> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://davidnunez.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Elaborate Ways to Not Start - URL: https://davidnunez.com/elaborate-ways-to-not-start/ - Published: 2026-08-27T17:18:05.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-27T17:19:49.000Z - Description: The green in every control room I have ever admired was a factory safety regulation, mandatory since 1948. I found that out while watching strangers give tours of their home offices, which is apparently how I do research now. - Author: David Nuñez - Tags: broadcast 👋 This past week I've been gearing myself up for something new (more soon). I've been thinking a lot about process, creative workflow, and building in public. The challenge is balancing getting the physical/digital workbench "ready" vs. the actual work of making something meaningful. ## Seafoam green was a safety regulation before it was an aesthetic. I am rebuilding the room I work in, and my research method would not survive peer review: I watch strangers give tours of their home offices on YouTube. The genre is enormous and it has subspecies. There is the [hyper-minimalist white cube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jTSZgj8kvM&ref=davidnunez.com), [one lamp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4atgADZ4l4&ref=davidnunez.com), [nothing on the desk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5QH0F4evYM&ref=davidnunez.com), which is either discipline or a real estate listing. There is the [orange-glow room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnO4f%5F-eR78&ref=davidnunez.com) where [every bulb is 2700 Kelvin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVq79Oz5yXo&ref=davidnunez.com) and it is [permanently 6pm in October](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8r2D087r1A&ref=davidnunez.com). [Japandi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca-gj0T43fI&ref=davidnunez.com), which is [Scandinavian furniture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTUCh5wxlNc&ref=davidnunez.com) that has [been to Kyoto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UG-urlQ%5Fn0&ref=davidnunez.com). The [slat-wall room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3b2ZE4YyGE&ref=davidnunez.com), [vertical wood battens over felt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-dZzsEhOGc&ref=davidnunez.com) fitted against [a noise problem that does not exist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDbLD5q4jwE&ref=davidnunez.com), now behind so many heads that it has stopped being a choice and become a [house style](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMnrNkv8GAo&ref=davidnunez.com), with a fake monstera in the corner because a real one would need looking after. The [wall of action figures](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qem9LITWVD0&ref=davidnunez.com), [arranged with the gravity of a natural history collection](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eHmb265t5o&ref=davidnunez.com), or [the entire nerd cave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSafxz1qBKo&ref=davidnunez.com) if the budget allowed. The [neon room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UveMtSiXg4&ref=davidnunez.com), [lit like a Tokyo alley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAMAZ8ixhHM&ref=davidnunez.com) by [a man answering email](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcoYVIgCG8g&ref=davidnunez.com). And [the cozy one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT1%5Frr9DqDY&ref=davidnunez.com), [all soft greens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecOzDsFvQLk&ref=davidnunez.com) and [a warm mug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sK6EdtmwGY&ref=davidnunez.com) and [a plant that is visibly thriving](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYAEkicxnXI&ref=davidnunez.com), filmed like a scented candle. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-27-at-12.25.28@2x.png) The filmed workspace. (via [Gabriel VIP](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVEvICC2uO0&ref=davidnunez.com)) Every one of them is impossibly clean. [No cable hangs loose](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAjXeETaIbM&ref=davidnunez.com), [not one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPxw8%5FpgC08&ref=davidnunez.com), no drawer sits open, no mug has left a ring. The camera pans slowly, the music swells, the color grade warms, and a room where somebody supposedly does their taxes is photographed the way a fashion house photographs a model. Which stops being odd once you notice the second job. A lot of these rooms are [sets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI5ZjDalU%5FQ&ref=davidnunez.com) for the channel touring them, [dressed and lit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EwPstaSsNg&ref=davidnunez.com) to look good behind a face. Five million people subscribe to [r/battlestations](https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations/?ref=davidnunez.com) for the still-photography version. I have watched enough of these to hold strong opinions about [strangers’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daKy5lzOxkQ&ref=davidnunez.com) [monitor arms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj-q%5FhB6tEk&ref=davidnunez.com) and [3d-printed cable trays](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TT96b98YZY&t=81&ref=davidnunez.com), which is not a sentence I am especially proud of. The ones I kept going back to had nothing in common stylistically and one thing in common otherwise. Across every subspecies, the rooms I responded to kept landing in the same narrow band of color: soft greens, muted sage, warm grey, that particular institutional mint. I assumed that was taste. It turns out to be inheritance. Designer [Beth Mathews](https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms-were-seafoam) toured the Manhattan Project site at Oak Ridge and got stuck on why the control rooms are all that color. The trail leads to Faber Birren, who dropped out of art school in 1921 to study what color does to people and once painted his own bedroom vermilion to find out whether it would drive him mad. It did not, which was arguably worse for science. He talked a Chicago meat company out of white walls because meat looks redder against green. Then he and DuPont wrote a wartime color code for factories, approved in 1944 and mandatory since 1948: red for fire, yellow for anything you could fall off, orange for the parts of a machine that can take a finger, and light green on the walls to keep your eyes from tiring. Every mid-century control panel I have ever swooned over is compliant, which makes my taste in that green a nostalgia for workplace safety regulation. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-27-at-13.16.06@2x.png) Faber Birren Color Wheel (via [Art.Peat.Repeat](https://www.instagram.com/p/DV63zYLjynW/?hl=en&ref=davidnunez.com)) Places like Disney and General Electric kept [Birren](https://guides.library.yale.edu/faberbirren?ref=davidnunez.com) on retainer for decades, and even he was late to this. In 1914 a San Francisco surgeon named Harry Sherman repainted an operating room in [spinach green](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2742127/?ref=davidnunez.com), walls and floors and gowns and sheets, because green sits opposite blood red and cancels the ghost image that swims across a white wall when a surgeon looks up. It worked well enough that no surgeon who could book the green room ever went back to the white one, and the scrubs never changed color. Then two researchers ran [the experiment](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20565201/?ref=davidnunez.com) that ruins my entire YouTube habit. They put people to work in offices arranged four ways: bare, decorated for them with plants and art, decorated by them, and decorated by them and then rearranged by a manager. Decorated beat bare by [17 percent](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100907104035.htm?ref=davidnunez.com). Decorated by the person sitting in it beat bare by 32 percent. Having a say was worth about as much as everything else combined, and having that say overruled undid much of the gain. The tours are all showing me the plants. ## Overengineering his way towards publishing. Ben Balter [wrote his book the way programmers write software](https://ben.balter.com/2026/08/17/how-i-over-engineered-my-book/?ref=davidnunez.com). The text sits in the kind of version-tracked folder where every edit is stamped and reversible, and each time he saves, the whole book rebuilds itself into five finished products: two paperback layouts, a Kindle file, an ebook and a website. A style checker scolds him for hyphenating “open source.” Another rule refuses to let the book build at all if a sentence claims he still works at GitHub years after leaving, a mistake he made exactly once and then made impossible. Creating a tool as a response to an embarrassing situation is the engineer’s version of yelling it out of your brain in the shower. One check flagged a paragraph opener as machine-generated, and he had written it himself, having read so much AI text that he “produced a fluent imitation of nothing.” Of course, in a classic [last-mile problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last%5Fmile%5F%28transportation%29?ref=davidnunez.com) after all of that, despite all of the complex workflow, “publishing” means logging into three retailer websites and uploading the files by hand. “My pipeline builds a flawless artifact, and then I upload it like it’s 2009.” None of this is new. Donald Knuth, who wrote [the bible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FArt%5Fof%5FComputer%5FProgramming?ref=davidnunez.com) most programmers were raised on, has spent his career paying readers [$2.56 for every error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%5Freward%5Fcheck?ref=davidnunez.com)they find in his books, which is the most menacing act of generosity in publishing. He picked that figure because 256 cents is one hexadecimal dollar, a joke that only pays off if you count in sixteens. The bounty on flaws in his typesetting software doubled every year until it topped out at $327.68\. Hardly anyone cashed them. People framed them. He stopped writing real ones in 2008 after realizing that he was mailing his account and routing numbers to strangers who then hung them on a wall. He now issues checks from the fictional [Bank of San Serriffe](https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html?ref=davidnunez.com). Proofreading by humans vs. automated book publishing by teams of AI agents. This is either progress or the labor dispute that triggers the series of events culminating in [Skynet gaining self-awareness](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/knVz807F9V8?ref=davidnunez.com). [Micah Walter](https://www.micahwalter.com/?ref=davidnunez.com) and I mused recently about whether the scaffolding of software development is generalizable for creative work. Or perhaps it is just the way engineers find more and more elaborate ways to not start. He published [his answer](https://www.micahwalter.com/posts/working-in-public?ref=davidnunez.com). Working in public gets sold as a marketing move, which he thinks is the least interesting thing about it. “I do not mean posting polished updates about a project. I mean the project itself is the public artifact, all the way down.” His blog is the whole workshop left open, [with the half-drafts and the arguments with himself and the ideas](https://github.com/micahwalter/micahwalter-www/issues?ref=davidnunez.com) he logged and never got to all sitting there readable by anyone who wanders in. An idea gets filed as a numbered ticket rather than a note. From his desk or from the train, he submits a “bug report” to himself and his AI helper. “Filing an issue is a small claim that something about the world should be different.” A note will sit in a drawer for a decade, but a ticket’s entire purpose is to be closed. He worked that way for years with almost nobody reading. The payoff he names is continuity. “The public trail is what keeps me going.” The trail is specific enough that he can pick up a half-finished thought a week later without re-deriving it, which is the same job Balter’s book-writing system does. He throws out the deadlines and the project-management ritual, and keeps one requirement he names outright: whimsy. / David **Listening:** [*Green Onions*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oox9bJaGJ8&ref=davidnunez.com), Booker T. & the M.G.’s, 1962\. Named after a color and a vegetable, containing neither.