Articles & Writing
Writing that comes out of building the tools. Each of these started as something I had to work out to make a tool behave correctly, and turned out to be worth explaining on its own — how a sand table's coordinate system actually works, what your salary looks like after every honest deduction, how a tattoo studio really arrives at a number.
They are grouped by the tool they came from. Nothing here is a summary of what other sites already say; if a piece exists it is because there was something specific to get right.
What Is My Time Worth?
The arithmetic behind your real hourly wage, and the judgment calls the calculator makes on your behalf. All WIMTW articles →
- What Your Real Hourly Wage Actually Subtracts — why salary ÷ 2,080 is wrong in both directions at once.
- Comparing Two Job Offers When the States Have Different Taxes — when a $10,000 raise is a pay cut.
- The Enjoyment Multiplier — why the DIY-vs-hire model needs a fudge factor, stated openly.
- What Is Life Energy? — the Your Money or Your Life idea the whole tool rests on.
SandPath
Kinetic sand tables, file formats, and why the obvious way to convert an image is the way that fails. All SandPath articles →
- Theta-Rho vs G-code — polar and Cartesian, and which format survives a table upgrade.
- Why Scanlines Look Wrong in Sand — edge detection, marching squares, and skeletonisation.
- Travel Lines: The Problem You Cannot Fully Solve — the travelling salesman problem in a sand tray.
TattooSafe
What a tattoo costs, how big it should be, and why both are harder to answer than they look. All TattooSafe articles →
- How Tattoo Studios Actually Price Work — area, style, placement, rate, in that order.
- Sizing a Tattoo to a Body Part — why screens mislead, and what actually limits size.
HoloPath
The largest collection here — sixteen articles on holographic displays, from Pepper's Ghost to LED fans to colour theory for holographic art. All HoloPath articles →
Essays
Longer pieces about the project itself rather than any one tool — why these get built, and what happens between an idea and a shipped thing. Browse essays →
Why These Exist at All
Almost every article here started as a bug or a wrong answer. The sand table piece exists because early conversions came out looking like corduroy, and working out why meant understanding what a ball dragging through sand can and cannot represent. The tax comparison piece exists because two job offers with a $10,000 gap turned out to favour the lower one once the state lines were accounted for. In both cases the tool needed the answer before the article could be written.
That ordering matters, and it is the main thing separating these from the enormous volume of writing that exists purely to rank. A piece here is downstream of code that had to work. Where an article states a number — a needle-time rate, a travel-line penalty, a bracket threshold — that number is the one the tool uses, not a figure gathered to fill a paragraph.
The practical consequence is that there are not many of them, and they appear irregularly. A tool that raised no interesting questions gets no article, which is why some tools here have five and others have none. That is the intended state rather than a backlog.
On Substack
Occasional longer-form writing goes out by email — pieces that belong to no tool and are not really essays about the workshop either. No schedule, no filler. These open on Substack rather than here.
- Sweeping for Mines — the early days of minesweeper.org, my brother's late-90s site, and what the web felt like when a kid could run one.
- Three Months to Book Cover — the dead ends behind the Dinosaur Road cover, before the process that finally worked.
- A Yellow Menace — the silly rabbit hole of getting the kids' theraputty back out of a swimsuit drawstring.