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I’ve started making music regularly again, for the first time in years. Before I would sit down and noodle, creating snippets and lots of eight-bar loops, but none of it resulted in a start-to-finish track. I simply could not figure out how to get past a mental block that kept me from finishing, and then I’d get angry with myself and give up in disgust or move on to the next shiny object.

I have a wonderful new group of eighth graders in my Tech Projects class, and they’ve been hard at work brainstorming ideas, narrowing them down, doing research, and finally picking their best one. At that point, I have them create a project proposal that asks them to step back and think about various aspects of their idea, even though they want to dive in immediately. This isn’t easy, and it doesn’t come naturally.

Last week, I got an email from an ed tech company inviting me to a conference that included speakers, a fancy dinner, and ways to explore their products in detail. I get these all the time. I usually don’t click through, but I did in this case and looked at the product. It was an AI-powered graphic organizer for students that had plenty of other things clamped onto it, nothing special.

I’m having a harder time than usual getting back into the groove of the school year. My rhythms are off, I can’t find things that I need without a lot of digging, and my sleep patterns are completely disrupted. Some life transitions happen slowly, so that you barely notice things have changed until you’re nearly there. Others tear through you like a storm, jolting you from one place to another without enough time to process.

One of the worst things about AI is how it validates my intelligence in plausible ways. I’ll reject an idea it comes up with and offer one of my own, and it tells me “your idea is much better, here’s why,” with specific details about my brilliance. Who wouldn’t want to believe it? The fact that the compliment isn’t coming from a being with any experience in the real world, and is actually from a computer that’s tuned toward sycophancy can easily slip my mind.

Anthropic recently announced that Claude models are going to start watermarking the text they generate, with older models getting the feature added over the coming months. The stated reason is compliance with the EU AI Act, which requires AI-generated content to carry some kind of disclosure marker, and it’s a poorly written law, in my opinion, vague enough that I’m not entirely sure how it’s supposed to apply to something like my own workflow.

I enjoyed this year’s World Cup immensely, and got completely absorbed in the stories of the teams and players as the tournament progressed. From Curaçao’s historic goal against Germany in their opening match all the way to the spectacle of the final game between Spain and Argentina, I discovered a sport that’s both inspirational and troubling, along with a whole history that I’d had no idea about.

I keep reading about how difficult the landscape looks right now for people trying to build a career in information technology, and it leaves me sitting with two feelings at once: grateful for the path I got to walk, and a little heartsick for the people just starting theirs, because that path isn’t available anymore. It’s left me with a question: if someone stood at the very beginning of this journey, still deciding whether IT was worth pursuing, would I actually tell them to go for it?

I was about an hour from finishing my website redesign (hope you like it!) when I hit my subscription limit. I could have stopped there, waited for it to reset, and picked back up later. Instead, I kept going, knowing full well that everything from that point on was going to cost me actual money on top of what I already pay every month. By the time I was done, it had cost me sixty dollars.

Modern life comes with a background hum of tiny indignities. Fill out the form. Scan this QR code. Sit through the ad before your call gets answered, and rest assured, your call is very important to us. None of it is a real hardship. It’s just friction, usually delivered by someone who has no power to change, so by design there’s no one to even be mad at other than a faceless company.

When I launched this site, I had a whole theory about what it would be. I’d write about what actually interests me rather than chasing fads, skip the tracking, and see where it goes. No growth hacking, no algorithm chasing. Just a homestead on the open internet.

A year and a half later, I’ve published more than thirty articles and a full run of monthly newsletters. It’s a real body of work now, and somewhere in the accumulation it stopped feeling like an experiment and started feeling like a practice. So this seems like a good moment to look up from the work and ask myself how it’s going.

I’ve been workshopping spoken word pieces, almost like poetry, to weave into my music. Monologues, textures, things I want to find my own voice for. So I asked ChatGPT for some feedback on my early ideas.