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 August 27, 2025. When it's gone, it's gone.

Making

Well, it's still been a long time since I made any art. But I've been running this HTML intro class for the last couple of weeks and it's been nice, sharing what I know. The original purpose of the internet.

I am working on a full rewrite of the homepage, which is both rewarding and very stupid, because my end goal is for it to look basically the same to the end user. But it will be cleaner and easier to manage, because back when I built v1.0 I didn't know basically anything about CSS so everything is some weird sideways hack with ten intersecting classes.

For the how is work going update: I have a regular job lined up and I am just sitting around while they figure out why my email doesn't work, and I feel like it would be rude to ask if they can hurry up a little bit because I'm urgently broke. But it's likely that things will turn around before the year's up, and I just need to hang on a little longer. (If you have been thinking of emailing me about a gig, let me say without pretense that now would be a great time.)

Doing

Ah, you know, running around here and there. Helped the library out at Community Day again, one of those neighborhood fun fairs where the cops bring the bomb robot to let kids try driving it around and it's 100 degrees all day. But I got a snow cone and a pretty good hot sausage. I like our little neighborhood and I could do without the cops, who are always taking up library parking spots to hang out with the guy who owns the pool, but I like the library and I'm glad it's still around. Support your local one, imo.

Last week I set up Home Assistant on the server rig and I am genuinely amazed at how powerful and how easy it is. Genuinely think it would be good to have even for someone who isn't big into tinkering. I am, though, and goddamn is this thing a bottomless hole for pointless tinkering. I got to spend like two days figuring out how to inject custom fonts on the dashboard because I hate looking at Roboto.Now I've got a screensaver that reminds me to do chores and tracks my grocery list and turns the lights on when I get home after sunset.

Thinking

I went back to the doctor yesterday and I took the depression quiz again and she added up my numbers and said that I'm now below the threshold for managed. Do I genuinely feel less bummed-out than I did last year? Yeah, I think so. Apparently I had ten points of depression that were a chemical problem, and now I'm on my own to try and fix the remaining eight that are apparently evidence-based. Woo-hoo.

The other day a very nice student in Italy reached out to me about doing an interview for her thesis project, which is on internet culture and aesthetic movements. We ended up talking a lot about my belief that technology itself is morally inert; that it's the way any tool is used that defines its value. And I kind of put together another part of that puzzle while I was saying it out loud, which is that I believe the computer is a tool, and if you're on the computer but not using the tool then you are letting somebody else use it against you, most often to make you mad or show you ads or both.

These days I spend as much time as ever on the computer (less so on the phone, because it's harder to follow this rule) but I try to follow this rule that my buddy retweeted way back: (The original guy has locked his account, which is why this is an embedded post of a photo of a printed-out post from a different website.)

Like my Home Assistant journey: I've spent plenty of it frustrated by something, but it was my problem that I caused for myself, not a vertical video of someone cooking food wrong on purpose. And they were all problems that existed within my control and I eventually got to solve, and I learned something, at least for long enough to type it into SSH one time.

Maybe a cleaner way to put the rule is: If you're using the computer and it doesn't result in something existing that didn't before—whether it's an artwork or a song or some writing or a solution to a problem of any kind—then you could probably do something else. And this isn't, like, grindset always-be-at-work mentality. It's just a way of budgeting your brainpower and shrinking the slice labelled hand over to faceless strangers in exchange for unfulfilling slop.

Reading

For a little while I thought I was reading Walter Miller's A Canticle For Liebowitz and I was waiting for the parts I had heard about to start, but after about fifty pages of orcs and sorcerers I realized I was reading a mislabeled ebook of R. A. Salvatore's Canticle (book one of The Cleric Quintet). If you want to check out a completely vanilla, serviceable fantasy novel I can't say I hated it. Anyway I found a real copy of Liebowitz and I have just barely started it and it already rocks.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I have put down temporarily because I needed some fiction. Might get back to it sometime because it was really interesting even if it's wrong.

Listening

I finally gave the new Anamanaguchi album a spin and I don't know. It basically sounds like if Anamanaguchi was your friend's band from high school. I see the point, you're older now and your previous sound is kind of dated and you want to try new stuff. I support artists trying new stuff even when it's not that good. I just think it's a little funny to age into rather than out of making emo music.

Also been listening to The Weather and 9 (Deluxe) by Pond a lot lately. Two great records. Stung! also rocks. Check out Pond, is my point.