The notebook, open

Things worth noticing.

Essays and notes on desire, language, work, books, games, and the strange business of being a person.

Newest first

The journal

Finished essays, live questions, and the occasional argument with myself.

July 3, 2026 Marketing What Is Mimetic Marketing? Desire is borrowed. Your buyers’ wanting came from somewhere, and almost all marketing ignores where. A definition, an ethic, and the receipts. Read entry May 5, 2026 Writing The Magic Mountain and the Discipline of Not Writing Yet Hans Castorp sat with illness for seven years. Lance sits with buyer data for weeks. The disease is the same: premature certainty. Read entry May 3, 2026 Marketing The Bolt-On Perry Belcher's highest-converting offer type isn't a transformation. It's an addition. And the reason it works is the reason it terrifies me. Read entry May 2, 2026 Writing Working with AI as a Poet I use Claude every day. It can do things with structure and speed that would take me weeks. It cannot do the thing that matters most: decide what's worth saying. Read entry May 1, 2026 Philosophy McAdams, Narrative Identity, and the Story Your Buyer Tells Themselves at 5 AM Dan McAdams proved humans don't have identities. They have stories. Your marketing is either part of that story or it's noise. Read entry April 30, 2026 Philosophy The Girardian Scapegoat in Branding Every brand needs an enemy. Girard says that need is humanity's oldest impulse. The question is whether you choose your enemy or whether your brand mythology grows one for you in the dark. Read entry April 28, 2026 Gaming Collaborative Fiction as Therapy: Why Adults Need to Play Pretend Three dads in their 30s and 40s sit around a table every Thursday and narrate space horror. It's the most honest conversation they have all week. Read entry April 27, 2026 Marketing The Hidden Layer 215 primary sources. Three years of obsessive reading. A methodology built from the collision of mimetic desire theory, deep metaphor research, and a stubborn refusal to write copy from assumptions. This is the story of how it came together. Read entry April 25, 2026 Gaming What Can Change the Nature of a Man? The greatest RPG ever made is one question repeated for sixty hours. You never get a clean answer. Neither does your buyer. Read entry April 24, 2026 Marketing She Read the Ad Out Loud and Couldn't Stop A client read copy built from her buyers' own language and said "That's huge for my culture." The room went quiet. Not because it was clever. Because it was true. Read entry April 16, 2026 Writing Writing a Book in Dialogue Because Essays Are Cowardly I chose to write my entire book as a conversation between two people because it's harder to hide behind abstractions when someone is pushing back in real time. Read entry April 10, 2026 Marketing Pretty Pages, Dead Copy The most beautiful website I ever built failed. The ugliest one I ever wrote worked. Design is not intelligence. Read entry April 7, 2026 Philosophy Zaltman's Deep Metaphors and the Buyer Who Couldn't Explain Why She Bought Gerald Zaltman's research argues that most purchasing decisions happen below conscious awareness. Your survey may be asking the wrong layer. Read entry April 4, 2026 Marketing The Ache Nobody Talks About: Why Business Owners Hate Their Own Agencies A recurring founder fear: the agency has the dashboard, so the owner does not feel informed enough to challenge the story. Read entry April 1, 2026 Gaming What Dungeon Mastering Teaches You About Leading a Team The best DMs never force a plot. They build a world and let the players destroy it. The best leaders do the same thing. Read entry March 29, 2026 Marketing The Anti-Mimetic Postcard We rewrote a client's direct mail piece by finding every phrase their competitors also used, then saying the opposite. The piece stopped sounding like the category and started sounding like the buyer. Read entry March 26, 2026 Personal I Was a Mormon Missionary and a Poet and Neither Side Knew What to Do with Me Two years knocking on doors in a white shirt. Two decades wondering why institutions need you to stop asking questions. Read entry March 22, 2026 Philosophy Elaine Pagels and the Mythology Your Brand Keeps Accidentally Building The origins of Satan aren't what you think. Neither are the origins of your brand story. Both were manufactured by institutions that needed an enemy. Read entry March 18, 2026 Philosophy The Universe Is Ridiculous and So Is Your Funnel Douglas Adams understood something about absurdity that every marketer needs to hear: the answer to everything is 42, and nobody remembers the question. Read entry March 14, 2026 Marketing 215 Sources Before a Single Word I read 215 primary sources about one client's buyers before I wrote a single line of copy. Everyone thought I was stalling. I was loading the gun. Read entry March 9, 2026 Personal The Mission Question When your kid asks you what you do all day and you realize your answer sounds like a LinkedIn headline, something has gone wrong. Read entry March 5, 2026 Writing Anne Sexton and the Courage to Say the Actual Thing She wrote poems that made people physically uncomfortable. That's the standard. Not comfortable. True. Read entry March 2, 2026 Marketing Why Every Agency Sounds Like Every Other Agency I pulled the homepages of 40 marketing agencies. 37 of them used the word "results-driven." This is not a coincidence. This is Girard. Read entry February 26, 2026 Writing Sitting with Data Like Hans Castorp Sat with Tuberculosis Thomas Mann wrote 700 pages about a man who went to a sanatorium for three weeks and stayed seven years. That's what real research feels like. Read entry February 21, 2026 Philosophy The Immortality Project You're Building and Won't Admit Ernest Becker said every human enterprise is secretly a bid to outlive death. Your business is no exception. Neither is mine. Read entry February 17, 2026 Philosophy Harold Bloom Walks Into a Marketing Meeting The literary critic who said every reading is a misreading accidentally explained why your customers ignore your ads. Read entry February 12, 2026 Writing What My English Degree Actually Taught Me About Selling Nobody recommends an English degree for marketing. That's because the people recommending things went to business school and learned to copy each other. Read entry February 7, 2026 Gaming Ramza Didn't Win. He Disappeared. Final Fantasy Tactics is the best marketing case study nobody talks about - the guy who told the truth got erased from history, and the liar became king. Read entry February 3, 2026 Marketing The Scapegoat in Your Ad Account Every underperforming campaign has a sacrificial lamb. Usually it's the creative. Usually the creative isn't the problem. Read entry

29 published entries · follow by RSS

Shorter than an essay

Notes

Things written down before they became respectable enough to call ideas.

Every meeting that could have been an email is a small crime against the human attention span. Every email that should have been a conversation is a larger one.

Running a tabletop game and writing marketing copy require the same skill: listening to the people in front of you closely enough to build a world they want to inhabit.

Poetry taught me precision. Fiction taught me empathy. Direct response taught me accountability. The combination turned out to be the point.

Anne Sexton wrote with her whole chest. That is the standard. Honest enough to make the comfortable sentence impossible.

On the desk

Currently

The rabbit holes that are winning this week.

WritingWhat Your Buyers Actually WantA book in dialogue, because an argument should be able to answer back.

ReadingThe Magic MountainThomas Mann, patience, illness, time, and sentences that earn their endings.

PlayingFinal Fantasy TacticsStill the best case study in who gets to write the official story.

RunningMothership RPGCollaborative horror fiction where every terrible decision becomes canon.

Lance Pincock — English major. Father. Dungeon master. Still figuring it out.

About the person holding the pen

I use words to help people recognize themselves.

I’m a poet, marketer, and founder of The Mimetic Method. I built Mimetic Intelligence because campaigns tend to fail in their assumptions before they fail in their sentences. This site is where the work, the books, the games, and the person behind them are allowed to share a table.

[email protected]The Mimetic Method Mimetic Intelligence