This essay was originally posted on natelistrom.com. Summary: Inciting incidents consist of one or more of three distinct story functions. This essay explains what each function is, how it works, and how I arrived at my current understanding. Bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson talks about the difference between “chef writers”…

Epistemic status: Just the kernel of an idea. Epistemic effort: Been kicking around this kernel of an idea for a while but without really investing in fleshing it out or drawing conclusions. There’s an interesting thing that seems to happen predictably in so-called “creative” fields as technologies become less expensive…

The sound of the foundry pounds all around me. Blasting and burning and breaking and boiling, And twisting and turning and taking and toiling. The bending of steel and the grinding of wheels, And the pushing and the pressing and the stamping and the stressing. The dark and the heat…

By Nate Listrom Years ago, there was a discussion in the online design community about the merits and demerits of using things like filters, drop shadows, gradients, bevel effects, and the like. At the time, CSS3 wasn’t even a thing yet. The discussion was about Photoshop and how to use…

This all began with a basic frustration I have with tap-based interaction. From there, it kind of got away from me. I ended up with a slightly new twist on gesture-based navigation, one that’s (hopefully) scalable and intuitive. But first things first — it’s easy to pick on Amazon because…

“Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill.” — Shinichi Suzuki I’ve been thinking about this quote for a long time. It sums up an ideal I subscribe to. I’m enamored of the idea that mastery of a skill comes from having done something over and over…