Reading

I was reading an essay out loud to myself and blew my own mind with how much I loved one of the pargraphs. This was a new feeling and one I’m trying to get better at noticing, so I went back a few days later and tried to analyze it, to understand why I liked it. Here’s that analysis: It feels less alive now, which makes me realize: I don’t really want to understand it. I want to just let it live, as it is. Trying to understand this stuff is like trying to understand how music works. Why does it work. I asked Lauren that once and never understood the answer, thank god. ...

I love both the form and content of his work, especially his ‘book’ that he’s publishing one chapter at a time on his site called Agentic Engineering Patterns. I also the fact that he’s been doing this since 2002!! That’s fuckin amazing. 24 years of blogging, all there on his website. Not only is this great for us all, but its great for him, especially in the age of LLMs. He talks about that here in the hoard things you know how to do chapter of the book. ...

Boris Cherny - the person who literally built Claude Code - just posted his 10 tips for using it. I read through them nodding the entire time. I’m a comedian. I don’t write code. Well - I didn’t used to. Now I kind of do? But the point is: I started using Claude Code for non-coding work, and I apparently arrived at the same workflows as the guy who made the thing. ...

Not how we say it as an insult - he’s an influencer - but the real thing. Maybe it’s because I’m reading Joan Westenberg’s ideas around it in her pdf, about how real influence isn’t about vanity. So what is it? Well, maybe it’s the ability to change minds. Casey Newton writes about AI. He wrote about Spotify’s new AI playlist thing and, right after, I tried to find that feature on Spotify so I could do it myself. ...

That’s the first axiom in the book Existential Kink which I’ve just started reading based on a rec from Paul Millerd. The basic idea here being - whatever situation you’ve got in life, there’s a part of you, deep down in the caverns of your sticky subconscious, that wants it that way. My mind quickly gets stuck in the logistics of it, the logic of it, which I think the author Carolyn Elliott would say is a trap. That’s the ego wanting to make sense of things, but none of this makes sense. That’s how it works. It operates beyond and outside of the rules of logic and reason where 2+2 = farts. ...

so I just wrote this little piece - having is evidence of wanting. it’s not a full essay, not even close, but it is…something. and that matters. how do i know? because i just a few minutes ago had a random thought pop into my mind about how i could use this idea - having is evidence of wanting - and the book Existential Kink as a whole - as the start of the story I can tell at the February 2026 Moth show that’s coming up. The theme is ‘Love Hurts.’ I don’t yet know what my piece will be about, but now I have a super interesting, alive-feeling start. ...

Vija Celmins, Heater (1964) We’ve got this detached office in the backyard. It’s like a shed that feels like a sauna because of the wood paneling. Is it called paneling? There are so many words that all basically just mean ‘wall’. Recently I learned the outside of a house is called ‘siding’ when Lauren kept talking about what color we’d paint the siding in our new home (soft launch btw: we finally closed on a home). ...

asking myself this as I read about a man named Lish. Gordon Lish. Editor of Raymond Carver. Friend of Don Delillio. I learned about him as a quick aside mentioned here in this YT video on White Noise which sent me googling and found me here at this ’expose’ in the nytimes in 1998 about how Lish edited Carver’s early works quite a lot, it seemed, and perhaps enough to say that he was the guy who wrote them? ...

there’s a difference! Because this blog right now is still an infant, and literally I think only three people have ever even been given the link, I am able to be much more sensitive to the shifting experience of writing it as more people become aware of it. for example: i shared it with Michael Dean last week (Michael if you’re reading this, which you probably are cuz i’ll probably send it to you, hi!). ...

I love collecting prompts and just found a bunch of real weird ones in a book titled Learning for people who prefer not to be taught Some prompts: Just add hot water and stir Internship Lottery Performative Artists’ Talks