This is a warm up

A delightful recent surprise, and a consequent decision

A few weeks ago, I opened up an email from Craig Mod regarding my subscription to his Special Projects membership program. It was about time for my subscription to renew, so I didn't really think much of it, but then I read the email the gist of which was: 

Hey this is going out to the people who have been subscribers since day one and have stuck with me through the years. I just gave you a free membership for the next 10 years.

I was gobsmacked and absolutely tickled. It was an act of generosity that was so completely unnecessary and entirely unexpected that part of me wanted to protest and insist that I want Craig to have my money because I am all in on letting Craig Mod do whatever project he desires at any given time. 

But I also know it's impolite to reject another person's generosity, so instead I'll be putting the money I would have sent Craig's way to let him do interesting things to someone else who needs a little money to do something that may be not at all commercially reasonable. It won't necessarily have the network effect that Craig's membership program had, but that's OK. Also, if you think this should be you please do reach out.

But that also got me thinking a little bit about Nerd Notes, which is the "premium" subscription version of this newsletter and has been running for about a year and a half now. I didn't start Nerd Notes to make money; I started it because I knew that there was often stuff I was leaving on the cutting room floor or extraordinarily niche rabbit holes that I wanted to go down at a level of intensity that might feel offputting to the casual reader of this newsletter. So Nerd Notes was a way for people to signal "hey, actually I want all of that weirdness." And because the only way I could figure out back then to set it up was to create a subscription fee, that was what I did. In the early days, I made some custom merchandise for anyone who subscribed so the majority of what they sent my way came back to them. 

But Craig's email got me thinking about whether I still needed to keep that paywall up...and that got me exploring...and that got me to realize: there's a way around this.

So, here's the deal:

• if you want the Routine Chaos B-sides, digressions, the early access to projects when they're still taking form, then sign up for Nerd Notes. It now has a 10 year free trial^[1].
• If you want to see what you've been missing out on, the archive of Nerd Notes posts has now been opened up and is publicly accessible. 
• if you're already a Nerd Notes subscriber, I've already cancelled your paid subscription and turned it into a complimentary one - thanks for the encouragement. It was the permission I needed to go in some directions that I wouldn't have otherwise and I'm delighted with where it's taken me.

Oh BTW, I'm actually having fun on TikTok

I'm as surprised as you are, but I've been making a video every week of opening my pack of cards for RMLAB, and then making another one where I talk about the book I chose.

And in the interest of not getting sucked into the social media vortex, I've got some basic rules:

• I only access it through the browser on my computer.
• I spend 10-15 minutes scrolling every time I post something and no other time.
• I only follow accounts that are about books.

Links as foreshadowing

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll tell you about how I used Claude to help me with this link's list at the end of the list...just know, there was some AI assistance here. 

This month's links have a common thread running through them: at some point in the next couple weeks^[2], you'll get the first installment of my write up of my November 2025 trip to Singapore. After drafting and scrapping and redrafting and rescrapping, over the last couple weeks I figured out what it was that I was trying to say...and while the work to now turn it into a coherent piece of writing is still underway, I at least feel good about the direction. 

And the thing that changed the game was that I read The Score by C. Thi Nguyen, and it crystallized so many loose strands of thought that have been running around inside my brain related to play and its importance.

So, consider this as the primer for some things you should dig into as the entry point to the impending Singapore write up...

• Nguyen on Design Matters with Debbie Millman - if you're not in the position to drop everything to read the book itself then a) you should reconsider your life priorities, but b) you can also listen to this interview he did with Debbie Millman who is such a consistently excellent interviewer. I will say: I don't think she goes deep into the most subversive ideas in the book, but it's still a good high level overview. 
  • You could also listen to him on my favorite nerdy podcast, My Perfect Console. Only click on that link if you're ready to splash down a few dollars on new games. 
• Playgrounds, Not Playpens - when the shape of the essay I'm writing became clear to me, there was an area that just didn't fit anymore related to the contrast between public and commercial spaces. A lot of the thinking about it, especially as it relates to the rise of mall playgrounds, came from this essay. 
• The Orthogonal Bet: Scenario Planning - Gordon Brander is one of those people who has the ability to play around with interesting ideas and turn them into interesting prototypes and products. This interview with him gets into the new product he's building, Deep Future, and how it sits in this intersection between the domains that Nguyen writes about: the game and the real world. In discussing scenario planning, Brander is also talking about the problems people encounter when they apply the wrong scoring system - in this case, applying a risk-based scoring system to an uncertainty-based construct. 
• The Elite Abdicated - I've been sitting this one for a while. It harmonizes with Nguyen's writing while also creating dissonance. Worth noting, that Nguyen's writing about bureaucracy isn't wholly critical. He draws out the qualities of bureaucracy that allow for systems to run predictably at large scales, and one of the key qualities is standards and standardization. This essay gets into the breakdown of common standards of class aspiration. Personally, I think it overstates the value of elites and the influence of elite standards...but I also don't think the authors are wrong. This is similar to what I wrote about in January regarding the broken scoreboard of the Forbes Billionaire List. 

A note on AI Assistance

Nothing above and nothing in this newsletter ever was written by AI. I enjoy writing, so it's not something I want to use an LLM for.

I do, however, have a long backlog of things I've read, watched, and listened to sitting in my Readwise Reader account, and I did connect that account via MCP to Claude and asked Claude to find some interesting themes and then suggest some links around those themes.

The majority of the links above weren't actually sourced by Claude through that exercise. Even the general theme isn't exactly what Claude recommended. At the end of the day, I don't know that this particular exercise made me efficient in terms of saving me time: after I saw the original suggestions, I took over for the next iteration. Then, once I felt like there was a coherent theme, I combed through my account to find the links that felt like they fit with it - but where Claude was looking for things that had significant overlap, I was looking for things that were speaking around the edges of the same idea but getting into different aspects. 

The value for me wasn't in efficiency. It was in activation: starting with something to react and respond to and to pull apart and piece together is a great trigger for my brain. I've got it setup to run this workflow every month now, because I think it will reinforce the behavior of thinking through a theme and curating some links to share. But the proof will be in the pudding. Let's see how the next few months go.