Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.
— Gloria Steinem in her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. Rest in peace and thank you for everything.
Tags: #approval
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When you know you love working with someone, keep doing it. That’s why my business partner Chris and I are cooking up something new together. We plan to launch by the end of the year. Visit our website to get a small taste of our new brand, designed by the excellent Jonas Leupe, and to sign up to get an email when it goes live. I’ll also post about it here.
Tags: #partnership #chrisandgina
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I’ve always been curious about 3D printers, so last fall when there was a Black Friday deal on a great model, I picked one up. I wondered if it would be one of these gadgets my family would play with for a couple months then forget about, but it turns out: we haven’t stopped printing since.
Whenever I tell anyone about it, the first question is, “What do you do with it?” At first it was making lots of silly fidget toys and figurines for my kid. Then it became about a lot more than toys.
A month or so in, during a dark and depressing winter, the printer gave me unexpected purpose. I joined a community of people 3D printing community ICE alert whistles. Over the course of a few months I personally printed and shipped several thousand whistles across the country. I was just one tiny node in a giant decentralized network of likeminded people trying to protect our communities, but it made me feel so connected and hopeful.
When I wasn’t printing whistles and fidgets, the thing I came to love printing the most is household stuff—all the gadgets and containers and tools and doodads that make our lives easier, nicer, and more organized.
I started small with stuff like planters, closet door hooks, a remote control holder, chopstick holders, travel containers, and a 2-in-1 iPhone and AirPods charging stand. I got more ambitious making jewelry boxes, a travel version of Tetris, soap dishes, a toilet paper stand, a desk organizer, and even a shelving unit.
I even designed my own very simple first model and published it here: a minimal electrical outlet cover.
The household projects that brought my little heart the greatest satisfaction were thanks to an open, extensible organization system called Gridfinity. This modular system helps you organize drawers of stuff—think junk drawers, kitchen utensils, office supplies, tools—into customized, perfectly fitted containers that snap into a grid. (Its creator Zack Freedman also made one of the greatest project announcement YouTube videos ever.) Freedman released Gridfinity under an open license, which means the 3D printing community has made and published endless Gridfinity-compatible models, which make it so easy to pick and choose what you need off the shelf.
Once I discovered Gridfinity, I went to town. When life feels out of control, there are few things more soothing than organizing small objects in little boxes.
I started with a messy drawer of office supplies I used to rummage through, inevitably poking myself with a thumbtack in the process.
Here’s the Gridfinity baseplate, and a couple of the containers I printed to organize this mess. The bottoms are designed to snap into the grid. I added a little yellow top edge for clearer visuals.
I also printed custom, green containers for various battery sizes, which have spots to glue in little magnets if you want extra stickiness.
Here’s the final, organized version of the drawer. It’s never been easier to grab a battery or a thumbtack now without hurting myself.
I’ve also Gridfinitied my kitchen utensil drawer. Take that, Rubbermaid.
All in all, I’ve derived so much more joy from a hard-to-justify 3D printer purchase than I expected. Yes, the printer with all the filament spools and related tools take up a lot of space; it occasionally jams and needs maintenance; more complicated prints require babysitting multiple plates over the course of hours; I worry about landfills and wasted filament. But having our own little personal factory to make things we need, learning and teaching my kid about 3D modeling and making a digital drawing real through tools we have at home, and appreciating others’ amazing creativity and generosity in the community has been far worth it.
Reading about how others got into 3D printing helped me take the leap myself, so here are some questions curious friends and fellow nerds have asked me.
I bought the Bambu P1S. I got it with an AMS so I could print with multiple colors. (This was my first pre-purchase lesson: The printer alone only handles one roll of filament and therefore one color at a time. The AMS lets the printer change colors automatically during a print.) I picked this model because the 3D printing YouTubers I watch plus a couple trusted friends all said it was a great printer for the price, which at the time was just under $600. Now as of writing the P1S by itself is $399.
I didn’t have any prior printer to compare the P1S to, but as a complete beginner I was able to assemble it, plug it in, and start making stuff very quickly. I’ve come to appreciate that it is a beautiful machine designed to be taken apart, serviced by the user, and easily reassembled: refreshing in a world of sealed electronics. Bambu’s thorough documentation includes videos on how to address common problems—things like jams and stuck filament spools. Even after just a few months of printing, I feel like I have a decent mental model of how the machine works and have even developed an intuition for what’s going right or wrong with a print when I hear it make certain sounds.
Mainly you control the printer through the Bambu Handy software, which does a lot more than I expected. It lets you modify and customize the model before you print it, livestreams a video of your print in progress to your app, and records timelapse videos, which are always fun to watch. There are some rough edges to the app, but there are regular updates to it and over the last 9 months of releases it’s gotten better and easier to use. The mobile apps are not as fully-featured as the desktop app and I hope to see them catch up, but it does feel like magic to start and watch a print on my phone.
Makerworld is a community site of 3D models that you can download and print for free. Similar to shared public code on GitHub, users take models they like, make modifications, and re-upload to the original maker, or upload a whole new design to the site. A decent system of ratings and boosts incentivize 3D designers to share their work, and deep discussions and photos of prints in the comments give you lots of information about how things will go if you commit your printer time and filament to the model. There are several other sites like Makerworld including Printables, but because it’s in the Bambu ecosystem I’ve mostly stuck to Makerworld.
Way too many things to list, but a handful of my favorite prints so far include these things.
For kids:
And a few things for grown-ups:
What are your favorite 3D models? Send me all the links.
Tags: #3d-printing #hardware
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My favorite pieces of art make me understand and appreciate things I’ve never cared about before. Horror is not my film genre of choice, but I saw Jane Schoenbrun’s slasher film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma a week ago and I’m still thinking about it. It’s weird, queer, gory, uncomfortable, and funny in the best ways. I especially loved the care and thought and effort that went into details like the opening credits and set design. Plus it’s about sexual healing with lots of candy and Gillian Anderson. Recommend.
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Anil did a nice job building and publishing a fun project: a DIY Touch ID-like fingerprint sensor that can unlock your Mac, called Dashboard Touch. I liked what he wrote about making it: “Nearly every task in this project has had me stretching to do things that I’m pretty bad at, from firmware coding to security review to detailed carpentry to video editing.” Working at the edge of your capabilities across different skills is the most uncomfortable and satisfying kind of project.
Tags: #hardware
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I’ll always be a sucker for great software tools that help people get things done together. Diddit is a new one from Chris I’ve been using for awhile now. It’s a log of stuff you need get done every so often. The ones you’d ask a partner, “When was the last time we….?” As in: changed the sheets, cleaned the oven, replaced the filter. The app doesn’t require you to sign up for an account, and it doesn’t store user data—instead, it saves your info in your own iCloud account. I wish more apps were designed this way.
Tags: #collaboration #tools
]]>Someday is now. Thanks to friends, family, lifting, and therapy, I’m feeling human enough to want to be in the world again.
So hi. Hello again. How’ve you been? If you’re reading this, thanks for sticking around. It feels great to publish again. More to come.
Tags: #meta
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This 13-minute animated short film Forevergreen is delightful food for the soul. The filmmakers released this digital book on the art that made up the film. The porcupines are my favorite.
Tags: #animation #short-film #art
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I got a 3D printer for fun and making stuff and now it’s my whole personality. (More on this soon.) It is also an outlet for dealing with my rage and heartbreak about the horrific murders and actions by ICE, Border Patrol, and federal agents here in the U.S. I’ve been printing and distributing community protection whistles in bulk with this incredible crew. Need whistles for your community? Request them here.
Tags: #3d-printing #protest
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The most common piece of personal finance advice out there is to “know your net worth”—the number that represents your assets minus your liabilities. As a money nerd supporting a family in an expensive city, for years I viewed that number as a measure of how well we were doing.
It’s easy to make a number more important than it is. When the number went up, I felt good. When it went down, I felt bad. Eventually, I realized: this game is meaningless. It’s putting points on the most boring scoreboard in the world. That’s why my favorite idea in Bill Perkins’ book Die with Zero is prioritizing net fulfillment over net worth.
I’d rather spend my time and energy trying to live the most fulfilling life I can than to accumulate a sum of money. Money itself doesn’t build relationships, create memories, bring you closer to your loved ones, or express who you are to the world. It’s how you spend money that can make those things easier.
When you optimize for net fulfillment over net worth, it’s a whole different game. It shifted my “save to make number go up” mindset to a different frame: “spend what we are able to on the things that matter most.”
So what are the things that matter most? This is a personal question, and you will have your own answers. Three years ago, I added a “Net Fulfillment” tab in front of the “Net Worth” tab in my personal finance spreadsheet. I use it to jot down the things I got the most fulfillment from, whether they cost money or not. Filling in and looking over the list each month is my favorite part of managing our money. Things that require discretionary money often make the list—like travel, home improvement projects, gifts, and going to shows. Things that don’t cost money also make appearances—like time with friends and family, enjoying nature, moving my body, learning and making things, and time to myself.
Once I started looking at our finances through the lens of net fulfillment, I wanted to cut every low-fulfillment expense. Again this list will be different for everyone. For me, it includes “stuff” that clutters our space but doesn’t bring enough value to justify it. Subscriptions that aren’t worth it. Tools I fight with or don’t enjoy using. Items that don’t look good or elevate the space they take up in my life aesthetically. Activities and social obligations that I do because I’m supposed to, not because I want to. Mindless purchases I make because I’m looking for a dopamine hit; things I need because I didn’t plan or think ahead; buying things to prove myself to others, or manage appearances. These kinds of purchases will always happen because I’m human, but an honest inventory helps me be more aware of it going forward.
The ability to save money is an important life skill, and so is the ability to spend it well. When I look at everything my family spends our money on, my goal isn’t to spend the least possible so we can save the most anymore. Instead, it is to spend as much money, time, and effort as we are able to on the things that bring the most joy, meaning, connection, and satisfaction.
Tags: #money #fulfillment
]]>I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die.
The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
— Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, one of my favorite books about writing.
]]>I’m only fifteen days in here, but so far, so good. The first week I had to train my attention on these changes and work to make them. This week, they are feeling a bit easier and more automatic. If I keep at it, at some point these changes will be no-brainers, and it’ll be time to make new tweaks and improvements. Wish me luck. What changes are you making in 2026?
Tags: #achievers #habits #writing #new-year
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AI CEO generates corporate executive thought leadership at the push of a button. “We’re not destroying habitats, we’re creating urban opportunities for wildlife.”
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Happy New Year! My favorite January tradition is treating myself to a fresh new notebook. A friend asked our group what our best notebooks are, and that question was a gift because I have thoughts.
Here’s what I said.
How do you use your notebook and what do you need from it? When my notebook is my daily driver, I am really hard on it. I take it with me everywhere and fill it cover to cover. I don’t want to worry about damaging it or be precious about losing it or caring for it. I want it to be easy and feel great to write in every time I have something to get out of my head. Like all great tools, the best notebook makes me want to use it.
My ideal notebook must: lay flat while open, stay closed while bouncing around my bag, have a wayfinder to my current page, not be too big or too small, look great, and feel good in my hands. The pages have to be thick enough to handle my favorite pen and not bleed or press through ink. A notebook gets bonus points if it has perforated pages to tear out, a folder inside the cover to store bits of paper, and if its pages are numbered. I like a generous header, footer, and margin on the pages, too.
When I’m in fulltime pen-and-paper mode, I grind through several $10-$30 notebooks a year, and re-buy the ones I want to use again. Here are a few notebooks I’ve enjoyed filling in recent years. (No sponsors or affiliate links here—just notebooks I’ve loved.)
I just received a Hokusai: The Great Wave Artisan Art Notebook as a holiday gift. The soft vegan leather cover is etched with one of my favorite pieces of art in the world, and feels great to hold. The wave on the page edges really got me, too. This is a notebook I do want to take care of, so it mostly stays at home and I’m using it for morning pages.
MOO’s hardcover notebooks come with a hard case and I beat the heck out of mine on my daily NYC commute and they took no damage. I kept the cover in my bag and slid it in when I was heading out the door. I don’t know how they made the binding, but this is the only hardcover notebook I’ve used that actually lays flat when open.
Poppin’s medium softcovers feel nice in hand and have fun solid colors. The first one I used was a freebie that came with a Poppin office furniture order, and I assumed it would be a low-end throwaway. Turns out I really liked how compact and put together it was, and I wound up buying more to use as my daily work planner and note-taker once I finished the first one. I’ve filled several of these but my commute did do some damage to the edges of the soft covers by the time I got to the last page.
The Mnemosyne A5 is a smart spiral-bound option, which absolutely lays flat. It has nice roomy page header, and subtle thick lines separate the pages into thirds, which helps you draw things like a weekly layout. The pages are also perforated so you can tear them out. This notebook does not come with a bookmark, which I missed very much. I stuck a ribbon in there myself and it worked but it was janky.
When I was full-on bullet-journaling I used several regular non-branded notebooks—which all work, to the credit of the non-proprietary system—but the “official” Leuchtturm 1917 bullet journal saved me the time of numbering pages and building the index and yearly view pages.
There are a lot of beautiful, high-end notebook systems online and I’m tempted by them all. Then I’ll be standing in the school supplies aisle at my local drugstore and remember that when you love the feeling of pen on paper, a $6 marble composition book will call to you, too.
Happy New Year!
Tags: #tools #writing #note-taking #new-year
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What do you like, and why do you like it? Personally, I have to practice answering this question. I get influenced by what others like. I have an internal judge telling me what I should and shouldn’t like. When I do know I like a thing, it’s not easy to quantify why I enjoyed feeling whatever it made me feel.
This past year, to practice figuring out what I like and why I like it, I rated and wrote a couple sentences about every single thing I watched, read, or listened to all year. As of today (late December), I’ve written 115 reviews of the movies, television shows, theater productions, books, albums, and podcasts I consumed in 2025. Whew! Here are the ones I enjoyed the most.
Sometimes even as a grown-ass adult you unabashedly love the most popular kids movie of the year. KPop Demon Hunters brought me the most joy by far this year. The art, the characters, the story, the songs all hit just right.
Rental Family was unexpectedly beautiful and had my heart in its hands in the first ten minutes.
Several documentaries left their mark on me this year. I sunk my teeth into The Quilters (on craft and purpose), The Speed Cubers (on friendship and competition and autism), Come See Me in the Good Light (on loving life), and Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey (on rehabilitating an amazing creature).
Hands down my favorite TV series released in 2025 was Dying for Sex, a story about two things relevant to my interests: devoted friendship and squeezing every last drop out of the days you have left on this planet.
I also fangirled hard over the new seasons of Hacks (Deborah and Ava 4eva) and Severance (just gets weirder in the best ways).
Honorary mentions: Adolescence rocked me. Families Like Ours stuck to my ribs. The Bear’s new season kept up its whole vibe. Operation Space Station inspired awe. The Last of Us left me a smoldering pile of ashes. Couples Therapy fed my inner voyeur. A Man on the Inside got me to laugh-cry both seasons.
In 2025 I let my inner theater kid loose and saw more Broadway shows than I had in years.
Sarah Snook blew my mind playing all 26 characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray. I laughed my butt off with friends at Death Becomes Her. My tiny heart grew several sizes seeing Real Women Have Curves with my mom and my sister. The Come From Away live stage film on Apple TV+ cracked me open as much as it did when I saw the show at the theater.
I also loved Oh, Mary!, Beetlejuice, taking my preteen to see Wicked on Broadway, and the Merrily We Roll Along live stage film.
I didn’t read nearly as much as I hoped to in 2025, but the most absorbing and affecting novel I could not put down was Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir All the Way to the River got stuck in my craw, and seeing her on tour connected me to the depth of her story even more. I also loved Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time and Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity.
My favorite album to rage-bop to this year was Lily Allen’s West End Girl. Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving was the perfect chaser. Thanks to the movies and the show, all three Wicked soundtracks got a ton of playtime in our household as well.
I didn’t do much podcast-listening this year, but We Can Do Hard Things continues to speak to my heart, and I admire what Ramit Sethi is doing in the personal finance space at Money for Couples.
Writing things down helps me understand them more, and compiling this list helped me see two things. First, I consumed a lot of mediocre stuff this year as a matter of habit or convenience or FOMO. Second, I found almost all the things I enjoyed most via human versus algorithmic recommendations.
As I look at other best-of-2025 lists publishing this month, I also see how much stuff I never got to this year. There will always be more to enjoy than time to enjoy it. How do you pick what you give your time and attention to? Tell me your secret.
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Digital tech has flattened our experience of the world to text under a glass touchscreen, writes Amelia Wattenberger in a beautifully-illustrated essay. We should build more computer interfaces that serve the way humans experience the world—through their five senses.
I think about this idea in terms of how my kid sees me get stuff done. When I was growing up and observing my parents manage our family life, I watched them jot plans on a paper calendar hanging in our kitchen, write checks and stuff stamped envelopes to pay the bills every week, scribble weekly grocery shopping lists, plan a month of family dinners on index cards, keep an address book of names and phone numbers, call their friends on the phone, and spend Saturdays going to the bank, the butcher, and the post office. Today, my kid observes me doing all those different things but has no indicator of what I’m actually doing unless I show her and tell her, because it all just looks like me tapping on a phone screen or typing on my laptop.
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Netflix released 142 gorgeous pages of digital art and behind-the-scenes stories about the making of KPop Demon Hunters, its most-watched film of all time. Writer/director Maggie Kang: “I knew I wanted to see female superheroes who were a lot more relatable, who like to eat and make silly faces….not just being pretty, sexy and cool, but with real insecurities.” This one’s a true visual feast — for the fans!
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— Rosie Perez’s advice to young people in this NYT Magazine feature on Gen X, “the last generation that wasn’t online until adulthood.”
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I can’t get this lovely second-half story out of my head: Paul Lundy, a man in his mid-50s, left his lucrative and unfulfilling corporate career behind to repair typewriters. There’s just something irresistible about fixing things with your own two hands.
Tags: #second-half #hardware #diy
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Last weekend’s Black Friday deals lured me to my local computer superstore, where I picked up a bunch of parts, went home, unboxed them all, plugged them into one another, pressed the power button, and crossed my fingers. Beep! My new server booted up, in all its redundant storage glory. Now I have enough room to store and search all my photos and videos and files, without relying on Google or Apple or Amazon to do it for me.
It’s been about six years since I’ve built any sort of computing device. The last one was an adorable and simple Raspberry Pi that cost under $80 at the time, and is still blocking ads on our home network like a champ. In the meantime, I’ve been buying myself shiny, sealed Apple computers that are all set up for you out of the box. There’s joy in that, for sure—I love my MacBook. But when you build a computer yourself, it just hits different.
You research, spec out, and price your enclosure, hard drives, and RAM. You leave room to expand, and make sure you can easily swap a drive in and out later if it ever fails. When you power it on the first time there’s the wonder of seeing it actually boot up. There’s the ouch of damn-let-me-fix it when you see the RAM you added hasn’t been recognized yet—gotta reseat it. There’s that feeling of snapping it into place and knowing you got it this time. There’s the anguish of realizing that SSD drive you bought it turns out isn’t compatible with this model despite all your research, and having to do a second trip to the computer superstore to exchange it. (First rule of building a computer: It always involves a second trip to the store.) There’s the meditative work of formatting the drives, installing the software, and setting things up just how you want them. Then there’s the satisfaction of seeing the device lights flickering and thinking, “Hey, I built that.”
I love my shiny sealed computers that just work when I turn them on, but they never feel quite as mine as the ones I snapped together with my own hands.
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