Alan Watts was a British scholar who became a Sausalito broadcaster, a Druid Heights resident, a houseboat philosopher, and, late in life, a student of sumi-e under Hasegawa and Hodo Tobase. The brand has to carry all of those, not collapse him into the last one.
The Way of Water is the name for that balance. Watts the man, Watts the voice, Watts the archive. The page is washi paper, the display face is a calligrapher's hand because Mark called the first round's type janky, the body is a Western humanist text family with true italics drawn for screens. Color is sumi on bone, with the blue undertone real ink takes when it runs thin, Mt Tam green, gold pulled from sun-aged washi, and one reserved warm tone for sunset.
Motion is reserved. The hero breathes, nothing else fades in just because it can. Where a stroke moves, it moves like ink finding the next fiber on washi, not like a slide deck transition. The background sim is sumi-locked: dye absorbs, ink lingers, blue surfaces where it runs thin.
To try to control the mind forcefully is like trying to flatten out waves with a board, and can only result in more and more disturbance.
Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way, Pantheon, 1975
The art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay.
Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way, closing chapter, Pantheon, 1975