Roden
Issue 102
March 23, 2025

Book Tour! The Good Place! A New Photo Book!

TBOT Book tour announcement, new photo book OTHER THING, and a members-only social network

Roden Readers —

Hi hi hi from Madrid. This was the first city I visited abroad on a random near miraculous-seeming (now in hindsight) high school Spanish class trip some thirty years ago. That trip felt like a horse — one raised on churros and jamón — had kicked open the barn doors of my forehead. Walking Madrid: That was it. I was leaving America. Felt that in my bones. Where to, I didn’t know, but I was out. I knew that. Here: The cobbled streets, the singing in the streets, the narrow streets, the people, the love on display, the smoking, the food, the looks from strangers, the flavors, the great texture of a city built from stone, the obvious history — holy (taste of) mackerel, had I been living in a veritable black hole of All The Things? Madrid, like a cosmic sucker-punch to the nuts. When I was nineteen and had the chance to live abroad I thought Spain (Europe) was a bit too “easy” (I’ll do that later, I thought) — and so Japan it was, by somewhat random fluke. And that’s where we’ve been.

But in the back of my mind, I always wondered what the European Edition of Craig would have been like. (I was primed to emigrate, was just a question of where.) Being back here for the first time in a long time, I’m trying to see the city with those fifteen-year-old eyes, and I think I can remember more than a bit of that early delight. Now I walk and wonder what I might lament had I lived here for the last 25 years — as in, what are the kissas of Madrid, the disappearing diners, the corner stores with all the flavor, being replaced by boring and bland nothingnesses? (I have a sense of some of these Madrid institutions, but it’s all impaired by my outsider eyes.) Anyway, (if you’re lucky) many possible lives to be lived, innit.

I’m here for a Walk and Talk, and just getting my timezone legs, writing, and working in cafés before heading deeper into the country to meet up with Kevin Kelly and co. In case you forgot: I’m Craig Mod and this is Roden and, as usual, there’s a lot to discuss.

#David Mitchell Blurb

Things are continuing to Become Other Things.

I’ve mentioned this over on the SPECIAL PROJECTS members-only main and Nightingalingale newsletters (I know, I know, nobody knows the difference between all these newsletters, but they help me keep things straight; I appreciate you all humoring me), but we got a last minute blurb from David Mitchell. This is a delight on so many levels. Not the least of which being I read his Number9Dream and Ghostwritten books while sitting in cafés around Tokyo thinking: God dammit, this guy’s really doing it. He was living in Hiroshima, teaching English, and now was writing — ”really” writing (which is what the cadre of us hopeless Tokyo dorks aspired to be doing), a bunch of sharp stuff (only to get sharper still; you probably know him from Cloud Atlas, a virtuosic book if ever; I think my personal favorite of his is Black Swan Green?). So, twenty-two-year-old me would have slapped himself in the face had you told him we were going to get a Mitchell blurb nearly two-decades after the fact. And it’s a good’un:

Luminous, poignant, unflinching and kind, THINGS BECOME OTHER THINGS reads like a future classic of its genre. — David Mitchell

Much to the sadness of everyone in Random House’s PR department, it arrived about two weeks too late to make it on the cover, but mockups have already been mocked up for a reprint, if we are lucky enough to print again.

Not only that, but the blurb came at the end of a 2,000 word email from Mitchell that was, to put it mildly, extremely laudatory. So, that’s being filed straight away into our hey_youre_not_a_piece_of_shit.md text file.

Meta note: This is my first time releasing a book on this kind of “scale” and I would be remiss not to say it wasn’t a wee bit … Exposing? Awkward? I dunno, it’s just … weird. All these potential eyeballs. So, to have these generous blurbs — and especially, a letter like that, from a stranger, whose work I admire and have admired for a long while, who has no obligation to spend his morning composing an email “with birdsong echoing in the trees outside the window from 6am until now, a couple of hours later, glowing from revisiting this beautiful book” — well, that’s like accruing a bit of adamantine-level psychic armor. Thanks, David, and everyone else.

#TBOT Book Tour Dates

What I’m really going to need, though, is stamina. The US National Book Tour Spring 2025 is largely nailed down, and here it is:

That’s what we got so far. (You may have to scrape me off the pavement by the end of that.) I’ll be updating the list on TBOT’s page, check there for latest info. I can’t wait to see everyone out in the world.

There are many, many, many more cities I’d like to do events in, but we had to hone in on the highest-responders in that survey you all so kindly took a couple of months ago. Boston might still sneak in. I absolutely want to do some Europe stuff, London especially. I’m also debating whether to record all these talks and release them as a tour podcast (just slap a couple wireless 32-bit float recorders on us at each event?)? Thoughts?

#Libraries!

As for things that you, gentle reader, can do to support TBOT’s launch, one not-entirely-obvious-but-potentially-impactful thing is:

Are you a user of the incredible Libby library app? Which allows for borrowing of digital books using your local library card? If so, please consider going in and using the “notify me” button to add TBOT to your queue. This sends a big signal to local libraries to stock the book. (You’ll probably have to search for “things become other things craig mod.”) (Thanks Robin for this tip, which I’ve been sitting on for about six months.)

And in general, for pre-orders, anywhere works (bookshop.org, amazon, etc.), but local bookstores are of course the best (supporting the ecosystem, spreading by word of mouth; my agent was in a bookshop in Brooklyn the other day and he heard someone asking for TBOT by name — thank you!).

Speaking of pre-orders, Lynne Tillman’s (in conversation with in Brooklyn on May 30) new book, Thrilled to Death is out … tomorrow? I love it, as do others, as shall you.

#OTHER THING

As a means of assuaging all the launch anxiety, I’ve subconsciously conspired to simply fill my brain and life up to the brim lest a millisecond for self-reflection slip in. So, naturally — of course — I’m producing a brand-new photography book in parallel with all the above. (Instead of drinking alcohol, I pathologically make books and program.) It’s called OTHER THING. Turns out, this is my first (solo) photo-only book. Three weeks ago, I went and did nine intense days of photographing people on the Kii Peninsula (where TBOT takes place) and came back with thirty rolls of medium format and 35 mm film (yes, yes, I need to write about shooting films after ignoring it / besmirching it for some twenty years) upon which were imprinted a bunch of great shots, fabulous light. (The process was documented in About a Nightingale.)

OTHER THING will be: 128 pages long, bound in red Irish linen, tipped in photo on cover, white foil stamping, same trim and production and printing as KxK and TBOT Fine Art; this is SP3. First run is 1,000 copies, signed. Printing and signing happens in April, and we’re aiming to ship by early May (12th?) (right in the middle of my tour ha ha). This is meant to be a true photographic companion to the Random House edition of TBOT. RH-TBOT is full of stories of people; OTHER THING shows you a few of those people.

I’ll be announcing it, of course, in all the usual places, but I’m also making a one-off newsletter just to let you know it’s on sale. You can sign up to be notified here.

Yearly SPECIAL PROJECTS members will get a little discount. And you can stack that member-discount with a TBOT pre-order discount, creating a discount bonanza.

#The Good Place

Amidst planning the launch tour, writing essays, doing a nine-day photo-project on the peninsula, a four-day walk with Papersky magazine, crunching taxes, and trying to organize everything else in life, I also (accidentally?) launched a new members-only social network called “The Good Place.” For a long time now, my taste in software has outstripped my ability to execute (mostly as a function of hours-in-a-day), but now with tools like Claude Code, I’m finding execution and taste are aligning in astounding ways. It’s no exaggeration to say that using Claude Code to build The Good Place (and also a bunch of other small tools and projects) is one of the most astonishing computing experiences of my life. It’s difficult to articulate how utterly empowering a tool like Claude Code (paired with malleable software, open software, open systems (i.e., not iOS/iPadOS)) is for someone like me: someone with a strong technical background who can guide the LLM, knows which questions to ask, and knows how to keep it from going off on weird tangents. (It’s like working with an eight-year-old who has a thousand years of knowledge.)

Twitter has always been annoying for a bunch of reasons for a very long time, and now with the furcation between Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, it feels dumber than ever out there. Discord feels like trying to whittle a beautiful piece of wood with a chainsaw. I’d rather bleach my brain than have Slack open. So I made my own “reverse-chron-text-feed” clone, but one that works exactly how I’ve always wanted the others to. Here are the tenants of The Good Place:

• You can only post 2x a day
• You can only reply 20x a day (conversations are good!)
• Text rules, photos display inline in 1-bit color
• Clicking a photo shows you the full-color version
• Posts disappear in seven days (but can can be kept “alive” with new replies)
• You keep track of everything through a single, well-marked RSS feed
• Asynchronous — no “real-time” anything, no “read” receipts
• Not only are links celebrated (they’re “demoted” at other major social networks), they have their own aggregation page

That’s it. No follows / following; scale is capped naturally by the nature of the members-only program. We have a few hundred active posters / readers, and it feels … wonderful? Like, this is accidentally my favorite place to check in on and post to online? Whenever I post on Bluesky now I think: Eh, why am I not posting this to TGP? People are self-selectingly kind, sharing great long form articles, personal projects, portfolios, ask questions about parenting. A bunch of folks just introduced their animals. The place is living up to its name.

Overall it probably took about … 10 hours? Of in-between work to build this. And cost about $75 USD in API tokens (which is only going to get cheaper; Claude Code is pretty inefficient presently; still: it feels like a deal to get TGP for $75, honestly). I’d be happy to open source TGP but it’s so specific to my own fiddly system (Memberful authentication, Flask framework) that that will have to wait until later.

If you’re interested in checking out TGP, SPECIAL PROJECTS members can find it on members.specialprojects.jp — click TGP in the menu. Come, say hi, share something you’re working on.

Unless you’re touching these AI technologies, it’s almost impossible to overestimate how powerful they are. Are we on the cusp of a bespoke boom of software development? On a personal level, I already am. With tools like Claude, in the last few months, I’ve built:

• TGP
• a search engine for all of my pop-up walk archives
• improvements on a local search engine for craigmod.com, where with a few key presses I can copy-to-clipboard a link (relative or absolute) to almost any article on my site in seconds (I use this dozens of times a week, and dozens of times when writing a newsletter like this)
• other template upgrades on craigmod.com; Claude Code is great at demystifying some cursed annoyances of Go templating (which Hugo uses), and I can describe what I need and understand what it produces, without having to spend hours digging through and debugging documentation
• upgrading other scripts (better error handling), like my members-only YouTube video archive generator
• an html2markdown converter — with a few keystrokes I can take HTML in my copy buffer, and have it replaced with Markdown for pasting

And more. I routinely test out dumb little software experiments, learn about new libraries by watching Claude think through problems, and am increasingly in a state of idiotic rapturous delight by how quickly I can go from notion to function. I wish Jobs was alive to see this. Bicycle for the mind? Pshaw. Electric bicycle for the mind and then some.

Required Caveat: There are many moral and ethical issues with using LLMs, but building software feels like a) one of the few truly ethically “clean”(er) uses (trained on open source code, etc.), and b) maybe the thing LLMs most excel at (science, medicine, and code seems to be their wheelhouse in terms of energy-in to manifold-value-out). Even with that caveat, I realize many of you will still be driven to madness by my breathless love fest here, but this technology is barreling forward, and if I’m going to criticize it (and I’m happy to, delighted to), I want to know the precise contours of its delights and horrors.

There we go. If you made it this far, I wish I had a cookie or something nice to give you. I’m off to hop on a train and get to the start of this Spain walk. More soon. And as always, thanks for your support.

C