Glog

Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

Conferences

Podcasting

2018 Creative Year in Review

Last year was hard to top. I had a designer in residence position at the School of Visual Concepts, printed a book by letterpress, traveled to New York for a Kickstarter event, Wisconsin for the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum Wayzgoose, and to London to research a book.

2018 started weakly. I got the flu on Christmas Eve, recovered briefly, and then was so knocked out with secondary illnesses that it took me about four months to recover fully. During that time, I was also writing a book, finding new publications to write for, and figuring out what I would do across the year.

It turned out pretty well in the end.

In the first part of the year, I finished researching and writing London Kerning, and then designed the book and had it printed—and then shipped it out to hundreds of people. I undersold myself on demand

Conferences

It Takes a Hidden Village

I love Kevin Kelly's work and life, and had a great talk with him months ago for my podcast, The New Disruptors. But during his talk at the 2014 XOXO festival a week ago, I felt a distinct chill when, in describing his book Cool Tools, he said it was the work of two people over a few months, and then went on to note their use of Elance and other distributed work tools.

Tim Maly felt the same chill, and wrote a very interesting essay riffing on that and related issue: independent creators are dependent on the work of so many others, most of whom aren't afforded the same opportunities at advancement and independence. Tim followed the thread of labor down to the Chinese workers referenced in another talk by the creators of the NeoLucida; the two guys behind that project traveled to China and spent two weeks

Conferences

XOXO to XOXO 2014

The XOXO conference and festival is back for its third outing this September 11–14 in Portland, Oregon, the center of all that is creative and right with the world at this moment. Portland is a special place and XOXO is a special event that could only occur there, I think. The organizers, Andy Baio and Andy McMillan are amazing people in their own right, and they bring together so much good will and positivity about life in one place.

Here's what I wrote about it years past and a podcast with Andy and Andy:

The first XOXO in 2012 changed my life. I was in a slump and slightly at sea, and nearly everything I did after XOXO was different than before: I changed my job (from

Buddies

2013 in Review

Last year, inspired by Joe Kissell, I wrote a summary of the enormity of what 2012 had encompassed. It was freaking huge. Joe enumerated for years all the words, books, articles, and such like he worked on. This year, I'm inspired again by Joe: he decided to stop the extensive documentation of his year, having felt he'd proven his productivity. I'm somewhere in between: less documentation than last year, but still quite a bit to share.

In June, I bought The Magazine from Marco Arment. It's been one of the greatest things I've worked on in my life, and it's a constant joy of collaboration with contributors both before and after the purchase. We just put out Issue #33 — we produced 26 issues during 2013, and now have some subscribers who are paid up though the end of 2015. We'd better deliver.

I launched the weekly podcast The New Disruptors

My XOXO 2013 Report at Boing Boing

Conferences

My XOXO 2013 Report at Boing Boing

Andy Baio introduces XOXO. 
Andy Baio introduces XOXO.

Excerpt:

The second outing of the snark-free, consensual hallucination known as XOXO took place two weekends ago in its permanent spiritual home, Portland, Oregon. Portlandia famously jokes that Portland is where young people go to retire. But that's only funny if one believes that work has to be a thing other than and separate from your own true self and in which you cannot be fulfilled. People reading this blog know intuitively or from practical experience that's not necessarily true.

I fell in love with the event last year, and renewed my vows this year. It was exhausting and exhilarating, and I don't regret falling in love all over again. I tried to explain last year why this event was meaningful to people who didn't attend; let me try again with an amazing year between under my belt that I owe in part to attending in

XOXOver

Conferences

XOXOver

XOXO. 
XOXO.

I leave tomorrow morning from Portland to return to my home in Seattle after nearly five days away. I came Wednesday to run my own shindig, a kind of music/comedy/interview variety show that relied on the participation and volunteerism of a ton of people. Thursday through Sunday were the XOXO conference and festival, a kind of celebration of the absence of cynicism in creating stuff that you love from which you might be able to also make some or all of a living.

Last year's XOXO inspired me to create The New Disruptors podcast, and encouraged me to pitch myself to Marco as the editor of the Magazine. The podcast is nearly a year old. The Magazine, which I bought from Marco in June, is 2 1/2 weeks' shy of its one-year anniversary.

I can't wait to see what will change in my life as a

Conferences

A Transformative Year

I have sometimes joked that I never know precisely what I will be doing from one year to the next. As a freelancer, I am dependent on both the goodwill of editors and the persistence of business models outside of my control. This means that my primary sets of income one year could have shifted somewhat the next and be entirely gone the year after that. It means I have to be fleet and agile.

In June 2012, I was a very busy lad indeed, as I often am. I was writing a lot: for TidBITS, Macworld, the Economist, Ars Technica, Boing Boing, and others. I had a constant stream of features and short work that was passing through my hands, and wrote a book later in the summer about Messages for Mac OS X.

In the middle of that, I decided to crowdfund a book on — well, crowdfunding. How

Conferences

Brief Report on Macworld Expo

The name is different now, but the friendships are the same. I had a non-stop great time at Macworld | iWorld, the new name for the 27-year-old trade show. Late January is a quiet time of year in San Francisco, which can be a beautiful city, and felt like it this time around. For the first time in many years, I stayed for the full length of the show, and even then barely talked to so many friends at the show and missed getting together with a bunch of people who live in and around SF — there just wasn't time!

My favorite story from the show starts with when I landed at SFO. At baggage claim, I turned on Find My Friends, an iOS app that Apple released some months ago. I'd barely used it before except to test. I received a group temporary request that would let me see a

Conferences

Macworld 2011

I'll be delivering two Users Conference sessions at the Macworld 2011 conference! I wasn't able to make the timing work in 2010, an I missed the first "no Apple" version of the event, which sounded chummy and wonderful. On 27 January, I'll present a session on remote controlling your screens (an overview of the many tools for remote access and file transfer for machines under your control or those of friends and family for remote tech support); a second session, on 29 January, will cover remote video chatting with Facebook, iChat, Skype, and other programs.

Macworld 2011

Click on the image above to get a 15-percent discount for conference registration, or use the code "speaker" when signing up. (It only applies to registration for a multi-day conference track.)

Conferences

The Bug What Got Me: Personal Epidemiology

Lasvegas-1

Lynn thinks it's a pretty tricky assignment to figure out where and when I received the bug that laid me up from Wednesday night until today. I agree. But it's fun to speculate.

I was on the road starting a week ago Friday, flying out from Seattle to Las Vegas. Jeff Carlson, officemate and friend, and I visited the Consumer Electronics Show Saturday and Sunday, then flew to his mom's in Dixon, Calif., near Sacramento. (We were warned that the Las Vegas airport, a place where the smoking lounge has no ventilation and open doors to the rest of the terminal, would be impossible to get through Sunday afternoon with 140,000 CES attendees departing. It took us an hour to get from the CES show to our hotel and then to the airport, where there were tiny lines and no wait. We wound up working for a few hours