I’m currently providing a little offering to the people who attend my talk in Portland in a few weeks, and in doing so I am writing.

Writing is best defined as four days of total psychic heat death, followed by three hours of writing the first draft in an absolute fugue state, concluded with four weeks of editing it into a fine paste. This writing is 1,200 words, so of course it’s taken over 100 hours to edit. I don’t have 100 hours to edit anything in 2026, so I’m editing it on the train, while I wait for the doctor, while I wait for my food at restaurants, while I walk the dogs. It has filled the cracks of my existence. Yet this will not make for writing that is necessarily good, because the writing may just be for me and not for you. Is the writing useful? Unclear. The writing talks about us. Writing is seldom useful when it’s about the author. Too ego-filled, ungenerous. But this writing acts as a bit of a business card, as a nice little way of planting our flag in the sand. Remember us, it says. We once met a client who saw us speak, said hello, they liked our talk and wanted to talk later but they had to run, and we handed them our business card and went about the rest of the conference. We ended up working together for almost four years. That was the only time we ever met in person.

The writing also plays to our strengths. We do both flag-plants and zines well. Zines are distinctive. Few others do them well.

The first draft is always muddy, and writing is imprecise even when it’s “good.” The idea of clarity in writing. How is writing clear? We’re not lawyers or mathematicians. The more we get into the weeds of design, the more we lean on vibe & emotion. We work well in that space and feel like our older work is a bit of an away game. When we have to print a thing now, we retreat back into an intellectual space, and so we have to edit from that angle, which feels unfamiliar and weird, a muscle you flex after a long time off.

And the wildest thing about saying any of this here is that we’re printing only 20 copies, and so we will absolutely run out. The goal is to run out by handing copies to people who are new to us. If you’re reading this, you are not new to us. Presumably you already get it. The thing will teach you nothing. Who, then, needs to learn?