12. People are going to be like, “Aren’t those gourds straining your neck?”
You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.
Some personal news
TL:DR - My wife and I are about to have a baby, so soon I’ll have to take a break from doing this. In two more weeks, to be precise.
The whole time I’ve been writing this newsletter, I’ve known that we were about to have a baby and our lives would change and that any free time would evaporate or at least need to be prioritised. We found out we were pregnant in February, and every, like, three minutes since then the subject would find its way to my frontal cortex.
I actually thought about making this newsletter a parenting thing, with links to parenting-related content and such. “Parent-theses”, get it? But I rejected that idea pretty quickly – what do I know about parenting? And don’t parents get enough unsolicited advice? And ultimately I realised I didn’t want to harvest that part of my life for ~content~ .
So I knew would have to end it around now. I just didn’t know the best way to handle it. My initial idea was to tell you, around now, “hey, I’m about to have a baby, and then have to deal with that, so if you suddenly stop receiving this, that’s why.”
But then I realised that was a pretty passive way to approach this. Given how little control I have over the whole birth thing, this seemed a little silly.
Luckily, last week my two newsletter dads – Robin Sloan and Craig Mod – sent out two things that together gave me the idea for a solution to this issue.
Craig’s newsletter talked about the lack of clear “contracts” on the web, and their replacement with “appholes” and infinite scroll and the likes of Netflix, whose main competition is (seriously, they’re on-record as saying this) sleep.
Robin’s email discussed the essential “edgelessness” of the internet. It just kind of… goes. Your options are: go on forever, or just vaguely end quietly. If you start a project on the Internet, you should probably work out how you’re gonna end it. He specifically called out newsletters as being in danger of just kind of petering out, and he pointed to the metaphor of “seasons” as a potential solution*.
So yeah, Season One of Parentheses will end on issue 14. Season Two starts… at some point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Expect zero parenting advice. Expect maximum incoherence. So, normal emails from me, really.)
Visual Aids Aide
Check out this cool thing
How Remy Sharp set up offline access for his blog.
Observable is a “magic notebook for creating visualisations”.
Free Your Mind
Learn/try this thing
If you still haven’t met GraphQL, here’s a perfect lil intro. You’ll love them!
Clever uses for household items.
Duck Duck Terrible Goose
Some silly things
The new “season” of Dissect will cover DAMN, btw. Sign me up!
Like quite a few people (#1 in the Switch Online Store!) I have started wandering around, flapping my wings and ruining people’s shit. (Playing Untitled Goose Game, I mean.) Honkify makes every website more goose-like.
Austin Kleon talked to strangers, suggests you do too.
Remember when I mentioned Desire Lines a few weeks ago?. Here’s another one: people using Instagram to read novels.
Ishkur’s guide to electronic music.
Finally, it’s decorative gourd season, so you know what that means. Real talk: can I be a father and also own one of these mugs?
Call to Action
Send this to someone you think may enjoy it, as long as they’re cool. I would love to have more of y’all on the team. No haters.