Hey friends,

One thing that gets me excited about Fall is ... flannel, truly the king of fabrics! Pumpkins? They're alright. Changing leaves? Pretty cool. But a nice flannel shirt? 😎🤌

Thinking Too Hard

When is done DONE?

If real artists ship—of which I'm not sure shipping in THIS way is sustainable—when should we release something?

Some say when it's not fun to work on anymore, or perhaps when it's fulfilled the promise it makes. Others have methods for slaying the Project Hydra to keep from stalling or getting stuck.

I used to get in trouble in my art classes because I would start a painting with great enthusiasm but finish weakly. When it came to adding the final details and FINISHING something I would drag my feet. I was itching to move onto the next thing. Consequently, I wound up with a lot of unfinished ideas. I had a friend also in the same classes who excelled in the small details, but would often get stuck, massaging minutia until it was 'perfect', a goal that seemed to always be just out of reach.

I feel like the happy path is somewhere in the middle: after some detail work has gone in, but before we feel completely done with it. Once you've fulfilled the base promise the work attempts to make but before your freak energy, your weird joyful energy for creation, runs out.

Let's get shipping (but, like, in a sustainable way! No 90-hour weeks, friends, mental stamina is finite!)

Interesting Web Bits

• A really neat generative piece in Miriam Nadler's Virtual Ant Farm
• One of the coolest font demo pages I've seen: Departure Mono
• Is YOUR blue MY blue?. Apparently I trend more blue than green in my color perception. 68% bluer than the population they tell me.
• Dynamicland is a fascinating idea that focuses on computing with physical objects. Don't fully get it? Neither do I, but check out the intro video. There's some really neat ideas here.
• Neat little game about defragging a drive.
• ANOTHER neat game about finding all the gems in a cave.