Over at Wired.com, I’ve got a piece up about Make That Thing, a new branch of web retailer TopatoCo that helps artists handle the organization and reward fulfillment of their Kickstarter campaigns. For the article, I spoke with webcomics creator Aaron Diaz, whose campaign to produce a print volume of his popular series Dresden Codak is an early test run for Make That Thing:

Aaron Diaz’s Kickstarter is doing pretty damn well. The artist and webcomic creator asked for a modest $30,000 to fund a print version of his popular webcomic Dresden Codak, and less than a week later, he’s pushing $250,000. But unlike most people who successfully fund projects on Kickstarter, Diaz won’t be fulfilling his obligations to backers – a daunting task involving third-party printers, pallets of books, and staggering shipping costs — on his own.

Read the whole thing at Wired.

“How Hash Oil Is Blowing Up Across the U.S. — Literally”

Literally.

For a non-stoner, I’ve been writing an awful lot about medical marijuana and hash oil lately. Here’s my most recent story, for Wired:

Last week, FEMA posted a rather unexpected alert in its emergency services bulletin titled “Hash Oil Explosions Increasing Across US.” Alongside more quotidian warnings of cyber terrorism and industrial vapor clouds, it described an uptick in explosions at apartments and hotel rooms involving “a process using butane to extract and concentrate compounds from marijuana,” destructive incidents that FEMA warned could even be mistaken for pipe bomb or meth lab explosions.

Wait, marijuana-based explosions? When did cannabis products start sounding like something out of Breaking Bad?

Read the whole thing on Wired.com.

I’ve got a story in the new issue of The Magazine, an iOS-only magazine published by Instapaper founder Marco Arment. I wrote about the incredible variety of cannabis-based products that are now available to the medical-marijuana cardholder—and adults in any state that legalizes marijuana for recreational purposes, barring intervention from the federal government. Here’s a teaser:

It’s dusk at Pickathon, the Oregon summer music festival famous for turning even the most uptight attendees into short-term hippies. A friend passes me his pipe. I haven’t smoked pot in years. When I smoke, I’m prone to paralyzing, near-hallucinatory panic attacks. But out here, surrounded by friends, with performer Neko Case’s voice drifting from the stage through our campsite, smoking seems like the thing to do. I take a hit.

To find out what happens next… and learn about how the medical marijuana community’s parsing of pot strains is as sophisticated as the wine-tasting world’s geeking out over grapes, click here for subscription information.