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 April 12, 2026.

Making

Still working on work. I have a 99%-done work of regular art in the garage that I just haven't picked up and polished yet because I'm tired and I'm more interested in tinkering with my little projects right now.

I've been doing some maintenance on the home server (now slightly over a year since I set it all up and still going fine!) and considering tearing it all down so I can rebuild it with the knowledge I've gained from a year of doing it sideways, which is something I like ro do periodically, but it's become so load-bearing to our home that I'm going to wait until Lauren goes on vacation next month to start unplugging stuff.

Oh, also the thing I mentioned last time with those LEDs was a bust. I tried stripping and splicing a USB cable to make it long enough to reach where I wanted them to go and now it doesn't turn on anymore, so I think I fried the driver somehow. Ah well.

Doing

Been a packed couple of weekends—for Easter I was in Virginia, as is traditional. Richmond is a beautiful city that I love deeply and I would move there in a heartbeat if the temperature and humidity weren't tied at 90 every day from Easter to Halloween.

Last time I was down there my sister was looking through my camera and said I really make Richmond look like a dump. Looking at the photos I took this time that's true, and I apologize. Usually taking photos of Pittsburgh means I only know how to shoot decay and despair. Anyway I got to see her and my little brother, who is staying with her this summer. It's so funny to all be adults now and get together at each other's apartments twice a year to talk about the time in 2012 that our dad rented Hugo from DirecTV or whatever and then forgot about it completely until at 11:45 PM the TV showed a popup that said “You only have 15 minutes left before your rental of Hugo expires” so he woke everybody in the house up on a school night and made a bowl of popcorn and the whole family watched Hugo and then went back to bed at like 2 AM. You guys remember Hugo?

Then I had a pretty swamped week because I didn't get back until Monday night and I was going to do some work on the way home but my “travel” laptop charger I got a few years ago doesn't seem to work anymore; meaning I was forced to relax and read a book instead. Got a hot dog and a beer on the train as well, which was pretty baller.

Yesterday Laur and I went down to Dormont for a movie and left super early so we could check out a new antique mall and new pizza place beforehand (both good). Today we mostly went to the store in different ways. Sizing up this coming week, during which I need to double-check that I have enough money to my name to pay off my taxes and then file my taxes, and also have a teetering to-do list of other annoying stuff. Ah well.

Thinking

I just finished reading Derivative Media and it threaded together a few things that I've been thinking about separately—the derivatives market and how utterly fake finance all is, how absurd and cruel it is therefore to give the finance sphere this much influence over the real world, and how that influence strangles the humanity out of us. Capitalism can choose to reward the secondary byproducts of creativity but it does not incentivize being creative for its own sake. I might cook up a longer blog post about this, but here are my disordered notes on something:

When I was in college I very nearly had a big embarassing crisis over how graphic design as an industry is almost entirely employed to launder the public reputation of the owning class. I still really don't like thinking about that but back then I was anticipating it being a bigger obstacle in my career, and now I've been out of school for five years and I'm mostly making like, a logo for someone's band and not UX wireframes for fascist surveillance apps.

They made a Mario Galaxy movie and I'm about 20 years too old to watch that but the reviews seem pretty grim. I did see the first Mario movie and I thought it was a total snooze, clearly the product of the copyright holder faxing the animation studio a pre-approved outline with “No new ideas please!” at the top.

I'm sure I took a picture of it but a couple of years ago I was at Barnes & Noble and they had a plush LEGO® Harry Potter™ toy in the clearance bin and it sort of sent me spiraling. A stuffed animal fascimile of a virtual 3D model from a video game styled to look like a toy and protagonized by the toyified likeness of a licensed character portrayed by an actor in a movie adapted from a childrens’ book. Layer after layer of abstraction and translation packed into a physical object that was manufactured in a Special Economic Zone by a person making 21 cents a day and shipped across the ocean with carbon nature meant to keep in the ground so it could wind up unwanted and unsold at a chain bookstore behind Friends Monopoly and Game of Thrones: The Unofficial Cookbook. I assume that days after I encountered it an employee was required by store policy to disfigure it beyond recognition before throwing it out.

Lego has become a style of movie instead of a topic for a movie; they've got all the software ironed out after the first one and you can be Pharrell or Netflix or whoever's next and just pay a fee to get your movie wrapped in some additional brand synergy regardless of whether it makes any sense for Pharrell or One Piece (God, a CGI movie styled like a plastic toy retelling a live-action remake of an anime based on a manga) to look like that. You can see why these guys are betting it all on AI.

The other week I read this Eliza McLamb article about a scummy music-promotion firm, which is worth checking out and makes some interesting commentary on the harsh necessity of gaming the system. But the part that has really been stuck in my teeth is this story the marketing firm boasts about where they forcibly viralized some guy's indie folk song by astroturfing tons and tons of TikTok AMVs of the TV show Yellowjackets set to it, which worked in that there are now more people who have heard the song, but then they state—proudly—that this tactic created such a robust connection that people turn up in Yellowjackets cosplay to this guy's concerts despite him having nothing to do with the show or its production. They don't even mention if he likes it.

I'm meaner than I should be to creative work of a type that starts with “fan-” because I think it's hacky to just pin your own ideas to a much more popular idea that's not yours. It's the same tactic the guys making ten-figure Jurassic Park hypersequels are pulling twice a year but they at least get a paycheck for it. And maybe the kids drawing comics about Shadow the Hedgehog are just saving their readership the minuscule trouble of guessing their influences. I mean, it is cool as fuck to violate copyright law. But it's also interesting how stuff on both sides of the mainstream membrane can be pushed through it for money. For every original screenplay that's been sold to a studio as a substrate for embedding Intellectual Property Touchpoints there is also a novel originally written on Wattpad that's been sold to a publisher with the male love interest swapped from Harry Styles to a new legally-distinct guy.

I've spoken on this before but my darkest prediction is that soon all fiction permitted corporate distribution will share a single “cinematic universe” and that universe will also be Fortnite and you can log on to it and hang out with virtual avatars of your favorite mascots for a monthly fee. The Ready Player One guy has executed a reverse Torment Nexus in that his awful vision of a world populated by unjustified callbacks to shit from 40 years ago is going to come to pass and loads of people are going to love it. Accounting for population growth, if P.T. Barnum was right in 1890 then there is now a sucker born every 12½ seconds.

He deleted it for being kind of mean but that Branson Reese review of the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie is often ringing in my head, where he says “We should learn to speak in a language that rich people who don't dream can't comprehend.”

Reading

Outside of Derivative Media I've been trying to pad out my book rate with some snacks. Diaspora was pretty good; recommended if you'd like to read one long book with the idea quotient of like seven regular books. Dino Buzzati's The Singularity was bad. David Grann's The White Darkness was good even if I thought it was a whole book and not a long-ish article. I'm still counting it. I just started The Terror and it's too early to tell but signs are pointing to it being sort of mid.

Listening

Trying to keep new-to-me music bumping as much as I can but one thing I've come back to a couple times is this trickpony album. Beautiful stuff.