Dear Reader,

Please excuse this Wednesday letter coming four days late. Life gets busy, yet I do want to send this out, otherwise the Motes just pile up in drifts in my telephone.

Speaking of Motes, you may not know this, but I archive them on my blog, jasper.land. Last week, when I was uploading last week’s Motes to the blog, I thought to count up how many total posts I had. The answer was higher than I thought: 509.

I confess to being a bit proud of my trove. Granted, some of these posts are just a photo with a caption. But most capture some kernel of thought or delight. And some are in-depth writing I’m rather proud of. The trove reflects many hours of thought and writing and care.

Maybe it’s vanity, but I think it’s cool to amass and share—and own—an archive of your own ephemeral writing. It’s kind of nerdy, kind of punk. Doing this work outside of the influencer economy, off the big tech platforms, it runs against the grain of our days. I love it, and I think more people should give blogging a try.

To mark 500 blog posts, I wanted to share a few of my notes on blogging, from the philosophical to the technical. You’ll know if this kind of thing is interesting to you, and if not, go ahead and skip right down to the motes!

If you have any question about my blogging practice, feel free to hit me up. And if you have a blog already, please send it my way. I want to check it out.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I look forward to sharing the next 500 posts with you.

– Jasper

Eleven Short Notes on Blogging

• The blog is a genre of writing, and the best way to get better at blogging is to just do it. (This is the secret to getting better at almost everything.) Waiting to start a blog until you’re a good blogger means you may never start a blog. (Which is okay, too.)

• Here in the 2020s, few of us read traditional, ’00s-style blogs. The blogs that do get read are “newsletters.” So if you want to hone your craft in the relative quiet of the open web, set up a traditional blog. If you want people to read you, start a newsletter. Both are legit paths! (I’m sort of straddling both these days, writing here in the newsletter but archiving via a more classic blog.)

• If you’re going to blog via newsletter, consider avoiding Substack. It’s backed by venture capital and is pretty clearly aiming to capture long-form writing onto its platform. Staying off Substack means voting with your feet for the open web. Decent-to-great alternatives include Beehiiv (which I currently use), Ghost, and Buttondown. Deprive the beast of your time, labor, and community!

• Whatever you do, don’t refer to your blog as “My Substack”. That’s like calling your novel “My Microsoft Word”. F that.

• If you’re going to set up a traditional blog, a great, cheap, easy way is micro.blog. They have a $1/month option that is rather full-featured. Register your own domain, set up a micro.blog on it, and get blogging!

• If you don’t like browser-based interfaces for posting to your blog, and you use a Mac, consider MarsEdit, a native app that posts directly to micro.blog, Wordpress, and other blogs via API. It’s great.

• Don’t expect that anyone will really care about your blog.

• But they might! Over here I sometimes get emails in response to my posts that put a smile on my face for the rest of my day. It can be someone I’ve never met, an old friend reaching out, or a nice note from my mom. Something about putting yourself out there in such an informal way seems to make people feel more comfortable reaching out.

• Get funky with the design! A big part of ’00s-era blogging was the janky web design. It should be a big part of blogging in the ’20s, too.

• Have fun!

• But also proofread.

S.I. Rosenbaum has a comic out in Flaming Hydra—“Lost and found”—that captures something of how this moment feels to me, too. I mean, I haven’t expatriated to Lisbon, I’m not married to a trans person, I don’t find myself compulsively looking for beads—and yet, I know that feeling of life passing, atrocities ongoing, and the mind trying to find meaning, trying to find mooring. It’s a beautiful piece.

I got a new California Driver’s License and was surprised to find that they changed the typography again. The DMV’s press release focuses on the security features but doesn’t mention what the new font for “CALIFORNIA” is, which is really the big change for me. I poked around but couldn’t identify it. Does anyone know what this chrome-age slab serif is?

(Kinda crazy that Ima changed her name to Janice and reverted to her maiden name. Or, wait, judging by the birthdays, is that Ima’s mom?!)

If you loved CharliXCX’s 2024 album-of-the-summer Brat, may I recommend 2023’s 10,000 Gecs by 100 Gecs? I’m not fluent enough in pop and “hyperpop” to know the chain of influences here, but a lot of this sound—and the use of autotune in particular—seems like a raw-er antecedent to the Brat sound.

(Chaser: 100 Gecs’s Boiler Room set, which I was briefly obsessed with a few years back. (Found it via Today in Tabs.) It’s still deranged!)

When you’re a parent, some stories just hit different. For instance, “From Jail, He Tears Intricate Pictures By Hand For the Family He Misses” by Lily Kuo. It tells the story of Gao Zhen, a Chinese artist who was living in New York City but traveled back to his home country to see his mother-in-law, only to land in prison. The art really hit me—something about the simple medium and how expressive it is in Gao’s hands. I was particularly moved by this homage to a painting I also love: Matisse’s “La Danse.”

I pray never to be locked away from my child.

(And for what? The crime of… sculpting yassified Mao?)

Another story that hits harder as a parent: the scandalous cover-up of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s [disgusting](https://www.telos.news/p/part-2-she-did-it-again) affair in the lead-up to his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services. This [roided-out](https://slate.com/life/2025/02/rfk-jr-confirmation-vote-trump-senate.html) shell of a man is working every day to endanger the lives of children, especially infants, and the elderly. And he was aided in attaining his high post by his ersatz mistress, the [prose-mangling](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/olivia-nuzzi-american-canto-excerpt) Olivia Nuzzi. For that reason, I appreciated the essay “A major Beltway scandal” by Scott LeMieux, which makes the case that Nuzzi’s disastrous roll-out of her tell-all American Canto isn’t just a funny media story, it’s a real scandal that should infuriate us. As he puts it,

Last weekend, with its several, each-awful-in-their-own-way mass shootings, felt like the big finale to our snakebitten year, 2025. It was, however, informative to see mass shootings play out in parallel, in two different countries. In Australia the government [swiftly moved](https://www.wcbe.org/npr-news/2025-12-15/australia-announces-strict-new-gun-laws-heres-how-it-can-act-so-swiftly) to further tighten gun laws. Meanwhile I was particularly heartbroken by Katelyn Jetelina’s article, [“Mass shootings continue to outnumber days in the U.S.”](https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/mass-shootings-outnumber-annual-days) in the great newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist. If you live in the U.S., how does this make you feel?

I know, I know, gun deaths in the U.S. are overwhelmingly suicides, overwhelmingly from handguns. But the answer has to be restricting handguns and high-capacity assault rifles, and, and, and… We must tackle all gun violence. Plus, let me just say, the psychic damage of facing 400-650 mass shootings per year, many of them at schools, cannot be overstated.

Cue the recurring The Onion headline, “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

There are some open questions that I ponder over the years, hoping to figure out a bit more of my own mind. One of these is the question of what to do with art made by hateful people. And maybe the place this most touches my own life as a reader is in the Harry Potter books, which were a lifeline and height of pleasure starting when I nine, and then through my teenage years. Their author, J.K. Rowling, has spent the last decade-plus reorienting her energy to be one of the leading haters and persecutors of trans people. What to do with these books, then?

This article—“Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person”, by Sandy Ernest Allen—bothers this problem with a great deal of empathy and insight. If you haven’t been paying attention to this saga, or like me you have unsettled thoughts, I highly recommend giving it a read.

One bit that really resonates is a discussion of how discordant it is for Rowling’s committed and prominent transphobia to be common knowledge, yet the Harry Potter spinoffs and Broadway show and Disneyland rides are all endlessly promoted. (Lisa pointed out to me that Rowling is doing all this partially to re-cast and reclaim her characters after the lead actors from the movies all came out and denounced her bigotry). Here is Allen on this:

Business Insider’s video “Why Professional Colored Pencils Cost 14 Times More Than Crayola” has tons of hypnotic footage from within the Faber-Castell factory in Stein, Germany. It was of particular interest to me because I recently bought an on-sale set of 24 colored pencils of the Prismacolor Premier line, and I found myself rather in awe of how much more pleasant and responsive they are than the Crayola colored pencils we have. Artisan products: sometimes worth the markup! (I also recently enjoyed this WSJ video on Blackwing pencils: Why This Cult ‘$40 Pencil’ Almost Went Extinct.”)

Final melt report: the snowman was knocked over by a miscreant. Whether human or beast we shall never know. RIP.

Even if the winter holiday season is weird and dark and full of special challenges, why not take an afternoon to bake some rolled cookies and then cover them with decorative icing, knowing that the more love you put into them, the better they’ll taste? Happy solstice to you and yours.

I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?