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 31, 2026.

Making

A few months ago I was thinking, oh, freelance is always really dry at the start of the year. This year somehow January through April have been as busy as ever. Which is good, because I’m almost on pace to be able to pay all my taxes at once, but also, yeesh. Haven't had a day off to go shoot photos in weeks, even though it's 80 degrees out in Pittsburgh every third day now. What section of the page is this?

The main secret thing I’ve been working on is starting to wrap up, and might even be public by the end of the year, which is neat. It's been a long time since I worked on a design project that was important enough to not talk about.

Outside of work I’ve been doing a lot of idle tinkering, which is one of my favorite activities. The new Mass-Driver font dropped (Yeah, I’m a guy who gets advance copies of fonts. Jealous?) so I rolled out a new & improved homepage set in it. It looks almost the same as the old one but I’m exorcising Inter from all my web projects and I’ve also made it much easier to update on my end.

Then I did the same thing with my Neocities, which took a lot longer, but I’m pleased with how it feels now. The fifteen people who ever look at my Neocities page are now having the most polished, seamless, intuitive UI experience I could muster. You're welcome.

I found some ESP32-controlled LED strip lights at Goodwill and I'm working on getting those engaged with Home Assistant (the smart part was easy but getting power to the driver is kind of a puzzle for where I'd like to put them). That led me into sketching up ideas for a whole new HA dashboard and digging my old shitty phone out of a drawer to see if there's anything interesting I can do with it, which I do every six months or so. I guess I unwittingly bought the most locked-down and secure phone ever made in 2018 because it's apparently impossible to load a whole new OS (which should be illegal to stop me from doing!). I can strongly recommend Universal Android Debloater, which at least got it to stop reinstalling Mega Candy Solitaire Quest Saga 4 every time I reboot it.

Doing

The year of movies cannot be stopped. Laur and I have been to the theater for PROJECT HAIL MARY (corny but in a way that honors the book, I liked it), THE NIGHT IS SHORT, WALK ON GIRL (an absolute treat, and very funny!), SCARLET (cool idea but did not really stack up against Mamoru Hosoda's previous work), and probably a couple other ones I forgot.

Recently we'be both been working a bunch so the weekends end up pretty packed, usually not with pre-planned stuff but just by virtue of cramming in all the goofing off we need to do to recharge. Getting breakfast, hitting one or two thrift spots (Laur has a list of blu-rays to look for, I like gambling on dollar CDs), putting around depending on the weather. It's a nice little cycle. I feel more stable and overall Okay than I have in a long time.

I’m going to Virginia this weekend to see some family for Easter and I know I’m moving up in the world because this time I managed to spring for Amtrak instead of Greyhound. Lots of things about it are annoying but I like traveling alone. The first bit of Marc Augé’s Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity about how nice it is to show up to the train station or airport and have an infrastructurally enforced hour or so with nothing to do but chill out really spoke to me. Then after the introduction he started talking about hyperobjects and the dialectic and I promised I would come back to it and read some stupid spaceship book instead.

Thinking

I've been off sertraline for about a month and I guess I didn't slow down gradually enough because lately I have mostly been thinking "why am I so dizzy?".

I've also been, as I mentioned, tinkering around a lot, and thinking about how much more possible things are when you're willing to take computers apart or mess with them at a past-surface level. I love saving a device from the trash and I love making something work that didn't before, and I think there is something critical to the human experience of the world that goes away when using something is replaced by just viewing something.

I'm slowly killing the elitist designer in my head who demands new and sleek and matte-black hardware and I'm coming to appreciate the hacked-together homebrew solution. There's something noble about the beater Android phone-turned-FTP-server, the grimy lidless laptop put to new use as a media controller; not just in that these things are no longer trash but in that defiance of their original purpose, which was to become obsolete.

I would love to be able to do more website-building on the go (or, y'know, at work when I'm unsupervised) and I have been reading a lot of reviews and specsheets of this tiny-ass laptop, looking at Reddit posts of people playing Fallout on a plane, basically the virtual analog of a Victorian street urchin pressing my grimy nose against the confectioner's window. Make no mistake: I would absolutely buy this thing if I had $1000 lying around, but I'm also wondering if I couldn't buy or build something less powerful for less money. Maybe what I actually want is a keyboard for my phone and some kind of rig to hold them together.

My hope is that people ditching smartphones in non-trivial numbers and the increased amount of computing happening on servers where you can just use a browser as a terminal will combine to reintroduce the netbook. I want a cyberdeck.

Reading

Between Two Fires was pretty good. I finished The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of in time to return it and liked that one as well. I started this new Cory Doctorow book Enshittification but I don't think I'll finish it because it turns out it's just a chopped cheese of The Internet Con retitled after the viral word he made up. Genuinely, get that bag, but if you've had it on your list just read the last one.

Yesterday I got started on Diaspora by Greg Egan, which so far rocks. Greg Egan is maybe a little too much of a theoretical-math nerd to write convincingly natural human dialogue, but this one is about a future populated by virtual constructs, so he's crushing it.

Listening

Great news, everyone: Chiptunes are back. I know they never went away but I've been very focused on listening to new-to-me music recently and I've caught so many banger chiptune releases from the last six months or so, which means they're Back.

Also been working through a weekend's worth of thrifted new-age CDs. This dolphin-themed ambient MIDI album feels like a lost 3DO game soundtrack.