback novel tucked into a nondescript shelf in some quiet bookstore.

But, no, this paper envelope was not empty when I happened upon it a few days ago. It contained a small quantity of sweet Thai basil seeds. Not a handful, not even a spoonful or a thimbleful. A dozen at best.

Seeds, which a few years earlier, had been purchased from a small company in Fairfield, Maine. Seeds that were packed into this small paper envelope, placed inside of a larger envelope, and then mailed to a three-bedroom apartment in that small, midwestern city. Seeds that followed my family and I last fall when we moved to a narrow, brick row home in southwest Philadelphia. Seeds that joined us again this year when we moved to a slightly wider house across the Delaware River. Seeds that up until a few days ago were lying dormant in that small, nearly empty paper envelope.

Seeds, years old and mostly forgotten, which after a few days of rest in their new bed of dark, brown soil, have erupted into a tiny, delicate forest of future pad krapow.

Seeds, which were seeds and are now plants.

Plants that spend their lives under a purple-hued grow light, in a white, ceramic pot, in between some (non-Thai) sweet basil and two small Asia Ip shiso plants. Plants which will grow taller and more fragrant each day. Plants which will, with luck, outgrow their new home and someday retire to the small garden that stretches along the wooden fence on the north edge of a backyard where they can, finally, breath fresh air and feel the rain on their leaves.

The small, empty paper envelope, its work done, now sits in a recycling can in our kitchen. It awaits its new life, wondering what it might become.

2021 in Favorites

2016-02-23T00:00:00Z

Reading

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa was my favorite book that I read in 2021. It was originally published in 1994 in Japan, but an English translation (by Stephen Snyder) was released in 2019.

I think this book is a masterpiece. An allegory for fascism? Or Alzheimer's disease? Or maybe just the existential dread of a finite and temporary world? Maybe. It's also about humans taking care of each other in a hopeless situation. Whatever it is, it's beautiful and feels like a small, lovingly-crafted object.

Related: everything I read in 2021.

Listening

Ignorance by The Weather Station was my favorite record of 2021.

Here’s a quick and incomplete checklist of my musical preferences: driving percussions, piano melodies, lush string arrangements, talented female vocalists who slip into confident falsettos, and former child actresses.

Well, check, check, check, check, and check. This record was such a treat to listen to this year.

Traveling

For two days, in the middle of the post-vaccine, pre-Delta summer, I decamped to a cabin in the New Jersey pine barrens to refresh four decade-old friendships with some long talks, very light hiking, and a lot of food. This was all orchestrated by my lovely, lovely wife and it was very, very appreciated.

This was my favorite and only trip of 2021.

Writing

I didn't write much this year, but I did manage to keep my weekly writing cadence for Alt Text going until July. That is… not a terrible result.

0002 Glass and Steel (or maybe 0006 Hills) was my favorite piece of writing of 2021.

This photo of the treeline reflecting off the water at Trap Pond State Park is my favorite photograph of 2021.

A butterfly flew past at the moment that the shutter opened. The lens gathered just enough light to see the yellow markings on its wings. Most of my photographic success relies on chance.

The full resolution image is available for anyone to use at Unsplash.

Personal Values

2016-02-23T00:00:00Z

A publicly accessible, occasionally refined list of personal values.

First, be kind.
Be more generous.
Be honest and clear.
Be reliable, earn trust.
Find energy in optimism.
Believe in people.

Pizza #00001

2015-10-01T00:00:00Z

▽

"Oh, great, another whoshisface on the Internet is asking for my email address."

That will be the sincere reaction of exactly zero people to the news that, today, I am launching a little email whatsit called Pizza.

You are reading the first delivery (get it?) now, which is also available on the Web. And you can read a broader description of what I'm going for over here.

Let's get started.

First things first: the name. It's called Pizza and that is not meant to be clever. Pizza and email are two things that make me happy. So, let's call some emails pizza and maybe those good vibes will seep into the ~~dough~~ words.

Email. Why email? Maybe it's the last safe place. Maybe it's the last stream beyond the reach of The Algorithms, the last Web service that really belongs to us.

Email is the most beautiful of dumb pipes, the perfect evolution of pneumatic tubes. Information delivered in a near instant, pushing bits over wires where we used to push cans over compressed air. One of the most successful, accessible, and durable technologies that we have to show for The Computer Age. The world's largest social network.

In a few wonderful ways, email feels like the Web. We know how it works. We trust it. We can explain it to each other. It's not a product. It's not a brand. It is email, useful and universal.

But, unlike the web, emails can be finished.

The words that I write here are complete. I cannot take them back or amend them. I fling these bits out into the world and they are no longer under my control. Everyone reads their own copy. How exciting it is to click send and let the machinery do its work, replicating and delivering.

Not unlike the machinery of a pizza shop, replicating and delivering. Sending out finished copies.

I love pizza. I love that we knead it into circles and slice it into triangles.

I love that it can function as the literal centerpiece of a meal. A communal box in the middle of a table, reachable from any angle.

Or, if I have no one to share it with, I can buy just a single slice. The pizza will find seven strangers and distribute the rest of itself. Think of the people we've unknowingly split meals with: little, accidental, anonymous communities having dinner together. Sharing triangles, walking in different directions.

And that's what I'm going for here. No dough, no tomato, no cheese, just words in an email that you can read alone, but also together.

Pizza isn't fancy, exciting food. Email isn't fancy, exciting technology. For many, definitely for me, pizza is comfort food. And doesn't that feel just right? Email is comfort technology.

That's it. That was the first attempt. I hope you'll join me for the next.

Positives

2014-01-01T00:00:00Z

Positives was a photography project that concluded in 2014. Photographs were taken with an aging Polaroid SX-70 and published weekly.

Each week, a photograph taken with a Polaroid SX-70, on Impossible Project film, scanned in a tiny studio apartment, and shared in the Positives email newsletter.

Most of the photos were taken in New York City, but a handful were captured in Thailand, Philadelphia, or other places that I happened to be carrying the camera that year. There were 45 photos published in 2014, which are all collected below, along with a few unpublished images from the same year.

Owing to the photographer's lack of skill, the demanding light requirements of the camera, and the sometimes erratic film, only some of the photos were properly exposed and focused. Others were... less so.

30

2013-05-10T00:00:00Z

Today is May, 10th 2013, which means that I am now thirty years old. Thanks to calendars, I saw this coming and was able to prepare myself. I even found some time over the last three decades (!) to write a few words.

Presented as advice to my younger self, exactly thirty things that I (think I kind of) know:

Try not to give unsolicited advice.
Showing up on time, consistently and without fanfare, is the single best way to show another person that you respect them.
People should hear nice things about themselves. Do not assume that everyone does. Give more honest compliments.
If you drink beer, drink the absolute best beer available, even if that means you can afford fewer beers.
Try to be the best person that you can be all the time. Maintaining different identities is a burden and it distracts you from working on your real one.
Kindness, and the strength to display it in all situations, is the single most admirable quality that people can possess.
If given the opportunity, people will surprise you. Leaving yourself open to these surprises is a kind of risk. Taking that risk is how you believe in people.
Own fewer things. Identify possessions that you love. Take care of them, treat them well, and keep them forever.
When with others, make every possible effort to be with them wholeheartedly and every possible effort to not fiddle with your mobile devices.
Every photograph and video you take at a concert or other live event will probably be terrible. Just enjoy the moments, don't feel pressured to document them.
Let people leave your life when they need to. Leave a light on for them in case they ever decide to return. Collect those lights and regularly remember why you keep them lit.
Write more letters. Literal, pen-and-paper, had-to-buy-a-stamp-and-remember-where-your-friend-lives letters.
Be a relentless champion of people you care about.
When hugging, hug with two arms, while standing and applying reasonable, affectionate pressure.
Take every possible precaution to ensure that you own what you make: words, art, music, photographs, and even social media updates.
If you make something that you think could help someone, give it away.
Go to bed an hour earlier and wake up an hour earlier. Life is nicer in the morning.
Give more, smaller, unexpected, personal gifts.
You will miss things. You will not live long enough to experience everything. Try to spend time with this in mind.
To accomplish something difficult, make the work as easy as you can on yourself. Remove every obstacle except the work. Then do the work.
When writing lists of advice, simply mine your past mistakes and failures, then try to rephrase them as folksy wisdom.
There are not many tasks that you'll be doing repeatedly for as long as you're alive, carrying stuff is probably one of them. Buy a really nice bag.
Other people cannot always see your intentions, they can see your actions.
No matter how important the rush that you are in, there exists someone in a more important rush, possibly the person directly in front of you.
Find something small, cheap, and easily reproducible that makes your day better. Make it a point to include it in life as often as possible. I suggest tea.
Settle into the realization that other people can be as intelligent as you. And more intelligent. And less intelligent. But, understand that you often won't be able to tell the difference.
Ask your parents more questions about themselves, answer more of your parents' questions about yourself.
Unless you have finished writing a book, it's probably best not to tell anyone that you are writing a book.
Seeking comfort is just fine. Seeking unending comfort can be a trap; occasionally, pursue the uncomfortable.
Placing a ripe, soft avocado in a refrigerator will extend its life by two days, give or take.
Once in a while, when you feel strongly about it, break a rule.

Shipping is a Habit

2013-03-18T00:00:00Z

Writing software is an art form. As much as it relies on engineering and science, at its heart, it is a creative pursuit.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination.

— Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

Unfortunately, programming seems to be an art form that lends itself to unfinished work. We build castles in the air, but we rarely allow others to visit. We take comfort in our open projects and their obscurity. Sometimes, it can be more exciting to be working than to have worked.

But, real artists ship and shipping is a conscious decision. Software does not ship itself. No one is going to discover your nearly-finished bug tracker 100 years after your death while buying your MacBook at a yard sale, launch it, and give you credit. Ship it while you're alive.

We get trapped by the idea that our work can be better. That more time and work will inevitably yield better results. Of course this is true, but it will always be true. It will never be finished, but it might already be mostly finished.

You guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn't going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. Just make it as good as you can.

— Steve Jobs, Real Artists Ship

So, real artists ship. This is not a new idea. What I would like to propose is that shipping is a habit. Real artists are habitually shipping, they cannot stop shipping, and they understand the value of shipping. Shipping, publishing, putting-private-work-into-the-public-space frees it from the tight grasp of its creator. Art becomes real at the moment that it ships, the moment that a second person sees it.

It is a cycle that refreshes itself. Constructive feedback, or praise, or disagreement are all seeds of creativity's more practical cousin: iteration.

Software, like many art forms, is perpetually unfinished. Pushing it out the door is the first step in the iteration process. And iteration is the only path to great work. Second drafts are refinements of first drafts.

Exposing our efforts into public light is adicting. We start to value our public works more than our private ones, not for their notoriety, but for their temporary completeness. For the idea that they were, in some imperfect moment, finished. We ship to move our work off of the stack, to make room in our minds and our lives for new ideas.

Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world.

— Seth Godin, Linchpin

So, ship something today. Launch something that is useful, but isn't perfect. Publicize something that you're only half-happy with. Show someone else a part of yourself that you aren't particularly impressed with. The goal should be to return to that work a year later and be amused by its amateurism, for having grown. Or to return to that work tomorrow, driven to improve it.

Much scarier than any result of shipping, is the idea that not shipping can become a habit too. We can be seduced by the comfort of our own minds and our own opinions of the work that we do. Our own feedback is overly accommodating, we are made partial by our own memories of how difficult it can be to create something. We can be scared to invite feedback that isn't colored by the struggle of creation. But, while fear is a poor choice of motivator to stay put, it's a fantastic reason to move forward.

There are very few acts more human than to make something. And when we share those things with others, we get to grow in ways that we didn't plan.

Keep building your castles in the air, but get in the habit of publishing the address.

Tins, Watches, and Emotional Assignments

2012-02-29T00:00:00Z

On the bookcase above my desk, surrounded by a dust ring of neglect, rests an old, oval, tin box that once belonged to my great grandfather. It's weathered with a beautiful patina that nearly obscures the detailed scenes etched into it, but just manages to make it look lived-in.

There is a single business card in that tin. The card is simple in its design, but thorough in its description of his job: "Master and Pilot for Yachts for the Atlantic Coast and Inland Waters from Maine to Florida."

What a title! Sixteen words. The phone number listed on the card is a mere three digits. His first and middle name are described only in initials. Delaware is abbreviated to Del. But, that title is there fully in all of its ridiculous specificity. He must have been a proud Master and Pilot for Yachts for the Atlantic Coast and Inland Waters from Maine to Florida.

I love this thing.

There are very few things that I own which carry any emotional or sentimental weight to them.¹ Manufactured goods are sterile in that way. So, it's much easier to develop an affection for older items. It's easier to believe they've had a life. Indifference is for things and emotions are for people. Or sometimes really, really old things that once belonged to people.

On occasion, I think it's useful to deliberately assign some value to those things that we choose to let surround us. By doing so, we can take an object and make it more. We can make it our own. We can give it a life.

Every day, I wear my Casio A168. Right now, it tells me that the time is 21:08. It lights up a stunning teal from the 1980's and it keeps track of leap years effortlessly. It is simple, it is ugly, and you can buy one for about 14 bucks. (2023 update: about $29, 2025 update: about $39).

Etched into the back of this mass-produced work of art are some mass-produced words. CASIO. STAINLESS STEEL BACK. WATER RESISTANT. Made in China.

Fair enough.

More than those words will ever convey, this little thing has been perched on my wrist for some wonderful moments of my life. I saw my sister get married in this watch. It, literally, touched my nephew the very first time that I held him. It moved to New York City with me. I once fell in love wearing it. It is the subject of the most thoughtful gift that I have ever received. And as I wrote each of these words it was with me, encouraging me from my left.

I have stretched my arm past my sleeve, letting it poke out to tell me the hour, literally, hundreds of times. It intimately knows every shirt that I own. It keeps track of any changes in the circumference of my wrist.

It is a personal logo, a brand, and a mark.

It is a watch, but I have high hopes for its life. It will inevitably outlive me. I hope that it finds its way to a great, great grandchild of mine. And if it ever gets that far, I for damn sure better have etched even more memories into it.² And so, it and I keep going. We keep making.

It is a watch. But, I've assigned it a larger role than that. It is a flag pole, clasped to my wrist, reminding me of the time, my age, and moments in my life that I am lucky enough to want to remember. With electroluminescence in case they happen at night.

Update (2023-02-15)

This year, after more than a decade of service, my beloved Casio A168 began exhibiting some odd behavior. A battery replacement didn't solve the problems and I ended up replacing it with the Casio G-Shock DW5600E-1V. It's a bit larger, hopefully a bit more durable, and still has its iconic, perfect electroluminescence.

Footnotes

In an apartment-building-fire situation, this tin is one of a small handful of items that I would grab before tumbling down my fire escape to the safety.
And I should probably provide a few decade's worth of (currently) available batteries.

Make Things and Give Them to People

2012-01-30T00:00:00Z

In 2002 Kurt Vonnegut gave a speech in southern Michigan to the graduating class of Albion College. Most of what he said that day ended up being included in his memoir, A Man Without A Country, which I absolutely recommend reading. But, I'm going to pull out two phrases and one point which I think he crafted just beautifully.

~~Indulge me and jump to about the 5:55 mark in this video~~ and stick around for two minutes or so. He'll start off with a joke, but it will build the context for the two quotes that I'll pull below.

So many people think that practicing an art is a way to make a living, is a good way to make a living. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.

— Kurt Vonnegut

He then gives the audience a homework assignment. He asks them to write a poem, as best they can, show it to no one and then destroy it. And here's what he expects will happen:

And you will find out, you have been rewarded, big time. This came out of you! This is the act of creativity. The hell with fame, the hell with money, you created this.

— Kurt Vonnegut

Looking a little closer and using the VTPE¹ we can come to the conclusion that Kurt was leading us to.

Vonnegut Transitive Property of Equality

art = soul growth
making things = art
making things = soul growth

There are a lot of different ways that we can spend our time and I won't be declaring that I understand life well enough to tell anyone how to spend theirs. But, I will write that I do not believe Kurt was wrong here. You will not be disappointed in spending a few minutes, or even a few hours, making something. The reward that we get, as human beings, from making things is undeniable and universal.

The best argument that I can grasp to support that universality is how much creating we all do as children. When unencumbered and encouraged, we were creating-machines. We colored any wax-able surface and constructed forts on anything fort-bearing. But, for so many of us, this making slows down as we age.

I have a simple, two-step plan to remedy that:

Make things again.
Give them to people.

The second step incentivizes the first. Our organic desire to create may wane over the years, but in that same time our connections to people have grown. We've figured out, in own ways, what friendship is, and what respect is, and what love is. And with those books on our shelves, unfinished as they may always be, we can make fantastic things.²

Sometimes, after making something, if you're comfortable with it (and sometimes even if you're not), give it to someone. Because, as human as making things is, its humanity pales next to making things for another person. Giving a gift is another, perfectly wonderful way to make your soul grow. So, here's what I'm positing as an addendum to Kurt's proof:

Vonnegut Transitive Property of Equality, updated

making things = soul growth
giving things to people = soul growth
making things + giving things to people = soul growth x 2

That's two times the soul growth for the maker-giver. Plus, the net soul gain for the receiver.³

Write someone something, draw someone something, or sing someone something. Make anyone anything. But, sometimes, give it to them. Choose the something and the someone appropriately or inappropriately. Choose so that it's easy, or that it's hard, or that it's unexpected.⁴ You will get a reward from both the making and the giving. You will get to give a brand new part of yourself that is distinct and that was made just for another person. You will get to be reminded that you can still make new parts of yourself. All of that will be inside this thing that you made.

So, make things and give them to people.

It's twice the soul growth. At least.

Update (2025-10-01)

Sadly, video of the speech is no longer available on Youtube. So it goes.

Footnotes

Vonnegut Transitive Property of Equality
Like this, and this, or this.
I haven't really tried to quantify this, but it's almost certainly positive.
That's my personal favorite.

Ties

2012-01-04T00:00:00Z

When I was 12 years old, my father taught me to tie a four-in-hand knot. He gave me a hands-on lesson and a sheet of illustrated instructions from an old tie box. We disagreed on the ideal width of that knot, a preference which evidently increases with one's years, but we both understood the utility of it. It was simple. And it served a purpose.

We also understood that I was, from that moment on, the tier of my own ties.

That four-in-hand has accompanied me to interviews, to weddings, and to funerals. It's come with me to new cities and returned with me to old towns. It's shown up for important moments in my life and helped me show up, appropriately dressed, for important moments in the lives of people close to me. And sixteen years later, I am still recreating it, crudely, each morning before I before I go to work.

I write software for a living in a windowless basement. The dress code for which is not formal.

I have not found that women are unavoidably attracted to neckwear.

That tie gets to leave my closet every weekday, and gets to ride on a train or a bicycle, to serve as a reminder.

I spend a non-trivial amount of my time trying to improve and to update skills that I am lucky enough to be able to earn a living with. Those skills allow me to make things. They allow me to call home a city that I love. And they help me to define a curiosity which I feel grateful to know.

I aspire to that same effort in the parts of my life for which I am not paid. I want to be better in what I write, and in what I say, and in how I treat people. I have days when I am so aware of all of this that it's thick in the air the moment that I wake up. But, I have days when it's not. And it's useful to build a symbol of it into my routine.

That tie allows me to literally affix my aspirations to my neck with a knot. It is simple. And it serves a purpose. I put it on in the morning and it becomes a small, sometimes striped reminder that I am going to be a professional today, in everything that I do. And that I am on my own to tie the knot and to choose the width.

Matthew Howell dot net

0012 — West 83rd Street

0011 — Chrysler Building

2025 in Favorites

Reading

Listening

Web Generalist

Thoughts on Engineering

Searching for a Better Title

Feeds Are Nice

2024 in Favorites

Reading

Listening

htmgets.js

0010 — Pōhutukawa

0009 — Orange Sky

Deploying Static Sites on Netlify without Github

0. Prerequisites

Install Netlify's command line tool

1. Unlink the Github from the Netlify project

Or create a new project

2. Update netlify.toml

3. Test the deploy

4. Production deploy

1024 Pomelos

1024 Oranges

1024 Limes

2023 in Favorites

Reading

Listening

Playing

reasonable.html

40

0008 — String Lights Across a Blue Sky

0007 — Four Lamps in the Evening Fog

0006 — Roller Coaster Track Lights

0005 — Train Tracks Looking North

0004 — Moss on Stairs in a Cemetery

0003 — A Sunrise in Rehoboth

0002 — A Butterfly Above a Pond

0001 — Hills Near Tortola

2022 in Favorites

Reading

Listening

Playing

Traveling

2022 at Reasonable Company

Defining Reasonable Company

Goals from 2022

1. Create the company

2. Launch the company website

3. Release one open-source project

4. Find one open-source project sponsor

5. Release one piece of art

6. Sell one art print

7. Release one video game

8. Sell one video game copy

Goals for 2023

1024 Lemons

Selling Lemons

What is this?

Lemon Illustrations

Art Prints

How are the prints being sold?

Why give away the art?

Unlocking the Commons

Contributors to the Commons

Questions

How are the illustrations being released into the public domain?

Have any been released yet?

What if folks don't want a print?

How about folks that can't afford $25?

Can we just do it for free?

Are there any non-financial ways to support this?

The Three Common Benefits

Unlocking common access

Unlocking common copies

Unlocking common use

And?

On Collecting Music