Going Dark, Dead Fist Bumps & the Nexus of Perpetual QA

Freezing temps mean it’s time to get cozy with schoolwork. Summer School, commence.

After the last dispatch, someone in our workspace said they love Summer School because it feels “actually written by a human being” and “full of such weird things.”

Which is wild—because we were pretty sure MoltBot was writing these just to waste tokens. Don’t worry about the bots, they’re fine. Nothing to worry about:

Don’t want to get this? Hit reply with “not for me” and we’ll expel you from Summer School—no hard feelings.

How do I survive a brutal winter?

Naomi: You don’t. You can’t. You descend. Join me and let’s go dark. Think scary thoughts. Walk in the cemetery and tempt frostbite. Buy your lover something a wee bit sinister for the Hallmark holiday approaching (I purchased a his/hers pair of these morbid rings and they come with free engraving! Vampire version also good).

Brands are going dark, too. Truly, I cannot stop thinking about this Jet-Puffed marshmallow ad where they show the many ways to torture a marshmallow. It’s morbid. It’s adorable. (Yes, the most recent Ghostbusters movie did it first, but still.)

Sometimes the only way through is straight into the fire. This is the game. It’s winter. You don’t have to survive it if you’re open to many terrible microdeaths. I’ll leave you with a slightly more uplifting quote my friend Dana emailed me last week:

Think of winter and the closing of the dark as I do, which is a time of great underground activity. The best part of these months is that you can close yourself into what you need to do and bustle unseen (which is always my favorite kind of bustling). Winter is anything but fallow and I love that time when the sun does come around and you get to show what you’ve done with the hidden months. Magic stuff.

Is the fist bump dead?

Tucker: The fist bump is fine. You can fist bump an acquaintance or a golf partner you’re ambivalent about. But hear this: I think if you care about someone you should go palm to palm. With force.

Everyone should have at least one friend that you high five regularly. None of this dap-adjacent, pound-ish nonsense. A clean right angle. Elbow up. Palm flat. Contact made. Or as Naomi stated: “Five me in the hand as hard as you can.”

Every morning when I drop off my kids at school, I see the same five to eight dads who are also assigned morning duties. They are delightful gents and render a variety of daps, fist bumps, middle-distance waves, and head nods.

But there is one gentleman with an infectious smile that stands out. Our kids are in different grades so we’ve never even had a conversation. What I do know about him is that for years, every single morning, he has delivered a serious “up high” palm slap to me.

It feels somehow more meaningful and intimate than the other modes. I love him for it.

To fight our loss of connection and the germ-aware freaks we became post-pandemic, slapping palms almost feels like…anarchy. It’s gross. It’s silly. It hurts so good. Who is your ride or high five?

What’s the point of school anymore?

Naomi: I just got my anonymous course reviews back from the Professional Creativity class I taught at the University of Florida last semester. Good news: they mostly liked my jokes. One student did say my contributions felt like “summer camp icebreakers,” which…compliment.

What was more interesting was how they reacted to an improv game I led called Bad Advice Hotline. The premise was simple: pretend to “call” a classmate with a make-believe scenario, then receive terrible—but wildly enthusiastic—advice from them. Students said that while they started the exercise feeling anxious and embarrassed and finished feeling braver and more confident, it was, well, still kind of scary.

Which makes me think more deeply about how we are shaping education in this…Community of Tomorrow, as Disney put it. We have to teach useful skills. Math, yes. Science, of course. Reading, no doubt. But are we teaching enough connection? Weird, messy, improvised, gross, eye-contact connection?

I realize young people have an intense fear of being seen, judged, and worse—recorded—in those situations. The techy Austin parents already know this because they’re sending kids to places like Alpha School to prep for an AI-shaped future while the rest of us are still arguing about screen time like it’s 2014 (I loved Benjamin Wallace’s controversial article about it and the lovely illustration by Justin Metz). Apocalypse Readiness should not be a private luxury! But I digress. I’m definitely not a neutral voice of reason or authority on this matter (I taught a friend’s 10-year-old what a “French Exit” was at a party last week and I think I’m now cancelled in 14 countries). But how else are we going to combat AI-produced schoolwork if it’s not going to be monologues and performance art?

How do I know if I’m ahead or behind on AI?

Tucker: Well, here’s how we see it. On one hand we live in agency land. We have to live and die by being the fastest, best, and most creative at all things digital. So we have our fingers stuck inside the Bonkers Sockets (latest tools, nerdy stuff, you get it).

On the other (less crispy) hand, we stake our reputation by the quality of our execution and by our skill in forging human connection, so we’re not going to jump onto a scammy bandwagon too quickly.

With AI workflows, I would say we’re two steps ahead, if I can toot our horn (we’re building enterprise tech faster with smaller teams than ever).

But right when you start to feel PRETTAY HOT with yourself and how you’ve adapted, you will invariably stumble on a project that makes you feel lightyears behind. For us this week it was this project and now I feel like we’re at the back of the pack again. (Isometric NYC is a SimCity-on-steroids personal experiment from Andy Coenen at Google DeepMind. If you want to feel left in the dust, go check it out.) (Of course, if you want to see a version of NYC made over 20 years BY HAND, that one might be even cooler.)

And if that didn’t do it for you, someone is going to forward you the Google Genie video and ruin your confidence for a week.

So the short answer is YOU ARE BOTH. You are always both. It’s uncomfortable in the middle, but no matter how hard you are swimming, there is someone in deeper water than you. There is also someone who is still trying to figure out Google Docs.* Just white-knuckle this with the rest of us.

*A friend who works at a large bank learned this week you could co-edit Google Docs. They’re not allowed to use any co-editing docs in their department. Technology is a spectrum.

Can I come see your gallery wall?

Naomi: Yes! After months of shepherding envelopes across the country (and losing at least one to Joshua Tree), we finally opened 23 pieces of physical art last month at our Creative Post party and it was better than Christmas morning. (Sign up if you want in.)

What’s more: our clients are printing things again (we’re working on a mailer that goes out alongside a digital product we built next month). Apparently, paper stuff is back, baby.

I hoped this day would come. Tucker promised me it would. (That’s why we started The Creative Post anyway.) There is something powerful about art that is tangible and slow. Sovereignty is not a lighthearted topic right now. Our bodies, our country, our people, our neighborhoods, our freedoms, our artwork—it all feels so much more delicate. It wasn’t a solid stair to stand on before, but it was something you could talk about with conviction and with hope. Now, things feel loose. Slippery. Unclear. I guess that’s why something as freakin’ simple as mail feels so grounding. May we all find something to remind us we’re ok. Paper forever.

Pop Quiz

How many Dunkin’ Donuts are in NYC?

At the time of this publication, it’s 623. Naomi got this question at pub trivia and fully short-circuited. So what chain has quietly conquered your city while you weren’t looking? Is it T-Mobile? It might be T-Mobile.

Who named these wifi networks?

Either humans are still funny, or a robot is learning irony faster than expected. Unclear which is worse. For goodness’ sakes, please tell us your LAN names are silly. This is the only way to offend and entertain our cranky neighbors.

Are you in the “Nexus of Perpetual QA?”

We are coining this term. This is the default destination of all vibe coding. You end up in a place of circular QA, perpetually fixing that which you broke. We’ve developed a few processes to avoid this, but I’m going to coin the Nexus so we have a way to describe the junk that was built with mindblowing speed and no guardrails that we’ll be running into for the next…decade?

Good Internet

(It still exists. You just have to dig.)

• Dotfork review, the “internet’s most trusted—and most feared—source of website criticism,” is always an entertaining read.

• Marginal Revolution is an economics blog you might actually like reading.

• The Marshall Allen Project is a resource that helps people fight medical bills (and even has a chatbot trained on advice from a dead person); it has already saved our designer over $7,000.

• A deeply satisfying “I wish this still existed” MTV-style music player, from good folk music management.

• A mom ate all her son’s weed gummies. Both are very upset with each other. Worth a listen. (Via Heavyweight.)

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Course six of Summer School completed. If you made it this far, reply to us with an itty bitty checkmark. ✅

See you in the snow, Naomi & Tucker