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

Making

I'm just accepting the slump. It'll end someday. I am simply too stressed out by all other aspects of life to sketch out an idea, let alone sit down and realize it.

The homepage rewrite is done and I just need this font to drop publically so I can get the web files. And I've been sinking most of my free time into (you guessed it) tinkering around with the homelab, which basically means trying to update or edit something, causing the entire server to break, and then blowing a pissed-off couple of hours getting it back in place. The Minecraft server works again, by the way.

Work is going, uh, I hesitate to say okay even but not bad. I am pretty sure I can get through this month on the gigs I have in the pipe. And when next month rolls around I'll figure that out too, somehow. I always do.

Doing

Took another Photo Walk on Saturday because I had nothing to do, it was nice out, and it's free. Plus it usually makes me feel good, moving around and absorbing some sunlight and when I get home I have a pleasant chore to do of sifting through the SD card for good ones.

I've been eating a lot of tuna salad lately, mostly because you can get a can of tuna for a dollar and throw in a couple other things and have two or three lunches. Pretty good. Check it out if you get the chance.

Thinking

Well, Charlie Kirk got shot. It's not good, I think, that a video of a guy taking a bullet to the throat has been viewed ten million times on Reddit, but America's hunger for violence seems to transcend any kind of political alignment. So too does the average person's internal ideology. I have been thinking—before this, too—about how the USA is built on the premise that nobody should be allowed to learn or know anything, which creates a billion permutations of in-the-dark guesses about what the world is or should be. For all the memeified hagiography of Luigi Mangione he was, like, an Elon reply guy with a business degree. Everyone is living this way all the time, totally oblivious to the contradictions because we never get a handhold on reality, and then once in a while a random person snaps and the public gets to spend fifteen minutes holding up to the light their completely inscrutable worldview, or at least as assembled from their profiles on different websites.

The other thing about all this I've found kind of grimly fascinating is the spectacle of the public death of a guy whose entire personality was driven by becoming more of a public figure. Obviously I think Charlie Kirk was a nasty little worm with despicable things to say and no evidence that he believed in anything at all, and I can hold simultaneously the ideas I would prefer to live in a world where nobody is murdered in broad daylight on college campuses and I am not going to bother shedding a tear for the president of the We Love School Shootings Club.

It's kind of insane to watch the conversation boil about this online, because what you're seeing is the tracks left by the final activation of Kirk's life's work; a network of gamed algorithms and bought ad-space that fueled his nasty little empire conflagrating as it lights up one final time to trumpet his death, Astroturf burning away to bare dirt. We are beyond, I think, fascism as the injection of the aesthetic into the politic; now is the time of Posting as politics. Maybe even the total replacement of any political structure we once had with pure Posting. The Arab Spring promise that social media (and it sounds so 40-years-old to use the phrase social media) would democratize societies everywhere has emphatically not come to pass. In fact, somehow the ability to plug directly into the brainstems of everyone in the world and make them angry, afraid and/or horny in numbers proportional to how much money you have did the opposite.

A lot of the Kirk shooting buzz has been about people getting banned from X or Y platform for being overly glib about it, or even liking someone else being glib about it, which is frankly (40-year-old voice) pretty Orwellian. Tough to imagine this same wave of crackdowns affecting the right-wing outrage machine anytime it carves a person's unfortunate death into a political wedge. Hasn't happened yet!

Ryan Broderick called this the 9/11 of the Internet age, and I think that comparison will only bulk up in the next few days as the fascist entity gets its playbook out and decides which existing enemy is to blame. That link is also partly about what I think may be America's new most comprehensive single artifact, a heavily self-promotional front-facing video shot during the attack by an aspiring Mormon TikTok influencer who was later spotted scooping up armloads of blood-splashed T-shirts to fence on eBay.

Reading

I finished A Canticle for Leibowitz. Pretty good! Loses some momentum in the last act but is full of interesting ideas. Now I am reading in parallel The Cipher by Kathe Koja and Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312. So far both of them are good.

Listening

Lately almost nothing but Bob James and Grover Washington Jr. Something about the fakeout week of fall temperatures before it's 90 degrees again feels just right for jazz.