Jesse HoldenInterview
Writer, creative dork
Adapted from Jesse Holden's interview on Uses This, published 4 February 2023. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
My home workstation is a 15-inch MacBook Pro, which I've been using since 2017 when someone smashed my car window and stole my last one.
We designed and built the "Feelies" - the physical artifacts from the story that we included with the original minis - using my Cricut Explore One which is an injket-printer-sized die cutting machine that's mostly marketed to hobbyists and scrapbookers, but which let us produce some really intricate and special objects for subscribers.
Communication
In rare cases I've had to actually build and run a CLI app like PINE or connect to a legitimate BBS to make sure I got the UI correct for one of the screens in the book.
Coding & Development
For those situations I use iTerm2, or I'll pore over original changelogs from the 1990s to make sure the features and UI elements I want to include actually existed in the exact year an issue takes place.
For our promo videos and fun clips, the 'live' captured screens that we created were built in the Mac terminal emulator Cathode by Secret Geometry - now sadly defunct, but still extremely gorgeous if you love that aesthetic as much as I do.
Design
CLIP STUDIO PAINT (iOS)+ 3 others
Clip Studio Paint on iPad is what I use when I help a little with the illustration part.