In Don’t Call It Art, Austin Kleon reminds us how to be creative like a kid again in 10 steps:

1. Throw out the instructions.
2. Don’t take things too seriously.
3. Give yourself time, space, and materials.
4. Permission to be bad!
5. Believe in magic.
6. Think outside your head.
7. Problems of output are problems of input.
8. Borrow a kid!
9. Nothing is wasted!
10. You don’t need a vision.

As we become adults, we let our inner critics get in our way. We fear not being good enough. We fear we can’t do it. We fear being laughed at. We fear of being too old. Kleon ensures us:

In the beginning, we don’t know enough to know that we don’t know what we’re doing. Kids don’t know what can’t be done until someone tells them they can’t do it. The impossible is still possible.

The beginning was always the fun part. When I first learned to ski, I didn’t know what I was doing or what I got myself into. In fact, I didn’t want to give it a try until my wife just signed me up and sent me to the bunny hill. In retrospect, my skiing was horrible, but I didn’t care. I just loved the feeling of running down the hill on two planks. I was just being a kid again.

Self-improvement has always been my motivation. I always wanted to make progress and the more I do something the better I get. I do recognize that I don’t have talent; therefore, I rely on practice to improve myself. Kleon points out:

[T]alent only gets us so far for so long. If you want to get somewhere, you must persist and persevere, and to do that you must have the desire to keep going. If you follow your true interests and your curiosity, the desire to keep going will be there.

While the ideas and concepts in this book aren’t revelation, they license us to free your mind and to be creative again without being fearful. It’s a refreshing read for me.

Each bottle of our HaH! Chili Sauce is truly handcrafted. From handpicking our peppers to cooking, hot-filling, sealing, and labeling, we work with our hands—gloved, of course—throughout the entire process.

In this video, I wanted to show how I designed and typeset the label as the final step. Even for a simple typographic label, I used five typefaces from the NaN Rage superfamily, designed by the NaN team: Hugues Gentile, Fanny Hamelin, Fadhl Haqq, Léon Hugues, Jean-Baptiste Morizot, Luke Prowse, Florian Runge, and Jolana Sýkorová.

As you may have already noticed, I loved the design and marketing side of our HaH! Chili Sauce. It has been a great learning experience for me. The hardest part was the actual work involved in making the product. This year, I took over most of the production work, including the cooking, and I gained even more respect for my wife, who handled almost all of it by herself last season. The design and marketing were the fun parts of making the product.

I deeply appreciate everyone who has supported our HaH! Chili Sauce. It has truly been a labor of love—complete with sweat and tears.

The winter is coming. If you’re a skier or snowboarder, it is time to dusk off your equipment and get them ready for your trip to the snowy mountains. You don’t want your equipment to ruin your trip.

I provide ski and snowboard services, which include:

1. Remove edges’ burrs and rusts
2. Sharpen edges
3. Repair bases with P-Tex
4. Apply hot wax to bases

Fee: $50 for each pair of skis or a snowboard

I live right next to George Mason University main campus. If you would like to get your equipment service, please drop me an email. For more info, visit Donny Truương’s Ski & Snowboard Services.

I have created different playlists of my YouTube videos for different purposes. Here they are for you viewing pleasure:

• hahchili.com
• Longboarding
• Rollerblading
• Snowboarding
• Skiing
• Motion Design

Enjoy!

Bác sĩ nha khoa Đặng Thị Nữ tặng tôi quyển Những câu chuyện nha khoa của BSNK Phạm Bá Thăng chắc cũng hơn hai năm rồi. Tôi trưng trên tủ sách cho đến tuần trước mới có dịp đọc. Đúng với tựa đề, sách gồm những bài viết về khoa học răng với khía cạnh đơn giản cho những người như tôi dễ hiểu.

Hơi tiếc là tôi đọc những bài viết của BSNK Thăng quá trễ. Giờ đây, những đứa con của tôi đã lớn. Mấy bài đầu của BSNK Thăng cho biết khi nào răng của trẻ em thành hình và cách thức cha mẹ giúp con cái giữ gìn sức khỏe răng miệng. BSNK Thăng cũng giải thích cặn kẽ việc trẻ bị sâu răng do bú bình khi ngủ.

Những bài viết về răng trẻ em thì tôi không còn áp dụng được nữa. Răng tôi bây giờ chỉ có cách nhuộm đen như những cụ ngày xưa. Theo lời BSNK Thăng viết:

Việc nhuộm răng đen có thể cũng là một sáng kiến khoa học không được giải thích tường tận mà kết quả là ngừa bệnh sâu răng rất hiệu quả, nhất là trên mặt nhai của các răng phía trong, như việc phòng ngừa sâu răng bằng chất hàn mặt nhai (sealant) của nha khoa ngày nay.

Đùa tí cho vui thôi. Đọc về khoa học răng cũng khá bổ ích. BSNK Thăng có khả năng viết về một đề tài chuyên môn mà khiến người đọc dễ tiếp cận, và còn viết bằng tiếng Việt rất thoải mái. Cảm ơn BSNK Nữ và BSNK Thăng đã gửi tặng quyển sách này.

Có vài lần tôi đến nhà vợ chồng BSNK chơi. Chúng tôi vừa nhâm nhi whiskey vừa nghe BSNK Thăng kể lại cuộc hành trình vượt biên của anh, cùng chuyện tình giữa anh và BSNK Nữ, đầy chi tiết và thú vị. Hy vọng một ngày nào đó trong tương lai, tôi sẽ được đọc quyển hồi ký của BSNK Thăng.

Yiyun Li and her husband had two sons who took their own lives. Her first son, Vincent, committed suicide in 2017 when he was sixteen. In 2024, almost seven years later, her second son committed suicide at nineteen.

Things In Nature Merely Grow is only 172 pages and she makes every word count. Her prose is clear, concise, calm, and candid. She loves her children and respects their decisions to check out of this world. She did all that she could to keep them alive, “despite the parents’ efforts, and despite all the beings and doings that occur as the children grow, some among them die before their time.”

She did not reveal how they died, but she did give some sense of why they chose to end their lives. She writes, “Vincent died because he did not feel that life could meet him: in poetry, in music, in beauty, in courage, and in perfection.”For James, she writes, “He died from thinking: a livable life might not be worth the trouble; a livable life, he must have concluded, was not what he wanted.”

As a parent myself, I feel her pain in not knowing what our children would do to themselves. She writes, “A mother cannot sit in front of her child’s bedroom all night long, a mother cannot follow a child’s every step of life, just so that she can make sure he remains alive.”

A mother went through all the pain to bring her children into this world, and yet she could not protect them from taking away their own lives. I could not have imagined what Ms. Li would have gone through if she didn’t write this memoir.

In addition to writing about her children, Ms. Li also writes about her childhood. Her mother loved her, but also abused her. She suffered from depression and had thoughts of ending her own life. After her children passed away, Ms. Li writes, “I am not a grieving mother. I am the mother who will live, every single day, for the rest of my life, with the pain of losing Vincent and James, and with the memory of bringing them up.”

I appreciate Ms. Li for sharing her deeply personal story. It takes courage to open up about devastating tragedies: “The saddest and yet the most irrefutable truth: when you lose a second child, you have already learned a few things about losing a child from your previous experience.”

Mark Simonson Studio has a new design since 2013. Scott Kellum, Kelsey Scherer, and Roel Nieskens had done an excellent job of bringing back Simonson’s original design yet modern. Mark writes about the new design:

It feels like something I might have designed myself, and picks up a lot of my early branding—including the black/pale yellow/white color scheme and the spinning starburst on the logo. And yet it feels thoroughly modern. I’m incredibly pleased with the results.

TypeTogether also has a brand new design. The new site was designed by Thoughtful Standard and engineered by Yil & Mann. From TypeTogether’s newsletter:

The team has worked for more than two years on the website redesign, and it’s a major step forward on many fronts. For users seeking type inspiration, we’ve made it much easier to browse our type catalogue, which now includes more than 100 type families in multiple worldwide writing systems.

The site is very slick with the focus on types. They had finally snatched up typetogether.com. Its previous address was type-together.com, which was ironic considering the hyphen separated the words apart instead of together.

Congratulations to both foundries. I love seeing websites being redesigned by humans instead of AI. I also don’t get to see too many sites redesign these days.

Today we launched our HaH! Limited Collection, which features six HaH! Chili Sauce flavors: Signature, Bourbon, Cognac, Gin, Tequila, and Vodka. Each bottle brings unmatched heat and unmistakable flavor to any of your favorite dishes. At just $75, a set from our HaH! Limited Collection makes a perfect holiday gift. Tasting all six flavors will bring your family together—in laughter and in tears—and that’s priceless!

Went to cast my vote this morning for candidates with a capital D next to their names. Democrats need to take back Congress. It has been a long, terrifying two years. It needs to stop.

Victoria Chang’s Tree of Knowledge is a fascinating collection of poems about trees, paintings, and lots of emotions. She wrote her lyrical poems referencing artwork from artists including Pablo Picasso, Cy Twombly, Ai Wei Wei, and Mark Rothko. Her writings were so beautiful and inspiring, that I had to take quite a bit of notes. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“Woman in Blue” (Pablo Picasso):

Before a hanging, someone calculates the drop

distance required to break a neck, based on height
and weight. Every death is a story of physics. If the

drop is too long, the person dies of decapitation,
too short, strangulation.

“Seated Woman” (Pablo Picasso):

To be alive is to be in the middle of two things.

“Spring” (Pablo Picasso):

I used to think that grief was heavy. But it is
actually like an edge. It weighs nothing. It

consumes itself to remain a line. On some
days, when I am too heavy with joy, I divide

myself into cubes and triangles so that I can

once again be faceted.

More from “Spring”:

Now I know that
when we die, each of us has a surplus. That
the body leaves, but the years stay.

“Abraham” (Barnett Newman):

Most writers want to be loved
by light. The same light we try to cover. So

writing is regretful to do and also not to do.
I always chose language’s black stretcher over

everything else. Language has morals. Time
does too. Writing is like pressing grief from

the inside and the outside at once. So that you
end up touching your own fingers.

“Self-Portrait” (Alice Neel):

Perhaps the difference

between desire and despair is our naked aging body.
Perhaps we are all unhappily married to our own deaths.

“The Smell of Eucalyptus (#2), 2006” (Louise Bourgeois):

This year,
I began to turn inward too. I was surprised to see

that what held the door open for me wasn’t
happiness, but mercy. Because every life falls short.

“Poppy Field” (Gustav Klimt):

Happiness is not
certain. Neither is sadness. Only our thinking about them is.

“Red and Pink on Pink” (Mark Rothko):

Each of us
has two lives. Most of us are wandering around

in the wrong one.

But I learned that when grief abandons its body,
what’s left isn’t what was there before.

“Nine Colors” (Ellsworth Kelly):

There must be a better way toward
death, color must be a part of it.

“Natural History, Part I, Mushrooms” (Cy Twombly):

He told me to leave
my bags at the door, but I misheard him and left my

melancholy there instead.

More from “Natural History, Part I, Mushrooms”:

I walked more quickly toward all the rumors of my happiness.

“Tree, 2010” (Ai Wei Wei):

If you have children, you must know
how fake hope is. How it requires a protractor. How

parenting is a problem of geometry. How it requires all
the angles of hope so that the children stay alive.

“The Reader” (Mathew Wong)

Maybe we have eyes because it’s easier to
change the subject than ourselves.

I read this collection three times and will definitely return in the near future. Perhaps I should read them while looking at the paintings.