You know those souvenir penny press machines you find at tourist traps? We made one. But instead of a single overrated attraction, our machine moves around our city, highlighting local favorite businesses. It’s called Local Crush.

We ran Local Crush for a full year-long circuit, with the penny machine hosted at twelve local favorites. Each month the host business chose a local charity, and all the quarters spent go directly to that nonprofit.

It’s a limited-time opportunity for penny collectors - visit each location once per year, and collect all the designs.

This post will be a recap that covers:

• what we did
• why we did it
• how it went
• and should you do this in your city?

First, here’s what it looks like, in one of our host stores:

We documented the journey mostly on instagram! But this is my restrospective report.

Why we did it

Our family has always liked collecting pressed pennies. We’re not super hardcore about it, but if a place we’re visiting has a machine, we’ll definitely get one. A pressed penny is kind of the ideal souvenir: they’re super cheap, they can only be attained by visiting the location, and they don’t fill up your suitcase (or your home) with junk. You can keep a lifetime’s collection in a spare jar.

You know, like this.

We’ve always imagined owning one of these machines. But I don’t run a tourist destination! And then the more we thought about it, we wondered - why should the tourist traps have all the fun? Wouldn’t it be great if the darling small businesses we love had this too?

So that’s what we did.

What we did

Well, we ordered one. There are a few companies around the country that still make these machines, and while it was a little more complicated than just picking something up on amazon, it’s not that much more complicated.

First, however, we started talking to the proprietors of our favorite local businesses. It’s kind of a weird pitch: would you let us station a penny press machine in your business? And use your logo to make a pressed penny souvenir for your business? And donate all the money to a charity? But it’s only there for a month? Certainly it took some explanation here and there.

But in general: yes! I don’t think we had anybody turn us down, once we got the idea across.

After we found the right vendor, we worked with them to set up the first two die wheels. Our penny press can hold 4 custom designs, and so we used three spaces slot for a local business, and then one for the Local Crush brand itself. I did a lot of variations.

With that plan, we need four separate die wheels, and we need to change them out once per quarter. The die wheels look like this:

Once we had the first two wheels, we put our order in with the machine manufacturer, and they built out the cabinet itself and the die wheels. We drove out to Colorado and loaded it up into our car to drive home!

The machine itself is kind of ugly, so we designed a vinyl wrap for it, and Erika constructed a big eye-catching topper sign.

How it went

It went great, I think?

We definitely achieved the first goal: make the press, move it around the city, and draw some attention to local favorite shops and charities.

• Total locations: 12
• Total nonprofits: 10 (some stores chose the same charity)
• Total raised for local charities: $1380.00
• Total pennies crushed: 2,760

Could anybody make a profit at this? Not the way we’re doing it, that’s for sure. Did we spend more on the press than we generated in quarters? Definitely. Plus, of course, we gave away all the quarters. Even if we were keeping the proceeds this would have lost money. But that wasn’t the goal, of course - we wanted to create something new for our city.

I often thought about how this would compare with a ‘normal’ penny press, where we are in a tourist trap location and relying on throughput of lots and lots of foot traffic. This is a different model, of course, relying instead on repeat visitors. I suppose even if we repeated this process, we could eventually break even and recoup the cost of the press itself.

What’s next

The actual day-to-day of running the press was… kind of a hassle? Not a big hassle. But we moved the press every month, and that means every month we had to coordinate with store staff to let them know when we’d make the transition (and remind them that they agreed to this a year ago and make space for it). Then we’d have to go pick up the press, and get it established in the new location. No a big deal, just a minor schlep.

But! We got to know the owners of twelve local favorite businesses, and in some very small way give back to our community. That was the best part. We had several other businesses reach out to join the next cycle, which I think is a vote for its future.

I’m always on the lookout for architecture inspiration; I’ve got an ongoing project file to design the Studio Kirkland ‘weirding haus.’ This is our codename for a new home, a small empty-nest-compatible house that’s planned for resilience in a changing climate, with a focus on maintainability. Aesthetically, I’ve always wanted a home to be a cold concrete box. Anyways, all my ideas were shaken up by this building.

It’s so beautiful. From the outside, the museum is a a kind of bland classical temple. Could be anywhere. But I love classical sculpture, so a large collection of sculptures from antiquity is Matt Catnip.

Nice enough, obviously, but inside is what blew my dome. The walls and ceilings are all this lightly plastered brick; apparently it was originally built with frescoes but they didn’t survive WWII, and this is how they’ve restored it. It’s a series of domes and barrel vaults, with some interesting brickwork that saves it from a kind of de Chirico uncanny valley.

The museum is a square, where you enter from the front portico and then can move around the square circuit in either direction. There’s a large courtyard in the middle.

(Shoutout to original architect Leo von Klenze and funder Bavarian King Ludwig)

You can see the park-like setting is quite nice too.

Because it’s all arranged around a courtyard, it has huge interior windows, which floods the galleries with natural lighting. I don’t think there even are any windows that face out, at all?

I was never there after dark so I don’t know how these rooms feel with any kind of artificial lighting. Maybe there are LED strips hidden in that break between the vertical wall and the bottom of the barrel vaults.

The front two corners have round rooms with interior domes and skylights above; these are gorgeous feature rooms that highlight showstopper sculptures.

Of course, it’s a museum and it’s full of incredible work; that lends some aura.

And now I have spent a lot of time in my sketchbook trying to scale this building down to something that would work as a house. Daydreaming about where we’d put a kitchen, and library, and guest rooms. It defeats many of the principles I’ve been designing from (minimal roof space, centralized mech services, easily replaceable/composable parts). But damn if it didn’t feel great to actually BE in. I spent a lot of time here, going back to enjoy the spaces themselves, but also to just hang out and draw.

Well: I’ve often ruminated on the dumb joke that takes this format, and finally decided to make it real. Sort of.

So: I made a little website studiokirkland.com/inthishouse - and now you can read ALL of Pride and Prejudice as a yard sign. And also buy one if you want to get a sensible chuckle out of your literate neighbors, I guess!

I love live music. I am pretty choosy about what kind of recorded music I listen to, but I will happily listen to the worst band if I can be in the same room with them, and feel the bass vibrate with my actual body. I love a live show.

And while they’re always kind of a crapshoot, I do really like to hear the opening acts. I show up to concerts on time!

The very first concert ticket I bought myself was for the REM Monster tour, in 1995. The opener for that show as a little British band I’d never heard of called Radiohead.

SO: I’m interested! If you like a band, what kind of bands open for that band?

I designed (and vibecoded) a little app:

This would be a perfect little app: connect your Spotify* account, get a listening history. Find the bands you listen to the most. Analyze their touring schedule. Build a playlist of which bands open for them.

And it worked!

It’s not perfect (sometimes it finds people that play the same festival, or even just the same venue on the same date, and confuses things). But it’s already surfaced some new-to-me music.

I was all excited to share this, and then found out: Spotify doesn’t actually allow this. Their API has two modes: build for yourself, or become a big partner. My Big Partner application was rejected (you have to have millions of users and serious revenue before they consider you).

So it only works… for my Spotify account.

Taking deeper / longer / more measured breaths in specific ways is supposed to have all these real, actual health benefits: physical and mental and emotional. Like, it can supposedly calm you, improve your sleep, improve focus, juice your attention span, etc., all depending on how you’re breathing. Maybe it’s a bit woo-woo, sure. But on the other hand: we all understand that taking a deep breath is calming. It seems plausible.

I know the few times I tried an ‘activating’ breathwork thing, it felt AMAZING. As good as a strong cup of coffee.

SO what I’ve always wondered, and think about once per week: does anybody write songs that build in breathwork? Singing is by its nature a kind of structured breathing, but in a loose way. When you sing, you generally decide when to take new breaths in, but the song itself determines when you breathe out. And it seems like with a little more planning, you could map this into a real breathwork exercise. Instead of just ‘in’ and ‘out’ and ‘hold’ in breathwork, we could have words and melody.

And furthermore: I go to church on Sundays, and every week we sing songs together that are meant (in part) to affect our mental and emotional state. That’s not the POINT of worship music per se, but it’s part of it, right? We sing Amazing Grace to remind ourselves that we once were lost but now are found. We sing It Is Well With My Soul to practice equanimity both when peace like a river attendeth my way AND when sorrows like sea billows roll.

SO my question is: who is writing new-age-breathworky songs for Christian worship, and where can I try them out?

My side project life now has a rhythm, and one of the big sections in that rhythm is Dracula Season. In 2026 this will be our fifth time through, and we’re about to embark on Dracula Season.

A crazy thing about this is: most people don’t unsubscribe after reading it! There are still hundreds of thousands of people sign up, and this year more people than ever read Dracula together. This kind of blows my mind!

The newsletter runs on Substack. Even if your newsletter is free, the platform really wants you to consider a paid subscription tier, and whether you like it or not they offer your readers a way to ‘pledge’ a subscription. So last year I caved to that pressure, and launched the official supporter tier.

I called it Dracula Weekly, because for those supporters only I write a weekly recap post. I cover what happened in the reading (in case you missed one or feel behind), and point to some of the good memes/jokes/artwork/etc that people have created, and then some general notes and pointers to other things I think are neat. That’s not much of an ‘exclusive’ reward here. Also I might mail you some merch.

I called it Dracula Weekly officially, but secretly I call it my OnlyFangs.

Sending the same emails out year after year to hundreds of thousands of people is exciting - but having these actual supporters is surprisingly motivating! It’s not the money, but the signal that people actually care. Because I get it: you sign up for something, you may or may not read it, and you might just never get around to unsubscribing. Maybe you delete it when it comes in, maybe you just throw it in your junk or to-read-later pile. I also don’t allow comments on Dracula (because I don’t know how I would community-manage this many people), and so it’s hard to know if people are engaged… or just haven’t gotten around to unsubscribing.

So knowing that there are real supporters out there who have made this choice, that actually want Dracula Daily to keep going, makes all the difference. Like I said, surprisingly motivating!

(Yes, there ARE also tens of thousands of new subscribers each year. I’m excited about them too!)

Anyway, this year as a thank-you I’ve made some Dracula Daily-themed band-aids, which I will send out to supporters. I think this is a good joke! We’ll see.

Anyways: Dracula Season starts on May 3! You can sign up to read along with us - it’s free! Or of course, you can also subscribe to my OnlyFangs.

Retro is a delightful read: an out-of-work actress joins up to be a Time Travel Agent for Retro, the world’s only time travel agency. I got to read an early copy of this and thought it was so much fun.

I worked with Jessica to build a site for Retro the company, following the description in the text (and adding some details here and there). My favorite bit: you can get your Pastport, the official ID that lets you ride the Retro Metro.

Sadly we couldn’t play it completely straight; the publishers and agents all want to eventually, you know, link to the book so you can buy it. But this was very fun, and I think Jess is going to sell a million copies of this thing.

[ Spoiler alert: I’m going to launch it as a newsletter a la Dracula Daily - I’ll email you the parts of Honeywood ‘as they happen’ to the characters. You can Join Honeywood Daily here to read it! ]

Honeywood is a series of found letters and telegrams between an architect, his client, and the characters involved in designing and building a house. Things do not go according to plan.

Reader, hear me out: this book is advertised as ‘comedic.’ But is this book funny? I wasn’t sure at first. It’s a bit painful at the beginning! It’s the story of a multi-polar working relationship; a story about people trying to do their jobs, despite everyone around them. It’s so true to life.

But midway through the book I had been convinced: this is laugh-out-loud, guffaw-worthy funny. A masterpiece of subtle cringe. A work of art.

I think the most sympathetic character is the architect. The book captures exactly what it’s like to work with a client, and have contractors or developers take your work and execute it. There are miscommunications, shifting alliances, optimism and pessimism, distrust and hope. The things that go wrong are not outlandish. Sometimes they’re barely even comedic. They’re just things that happen: the client visits the building site, sees the brickwork going up and says ‘I wanted reddish pink bricks not pinkish red bricks, you must fix this immediately.’ Reading the first pages of this book FELT LIKE WORK. It felt like reading my own email inbox!

But after the initial shock I started to enjoy it… in the precisely the same way I enjoy watching videos of train crashes. This is going so wrong! It’s so bad! And every step of this is predictable!

One of my favorite parts is that there’s another character, actually - the ‘editor’ who ‘found’ the Honeywood File and is presenting it to us, with his commentary. In between all of these painfully, uncannily realistic letters, the editor is writing commentary on how each party handles the situation. “This letter should have been more straightforward” or “We can see now how the architect is worried this will compromise his future work” and sometimes he’s just cheerleading a well-written rebuff: “Bravo! A bag of nuts to Sir Leslie Brash.”

I’ve been a working professional in the design field for 20+ years, and I’ve had this sense that miscommunication and passive-aggressiveness and cover-your-ass wishy-washiness is somehow a product of EMAIL culture. Right? Email’s the problem. If we didn’t have email, we could simply meet and solve problems together, or send a single letter that meant-what-it-said-and-said-what-it-meant and at LEAST we wouldn’t screw up our projects so badly. (Here I mean ‘we’ as in ‘all of western civilization.’)

But this piece of fiction is from 1929, and it’s all letters and telegrams, not an email in sight! And everything you hate about your email job, each weaselly bit of corporate speak, ‘per my last email’ and ‘the contract states’ and ‘this is out of scope’ just… already exists. We must have been doing it this way all along! Maybe the pyramids didn’t have this kind of BS when they were built. But I’m starting to think that they did.

And me personally? I’m not exempt! The whole book is like holding up a mirror to my career’s worth of email. I’ve written every single one of these letters.

• I’ve been the designer, of course, trying convince a client to not make a disastrous late-breaking change (while still knowing I also need to keep that client happy enough to pay their invoice). I’ve given half-baked instructions to a developer, causing them heartache.
• I’ve been the client, standing on the sidewalk outside the job site of my own house and asking: is that right? Are you sure? And wondering if (and how) I’m getting screwed by the trades.
• And I’ve been the tradesperson executing a project and dealing with contradictory instructions from all parties, while still trying to do a job I’m proud of, to good standards, while working within a budget and timeline that I didn’t set.

SO: ultimately the journey of Honeywood is both entertaining and cathartic - the things that can be so challenging about working with others are right here in this book, and we can see how these characters navigate it. It’s beloved by designers and creatives, and I think anybody with an email job that does ‘knowledge work’ will love it too.

I’ve been thinking about this book for a few years now, and I think it’s perfect for something to read all together: all the communications have a date, and we can follow it in real time, just like we do with Dracula in Dracula Daily. Plus it’s a great, underrated and overlooked book.

We can read it together on Substack in the same way: in real time, as it happens to the characters. We’ll start on April 1 (no joke).

I’m so excited to share it. Let’s read Honeywood together!

If you think this sounds interesting, sign up for the email list - we start on April 1 (really).

So last year I started Tiny Truck Tracker, which keeps tabs on which (if any) of these startups will get across the finish line. I’ve put down deposits on more than one of these little guys!

Tiny Truck Tracker gives an overview of the contenders in this space, a kind of scorecard for all the tiny truck stats, some news and updates when available, and an overall ‘how likely I think this is to actually happen.’

(Yes, one of these, the Pickman, isn’t even really an electric pickup - it’s a ‘low speed vehicle’, effectively a chinese-made golf cart dressed up like a pickup for Halloween.)

The race graphic at the top features a few of the dead startups (RIP CANOO). I think it’s worth remembering that most of these attempts have already failed! I’m not cheerleading for any startup’s demise - really the opposite - but it’s exciting to remember what a difficult category this is to enter.

Type 1 fun is stuff that’s fun in the actual moment. Watersliding. Eating a bag of Cheetos. Drinks with friends. Laughing at a joke.

To celebrate Brand New Box’s 15th birthday in 2022, we took the whole company and their plus-ones on a rafting trip through Grand Canyon. It was awesome. We started by meeting up in Vegas, we did escape rooms, I encouraged everybody to go to the Meow Wolf installation, we had an evening on the Vegas strip. The next night we watched the Kansas Jayhawks win the national basketball championship. This is classic Type 1 Fun.

The next morning we got up early, caught a charter bus to the launch point, and met our river guides. The weather was beautiful. Gorgeous scenery, lovely float on our new rafts, fun chatting with fellow rafters and guides. The float trip is going to have a lot of Type 1 fun.

This particular Grand Canyon rafting trip is pretty luxurious. Five days of fun rafting, beautiful hiking, and very chill camping. The guides do everything for us, including preparing three square meals a day. Bougie. All we need to do is hang out, help unload the rafts, and sit around the fire in the evening. We brought card games and booze.

At the end of the rafting trip, we’ll hike out of the Grand Canyon - from the river all the way up to the South Rim park. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s a pretty serious hike, all uphill and after a week of camping. We will have to carry all our own stuff, water is only available at a couple of rest stations, and it’s going to be HOT. But this is a work trip - it’s not THAT strenuous. We asked everybody to do a few practice hikes. And we promised: it won’t be that bad. We encouraged everyone to just go at your own pace. Nate said he’d happily bring up the rear, at whatever pace that happened at.

The Greeks call this dramatic irony.

Type 2 Fun is fun that’s not enjoyable per se. It’s not super fun in the moment, and perhaps it’s difficult. But Type 2 fun is rewarding, even if it’s only rewarding in retrospect. Running a marathon. An all-day hike carrying a heavy backpack. Serious camping. Endurance challenges. Maybe some of our work at BNB is Type 2 Fun!

We had a few doses of Type 2 fun on the river trip. During the first night camping at the beach there was a strong wind all night long, and for about twelve hours straight it felt like were were sitting inside one of those sandblasting cabinets they use to etch glass. But the weather calmed down the next day, and we had gorgeous sunshine the rest of the trip.

The rafting trip is mostly very chill; sitting on a calm raft, enjoying the scenery. The rapids themselves are fun, and could be a little bit Type 2: if you sat in the front, you would get doused with very cold water, and more than one person (me included) barely kept their seat because the powerful waves would push you around with so much force. Camping is always a little bit of Type 2 Fun anyway: wind, weather, sleeping on the ground, no access to showers, cleaning yourself by swimming in the ice-cold river, sharing a single outdoor vault toilet. The usual.

Type 2 started to ramp up when the first people got sick.

First there was one person with an upset stomach, maybe a little diarrhea. Bummer for them, but they were good enough sports, and they muscled through. They weren’t the camping type, and they chalked it up to nerves. Then a second person started feeling it.

The guides gave us stern lectures: drink your electrolytes! Eat more food than you think you need! The rafting trip takes more out of you than you might expect.

But by day three, it was clear: people were getting sick. This wasn’t just a nervous stomach, it was communicable. Nobody was worried though, it was just a drag. Unlucky. People get sick. It’s OK; that’s Type Two Fun. The guides had brought along two covid tests (two! for a party of 28 people! in April 2022!), and one Poor Soul tested positive. I think this was a lingering false positive - this person had recently had covid a few weeks back, and wasn’t feeling too bad. But with a positive covid case, everything ground to a halt.

Poor Covid Soul had to get airlifted out, even though he felt fine by the next morning. We got stuck at the beach for half a day while the guides and national park and the state health service got all their ducks in a row, and then we rafted down to an official Evacuation Beach, and said goodbye to the Covid Sufferer. As a boss, this feels pretty bad: we brought employees on this trip, and then watched them get helicoptered away. Their partner was in tears. There’s no cell service in the canyon, so their partner had say goodbye. We’d meet him at the top, in a couple of days.

In the meantime, it was clear that this illness was spreading FAST. More and more people coming down with it, including some of our guides (who continued to make our food and pilot our rafts).

And it was also clear by now that this was not COVID. It wasn’t respiratory, but it came with a backpack full of other fun symptoms. Fever. Exhaustion. Dizziness. Vomiting. Expelling fluids from any direction. I will remind you that more than twenty people were all sharing a single vault toilet.

By this point we could visualize the graph. Our symptoms were different, but we’d just lived through two years of a coronavirus pandemic. Plus, we’re a tech company. We know what exponential growth is. We joked about the r-value. We washed our hands more vigorously. In the river.

And one-by-one, someone would simply… not show up to the next meal. One more empty space at the campfire. And in the distance, one more sound of some very intense gastrointestinal distress. This was horror movie stuff, except instead of a serial killer it’s a virus.

In the meantime, we were all just trying to drink a lot of fluids and electrolytes, and cram in the calories to help us power through the remainder of the trip. Remember: at the end of this rafting journey is an all-day hike - up from the river to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The next morning was the hike out.

Type 3 is when you seriously think you might die.

By the last night, everybody was just trying to hang on and salvage some bit of fun. But overnight, the shoreline became a parade of people emptying themselves of whatever solids and fluids they had. It was sad, it was hilarious, and it was definitely gross. Lying under the open desert sky, watching bats chase after insects as they flit through the most beautiful starscape you’ve ever seen - and all around you the sounds of miserable people, retching.

Those that had already been sick a few days were strengthening, a few were at the lowest point, and some just hadn’t got it yet.

I got it on the final evening, and spent all night vomiting. The next morning, sleep-deprived and completely emptied of fluids and calories, it was time to start hiking.

We put on a brave face and just went for it: every man for himself, just get yourself to the top. The guides - who were all pretty sick by now too - told us this was the only way. There’s no backup plan. Just get out of the canyon. One foot in front of the other. I walked with Erika, who never got sick, and she VERY patiently walked alongside me as I hiked at a snails pace. We split into groups.

We straggled our way up the trail, spreading out. At shady points, we stopped to rest (or vomit). We heard trail gossip from the different groups. So-and-so is sick now. Someone else fainted. Someone collapsed. A ranger took a look at one guy and stopped him: there’s no way you’re hiking out. He got airlifted out on another helicopter.

We met more park rangers on the trail. They said, oh, are YOU with the river trip? THAT river trip? The one where everybody is sick? Then we started hearing it from regular hikers we met on the trail. We knew this was getting serious when even casual hikers on the canyon trail had heard about us, and kept their distance.

At one rest point, we met up with Nate’s group. He was feeling fine this morning. He laid down in some shade, and was still lying there when we left.

My little group, encouraged by Erika with infinite patience, plodded our way up. We picked up a few others and a ranger who coached us. One step at a time. In the meantime I was wondering: will any of these people still want to work with us when we get out of here? WILL we get everybody out of here?

I made it to the top.

At the top of the Grand Canyon, your cell phone works again. Service is spotty, but it’s there a bar or two of signal. It’s hard to make a phone call, but you might get a text message.

This became an evening-long coordination problem: how to find the people that have been straggling out of the canyon all evening. Who made it out? Who hasn’t yet? One couple who hadn’t gotten sick had sprinted their way up the canyon, but were now falling ill.

We only had one night booked in the Grand Canyon lodges, and they were totally booked. You couldn’t extend your stay for love nor money. But that was OK: we had a chartered van coming to pick us up in the morning and take us back to Vegas. And Vegas has hotels. And medical facilities. And our airline tickets home. When we found people, we passed along the message: just get to the bus. Help others. Get everybody on that bus in the morning. No man left behind.

We called at least one ambulance that evening. (The victim was OK, just dehydrated and feverish. Give him electrolytes and rest, the medics said.)

By late that night we still hadn’t heard from Nate. His wife had left him at the rest area, under the care of park rangers, and hiked out alone. Then we got a slack message! He was spending the night at the ranger station, and had hacked into their wifi. Go on without me, he said. Just get the team out to Vegas. Get our people home.

And so that’s what we did! I don’t think I would have felt OK leaving an employee or their partner behind. But Nate’s a resourceful guy, and I trust him to take care of himself. We got everybody else on the bus. We got to Vegas. We got on our flights home.

Nate made it out the next day. A ranger helped him hike the rest of the way. At the top he bribed somebody to drive him to Phoenix. He caught a flight home.

It turns out, our illness was just common Norovirus. We were the first of a season of infections, shutting down rafting trips that summer. Over two hundred people got sick. The CDC wrote a paper about us.

(Our group included patient zero: we’re that first bump on the left side of the graph.)

So: it turned out fine. Everybody survived, nobody quit. We definitely all learned about the Three Types of Fun.

But I don’t think any of us have been back to the canyon.