Season 3, Issue 24: 🖨️🍆❤️
mild ringing
1. The Week That Was
Yesterday our Guestbook project was momentarily the top story on Hacker News, and that brought us a sudden and enormous wave of traffic that we did not expect. The site was brought to its knees and our little printer was overwhelmed—and poor James was just watching all of this happen at his co-working space in London.
We’re grateful for the attention. But our little art project is a labor of love, and we never expect 800 prints in one day. (Before yesterday, we were receiving about a handful of drawings every day, and I would re-print each drawing and scan it.)
To all the people who sent us drawings: THANK YOU (well, actually, most of them are probably not reading this newsletter, but still). Unfortunately about 50 drawings didn’t come through, and we won’t be able to scan most of the prints.
The funny thing is that I just wrote a blog post about marketing & preparing for when people show up—and we were clearly not prepared! But we’ve learned from the experience and there will be a follow-up about the event.
Aside from the Guestbook excitement, this week was all Yay.Boo: billing, custom domains, and a few fun goodies. The goal is to finish it next week and turn our attention to Letterbird (it’s not ready, so please proceed with caution if you want to try it). —Shawn
2. What Do You Notice?
You’re having some kind of experience right now, presumably. At the very least, I know that I am. Something seems to be happening.
It's easy to forget this! It's so easy to get mesmerized by the goings-on of the world, of our day, of our duties, obligations, projects, goals, and struggles. And on and on – you know this game.
But underneath all of that is the raw, unadulterated fact of experience. Something is happening. How do I know? I don’t know, but there’s always a surprising amount of things to notice, just by noticing what I'm noticing.
Right now, I notice:
a mild ringing in my ear
a thought about the form of this piece of writing
the taste of a burp (tastes like coffee)
a bit of pressure at the top of my head
a sharp, almost stinging sensation in my throat
a sense of movement from there up into my head
more pressure
the wavy nature of that pressure
the sight of my hands typing at the bottom of my visual field
the smooth moistness of my eyes blinking
a thought about whether this is interesting or not
a thought about trying to land some narrative-poetic art
a hint of an emotion flowing up my torso (a hint of a taste of sadness)
a thought about making sure to assure you that I'm ok
wondering if that even matters – why would you care?
little micro-movements of my neck and head
the aliveness of sensation in my legs
the ringing again – mostly in the right ear
still the ringing
how the ringing kind of waves up and down with my breath
a little bit of pain in my ribcage
remembering that I'm looking at a screen
a thought about how to wrap this up
There's so much more I could say about this – the nuances of it and the benefits that can accrue from doing something like this regularly. But I'm much less interested in that more in: when you look, what do you notice? —Arun
3. Sharing is Caring
Patrick shared a website that bills itself as a “generator of random awesomeness” and it really is. (Be careful—you might want to sit down and give yourself an hour or two.)
Arun loves this artist’s animations.
Chocolate + 3D printing anyone? (via Web Curious)
Matthew was impressed by how the team behind Orion was able to launch their latest app in 45 days.
Matthew also informed us of a Good Enough x K-pop opportunity.
4. In Conclusion
I’ve been slowly going through the 800 or so drawings we received yesterday. We expected the occasional 🍆 but I did not expect so many ❤️s. Shaded hearts, hearts within a heart, heart balloon, hearts with nice messages: hello from Croatia, have a beautiful day, and have a nice weekend. And there was this message from Jojo:
You’re welcome, Jojo, and I hope you’re feeling better. ❤️
Wishing you all a beautiful weekend.