Note: I accidentally published this already, but I managed to back-date it to yesterday, so I deleted and am republishing. I apologize.
In the comments section yesterday, Caroline G. asked:
Really interested in knowing more about your writing/journaling/drawing process and practice!
And because I love being asked questions, I thought I would respond in a post!
Basically first thing each morning I drink coffee and draw for an hour or so. I usually draw whatever seems memorable from the day before. This is like three days worth of the journal comics:
The habit started about seven years ago when I stopped drinking and found I had a lot of energy in the morning, and that I really enjoyed doing something manual while I drank a ton of coffee. So I began keeping a traditional journal, and then I started a second journal for sketching (following the classic sober advice of “you might still like doing the stuff you liked doing as a kid”), and eventually the two journals melded into one. Also I was reading a lot of Julia Wertz and Gabrielle Bell, whose work and diary comics have been very influential.
I started posting a few of the comics to an Instagram account in 2017, and I enjoyed doing that so much that in 2019 I quit my job to publish the comics to a newsletter instead, with the hope that I might one day charge people to read it and make a living doing so. That never quite happened (the making-a-living part), but it was going well and growing, until eventually the whole thing started to crumble, for reasons that are still not totally clear to me. But basically I stopped liking my work. I think I was shaping it to try to appeal to people. Or I had lost sight of something. Or both. Or something else. Also I had a baby who was turning into a toddler, and it was easy to accept being a stay-at-home-mom as an identity.
But I kept doing the journal comics, just privately. And a year+ passed, and then Jason Kottke asked me to guest-blog for him, and it got me thinking I might get back into publishing things again! (Plus some other factors, like general boredom and hunger for a project.) I’d love to find a new rhythm for my own newsletter, and I have a few ideas about how I might do it.
On a more technical aspect, I use Micron pens (size 01) and Staedtler Ergosoft colored pencils, on Borden & Riley Paris Paper No. 234. I scan it all in using a Canon LiDE 220 scanner and then tweak it using the Preview application on my MacBook.
Not long ago, when I ordered a café au lait in downtown Washington, I was told my lait choices were oat, soy, or almond. “I’ll take regular whole milk,” I said. “Sorry, we don’t have that,” the barista replied.
My mind was blown in this entertaining Natalie Angier review of a new book on milk. (“Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood,” by Anne Mendelson.)
When Jason asked me to guest-blog for him, one of my first thoughts was, Omg I get to do a MEDIA DIET!!! However my recent book/TV consumption has mostly been straight P.D. James novels (fantastic, A+), with sides of C.J. Sansom and Sesame Street.
But I do have a mini-diet of media-diet features:
Embedded’s “My Internet” Q&As, where “very online” people share what they’ve been reading/watching/doing online. A recent favorite is Amanda Hess’s.
NYT’s “By the Book” (and its wonderful portraits). However: Do people really keep such a particular and revealing stack of books on their nightstands? Or is “nightstand” a figure of speech?
The Monday Media Diets featured in the Why Is This Interesting newsletter, even if they frequently enrage me (not this one, though!).
I also read a lot of newsletters, and after years of subscribing and unsubscribing, I can wholeheartedly recommend the following, most of which will probably not be new to Kottke readers, but just in case:
I’m enjoying sharing some of these more-recent comics on this site. This one basically picks up after yesterday’s left off. Maybe I will try to keep up a string of them until it’s time for me to go.
Cultural Achievements Inspired by Lice: Laura Hazard Owen, editor of Nieman Lab, recently republished a personal essay about getting lice, in her newsletter. And on YouTube, the ASMRtist Latte’s wonderful video “School Nurse Lice Check” now has more than 21 million views. Both are great!
How to Clean Mold From Bath Toys. In case anyone is in a similar boat, I tried the “put toys in the dishwasher” suggestion, but it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped (but it was pretty good), so I tried the “soak toys for hours in a tub with vinegar and water” suggestion. Also not an obvious success, but maybe I didn’t have enough vinegar. Or maybe I just let the toys get too moldy.
For my husband’s birthday, I got him a candle sculpted to look like us, by the artist Janie Korn. It’s brought a lot of joy. She also makes custom pet and house candles, as well as cookie, cigarette, and Marie Antoinette candles, among many others. [Janie Korn]
I’m a megafan of the newsletter The Culture We Deserve, by Jessa Crispin (formerly of Bookslut). I spent most of an entire therapy session discussing a line and a half from an installment a few weeks back: “…online creators need to start developing a healthy amount of contempt for their audiences. Because your audience has contempt for you!” Pairs well with Becca Rothfeld’s essay on condescension in the Yale Review. (“Why do public intellectuals condescend to their readers?”)
“Anti-aging is a disappointing pursuit. … There is no point at which the anti-aging will have worked – when you look in the mirror and say, ‘I’ve done it! I’m anti-aged!’ Once you buy into the concept of anti-aging, you buy in forevermore.” That’s from the first installment of Ask Ugly, an advice column by Jessica DeFino, in The Guardian’s new Wellness section. (And in response to the question “Should I get Botox?”) DeFino’s beauty newsletter, The Unpublishable, is also great.
A journal entry from last month. I was hoping it would be more interesting, but I’m just going to keep throwing things up here and seeing what happens.
“I woke up one morning and realized that all I wanted to do was drink.” That’s from the “Ask a Sober Oldster” Q&A series, which is a collaboration between the newsletters Oldster Magazine, by Sari Botton, and The Small Bow, by A.J. Daulerio. (I’m biased because I do the illustrations, but I truly enjoy the interviews.) There have been six installments so far, and I think my favorite is No. 4. Or maybe No. 5. Also No. 2. Really all of them.
Shortly after I learned to knit, a friend suggested I find the 1983 book Fox & Geese & Fences: A Collection of Traditional Maine Mittens, by Robin Hansen, and make her a pair. I did, it was a wonderful experience, and I have been knitting mittens from the book ever since (some pictured above). They are exceptionally warm and durable. A bonus is that the patterns are written with a kind of common sense that for me at least made a few steps feel like fun puzzles. (What does she mean by “K both colors, gray then red, into the st that should have been gray”?? … ohhHHhhh!!!)
I found the book used on Amazon, but other books of Hansen’s are available on her website. My favorite pattern to make is “Sawtooth” (various above and below), but the best are maybe the “Safe Home” ones (center left), found elsewhere online. [thx Cecilia!] Oh also: Pair with Maine’s Bartlett Yarns – perfection.
Okay one more shot, these are my everyday mittens, I think I’ve been wearing these for the past five winters (Sawtooth pattern). Glorious!
Dolly Parton on “Jolene”: “…to have someone love a man so much that she would, rather than giving him up and being mad about him having an affair, but loving him enough to understand how he would fall in love with someone else because they’re that beautiful. … People thought it was a very honest, open, and humble kind of song about the subject.” I’ve always wondered about that aspect of the lyrics. Maybe that’s something to aspire to, but I don’t really get it. Obviously I love the song. [vulture]
Hello, I’m Edith! I love this site, and I’m excited to be here. (Thanks, Jason!) I haven’t blogged like this for more than a decade, so I hope I’m not too rusty. Please feel free to email me any tips; I would be delighted to get them.
As Jason mentioned, since 2019 I’ve been sending a comics newsletter called Drawing Links, although it’s been on hiatus since last fall. However, I’m going to try running some old comics here – see below – in the hopes of working up momentum to bring my newsletter back. We’ll see how it goes!
More about me?? I’m originally from Cambridge, MA, and although I lived for 16 years in Brooklyn, a couple years ago my husband and I moved to a small town in upstate New York, not too far from Albany. We are now expecting our second daughter, due in a few weeks.
Thanks for reading!
…Okay, I was hoping to hide these comics behind a “read more” page-break button, but it seems Jason’s interface doesn’t have that option, so I guess I’ll be really taking over the main page.
And so, to kick this off, here is a little story about the first time I saw a bear (from 2022):
Hello everyone. I’m going to be traveling for a few weeks and have invited my friend Edith Zimmerman to guest edit kottke.org while I am gone. Edith was the founding editor of The Hairpin (RIP), wrote a profile of Chris Evans that broke the internet a little bit, and most recently was Drawing Links (on hiatus). You can buy greeting cards featuring her drawings on Etsy. She starts tomorrow — I’m very excited to see what she’s going to do with the site. Welcome, Edith!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to complete an item from my bucket list: going on a walk with Craig Mod and Kevin Kelly. I will see you back here in mid-December. 👋
Brickception: a Breakout-style game for desktop browsers in which a popup window acts as the paddle for the main window…but there’s also a mini Breakout game in the popup. So awesome.
Itttt’s baaack… After not happening for the past three years, the Kottke Holiday Gift Guide has returned. I’ve scoured the internet and dozens of other gift guides for the best (and sometimes weirdest) stuff out there — it’s a curated meta-guide for your holiday giving. This list is US-centric, link-heavy, and you might see some tried-and-true items that have been featured in previous years. Ok, let’s get to it.
Charitable Giving
First thing’s first: charitable giving should be top-of-mind every holiday season if you can afford it. Giving locally is key. I support our area food shelf year-round, with an extra gift for Thanksgiving and the December holiday; giving money instead of food is best. The kids and I also support Toys for Tots by heading to the local toy store to get some things — they like it because they get to pick out toys and games (they’re thoughtful about deciding which ones would be best).
Some kids and some ages are really easy to shop for. But for those that aren’t, here are some good gifts for the young and young at heart.
Give the gift of sitting at a table for a few hours, listening to quiet music, and sipping on a mug of tea: the JIGGY Puzzle Club. Remember the Babysitter’s Club books from the 80s & 90s? They’re back in the form of graphic novels…my daughter really liked these when she was younger.
I’ve heard some mixed things about the Tidbyt, but I still kinda want one. I definitely want one of these cute Tiny Arcade Pac-Man Arcade Games. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that you could buy climbing holds and just make your own climbing/bouldering wall at home with some plywood.
And here’s a great gift for kids that doesn’t require shopping: holiday coupons (like “stay up 20 minutes past bedtime” and “one minute of saying bad words”).
This is the section where you’re going to see a lot of repeats from past years because this is stuff that I regularly use and love. You’re probably getting tired of me talking about the 2nd-gen Apple AirPods Pro but I use mine every day and they are great. Almost every book I read, I read on the Kindle Paperwhite — it’s light, waterproof, and very travel-friendly.
Apple AirTags are super useful for traveling and keeping track of my keys and bags. When I need some art for my walls, I go to 20x200, run by my pal Jen Bekman. For a pleasant atmosphere while working, I often burn a Keap Wood Cabin candle.
It gets cold here in Vermont and instead of wearing slippers in the house all day, I wear a thick pair of wool socks because they are unbelievably warm and comfortable. I got mine from a local place, but you can find alternate options on Etsy. Speaking of VT, I thought Darn Tough socks were a local secret, but I found them on multiple gift guides — they’re great for any outdoor activities.
And I give up: everyone loves Crocs. They are comfortable and you can get all sorts of jibbitz to fancy them up — Star Wars, Minecraft, Pokemon, sports, Starbucks, Pixar, Marvel, etc, etc, etc.
Every year, I feature goods and services by people I know, folks who read the site, and from kindred online spirits. My friend Aaron runs an ice cream shop in Somerville called Gracie’s and pays extra attention to the merch. Wondermade sells marshmallows in all sorts of different flavors. Robin Sloan and his partner make extra virgin olive oil in California. My pals at Hella Cocktail Co. have grown quite a bit in the past few years: in addition to bitters, they now sell mixers and bitters & soda in a can.
It wouldn’t be kottke.org without a bunch of stuff that’s difficult to categorize. Get your favorite nature lover a 1-year National Parks Pass.. Whoa, check out this intricate maze drawn as a side project over a period of 7 years — now available as a full-scale art print. This gorgeous blanket was designed by Addie Roanhorse, a member of the Osage Nation who worked on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
I haven’t had time to compile my EOY books list yet (and may not get around to it), but books are always the most popular items under our tree. Rapid-fire-style, here are a few titles that caught my gifter’s eye over the past year:
More goods and services from pals in my little corner of the internet. Moss & Fog and Spoon & Tamago both have shops filled with well-designed products. Andre Torrez makes bags (products here go quickly and may not be in stock). Fitz sells custom-fitted eyeglasses and was inspired in part by a post on kottke.org. Craig Mod’s new book just came out: Things Become Other Things.
During his cancer treatment, Hank Green designed some socks; they’re now for sale, with profits going to help people get access to cancer treatment. OG web designer Dan Cederholm sells fonts and shirts, prints, and other type-related products at Simplebits. Field Notes makes some of the best notebooks around. Ami Baio makes “sweet, kind games to connect people” at Pink Tiger Games. Storyworth helps you compile a book of stories told by a loved one.
Things I Would Like
In the course of compiling these guides, I always run across some stuff I’d like to have, even though I have relatively simple everyday needs. This year, I’ve got my eye on Super Mario Bros. Wonder (while also hoping for a new console from Nintendo soonish) and the Analogue Pocket (alas, sold out). A few years back, I replaced my 27-inch iMac with an M1 MacBook Air & a 24” LG monitor. I love the Air but miss the bigger monitor, so I wouldn’t complain if I found Apple’s Studio Display (or, better yet, the truly bonkers 32” Pro Display XDR) under the tree. But I’d settle for the cheaper LG 27MD5KL-B 27 Inch UltraFine 5K.
Lego sets are always a huge holiday hit. I’ve had my eye on Hokusai’s The Great Wave set (Amazon) for awhile but I hadn’t seen this NASA Mars Rover Perseverance set (Amazon) with the Ingenuity helicopter — wow. If your household already has too many Legos, check out The Lego Engineer by expert builder Jeff Friesen — he guides you through 30 builds of engineering marvels like bullet trains and skyscrapers.
Let’s destigmatize the gift card: there is no shame in not knowing what to get someone for a gift, even if you know them really well. This is actually the gift of getting someone exactly what they want, even if it’s something practical & lame like razor blade refills, HDMI adapters, or laundry detergent. There’s the obvious Amazon gift card but you can also get cards for Apple (use it for Fitness+ or Apple TV+?), Audible, Fortnite, Snapchat, Airbnb, Disney+, Spotify, Netflix, and Roblox.
Days Gone By
Ok, that’s quite enough to get you started. I’ve got more recommendations that I’ll add in the next few days. If you’re interested, you can also check out my past gift guides from 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
Phil Plait on How to Buy Your First Telescope. “If you just want to see the moon, the bright planets and the occasional astronomical event such as a bright comet, then you don’t need anything big and fancy.”
The opposite of the straw man argument: the steel man technique. “Put simply, it’s building the best form of the other side’s argument and then engaging with it.”
I listened to Ministry of Sound’s The Annual - Millennium Edition on heavy repeat in my mid 20s. What a treat it is to rediscover it on Soundcloud:
It’s an unofficial upload so who knows how long it will last. The three song mix by Judge Jules at the beginning of the first disc is still one of my all-time favorite mixes — I’m dancing in my chair to it right now.
The Ministry of Sound did a show back in September at the Royal Albert Hall where they re-imagined classic 90s dance music (Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers, etc.) backed by a 50-piece orchestra and vocalists. I found out about this via organist Anna Lapwood’s Instagram, where she posted a clip of her participation in the show: playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor as a lead-in to Insomnia by Faithless. I enjoyed the captions but the sound on her video is not great; I found this video on YouTube with much better sound (relevant part starts at the 4:15 mark):
I would love to have seen this live…I’d have lost my mind at this part. Sometimes I think I love remixes, mashups, and covers more than the original versions.
This entire article is a delight from start to finish, full of laugh-out-loud moments. I couldn’t decide which part to quote for you, so here are more than a few particularly delightful paragraphs.
The flight to Rome is sentient; it knows exactly where I’m going and what to provide. At my gate, I find myself sitting next to a guy eating a massive perfect panini. He smells like ten men, perhaps because of the additional paninis he is smuggling on his person. On the phone to his mother, he utters the immortal words: ‘And my sanweeches’.
Hope and I have, we have calculated, exactly 72 hours to be tourists. But the elements are against us — it’s 35°C, it’ll be 38°C tomorrow, and I forgot to bring deodorant to meet the pope. So we head to the farmacia, first things first, and buy me an Italian one that somehow makes me wetter than I have ever been in my life.
From there, we head to the Capuchin crypt. My Tyrolean mountain climbing outfit is judged too revealing, so I am asked to tie a sort of barber’s cape around my waist. ‘Just the waist!’ the man yelps, when I try to put it around my whole body; I’m not going to cheat him out of an arm view. Downstairs, I start my period immediately while looking at an illumination of Christ as a sausage, coming violently uncased. I contemplate the bloodstained sheets of the stigmatic Padre Pio.
Those six words every girl wants to hear: an Irish bishop is sponsoring me. He finds us at the welcome party on the second night at the Vatican Museums. Afterwards he takes us out to dinner, where I somehow, and to his grave disappointment (he had recommended the pasta), order the deepest salad in the world. There is literally no bottom to it, like mercy.
Before leaving that morning, we stuffed my bag with all sorts of objects, reasoning that if the pope blessed me, anything on my person would be blessed as well. It now has to go through the metal detector, a tense moment. I wonder what security will make of it — a jumble of legs, jaws, little girls, torsos and precious stones, all awaiting the gesture. How far does the principle of a blessing extend? Because there’s a tampon in there that going forward I will hesitate to use.
Sam Altman to return as CEO of OpenAI. All but one of the old board members are gone (including both women). New board members are Bret Taylor (Facebook/Salesforce) and Larry Summers (economist). The money won, full steam ahead.
I linked to this in the recent David Bowie post, but it’s worth pulling out separately: the 100 greatest BBC musical performances. This is an incredible trove of late 20th and early 21st century musical greatness. Some selections just off the top of my head:
Blondie – Atomic/Heart of Glass (The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1979):
Talking Heads – Psycho Killer (OGWT, 1978):
Daft Punk – Essential Mix (Radio 1, 1997):
Hole – Doll Parts/He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)/Violet (Later, 1995):
Joy Division – Transmission (Something Else, 1979):
Tumblr is betting big on going small. “We are shifting from the mode of ‘surging’ on Tumblr with tons of people to get it to exciting growth, to working on how we can run Tumblr in the most smooth and efficient manner.”
Manifesto for posting online in 2023. Liked this bit: “Most people would prefer you to be an indentikit loaf of sliced white supermarket bread, but we know that all of the goodness is in your funky sourdough starter mix.”
The reason is that now, we have a better story to tell. The evidence is clear: Responding to climate change will not only create a better world for our children and grandchildren, but it will also make the world better for us right now.
Eliminating the sources of greenhouse gas emissions will make our air and water cleaner, our economy stronger and our quality of life better. It could save hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives across the country through air quality benefits alone. Using land more wisely can both limit climate change and protect biodiversity. Climate change most strongly affects communities that get a raw deal in our society: people with low incomes, people of color, children and the elderly. And climate action can be an opportunity to redress legacies of racism, neglect and injustice.
I could still tell you scary stories about a future ravaged by climate change, and they’d be true, at least on the trajectory we’re currently on. But it’s also true that we have a once-in-human-history chance not only to prevent the worst effects but also to make the world better right now. It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions. Consider this your last warning from me.
Many things that were once true — that we didn’t have adequate solutions, that the general public wasn’t aware or engaged — no longer are. Outdated information is misinformation, and the climate situation has changed a lot in recent years. The physical condition of the planet — as this summer’s unprecedented extreme heat and flooding and Canada’s and Greece’s colossal fires demonstrate — has continued to get worse; the solutions have continued to get better; the public is far more engaged; the climate movement has grown, though of course it needs to grow far more; and there have been some significant victories as well as the incremental change of a shifting energy landscape.
Apparently, Aardman Animation is running out of clay. The company that produces the clay ceased operations and they only have enough for one more feature film. Uhhh, why doesn’t Aardman just buy the clay company? Lucasfilm had ILM after all.
These didn’t track as AI-generated at first…and then I tried to read the text — THE STANFORD PRESERIBENT. You can see the whole set on Bluesky (if you have access).
I came across 
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