312: ‘Not to Get Zealotrous’, With Craig Mod

The Talk Show With John Gruber

Craig Mod joins the show to talk about writing, designing, filmmaking, what makes for good software, and building a successful membership program to support independent art. And: pizza toast.

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Links:

• Craig’s annual essays about running a subscription:

  • Year one.
  • Year two.

• “Kissa by Kissa” — Craig’s book documenting, in words and photos, “walking 1,000+km of the countryside of Japan along the ancient Nakasendō highway, the culture of toast (toast!), and mid-twentieth century Japanese cafés called kissaten.”

• “Pizza Toast & Coffee” — Craig’s new short film.

• Craigstarter — Craig’s open source project to host your own Kickstarter-like projects.

• Craig’s recent essay for Wired on the pleasure of programming, or as he calls it, “coding”.

• “Fast Software, the Best Software” — Craig’s 2019 essay on the feel of software tools.

• Kevin Kelly’s seminal “1,000 True Fans” essay.

• Author Karl Ove Knausgård, who calls his editors each day to read that day’s work to them.

• Software tools mentioned:

  • Ulyssses.
  • Final Cut Pro, which no longer has an “X”.
  • Lightroom Classic, the “Classic” part of which feels ominous.
  • Robin Sloan’s tweet deleting script.
  • Plausible Analytics.
  • Fathom Analytics.
  • fzf — Command-line fuzzy finder search tool.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.