AROUND THE BREW ☕
How is it March already? Last I looked, I was waving goodbye to 2021. Maybe it’s the liquid caffeine I started adding to my espresso. (At only 60 mg of caffeine per shot, I need at least 4 a day). I promise, I haven’t done anything THAT crazy. I hope you had a productive first week of March. Thanks for all your help in helping us launch on Product Hunt! It was a resounding success! We ended up being the seventh product of the day, received over 150 upvotes, and over 100 new subscribers. 🎉🎉 Woohoo! Let’s keep the good news rolling! Have you been enjoying the gifs at the end of each newsletter? We’d love your help picking out a new one for next week. If you’d like to submit a gif – please respond to this email with your favorite – and we may pick it for next week’s newsletter! Looking forward to seeing what you send. 😄
Sponsored friend of Creative Brew*
A DASH OF SUGAR 🍬
- Build a space for you and your team to get creative! This free open source platform is like Zoom – but on a entirely new level. You can chat with video, voice, use sticky notes, or embed iframes of webpages to work on whatever you want. Get the source code free and install it on your server. Check it out.
- Need to create productive writing habits? Join the Taleguild – where writing is a game. Gain coins, experience, and earn rewards for your work. It’s a free writing editor that is focused around minimalism and productivity. No distractions here! Embark on your quest to write the next best seller. Check it out.
- Spread the word! The SDK for the Playdate Handheld (think the gameboy advance, but with a touch of modern) has been made publicly available! Develop your very own game for the Playdate market. It’s going to be a small market – but the product has gained a lot of hype among the tech community. Plus – what mechanic can you create that requires a physical hand crank? Check it out.
- Keep visitors on your website longer with native web stories. Stories are popular on Instagram and Snapchat – why not add them to your website too? It’s a very novel idea that is still relatively new to websites – thus making it more likely that visitors will click on them. With Embedsocial – you can put IG stories directly on your site – so you don’t have to worry about creating a whole new content feed. Check it out.
- Glitch is a fantastic platform for building apps, sites, and other fun web projects. They’ve recently partnered with Digital Ocean for easy deployment, and you can get a free $100 credit for signing up. You could even deploy your very own “link in bio” style site! Check it out.
A BIT OF CREAM 🥛
Collecting tools and educational resources to pursue your creative challenge can feel a lot like this, can’t it? Too many tools, and so little time. Collecting your inspiration – and sorting them for future reference – is essential to the creative workflow. A great way to manage all that content is through a bookmark manager like Raindrop.io. Take a journey with me to the Scarlet Grounds, and we’ll enjoy the sounds of this live AI generated music jam session. Absolutely wild stuff! If we put the song on a loop, we only have to hear it 100 times for our 10 hour cold brew to be done. After a few sips, let’s head on up the elevator, shall we? We’ve got to play some music together!
THE BEANS 🌱
- Learn the fundamentals of music with this free Ableton course
- A great thread of awesome drawing tips on this Hacker News post
- Dive into the thought process of the design behind this ancient city
- Practice your beat making every day with Soundgym
JOBS 💼
- Game Designer at Roblox – See the listing
- Music Composer at Player One Trailers – See the listing
- Principal Environment Artist at Mountaintop Studios – See the listing
INSPIRATION 💡
“So you want to be a writer” by Charles Bukowski is a very thought provoking poem. It asks the important question – What is your motivation when it comes to writing? Do you write because you want to – or because you want the benefits (money, fame) of being a best selling author? As Bukowski writes “if it doesn’t come bursting out of you / in spite of everything, / don’t do it.” Does the desire to write come bursting out of you? If so, it’s key that you hone your skills every day – so you can produce writing that YOU can be proud of. Stephen King has a fantastic book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft which has many valuable lessons. I strongly recommend reading it! Here’s a list of 22 pieces of advice from King – including the very important “Write primarily for yourself.” If you don’t write for yourself – who are you writing for? Writing needs to be a creative pursuit that brings you joy – don’t forget!
That’s all for this week!
