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

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.