Worksonmymachine

There was once a wizard who lived beside a pond. It was a small pond. The sort of pond that probably gets called a "water feature" on a Zillow listing by a real estate agent who really knows their euphemisms.The wizard loved it."This," he said, "is my moa

Note: I just enabled paid subscriptions for $8/month. Most of these essays will still be free, but I'm working on adding premium features to Artifact Land and launching a hosted version of Conjure among other upcoming products that will come with the subs

Building a personal blog with Astro and Claude was the easy part. Getting it to resolve on my own network was not.

There is a photograph of a coral reef on the wall of my dentist's office.It's a good photograph. Technically impressive, the fish are crisp. I've stared at it and imagined I was snorkeling with them at basically every cleaning since he put it up.But as my

Penn & Teller have this philosophy about their craft. Or, I guess, all stage magicians do, but Penn & Teller are the ones who spend the most time talking about it.They will spend months on a single trick. Years, sometimes. More time on something than anyo

You had a technique.Don't pretend you didn't. Everyone had a technique.Three short breaths, then one long one. Or two long breaths across the whole cartridge on either side. Or you put it in your shirt and blew through it like I did. You knew yours was th

So try explaining freemium to someone who's never heard of it.You build a thing. A whole thing. Then you give away part of it. The worst part. On purpose. And you hope that the people using the worst part of your thing will eventually want the better part

There's a seed library at the community center near my house. Or there was. The way it worked: you'd take a packet of tomato seeds, grow your tomatoes, save some seeds from your best plants, and bring them back. Then last year, something changed. People s

On Sunday I wrote about what happens when a fundamental input gets cheap and new categories of activity explode in ways nobody predicts. I teased, at the end, that I'd been writing science fiction about what life looks like on the other side of that explo