Now:

A page that updates periodically about what I'm up to and into right now. You are viewing the version of this page from March 5, 2026.

Making

Most of my work has been for them rather than for me the last couple weeks, but since I need to scrape up for taxes I guess that's fine. I have an artwork in the back of the fridge that's, like, 99% done but missing some little highlight that'll make it qualify as worth sharing.

I've been screwing around learning Computer Stuff in order to better automate ripping obscure thrifted CDs to Youtube, which has been kind of an interesting challenge from my limited skill level. I've made it as far as an FFMPEG script that will combine the songs into one track and then render a video from that track and a thumbnail image, but I'm still doing timestamps by hand, which is the most boring part. Not that anyone is even making me write timestamps for like a health-scam binaural ambient CD from 2009.

Doing

You'd really think I would have more to write about in here, since it's been like seven weeks since I pushed an update. As it turns out I have mostly been either at work or sick or tinkering with some dweeby project or another.

Lauren and I have been going to the movies a lot this year, just because it's fun and gives you a little bit of an anchor to The Culture in a way that's less draining than watching reality TV or TikToks. A couple of days before Valentine's I promised her that I wouldn't take her to NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE on Valentine's Day, but then we went out to dinner the night before instead, so that is what I ended up doing. It was great and I gotta recommend it. The most absurd and unmakeable-feeling thing I've seen in a theater.

Other theater watches this year include THE BONE TEMPLE (not as good as the first one but okay), IRON LUNG (really impressive for an indie!), ARCO (very nice!), and NO OTHER CHOICE (both really funny and upsetting). Just like they are every time a movie comes out, movies are back.

I decided to revive my Letterboxd account a month or so ago just because it's way more frictionless to write up a little blurb about something on the way home from the theater than it is to write it up on Neocities like I had been doing (and am still doing for books). Feel free to look on there for my thoughts about stuff we've been watching, or my ancient embarrassing reviews from 2019 where I say nothing about MISSION TO MARS (2000) for 400 words.

Thinking

I've been archiving stuff lately: CDs mostly, but in the same spirit also organizing my music files and pulling some stuff locally that I don't own copies of. Thinking about how a website some company runs is really just rented space, and anything you put on there becomes as ephemeral as its platform, one bad earnings report away from oblivion.

As part of this kick I've been doing some self-archaeology again, tracking down stuff I posted online a long time ago and saving it, even if it's embarrassing or bad. This is a habit I have had for a long time and I kind of flip-flop about whether it's rational or healthy. I've never had the executive fuel to journal in any real way—this page excluded, and even then how often do I change it—and so when I want to evaluate my past on a day-to-day level I'm left piecing together scraps and artifacts that I left behind without thinking at the time that they reflected anything important. My teenage years are a metaphorical landfill dig site.

I saw this post on the self-hosted Reddit a few days ago from a guy who is asking about storing an archive of thousands of hours of videos from a camera he seems to wear attached to his person at all times, just recording his day-to-day life, somehow tricking the GoPro Corporation into cloud-storing 35 terabytes of presumably unwatchably dull 1080p footage.

It reminded me of this old Radiolab story David and the Wire about a guy who carried a MiniDisc recorder around for a decade, archiving every conversation and interaction out of a pathological fear of losing them. David is open about the compulsion this practice became in a way that's always stuck with me as a sort of warning. This Reddit guy, who claims his children will appreciate inheriting a stack of hard drives documenting his commutes and chores before further down the thread admitting that he does not yet have a wife or children, is subject to the same pathology. In a sense, at least for many people, the archival impulse is fueled by a fear of death; a fear so overwhelming that it's preferable to become an off-putting weirdo in life. (Imagine every word in that sentence was a link to a different article about that rich Mormon guy who eats 200 pills every day.)

What I'm doing, and I know this is a thing a pathological person says, is not that. In fact I think my problem is inverse: if I could devlop a healthy and controlled habit of documenting my internality I wouldn't have to periodically spelunk through my digital footprint to cringe at a guy whose personality I barely recognize anymore and gawk at how I am somehow a continuation of him. Would I be more able to integrate my own self with that perceptually-separate past self if I had some primary sources on what he was thinking, and not just the Adventure Time fanart he was scanning on graph paper to post on Imgur?

When I was in college we had an assignment to make a 500-page book full of whatever we wanted. Mine contains just about every artifact I could scrounge up: old photos, drawings, screenshots, et cetera. When it was back from the printer I think my idea was that, red-yarn-detective-board-like, seeing all these scraps in a stack would reveal some kind of throughline or pattern. But, of course, they're just a bunch of scraps.

Reading

Keeping my pace up: I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children trilogy (first two are good, third one doesn't quite stick it) and then China Miéville's Kraken, which was a little outside my usual lane but I really enjoyed. I just started Between Two Fires, which is even more outside my lane, and it's too early to tell what I think yet. Oh, also I've been chugging through Thomas Disch's The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, which is pretty interesting but I couldn't find a good EPUB of so I'm lugging a physical book around like a damn caveman.

Listening

In addition to weird CDs I've been finding I have been back on my midcentury dad shit lately; spinning a lot of Cal Tjader in the office. Soul Bird especially makes me want to get a bigass pipe and a housecoat like Bob Dobbs.