I live in a constant state of tension between consumption and production. Consumption includes things like reading, researching, purchasing, exploring, and even taking pictures. Production is much narrower and boils down to writing about whatever I was consuming. There are phases where I just want to consume everything – reading old magazines, reading current news, watching documentaries and YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, researching, buying, exploring my own collections, taking photos.
These are followed by, or are concurrent with, production, which begins the process of culling and editing images, drafting posts, checking facts, revising, rewriting, and hopefully publishing. Production phases require more energy and are shorter than consumption phases. They’re creatively exhausting because they are the actual work. The result of this unbalanced ebb-and-flow is a bunch of half-written articles and parts of my collection that I’m “using” strewn about the house.
For example, I was in a photography consumption phase this spring, buying lenses and cameras, and taking photos with them with the intent to write both nostalgic and contemporary reviews. I currently have twelve partial drafts from that time, some of which I started writing during the summer of 2024 and still haven’t completed! Even this piece, an attempt at quickly getting a thought out before losing interest, has been under revision for a week.
It’s a quandary, but it’s me. Right now I’m trying to manage concurrent consumption and production phases; here’s a quick list of what that entails.
I’ve been consuming:
- A book from 1993 about the 68k to PowerPC transition
- Back issues of Computer Shopper from the early to mid 90’s
- Coverage of Apple’s iPhones 17 and iOS 26
- Foundation seasons 1-3
- Alien Earth
- Podcasts: Upgrade, Mac Break Weekly, The Retro Hour, Simple Beep
- Restoring a 2015 12” MacBook and finding a use for it in my regular life
- Restoring a 2007 MacBook Pro to its original configuration and loading it with software from its era
- Loading up an iPod nano with every iPod game ever made
- Consolidating my Mac Museum inventory and documentation from Google Drive and various README files into Notion pages
- Inventorying my various VMs across my systems
- Mildly obsessing over having every version of iTunes installed in a VM and loaded with music
- Organizing all of the retro software I have on my RAID
- Exploring the website of Basic Apple Guy, downloading his wallpapers, buying his stickers, and reading his articles
- Exploring the photography of Bill Atkinson and downloading his images for desktop backgrounds
- Reliving the days of custom icons – downloading icons of you’re and managing them through CandyBar
- Playing with my Pico Mac nano
- Testing out a SCSI PC Card that allows a Zip drive, CD ROM, MO drive, or hard drive to connect to a PC laptop
- Connecting a Zip drive to my IBM Thinkpad 760E to load era-compatible software on it, such as Windows 95 Plus!
- Completing and organizing my digital collection of Macworld magazines
- Testing Notion as a way to draft blog posts
I’ve been producing:
- A few pieces about the iPhones 17 (published, and published)
- A review of the 12” MacBook (published)
- This piece (published)
- A piece about Notion, CandyBar, Bill Atkinson, and Basic Apple Guy (published)
- Photos from our block party, the boys’ first season of marching band, and Sally’s recent 5K (published)
- Short articles about Alien Earth, Foundation, The PowerPC Macintosh, and Simple Beep (drafted)
A little unbalanced, right? Perhaps I’ll shift some more of those consumption items into production, but I won’t kid myself – some of them will never be finished let alone written about.
Relatively Ambitious 