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 February 12, 2025. When it's gone, it's gone.

Making

I have been made aware that my behavior lately has mostly consisted of seeking out insignificant-but-complicated little projects, such that I can kind of spawn-farm the feeling of solving a problem after working on it for a while, and so that I can surround myself with things I have control over, even if none of them are important or impressive. Realizing this has not brought me closer to stopping. I made a Raspberry Pi into a little NAS server. I've been messing around with these trash laptops—one of them works great sans battery, so I'm just waiting until I have 80 bucks to spare to call that finished.

I refreshed my profile pic because I don't look quite the same as I did in 2023. I wrapped an album cover gig that I'm pretty happy with. Couple of weeks ago I made a bunch of hourly comics, like I always do, and then I made a webpage for the full archive which was a great unimportant project full of problems: for one, scouring my Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram history for drawings from ten years ago, and then making the nice scroll-reactive menu behave the way I wanted. I know it's not healthy or very Marxist to associate a feeling of productivity with self-worth, but I do feel decently productive.

Doing

I keep on going, which is the only thing there is to do. I'm worried that if I'm unemployed for much longer I'll decide I like it and call off the hunt. I definitely inherited a predisposition to alcohol from my dad (he's a great guy and I love him, dude just pounds a lot of Miller Lite) but I think I may have also inherited a predisposition toward being a bum. Or I guess a professional would call it ADHD-related dysfunction plus a hard time thinking long-term. I'm broke right now but I'm gonna have rent for this month, and probably even next. What else could you ask for?

What I ought to do is go outside more, but it's either cold or wet or both in these Pittsburgh winters. Went out to the store yesterday and killed off a roll of Fuji 200 on my walk and then dropped it off at the CVS for developing. I can't wait to see if any of those pictures are good and/or what this plastic Winnie the Pooh camera is capable of. I have to go back to the store today because I forgot something. Might take the digital camera but I want to say I have photographed every photographable scene between my apartment and the Giant Eagle.

There have been highlights, too. Lauren and I went on a lovely anniversary date to the same Italian place we went last year, because it's really good. It was really good. I even managed to cover the check with an invoice a client paid me that morning. Valentine's is coming up here and we have agreed to a moratorium on gifts due to both being severely broke, but I think we're gonna go get brunch or something.

Thinking

I was thinking a lot about the algorithm and the way that computers (and the computers' shareholders) have basically rebuilt the conservative monoculture of the pre-internet world, but even more hostile and invasive because the speed and volume of mass media have ramped way up. I ended up writing a whole real blog about it, so I don't have anything left to put here.

That's something I've been trying to do more: having a thought and letting it snowball a while until it feels writeable standalone rather than do nothing with it. And maybe it's too negative a process to let every pearl of a blog post or essay form around the grain of something I've been angry about because it sucks. Maybe some un-matured chnk of my brain still finds it embarrassing to talk uncritically about something I like in public. I dunno. Either way I am writing more than I have in a while, which is something.

Reading

I am crawling my way through Edge by Koji Suzuki, which isn't to say I don't like it, but I think it's the first book I've read translated from Japanese and the texture of the prose takes some getting used to for it. Like I can tell it's going to pop off soon and I would even say it's good so far but there's something about a whole book of eight-word sentences that makes it a little slippery to focus on.

Listening

Recently I have managed to trick YouTube into becoming good by cultivating an algorithm that serves me various '60s jazz concerts. So almost every day for the last week I've thrown on, like, Thelonious Monk Live in Paris 1967 or Thelonious Monk Live in Copenhagen 1961 or one of those. It's mostly Monk, which is fine by me, because he's great.

I also checked out this new Oklou album I saw everyone talking about last week. It's very good—the best pitch I can think of is feminine AG Cook. Very cool sound design and vocal treatment.