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 June 24, 2025. When it's gone, it's gone.

Making

Well, a while ago I was making some assets for Dreamsettler, the sequel to Hypnospace Outlaw. You might have heard that Dreamsettler is no longer coming out. I'm sad for it, and mostly sad for Jay Tholen, who is an incredibly nice guy and who was very excited to bring in so much talent on the project.

I got his go-ahead to post the big batch of clipart I was making to my portfolio. I think they are really cute.

As for personal work, it's another slump. I have a couple of pieces in progress sitting on the desktop that I should finish on stream just to get 'em out the door. So watch out for that soon.

Last week I attempted a Studio Stream around this 90s drawing software (with a ton of premade pixel art by Mark Ferrari!) that looked really fun but would not run for more than five minutes at a time on my computer.

Doing

Last weekend Lauren and I were in Ocean City, Maryland with her family. The weather was cruddy but OC is zany enough that there's plenty to do without actually being on the beach, plus which I'm only medically allowed about 200 minutes of annual sun exposure anyway. We cruised the boardwalk, watched a lot of baseball, played and ranked almost every mini-golf course in the county. (Lauren racked up a combined 15 holes in one; I stink at mini-golf incurably.)

Unfortunately I woke up on the day we had to drive down feeling alarmingly bad: tired, nauseous, sweatier than usual. I decided to stick it out and go anyway, and then I spent most of the weekend with a nonstop head- and/or tummyache, which really impeded the amount of crab-eating and beer-drinking one would typically pursue in Maryland.

Then we came back to Pittsburgh and I had exactly 48 hours to wrap up some work and clean the apartment before my dad and little brother came to town to see Khruangbin. Good show, kind of expensive for the venue, but seeing John Carroll Kirby live was a highlight of the summer. That guy is so fucking good, and the whole live band is having so much fun. The flute guy was, at one point, kicking around a hacky sack on stage during an extended keyboard solo.

The guys stuck around Sunday and we went up to the north side to see Randyland (worth seeing once if you happen to be in the neighborhood) and also went to the Mattress Factory (one of my favorite places in the city; the James Turrell floor alone is worth admission). Sitting in the totally-dark gallery staring at Pleiades for twenty minutes and then immediately walking out the back door into the 90-degree sun is an insane experience. I wonder if that's what he intended for it to do to the viewer, is reset your senses so that the world after you leave the confines of the artwork is briefly more vivid, more real.

Thinking

Lately I have been thinking a lot about first principles. I'm doing more and more self-hosting and self-making of stuff; this website is obviously part of that but I think this grew out of a realization that corporate platforms will never be a stable place to keep anything meaningful. And I still think that—if anything, even more than I did a couple of years back—but I am also thinking about having more direct control of my environment by way of having more knowledge about how it works by way of having built it myself. Is this pattern of thinking informed by the world at large entering an accelerating spiral towards chaos and destruction? Could be!

A little while ago I found this guy's website where he is documenting a bunch of experiments in seeing how advanced a level of technology can be built by hand from raw materials: homemade vacuum tubes and lightbulbs, homemade photo emulsion, homemade telephone. I am utterly fascinated by this stuff; it feels like the positive and true manifestation of the doing my own research mode of thinking that leads a lot of people into reactionary derangement. There is a healthy way to do epistemology, and it isn't doing shots of bleach instead of taking antibiotics, it's teaching yourself electroplating so you can build a solar cell from scratch.

The About page speaks to how this guy ended up doing this stuff: they used to be a programmer, and descended the staircase from thinking about software to thinking about hardware to realizing how ephemeral and ultimately disposable software is for how much work is put into it. And, really, so is a lot of hardware that's been made too complicated to take apart.

I think there is a real argument to be made for the disintegration and atomization of society as a symptom of the increasing alienation of American people from the physical processes of labor. I used to work at a screen-printing shop. It basically sucked ass, but there was something primally grounding about starting every day with a giant stack of blank T-shirts on a cart and ending every day with twenty taped-up boxes of product ready to ship. What eventually wore me down was thinking about the huge portion of that product that was going on a person's body once and then right into the trash. The first time you see a Dayton Legal Consultants Team-Building Picnic 2023 Gildan DryBlend at Goodwill that you pulled off the press nine hours into your workday last week it's kind of funny. The tenth time it makes you feel like you're wasting your life. At least designers get to make stuff that—if you're lucky—goes into production and has something of a lifespan and exists not tethered to one disposable object, but many.

I don't think working in a factory is good for people, but I do think you can make a pretty convincing sequence out of "the American economy offshores every job where you touch things and pivots to being mostly email-based" and "the middle 80% of the American public shrug and change the channel as the rotten, fascist core of the empire is put on display by grifters no longer compelled to put up a respectable façade." Like, at least when most people's jobs could lose them a finger the bosses were scared enough to build some libraries.

Making something yourself that you can keep and hold with your hands feels so important, regardless of whether it's how you get paid. Remind yourself that the world is real and you can affect it, that you exist within it. Earlier today I was looking at this paper about an experiment where a cultured film of neural tissue can be stimulated and monitored digitally in a way that suggests that it is experiencing a virtual environment with some level of consciousness. This is worrying and interesting for its own reasons, obviously, but the introduction spends some time explaining the model of sentience and includes this quote:

The gap between the model predictions and observed sensations may be minimized in two ways: by optimizing probabilistic beliefs about the environment to make predictions more like sensations or by acting upon the environment to make sensations conform to its predictions.

So I've just been thinking about that lately. Act on your environment. I guess it's converging on the corny hippie Be Here Now stuff but you have to remember sometimes that your mind inhabits a body that inhabits space, and all three of those things can alter each other.

Reading

Actually kind of a lot these last couple weeks. I bought a book for a dollar called Area 51: Nosferatu that I am very excited to get into but haven't cracked yet. Instead I finished qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division, which I really enjoyed, so I also plowed through Fine Structure, which is excessively silly at its weakest points but is genuinely compelling at its best. Then just for completion's sake I read his collection of short stories, which I would give basically the same review: it's trying a lot of stuff and it doesn't all hit but the hits are great.

In between all of these I have been reading China Mieville's October a little bit at a time, although obviously that's an intersection of author and subject matter that keeps me to small doses.

Just yesterday I started Oceanspace by Allen Steele. Hard to tell how good the plot or themes are yet but I am a fan of deep-sea fiction and I am also a fan of slightly-too-optimistic predictions of what the world would be like in 2010, so I'm having a treat.

Listening

John Carroll Kirby covered Herbie Hancock's Butterfly live, which has sent me on another Herbie kick the last few days. One of the greatest to ever do it. Of course I've also been spinning a lot of JCK too. It's Jazz Guy Summer.

Speaking of hot-weather music I gave Post Animal Performs The Most Curious Water Activities a revisit on a sweaty walk to the store the other day. It ranks below When I Think of You In a Castle for me just on scale but it's easily their most texturally pleasant album; sun-baked and crunchy. Post Animal was so good back in the Joe days.