Jonathan Stephens

@jonathanstephens.us

620 Followers 947 Following

Fond of — semicolons, and‽ Late-realised AuDHD—always a bit queer. Garden: jonathanstephens.us Business: poetandscribe.com Newsletter: craftandpractice.com

A photo of a book, laying open on its spine, stop a high-top bar table. The photo is vertical, with a forest of multicolored tabbed pages. Hints of dog ears can be seen on some of those pages (as if for extra emphasis). There's a G2 Pilot Pen resting on top of the open page, to help hold it down. A gray notebook is blurry, but resting stop the far side of the spread—holding it down.
A photo of a hand holding up a book, using their thumb and pinky finger as feet of a book stand. The book is open to the spread, introducing chapter two, The Voyage Home (In which we realize we have no fucking clue about "space"), on page 21 of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's book, The Edge of Space-Time.
A row of books, sitting on a bookshelf, highlighter-colorful spines, showcasing the full Dungeon Crawler Carl series, minus the most recent release.
A photo of a—guesstimate—12" long brown feather with down tufts at the quill's base. It's being held by a white man's left hand, that's also holding a tied bag of poop, has a wrist tattooed of be Kind, and a dog's leash loosely held on the upper forearm. All this with a lens blurred background of flower greenery topped with opened orange lily blooms.
A photo of a chewed off bud of a lily. The background is filled with a strong lens blur of all the other lilies, yet to be smacked on by deer.
Photo of a page of a book, full and only showing typographic characters and words. Circled is the end of a word (parachutes) followed by an em-dash, a space, and another word (even).
A growing quercus texana sapling, with still evident fresh wood mulch from its planting.
A photo of a very fresh tattoo on the inside of my left wrist that reads be Kind, with a rainbow infinity symbol below it, where one of loops is in the form of a crashing wave.
Photograph of carnitas in a round, white bowl, with a playfully decorated fork resting and waiting for use. On the right and left are parentheses looking containers of a bell pepper and onion mix. All sitting on top of a wooden serving tray.
Photograph of a border collie, lazily seated in a round chair. She's looking directly into the camera as she guards her soccer ball | football that rests between her head and dangling paw.
A screenshot of a git pull request timeline that reads "jonathan-stephens requested a review from Matsxmats 4 minutes ago". Below that is the notification that the commit was merged by Matsxmats into the main branch one minute ago. Then, an inline-alert that says the pull request was successful, can be closed, and can be deleted (with a handy, dandy action button to Delete branch right beside the alert).
A screenshot of Lynn's website as default dark system setting. Text is visible, but barely as the text is pure black on an off black background
Four loaves of bread, resting on a cooling rack, just out of the oven. One of the loaves rests, leaning on two of the larger loaves. The two loaves on the side are MUCH thinner than the two center.
A screenshot of page 21 of the book. The section is titled, "Beyond, Before, and Besides Yeast Bread: A Plethora of Categories." The subsection is titled, "Batter Breads, or How to Have Yeast Bread without Exerting Yourself." The first paragraph reads: Face it, some people just don't enjoy kneading, even enough to make homemade bread. But there is another way, batter breads which are beaten, not kneaded. How much depends on your stamina and patience. The minimal effort will still produce a tasty bread. If you're lucky enough to have a heavy-duty mixer you can get superb breads with practically no effort at all on your part."
A spread of the book The Garden Way's Bread Book by Ellen Foscue Johnson, pages 16 and 17. The first ppage, on the left, shows a—crunchy? softy? fresh? tasty— bread, looking freshly baked, puffing out of a ramekin (the "mushroom cap" is the size of the ramekin itself!). On the second, right page of the spread is a paragraph, followed by a simple list. On either side of the list (in the first and third columns of the three column page layout; with the images flush to the edge of the center column's margins) are the twelve signs of the zodiac, illustrated as woodcut style line-art. At the bottom of the page (the lower third), there sits an illustration of a human man, sitting at an "outdoor, European café style" table, dressed in a suit—shoes resting flat on the ground, legs resting in a comfortable position. In his hand, he holds up a slice of bread; just taken from the plate at the opposite edge of the table, other slices of bread resting and ready to be eaten).
The new logo of the company, Poet & Scribe, with its mission right below as a lede: helping teams shape accessible web products, thoughtfully built to grow. It then lists the company's five guiding principles: coalitions over competition, spectrums over binaries, curiosity over assumptions, care over exploitation, transparency over obscurity.
A screenshot of a push notification sent by Duolingo. The message contains around 50 emoji owls as a text. That's it. No other context or anything. Annoying fuckers.
A glass wing butterfly rests on a bright green leaf. The butterfly, itself, has two wings that gradate from dark-brown to a natural orange-red/brown. But the magical bit is in the center of the wings—those colors are just a thin, inner border. These wings. They're clear...as glass. The glasswing butterfly's probiscus(?) is spiraled up, not actively sucking any nectar.
Highlighted text: In this current version of tech we built–which is to say the overwhelming jungle of rituals and group identities and normative behaviors and seemingly abundant but actually restrictive sociotechnological covenants that make up what we pretend will eventually feel like belonging in tech–someone else will always control genius.
An animated .gif of Amethyst from Steven Universe. Amethyst exclaims to Steven, standing beside her, "It's my hole! It's me sized!" As she says "size" she stands with her back to the wall, arms down, staring forward and glides backwards into the cavity—a perfect fit. Steven looks inside, surprised, at the discovery. And blinks.
A book sits open on a mosaic table, outside on a wooden porch. Three corners of the spread are folded—tagged for future reference. Marginalia is seen scrawling on the left-most margin; a black Pilot pen rests in the centerfold. The book sits in front of a full cup of coffee—the mug is of Miffy, the Dutch children's book character, as an artist; holding paint brushes behind their back, in front of a painted white wall of Miffy heads.
A photo of the paperback book: Shady Characters—thesecret life of punctuation, symbols, and other typographical marks—in my hand. It's opened to a spread with every corner of the pages multiply folded. The top left, doubly folded, hints at the marginalia on previous pages and reveals the layers of many pages' corners folded throughout the book thus far. On the right, both top and bottom corners are double-folded. The top paragraph is squared off in black pen. Marginalia scrawls every margin of the page, stemming from the paragraph that reads: Alphabetical labels, asterisks, daggers, and other typographic marks were all employed to link notes to text in this fashion.
A photo of me holding a 3-foot-ish | 1-meter-ish long lily plant, roots and all.
A screenshot of the Washington Post's mobile website, in dark mode, of an article published today; tagged topic, Immigration. Titled: Fearing deportation, a beloved music teacher gives a final lesson. Subtitle: Jesús Rodríguez, worried about being detained, decided to leave the country before his humanitarian parole expired.
A screenshot of the majascule/capital R appearing in the whitespace, surrounded by two or three full character sets. Printed using a letterpress. There are two quotes in the composition, one above the R and one below. Above: Fall seven times, stand up eight. Below: Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, there is nothing to remember except the story.
A photo of me, standing on our driveway, holding a large amount of Carolina Ivy vines...a result of following my distractive energy. This was just a few square meters of vines pulled...off the side of the house's vinyl, brick, electrical boxes...wrapped around wires, bushes, and other plants.
Two frames from the show Supernatural. The top frame shows Castiel, an angel, looking longingly into Dean Winchester's eyes—full of concern, and love. The second frame, the bottom, shows Castiel's hand resting on Dean's soldier—the same place where the angel had pulled the human Dean out of hell and raised him from perdition—but is focused on Dean's face as he looks back at Cas. His eyes are watery, as if he feels Seen for the first time; cared for with kindness, tenderness, and care.
A photo of my most recent tattoo, the seventh. Located on the inside of my left wrist, it reads "—be—Kind" above a rainbow-colored Infinity symbol, one side being a cresting wave, curling towards & to complete the line's cross stroke. "be" is set in Inkwell Script. "K" is set in Inkwell Blackletter. "ind" is set in Inkwell Sans.
An open book at the spread of the final chapter, Conclusion. The corners of each top page are folded; the left, folded at a full half. On each visible margin, I've written notes...underlining the spark-moments and associated thought-strikes.
A photo of Freyja, a border collie, sitting on the couch looking at me...telling me it's her dinnertime. Her head's tilted and her eye's Gaze communicating; typical.