 Roden
Issue #111
February 11, 2026 The trick is to just keep making stuff faster than the machines can eat your purpose
 Roden Readers — Hello from the backside of some Tokyo snow. It was purty. I miss snow. Maybe not as much snow as New York's been gettin', but still — I wish we had a good five or six snow days in Tokyo each year. As is, we're lucky to get one, and then it's all gone in twenty-four hours. I still remember a Valentine's Day night some thirteen years or so ago — a mega blizzard hit Tokyo. I popped out of a restaurant with a friend and we just laughed and laughed at all the snow, everywhere. On the TBOT-events-in-Japan side of things: I had a great event with Motoyuki Shibata in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago at Dandelion Chocolate. Thanks to everyone who came out for that (we had a sold out, packed room of lovely humans). More literary events in Tokyo is a thing I’d love to see more of this year.
 #Memberships, Year Seven Seven years I've been running this thing, SPECIAL PROJECTS. Here's my writeup about last year: Year eight? As usual: books — that's the focus, and will continue to be the focus. Writing the next book, and then the next, as catalyzed / driven / permissionized by the membership program. I also talk about the economics of the program, and how much money has come in from book sales (it's quite a bit). Also, "n of 1" software, and not being tied to a single monolithic entity as a membership container (i.e., Substack). "The Good Place" emerging as the big "surprise" of 2025, and of course my Things Become Other Things (amzn | bkshp) launch and tour. Mostly, it's a wistful meditation on running a program like this in 2026, a year that's only going to be considered the least weird of all years going forward. ("The coolest summer of the rest of your life," goes the old climate change joke.) Things are going to get stranger and stranger. More and more bad-faith. Meaning is going to be stripped from things we've traditionally derived meaning, and within all that, my gratitude for SPECIAL PROJECTS members and the community growing around it is like a cold plunge of grounding / sanity. Thanks to everyone who has joined. If you'd like to join, we'd love to have you. (Probably — as long as you're not a jerkface.)
 #The Creative Strategy of Just Keep Making If there's one thing you learn over the many years of making things, it's that you have no idea what's going to "hit." I mean, you have a sense of what's "good," of course, but your control over the narrative at large is mostly zilch. Sure, you can build up levers over the years, but nothing is guaranteed. So the absolute best muscle you can build is the one of: Next. Next. Next. I'm thinking of this in the context of directors like Scorsese or Woody Allen (lots of making, quite a few clunkers), and also musicians like Billy Joel (again, lots of doing before finding the success you know him for). And also writers. I was reading an old Paris Review interview with John Hersey, most famous for his 1946 piece on Hiroshima in The New Yorker (later published as a book, as happened often in Ye Olden Days of Getting Paid Stupendous Amounts of Money to Write 30,000+ Words for a Magazine and Then Getting Paid More for it to be Published as a Book Ha Ha Ha Ha). The entire issue was his piece. No ads. Nothing, just his account of six survivors. That's all I've known Hersey for. Turns out, he wrote twenty-one books (!!) and won the Pulitzer Prize for one of his novels. Nobody has ever recommended a single one of these books to me. Huh. It's weird, so weird, what breaks through and sustains over time. The Hersey interview, being from 1986, has some interesting asides. On word processors: Q: If we can talk a little bit about how you write: I understand you are a great fan of the word processor. Does it change the way you write in any way? HERSEY: I was introduced to the idea very early. Alvin Eisenman, the head of the design department of the Yale School of Art, came to me in 1972 and said that a young electrical engineer, Peter Weiner, was developing a program called the Yale Editor on the big university computer, with the hope that there would be terminals in every Yale office. They were curious to see whether it would work for somebody who was doing more or less imaginative work, and they asked me if I'd be interested in trying it. My habit up to that point had been to write first drafts in longhand and then do a great deal of revision on the typewriter. I had just finished the longhand draft of a novel that was eventually called My Petition for More Space, so I thought, well, I'll try the revision on this machine. And I found it just wonderfully convenient; a huge and very versatile typewriter was what it amounted to. It could remember what I'd done, and help me find mistakes, and so on. If I used an out-of-the-way word and had a dim memory of having used it a hundred pages earlier, I could simply type the word and ask the machine to find it, and there it would be, in its context, right away, instead of my having to riffle through a hundred pages and spend two or three hours looking for it. It was simply a time-saver. It took about a month to get used to looking at words on a screen, almost as if in a new language; but once that was past, it seemed just like using a typewriter. So when these badly-named machines—processor! God!—came on the market some years later, I was really eager to find one. I think there's a great deal of nonsense about computers and writers; the machine corrupts the writer, unless you write with a pencil you haven't chosen the words, and so on. But it has made revision much more inviting to me, because when I revised before on the typewriter, there was a commitment of labor in typing a page; though I might have an urge to change the page, I was reluctant to retype it. But with this machine, there's no cost of labor in revision at all, so I've found that I've spent much more time, much more care, in revision since I started using it. Q: Some writers think that what one starts out to write will come out differently if one uses a word processor. Not "corrupt," necessarily, but different … HERSEY I don't think so. I think every writer becomes habituated to a way of working that may matter to him a great deal. Disturbing the rituals surrounding writing may be very confusing, very difficult. I think there are a lot of things that are annoying about modern computers, particularly the ones that are interactive and keep giving you cute questions to answer as you work. That kind of thing would madden me. But I have a very simple, old-fashioned, "dedicated" word processor that doesn't inflict any of that on me. I think of it as a useful tool. It's fun to think about step changes in our personal storytelling / recording tools: Oral culture to clay tablets. Clay tablets to reeds and paper. Reeds and paper to … typewriters? (We were on some variation of "reeds and paper" (vellum/parchment, etcetera) for a very long time — 3000 BCE to the 1800s). Typewriters to word processors. Word processors to Super Computer Laptops. To … LLMs? One of these tools is not like the others. Perhaps the sweet spot was word processors — dedicated writing machines that afforded some simplicity (no dependence on physical media to write at length; search; inline editing; compact-ish) without (overly) compromising the act itself. No extraneous distractions, just thoughts and words. Laptops kinda ruined this. I find it hard to focus on my laptop, the wondermachine it now is. So: I'm typing this on my "modern" word processor — the cheapest iPad Mini I could find, stripped of anything fun, with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, in Obsidian. It's been working pretty well for me. iPadOS is so bad (at this point they'd need to do a full reset to make it feel whole and / or interesting) that it makes doing any kind of "fluid computing" impossible. So it's best to just stay in Obsidian and write. Sadly, you can't remove Safari from iOS (maybe the EU can help me out with this request?). But the system is pretty close to a pure networked (for backups, syncing) writing machine. I've written more in the last few weeks on this, more easily, than on anything else I've owned (this says more about me than any device).
Also, one last big quote from the Hersey interview, if you'll indulge me. On atomic weapons: Well, let me put it another way around to begin with. I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima. I think that an argument can still be made that it would have been better to demonstrate the bomb somewhere else, rather than dropping it on a city. That might have brought an end to the war. Yet I wonder whether we might not have experienced another use of the bomb, since then, if there had been only a demonstration on a desert island. The demonstrations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so powerful that we have been able, so far, to extrapolate from them what it would be like to have a much bigger bomb dropped on a center of population. But if memory had been fully active, fully functional, we would long since have had some agreement on the use—or rather the nonuse—of these weapons, some curbs on their manufacture and deployment. For some, the memory is certainly still there; but it seems to me very spotty in the centers of power. A Caspar Weinberger or a Richard Perle, it seems to me, must never have grasped the meaning of the Hiroshima bomb, the way they go on about a future with bigger and better nuclear weapons. In the Soviet Union, there's probably very little memory of it. The control of information there is such that I wonder how many really know what happened in Hiroshima. Then, you have to remember that two generations have come along since the bombs were dropped. A very large number of citizens of this country, of every country, have no memory at all of what happened. The memory isn't even there. We're so far away from the bomb having been dropped that more bombs than ever — bigger than ever — are being produced. We are fools. I often annoy my friends by saying: the biggest issue in the world isn't climate change or some political hellstorm or Robot Reddit, but the fact that we have all these bombs lying around. And something dumb and profoundly and cosmically sad (and avoidable) will eventually happen as long as they exist. Outside the bomb, but rhyming with atomic destruction: consider boredom or downtime. "Everything is boring and no one is bored" is a quote I heard recently about our contemporary moment that feels true (see also: David Marx' Blank Space). In the same way we've forgotten what atomic fear is like, we've also forgotten how to be quiet with ourselves, to "authentically" engage with the world, sans smartphone mediation. I'm left wondering what's worse: a world with a dozen loud atomic explosions, or one suffused with the quietude of doomscrolling until death (and all the attendant second-order consequences of such; the loss of meaning and a rise of fascism being, to me, clearly one of them).
 YouTube is one of — if not the biggest — "miracles" of the internet. (I think it's far more important / miraculous than Wikipedia.) Yes, it's getting "crappier," ("enshittified") and yes shorts are a major "crack" in its foundation of "purity." But keep in mind, YouTube's not some non-profit — it's run by GOOGLE for God's sake ("I’ve abandoned my child!" everyone at Google should scream each time they look at a search results page). That it's been as good as it's been for as long as it’s been good is the tenth wonder of the world. Regardless, the best parts of YouTube are the committedly weird parts. And this channel, the insanely named "Technology Connections," is one of the weirdest of all the wildly popular channels out there. I don't know how I first encountered it. I think, eight months ago, I was trying to learn how to "best" use a dishwasher, a machine I had never before owned. Up he popped, Alec Watson and his channel, in the search results. I will sheepishly admit: Almost everything about the channel made me uncomfortable. The clothes. The background. The cadence. The gaze. But, the Alec was also … oddly compelling … in his total commitment to the bit. (I mention this because I think a lot of potential viewers "bounce off" this guy; he'll grow on you.) And so I watched. And watched more. And eventually subscribed (it's fascinating, the journey of a "subscription" button click). And then he posted this gem a couple of weeks back: (Period and all, in the title.) It's worth watching the whole thing. For the record, I watched it at 3x speed (I am a heathen, I know, but he also speaks very slowly, and I'm certain mosta y’all out there can even handle this one in 2x). But the real oomph of the video is at the end, the last twenty minutes, where he gets MAD. (!!) And PASSIONATE. (!!!!) In a way I'm not sure if I've ever seen a tech-adjacent YouTuber get before. I've seen performative political dingdongs do the whole "mad" thing, but this is a Midwestern geek in his garage/bedroom, getting truly riled up, and riled up about FACTS. And ENERGY. And it's hard to argue with anything he's frustrated about. It's all very sensible. And I think his fist slamming (which he does, actually, impressively, and without self-consciousness) is appropriate and powerful. Why every desk in this world of ours isn’t in pieces on the floor is a daily mystery to me. Because: What he feels is what I think all of us with brains half screwed in feel: That we (collectively) have the capacity for so much more than we do, and yet systemically we (collectively, but especially in the United States of America) so utterly undermine activating this goodness that it makes you feel INSANE. And makes you feel, if you're of a certain rational mindset, like you're in an eternal state of being gaslit. Anyway, I'm glad Alec Watson (what a name) is out there, and I'm glad he's making these wacky, useful videos about dishwashers, but I'm even gladder he's making these more poignant videos about energy, and about legislative idiocy and our capacity for so much more.
#Thanks Thanks again to everyone who has joined SPECIAL PROJECTS. Come on by TGP. Share something fun. Things Become Other Things (amzn | bkshp) is $17 bucks on Amazon. If you've enjoyed it and haven't left a review, please do. I think it helps with some of the more atomic forces whirling around a publication. Over in the SPECIAL PROJECTS shop we've got the sixth edition of Kissa by Kissa, and OTHER THING, both ship next-business-day, and arrive pretty much anywhere in the world in a few days. Oh, in the next few days I’ll be running a members-only Q&A explicitly about the membership program itself. Mail going out in the next day or so announcing / providing the link. There was no Roden in January because I was on deadline for other articles, and was working on the big SPECIAL PROJECTS write-up. I have a whole stack of books and films I want to write to you about. More soon in another Roden near you. To more banging of fists on desks in 2026,
C
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