personal

29
May

I don't like being on the computer anymore

I quit social media again. I do this every few years, deactivating or deleting accounts or abandoning platforms entirely after either the platform itself becomes too evil for me to justify my presence on it or I just see a post or a trend so bad that I decide being online is just bad for me. This time I just saw a Bluesky reply argument that was so stupid I decided to deactivate my account immediately. Bluesky has a bit of a problem with constant context collapse: leftists and irony posters are sharing a much more confined space with Maddow-loving

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3 min read
21
May

If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Poorly

It feels appropriate that in sitting down to write this I intended to reference something I read recently and realized I had forgotten to bookmark it. I have been trying to be better about keeping a "second brain" with Pinboard and Obsidian but I still forget to bookmark things, forget to write things down, lose them somewhere in the sea of tabs and browsers and devices that are a part of my daily life. I have always aspired for this site to be something like Simon Willison's blog - a constantly updated, eternally useful source of knowledge - but mostly

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2 min read
15
May

The Joys of Undercommitting

I terminated the lease on my art studio today. I feel pretty sad about it: I'm very fond of the space and its people, I've made good friends and cool work there, and especially while I was working from home it was great for my mental health in a lot of ways. But once I started working hybrid it became a lot harder to make it in - on my work from home days I wanted to like, do laundry and dishes, not schlep half an hour there and back - and once my mom got sick it became functionally

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2 min read
06
May

Maybe this is enough

Lately I have been feeling what I think might be contentment. This is a bit of a weird thing to be feeling given the general state of affairs outside of my little slice of the world and I find myself second-guessing it pretty often but for the most part the ambient sense of crushing guilt and dissatisfaction that has accompanied me for most of my life appears to be significantly reduced.

About a year ago I set out to try and stop being so stressed out all the time. I stopped saying yes to so many things, quit a job

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2 min read
18
Apr

Touching peace

I've always had a fantasy about becoming a monk. I'm not wedded to a particular kind of monk, I just figure a life of peace and solitude dedicated to pursuing a relationship with God or internalizing the Four Noble Truths might be the thing that fixes me.

This is an idle thought that I have not seriously pursued. I love my little treats and abandoning all material attachments sounds hard. I assume I will be stuck in the cycle of samsara for some time yet.

All the different schools of thought on this basically boil down to the bell curve

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3 min read