RomM is the best thing to happen to my game library, and I think it is a preview of how personal media should work generally. Point it at a collection and it scans the files, identifies their systems, enriches them with metadata and artwork…
The AYN Thor is an Android handheld with two screens and, out of the box, no opinion about what either of them is for. The upper screen is wide and bright and obviously wants to be where the game happens. The lower screen is smaller, nearly…
For about fifteen years, my answer to a music theory question had the same shape: open another window. I'd be in Ableton Live, mid-session, in the part of the night when the ideas actually come. A clip would be sitting there with four chord…
Everyone has lost a dream to language. It is whole and certain for the first second after waking, and the moment you reach for a word to keep it, it begins to thin and shrink, until what you have on the page is a label where a world had bee…
A changelog for a personal website is a strange genre. Nobody asked for release notes. There is no userbase waiting on a fix, unless you count me, and I already know what shipped. But this site is the closest thing I have to a workshop with…
There's a genre now. You've seen it. A face fills the frame, the captions bounce along the bottom, and the voice says something like: five signs you might have ADHD. Or: things I didn't know were autism. Or the compound form, the one I see
There's an entry in my Obsidian daily notes from this April that I didn't think anyone would ever read, including me. It says: Working on the vault today. Got a fancy new theme going, pretty good. Refactored the style of the vault to be mor…
Rhyme is a fact about sound, not spelling. Blue rhymes with shoe and through and you, and not one of them is spelled like the others. Comb, bomb, and tomb all end in the same three letters and not one of them rhymes with another. The ear kn…
This week I did something I'd been putting off for a long time. I reread MentalHealthError: an exception occurred, the essay where I told the internet I had bipolar disorder. A hundred and fifty thousand people read it the first weekend. It…
Some of my own essays this year have made me cry. That's not remarkable; writers cry at their own work all the time, usually at how bad it is. What's remarkable is when it happens. Not while typing a sentence. While reading one back. Becaus…
There's a thing that happens when you start using AI coding tools seriously. You assume the best workflow is obvious: let AI generate the first draft, then you clean it up and maintain it by hand. I've been finding the opposite to be true.
Aaron Swartz told us not to read the comments. He was right. The comment section of the early-to-mid internet was a place where nuance went to die and bad faith went to thrive. "DON'T READ THE COMMENTS" became a survival heuristic for anyon…