Using It UpSep 3, 20264 min read

Using It Up cuts a ninety-one character sentence down to "the wishlist got old", and never writes a new one

A reader searching for something to read is shown a page's title and very little else, and one of ours is a whole spoken sentence ninety-one characters long. The cap we hold a title to is sixty, and fourteen of those go to the publication's own name on the end, so what that reader gets is a sentence stopping in the middle with no idea what the other end of it says.

Measured this run off the file the site builds from, the sentences run from twenty-one characters to ninety-one, median fifty-three. Forty-six of them are longer than the room a tab leaves.

Watch the Using It Up, Things used to the end, mended, kept, finished, and not replaced demo

What Using It Up is

Using It Up is a small publication about finishing what you already own: things used to the last of them, mended, kept, and not bought. It's for anyone who has got to the bottom of a bottle of shampoo and felt something closer to pride than relief. What you get is one object at a time, one to a page, with the lines that were spoken over that object set as the body under a still of the thing itself, filed in one of five columns: Finished it, Still works, Didn't buy it, Became someone, Noticed. There's a letter as well, one entry once a week. All of it is free, nothing on it is for sale, and it carries no links to buy anything, which would rather miss the point.

Landing page for repair/reuse brand with headline and scattered domestic object photographs, Visual identity promoting repair and reuse practices through vintage aesthetic imagery.

The words are the words

Nothing on this publication is authored for a page. Every headline is what the account said out loud over the footage, and the tab holds to that too.

So a title is the writer's own sentence, cut short at a boundary the writer already put there. A sentence that fits is used exactly as it is. Otherwise it stops at the first real break: a full stop, a dash, or the word where the sentence turns from naming the thing to commenting on it, which in this account's writing is almost always and, but, until, before, because. Then a hard limit on a word boundary. Then a walk back off anything left pointing at something that got cut, a trailing the, of, with, just, only, up, out, nobody.

Sentence, as it was spoken	Length	Where it stops	What the tab gets
i finished the whole bottle before buying another and it felt like a personality upgrade	88	at "before"	i finished the whole bottle
the wishlist got old and i realized i didn't want most of it. i just wanted a different day	91	full stop, then "and"	the wishlist got old
POV: you wear the sneakers until they're actually done and they tell the whole story	84	at "until"	POV: you wear the sneakers
my headphones are six years old and that's the flex	51	at "and"	my headphones are six years old

Bottle. Wishlist. Sneakers. Headphones. That's the half of the sentence a search can collide with, and it was already sitting at the front, because that's how the account writes.

What doesn't move

The full sentence stays untouched in the three places that carry it: the headline at the top of the page, the headline in the page's own machine-readable record, and the last step of the breadcrumb. Only the tab and the line in a results list take the short form, and nothing is ever added to either. Every title on this site can be found, character for character, inside a sentence somebody said out loud over a film of an object.

Read the inventory: https://usingitup.thecompound.tech/kd

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