Hey friends,

How do you know when your homeownership has transitioned into a hobby?

When a "quick trip" to the hardware store somehow lasts 90 minutes, and YouTube thinks you're in the construction trade...

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

How do you manage side projects?

I was listening to an interview with Reiner Knizia, a boardgame designer with a whopping 834 published game designs and counting. Two things stood out to me in the interview:

1. He often 'goes away' to fully immerse into something. Something like the 'writer's cabin', Reiner would leave the daily operations to allow himself to explore an idea fully.
2. He then 'shelves' the idea. Reiner has 50 drawer in his office that each contain an active project (I can barely keep up with a half-dozen or so!) After working on a project for a while, he'll shelve it and come back to it later, sometimes for up to half a year. After he's gotten some perspective, he'll re-evaluate and see if it still excites him—if it's worth keeping or killing.

Both points revolve around space and energy. Space to focus and prevent distractions. Space to gain perspective, then using your freak energy thermometer to choose what's worth your time.

I like this framing, not just because it justifies my haphazard approach to side projects (TOTALLY meant to forget about that for half a year...), but also because it gives structure to two sides of space needed for creativity.

Do you have any 'drawers' full of side projects? Are any of them worth pulling out and seeing if the spark is still there?

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• Carmen Ansio talks about all the nice things we have for typesetting in CSS now.
• Domenic Denicola shares his agentic workflow that accesses a Tailscale-unified Linux VM.
• It's easy to take the current internet for granted. Faza wrote a neat interactive post about [the magic of networking] (The computer kind, not the people kind).
• Maybe some people's vision of the future is not a place we'd want to go.
• Jordan Scales takes us back to 1998 with CSS.
• :wide-eyed thousand-yard stare: What even is state and do we even manage it...

Other Stuff

• An incredibly in-depth look at the computers in Jurassic Park.
• "PSST, hey you, yeah you! You interested in my collection of digital clocks?"
• *Looks silently at drawer full of empty notebooks*
• Maggie Appleton reflects on WWI and the gaps in the history we're taught.
• Yes! Write by hand MORE!

👽 Weird, 📺 Watch, and 🎮 Play

• 👽 Gaussian splats can be pretty impressive, like this one of Grace Cathedral.
• 👽 A digital museum of video game levels.
• 👽 When asked to draw a horse, what else do people draw?
• 👽 This daily solargraph is mesmerizing.
• 📺 I've needed this method to tie drawstrings my whole life.
• 📺 Shilpa Uskokovic makes a giant hazelnut butter cup... because why not?