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Fragrance, Making Things Last, Rust, and more.

Tentatively making incense sticks, reducing, reusing, and recycling, and doing my best to learn Rust.

A black Braun watch with white and yellow hands on a dark background.


By Nathan Upchurch

Lately, I’ve gotten back into the swing of making Japanese style incense - a nerve-wracking endeavour because you never quite know how the expensive aromatics you’ve spent hours grinding, kneading, and extruding will turn out when you light a stick. Will my latest batch smell like burning tires when it’s properly cured? Tune in next time to find out.

I’ve also been on a mission to reduce what I consume by focusing on buying well once, and buying reusable items wherever possible. Starting with one good fountain pen, I’ve now got a number of cotton handkerchiefs and some reusable cotton “paper towels.”

Rust has been on the top of my mind, and I’ve been going through a Rust course on Udemy. Coming from JavaScript, it’s a lot! I desperately want to begin writing native applications for GNU/Linux using Rust and Qt, so I’m determined to keep going even if using strings is an order of magnitude more complicated than const myString = 'Hello there.'.

Nathan Upchurch Nathan likes to cook vegan food, play the trombone, make incense, design stuff, muck about with free software and tech, and more. As a millennial, he dreams of owning a modest rural home in a sane country where he can make incense sticks in tranquility. To support Nathan’s writing (or simply help a filthy pinko leave the U.S.A.), you can donate on Liberapay.

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