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 January 13, 2026.

Making

After about 1,000 years of kicking around bad ideas that never made it off paper I finished an actual piece of art the other day. It feels good! I even actually like it, rather than just being proud to find out I'm still capable of making things, although that's a component as well, certainly.

I immediately started sketching two other things, to try and keep my momentum. I also decided that I'm going to always have Illustrator open and always have a scratchboard document running to collect weird shapes and half-ideas that I can then preen through for anything good. So far all I have on there is a mockup of a bumper sticker that says KEEP AUTISM WEIRD.

I am in talks to turn my moderately-successful Discord-based introductory HTML class into a real community program at my local library; probably one version for adults and one version with a gentler technical on-ramp for teenagers. I think this will be fun, depending on how many people turn up, and how much of my "making a website is revolutionary" rhetoric I can pad into the lessons.

Doing

I spent New Year's Eve in Dillsburg, home of the Pickle Drop, which is a local tradition so corny and weird that I always wanted to see it but kept getting invited to literally anything else. Not so this year. It's a six-foot-tall fiberglass pickle dressed like Mr. Peanut that they lower off the back of a tow truck in the church parking lot. The longer I spend away from it the more I kind of love southern Pennsylvania. My hometown is kind of like a guy you know from high school who periodically pops up on Instagram still somehow exactly the same person they were in 2013. I'd never move back there permanently, but it's fun to check in once in a while.

Lauren just started a new job, and I've scored a part-time gig at the library, which I think will be really good. Of course I love and respect the library and what it stands for, and I also think that having some externally-imposed structure—having my infinite supply of formless, indistinguishable days off reduced by some fraction—will get me to start considering how I'm spending my time more carefully. And I'll have a little bit of dependable money to pay the bills instead of entering every month like I'm pulling a huge slot machine to determine whether I get groceries. I am still seeking a full-time job within my field, but at the very least I can hoist the bar back up slightly and stop desperately applying for ten a day that are half scams and half AI startups.

Saturday Laur and I recruited a friend to go to the conveyor-belt sushi place in Southside, which was offering some Kirby cups to anyone who ate a requisite number of plates. We achieved the quota and then found out the cups were all gone, so that was a bust aside from the sushi. On Sunday we went to the vintage fest at the convention center to putt around and consider buying a Nintendo 64. I do like vintage stuff, but mostly because a jacket from 1975 will be better-made than anything at the store now, and the majority of guys who deal in that scene are more focused on asking $150 for a T-shirt promoting Looney Tunes: Back in Action because then it's a wearable signifier that your lifestyle is based on irony. But lately I'm trying to dress like a guy who went to jail for selling LSD to Kenny Loggins, so maybe I'm the one who's out of touch with what's charmingly outdated.

Thinking

I've been flashing back to the beginning of 2025, and how I felt a lot like I do now: normal, prepared, optimistic. Then, of course, a bunch of dumb bullshit happened to me and the shine kind of wore off. I've been trying really hard to preserve the shine this time, to let 2026 be The Year I Take Control. The other day I spent about twenty minutes explaining Home Assistant to my therapist, to illustrate a point about how I need to use technology and specifically use tools I crafted myself to patch the holes in my sick brain. And I decided as I said it out loud that I should lean into it, since it mostly works.

In the same way that Wikipedia and mobile access to it creates a deep well of prosthetic knowledge—that is, knowledge that isn't inside your brain already, but that you know how to get to—I have been coping with ADHD or whatever it is I have by creating a lot of prosthetic function. My phone buzzes every 20 minutes to remind me to have a sip of water. My to-do list is automatically populated every day, week, and month. I bought a fresh pack of little notebooks to live in my back pocket. The key feature of all of these systems is that I made them. I've never bought a pre-printed planner or tried a pre-built app because I don't recognize those things as mine; they will be left behind. But writing down a list by hand, or mucking around in YAML creating a script that alerts me to grab my keys if I leave home: that's effort justification, baby. If I don't let the stuff I made myself do its job, what did I do the work of creating it for?

I still deeply believe I could use some Adderall, but constructing this web around my oaf ass has taken me a long way. I guess this is all probably obvious to anyone in the same situation, so it feels trite to conclude here with something like Maybe try it out!, but if the Thinking subhead of my personal blog on my vanity website isn't an acceptable place to pointlessly riff on some inane reflection, I don't know what you want.

For the first time in many iterations of this page I would say I feel alright bordering on pretty good. I'm about a week deep on sertraline, so too early to call whether that's working, but I am talking to people and I'm returning emails and keeping the dishes down and looking at the sun. And it's not even hard.

Reading

I finished Hallucinations, which I thought was pretty good but by no means tore through. While debating what to read next I saw this great interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky, which compelled me to pick up his book Children of Time. I'm about 15% through it and already very engaged by just how many ideas it contains, mostly about a planet populated by insects and spiders that are artificially accelerated in their evolution to the level of a technological society. That sounds very silly but is genuinely told in a way that makes you care about it. Unless the back 80% of this book stinks—which I doubt—I'm giving it a big recommend.

Listening

In trying to clear out my way-too-deep listening queue are.na lately I've found a few gems. This Phi-Psonics record from May is lovely: I think I did listen to it when it was new but must have been in a bad mood. That's been played front-to-back in the studio a couple times this week.

Also, I was at the thrift store Sunday and found this beautifully-1994 CD by a guy I'd never heard of. Took it home for a dollar and I've been spinning it a lot. Wonderful FM smooth jazz.