2025-02-23 08:00:00
Roden Readers — Hello from the train! I’m en route — once again — to KII PENINSULA which many of you know is where my book Things Become Other Things takes place. I’m going back to photograph PEOPLE. That’s the aim, anyway. We’ll see if I pull it off. You can follow along in real-ish time on my new pop-up: About a Nightingale. It starts today (Feb 23, and ends on March 4, and then I delete all your email addresses).
2025-02-20 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — A funny thing happens when a Snickers bar goes from whole to eaten — the wrapper transmogrifies from useful to toxic. Suddenly, this thing that was keeping germs and dirt off your chocolate sugar log is now “useless” and with this comes the heaviest burden a modern person unencumbered by genocide or famine can hold: garbage responsibility. I have taken visitors for many walks around Japan. Around Tokyo, sure, but also around the hinterlands.
2025-02-14 08:00:00
Ridgeline subscribers — Hello! Since I last wrote in January, I’ve published my Year Six SPECIAL PROJECTS look-back focusing on the “rules” I use to govern how I think about my membership program. Huge thanks to everyone who has joined and supported over the last six years. Now, SPECIAL PROJECTS members following along on the members-only book diary-newsletter, Nightingalingale, they’ll know that I am … uhh … busy. I’m in a tunnel of to-dos, organizing the Things Become Other Things book tour, setting up podcast recordings, writing essays aligned with TBOT, taking on other newspaper assignments, all with the aim of generating attention / interest in this forthcoming book.
2025-02-05 08:00:00
Roden Readers — Me again (Craig Mod), back with another (short-ish?) Roden. Issue 100 of this thing! Started in December 2012, twelve years and change. Whoosh. So it goes. (Time.) In honor of this milestone, I dug up issue 001 and put it online. (Not quite as embarrassing as I expected.) Thank you to everyone who responded to the TBOT Book Tour Poll! VERY instructive / helpful. More on that, soon.
2025-02-01 08:00:00
Should you start a membership program? Probably not. But boy am I glad that I started mine. Today (basically) marks the sixth anniversary of starting SPECIAL PROJECTS. Each year, I’ve written up everything I learned. In total, here are nearly 40,000 words on running a membership program (each a little snapshot of how I felt that year, a slight evolution in thinking about Doing the Thing): Running a Paid Membership Program (2020) Running a Successful Membership / Subscription Program (2021) Memberships Work (2022) Running a Membership Program: Four Years In (2023) Five Years of Memberships (2024) This year, I thought I’d try something (slightly) more concise.
2025-01-23 08:00:00
Roden Readers — Hello hello hello out there in this weird and terrible and beautiful world we inhabit, this world of wonder and sadness and extreme fartage of many kinds. I’m Craig Mod and this is Roden and it’s 2025. Below: SPECIAL PROJECTS 6th anniversary (!!), a book tour, notes on attention, a didactic rant on social media in 2025, and a plea for Not Bullshit. Book Tour I’m going on a BOOK TOUR in May / June 2025.