Dear Reader —

I re-started this newsletter about a month ago because, in this anxious time, I need something to keep my hands busy and my community close. It’s working. I’ve been so enjoying the rhythmic pleasure of having a column to write every week, and having readers like you who do me the honor of reading me. Thank you for that! (And if you just signed up, thanks for giving Lightplay a try!)

Like any time you restart an old project, I’ve been tweaking it. One of the tweaks has been to bring back “motes”—the little items at the bottom of each newsletter. I remember that two years ago, when I announced their demise, my friend Alex wrote, “I'm going to miss those motes.” That sweet email always stuck with me. Now, they’re back! It turns out it is nice to have a place to share links and little insights. Also, here in 2025, the bottom of a newsletter reaches way more people than a blog.

Another shift I made in restarting Lightplay was to get rid of the little letters to readers that Lightplays used to always start with. But on reflection I think it’s worth reviving. There’s something personal and nice about saying hi, welcome, thanks for joining me today. And I think it’s nice for readers, too. One of the main reasons we read things is because we feel connected to the author and we’re interested in their project. I hope to keep cultivating that with you! So I’m bringing back the headnote.

These days I’m trying to rigorously focus Lightplay on “making books and cooking food.” This installment stays true to that mission. The main essay is about a sweet, simple book I made a couple years back. It was great to get to return to it and reflect on its pleasures. And if it inspires one person reading this to just go for it and make your own simple, little book, I’ll be happy as a mussel on spawning day.

– Jasper

A Book for Watering Plants

“That’s a vibe for sure,” says a man at the coffee shop. I’m immediately a bit embarrassed, because he’s caught me using my telephone to photograph my cappuccino before drinking it—a quintessentially millennial act. But I suspect that his response has more to do with the other object I’m framing the photo around: a little pink book titled HOUSE PLANTS. His compliment is an opening, but I don’t know exactly what to do with it. I squeeze a smile and say, “Thanks.” He wanders off to make small talk with the baristas.

What is vibe? Like authenticity and cool and pornography, it’s easier to identify than to define.

That said, my personal theory is that small, handmade books are almost guaranteed to have vibe. That might be doubly true for books of which only one copy is ever made. Like HOUSE PLANTS.

I made HOUSE PLANTS about two years ago, in preparation for our family taking a long trip. We had hired our usual catsitter to come water our plants every ten days or so, and he needed instructions on how much water to give each plant. We could have done this any of a dozen ways: a spreadsheet, post-its on each plant, a confusing text message, etc. But one of my mottos is: MAKE MORE BOOKS. And I’m glad that on this occasion I actually did.

It’s a rather plain booklet: 5.5” x 8.5”, 16 pages, saddle stitched (two staples on the spine), 9 polaroid photos taped in with double-sided tape, text in pencil. For the text block I used a slightly fancy paper with visible wood fibers—I bought a ream of the stuff a decade ago, when my favorite Fort Bragg copy shop, Beckman’s, was going out of business. For the cover: some pink card stock that was laying around. Glory to the paper hoarders!

Directions: 

1. One at a time, fold and crease your cover paper and four sheets of text paper in half. 

2. Flatten them back out and make a neat stack, with the cover paper on top. 

3. Put two staples through the spine. (A long-reach stapler will make this part easier.) 

4. (Optional) Use a straight edge and a razor to trim the outside edge, so the inner leaves don’t stick out further than the cover. 

5. Add pictures, text, stickers, etc. 

6. Victory!

The joy of a handmade book like this lies in its thing-ness. It’s a neat little package. You can store it on a bookshelf. You can even mostly forget about it, until you’re about to leave on a journey, when you’ll want to take it out and leave it on the table for the plant-sitter. There it is, HOUSE PLANTS. Right where you left it.

Honestly, it’s getting on time to make an updated edition of HOUSE PLANTS. Over the last two years I have added some new succulents by the front door—gleaned from a neighbor’s yard waste bin. They should be in the book. And our old watering pitcher got left on the stovetop while the oven was on, leading to the emergence of a big Charles Burns’s Black Hole-style mouth in its side. The new watering pitcher—the repurposed basin of a retired water filter—is much bigger than the old one. So the watering amounts will need to be updated. 

But even as time has diminished the usefulness of this edition of HOUSE PLANTS, it has become more precious to me. The pictures show our apartment as it was the first summer of my kid’s life. The text reminds me of the many Sunday mornings I have spent watering these sweet plants that I share my home with. I expect the sentimental value of the book only to rise and rise, at least while I live.

And, hey, when I take it out in public even strangers agree: it’s got vibe!

Check out the instructions for “How to Build an Electrically Heated Table” over at Low-Tech Magazine. Doesn’t a heated table in a chilly room just sound cozy as can be?

(Also: what a cool website! I love how all the images are dithered—ostensibly to keep filesizes minimal (for their solar powered website) but also (I just know) because they look cool and vibey, the digital equivalent of a risograph print)

I can’t say I recommend the breathless AI girlfriend thinkpiece in this week’s New Yorker. It reminds me of the Sam Altman move of waving your hands about how scary AI is and how it’s going to change everything, all just so we give him our attention and investment dollars. Here the message seems to be: get afraid that your kid will soon be dating their telephone’s operating system. (?!) This makes a good deal more sense when you google the article’s author (Jaron Lanier) and realize that for the last 19 years he’s been working at OpenAI’s main partner, Microsoft. It’s telling that he’s chosen to mix his labor with the most charmless of the evil five; of course he indulges the thrill of worrying about AI. (Kate Folk dealt with this whole train of thought more succinctly and with infinitely more humor and insight in her short stories “Out There” and “Sur”.) All that said, I did crack a smile with this sentence:

My brother in Christ, no matter what the New Yorker’s style guide says, the indefinite pronoun you are looking for is they.

The latest scandal from the “losers with aircraft carriers” currently running our federal government is that they made a big group chat to share war plans, on a consumer chat app, and they accidentally added a journalist. Classic buffoonery from a group of people for whom hypocrisy is a fun way to show dominance. But for me, the most ghoulish detail from the text messages themselves is a casual reference to the open secret that the U.S. military now routinely carries out single-target assassinations even when civilian bystanders are guaranteed to die en masse. Here’s the passage that got me:

Nice emojis, bro. I hope no one you love ever makes the mistake of having a military leader’s girlfriend for a neighbor.

I’m obsessed with the lower-case e in the font in the bathroom at Astro Burger.

Whoah!

One last dispatch from our dystopian present: MKBHD has a new video with the clickbait title, “The Truth about Drone Deliveries!” I found it worth watching, if only because it’s the first time I’ve seen a vision of aerial drones bringing you stuff where the service seems potentially useful rather than exclusively dangerous and scary. I still find these deeply upsetting, but I can see how under Silicon Valley logic they might also be inevitable. 

The big miss in the video is that the only possible downside Marques sees fit to mention is light pollution. Ummm… 1984 would like to have a word. Every police force in the world is going to want their own little fleet of these bad boys! Talk about a parole officer’s dream. We’re like five years away from a droid reading you your Miranda rights. (Already when we drive to our pediatrician’s we always pass a programmable road sign that flashes between two messages: “WELCOME TO BEVERLY HILLS” and “POLICE DRONE IN USE”.)

Did you know you can just grab a pair of scissors, remove the sleeves from any t-shirt, and it immediately becomes a muscle shirt? Doing so feels destructive and liberatory and addictive. 

These bats! (They remind me of my favorite ant.)

Why not take twenty minutes and clean up the area around your front door, washing the threshold, tidying up the potted plants, and trying to make it a limn that welcomes?