Back on the newsletter, maker updates, and finding your counterbalance
Finishing a board game, coding with AI, uncovering ancient Egyptian games, and balancing it all with the slowness of plants.
Hello again after a long newsletter hiatus!
I'll keep this re-entry short: after my year of writing bi-weekly, I realized I didn’t want to give up every-other Saturday afternoon to force something out. I thought it’d get quicker and easier, and in some ways it did—but it still felt like a willpower-heavy activity, and I needed that juice for other things :)
This time around, I’m aiming for shorter, occasional updates with a focus on staying in touch—no need for everything to be polished or profound.
Especially with AI becoming more integrated into our lives and creativity, I’m betting that raw, real human experience is only going to grow in value.
If you’ve totally forgotten who I am, I usually write about creative projects, adventure, and life philosophies.
Updates
🎲 The board game launched! I completed the Kickstarter for the Cerro Gordo Silver Mines game with my team in collaboration with Ghost Town Living. It’s now being manufactured. I’m excited—it’s going out to 2,000 people soon. I have a prototype at my apartment and I’m genuinely happy with how it turned out!
♟️ Board game arc continues. I didn’t really play board games before this project but my obsession has continued. Now I’m picking a new one every month. Latest additions to my collection:
Backgammon (it reminds me of my childhood on the Red Sea in Egypt)
Senet: A game from ancient Egypt that’s over 2,000 years old. It’s wild to discover that my ancestors were also producing games.
🧪 Building Products with Creators: I’m collaborating with another creator on making a product with his audience. I love making things more than I love building audiences (though I wouldn’t mind getting better at the latter). If you know anyone with an engaged audience of 100K+, send them my way—I’d love to have a chat.
💼 Boring Business: On the side, I launched a “boring business” — making niche tape (yes, tape!), born from an underserved market my teammate spotted during product research. It’s weirdly fun, quietly growing, and maybe one day I’ll tell the whole Tape Titan saga.
🤖 AI experiments + “vibe coding.” I’ve started using AI more in my personal life and wanted to get hands-on with this species-shifting technology. I discovered “vibe coding”—basically prompting AI to build apps. I rebuilt an old project of mine (Mixcard.me – sending playlists as physical postcards) in just a few days. I hadn’t coded in 5+ years, and this blew me away.
🎥 Learning video + building a course. My next challenge: Getting comfortable sharing on video—not for social content (my dance moves aren’t there yet), but in a way that feels useful. I’m combining that with my AI curiosity and building a course on app creation. I spent 50+ hours working with app building tools, took some courses, and then taught my own live workshop to 12 people —it went great. Here’s the landing page if you are interested in learning how to build apps with AI. I’ll be sharing more as I go.
Finding Your Counterbalance
Now for a bit of life philosophizing, because I know many of you are here for that.
One of the biggest themes I’ve found in living a good life is Balance with a big “B”.
For a while, that meant mixing in travels, taking walks, journaling and all the other slew of things we define as "self-care" and just "being".
But I’ve found something recently even more useful than rest: doing two extremely opposite things!
Picture a see-saw—equal weight on both far ends.
For example, I love partner dancing because it’s the opposite of sitting alone at a laptop. One is me wiggling my fingers with disembodied focus, and the other is full presence, physical connection, and complete body awareness. Instead of taking breaks, I switch modes—total counterbalance.
Right now, I’m loving the contrast between:
⚡ AI (moving at quantum speeds)
🌱 Gardening and homesteading (you literally can’t speed things up)
You can fertilize and stare at a seed all day, but it’s still going to grow on its own time. Impatience and attempts at speed can ruin things. That’s why I love my balcony garden and fermentation experiments (I’m making tepache right now!). They’re earthy and visceral—exactly what I need to counterbalance world changing transformation.
I see myself growing more into this path, and I’m cruising around in a 4x4 looking for land on the weekends to grow my homesteading experiments.
My challenge for you:
Where in your life are you feeling out of balance? What’s something radically different you can lean into—not to rest, but to counterbalance?
👋🏾 Thanks for reading— Hit reply and say hi if something resonated or you just want to share what you’re up to.
Love this approach to finding counterbalance! I also love thinking of you driving around in a 4x4 searching for land! Always a treat to hear about your adventures.