This is the longer-form blog of Tyler King (me!). There’s also short-form blog that I created to jot down interesting turns of phrase or ideas. It was, I suppose, a way to self-host what I would have put on Twitter or Tumblr in their golden eras.

Occasionally I see something and want to share it with myself (my intended audience here is me, though all are welcome) so it ends up here. There’s no overarching theme, just things that caught my interest.

Hi, I’m Tyler King, and I never knew how to answer “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. The closest I came to the truth was “artist”, “scientist”, or “toy maker”. I think I did ok meeting those goals.

As a kid, and still as an adult, I have always made a lot of the things I play with. It’s so much more satisfying to play with the janky thing you made for yourself than its mass-produced equivalent. The entire process from idea through iteration and finally (though not always ideally) minimal viable product, is most of the fun.

I’ve always been curious and, and as a kid, it led me down all sorts of rabbit holes. One spring I was given a kite. It was wonderful and I wanted to learn more about kites so I checked a stack of books out of the library. Then I wanted to try every kind of kite, which at a certain level necessitated sewing, which (thanks to a new stack of books from the library) introduced me to quilting, which led to pattern-design, which led to computer-aided design, which ultimately led to a career.

I’ve always liked the notion of orbital salvage. I imagine a gritty but high-tech junk recovery and recycling outfit in Low Earth Orbit. It feels like it would attract resourceful people with checkered backgrounds and limited futures. Maybe I’ve read too much science fiction; maybe not enough. Maybe some day I’ll convert the site into a homepage for my satellite recovery side hustle.

A lot of my favourite sites have long-ago vanished (k10k) or diminished (slashdot).

One that has always been there:

kottke.org – Jason Kottke’s blog that has been consistently interesting since the late 90s.

Other sites I visit often:

Hacker News – Has kind of replaced Slashdot for me over the years. Community voting ensures the good stuff usually ends up near the top of the list, and the commenting community can be very insightful and knowledgeable.

Bubbles.town – It surfaces independent blogs and community upvotes push the best writing and ideas to the top. Like allowing a community of your peers full control of your RSS feed.

Sidebar – Five or so links every weekday, generally related to the design professions.