I'm the founder of Norbauer & Co. I write about luxury, commercial escapism, retro-futurism, and the psychological burdens of civilized life.
Fairmont Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC near Tiny HQ I had the most curious sensation when I was working the other night: I was kind of happy. You know, not just in the I find this work satisfying kind of way, but in the and I don’t also
Back in 2007, I used to write a guest column for 43folders —a now mostly forgotten website about productivity that was nevertheless widely read in those days of a much smaller and nerdier Internet. I reproduce here my favorite essay from that series, a sort of workaholic's
The essay as it originally appeared in print. In 2015 I was invited to write the following essay for Offscreen Magazine , which appeared in Issue 11. It set in motion the ideas that led me to create my techno-nostalgist luxury keyboard brand Norbauer & Co. . I've always
Stabilizers have long been the great unsolved problem in the world of keyboards. Their function is straightforward; they prevent longer keys (such as the spacebar) from seesawing upward at one end when the opposite end is pressed down. Current solutions serve that purpose well enough, but the issue is: they
Every year since I was about 12 years old, I've spent a few hours each Christmas Eve listening to Patrick Stewart’s one-man-show version of A Christmas Carol. The Dickens story has become so infused with Western Christmas culture in its many retellings, variations, and
I have undertaken many self-guided Lovecraft-centric perambulations in Providence, and I recently expanded my dossier on the subject thanks to pointers received at the scholarly HPL conference held in the city in 2013. The notes that follow are the culmination of those researches and explorations. If the avid
Steele Canvas Basket Corp., founded in the 1920s, continues to operate in Chelsea, Massachusetts. I visited their factory in 2015 to study their process and photograph their operation.
In 2015, I visited the office of my dear old friend and nuclear scientist Scott Kemp and snapped these photos.
French confiserie and, in particular, making Nougat de Montélimar (a.k.a., nougat blanc , or torrone in Italian) has become a minor obsession and happy diversion of mine. At every step of the process the substances involved are quite beautiful, and the end result has a sublime taste