Glow Jackal: the dog who was always the god
OG Bobby Johnson raps on a wall of bass. His shadow grows taller ears. His eyes go gold. Then the wall drops out from un...
Archive
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Level Up the Game
Kent Beck wants the genie to bear his toil and leave him his struggle. My first thought: then move the target. Go after ...
Saul, Saul: Schütz as cathedral EDM
A voice from heaven calls a proud man by name. His horse throws him. Three days blind, then sunrise. Heinrich Schütz set...
The Rest of the Map
The rest of my cybernetics reading list has its primers now, from Beer to Boyd: a companion, an audio primer and a print...
Arguing and Agreeing
Listening to cybernetics primers before the papers, and an insight about conversation theory: my work with frontier mode...
Melt Into the Sunbeam
Slow breath in and out to start the page, a memory of perfect waves in the emerald green tunnel, and a question: can we ...
A Sound Plan: the DoorDash of DevOps
OG Bobby Johnson has a plan. Plan 9 is an AI, so he's taking the notes. The DoorDash of DevOps. Push to prod on Friday, ...
The Right to Explore
The hackers didn't understand the machine when they started. That was the point. So why is someone exploring with AI wri...
The Grand Map: the AWS Solutions Architect Exam on One Sheet
The whole AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam drawn as one kingdom on a single two-sided sheet, checked against curre...
The Hacker Ethic Meets Cybernetics
A fourteen-year-old's robot bug at the MIT AI lab pushed a wallet across a grimy floor while the grad students upstairs ...
The Regulator Was Fed Intents
I built the smallest loop that could be wrong, to watch a law from Ashby do work. The loop was wrong twice before it was...
Every Check Passed
Most of my essays had gone missing from the page that lists them, on production, and every check passed. The same week t...
The Gates Are the Product
I let an AI run a music and film studio for a month: render, master, verify, repeat. It mostly worked. Everything that w...
Gentler On-Ramps to Cybernetics
The founding papers were too steep and so were my own primers. So here are the gentler ways in: stories and a game to te...
Humans Just Don't Understand: an AI tells on its human
An AI assistant tells on its human. His name is Kevin. It was Friday at five and it was just a button. A 90s story rap w...
Vega: Harmony & Beauty
Vega, the Standard Star of astronomy, sits 25 light-years distant, sending photons from the year 2000. Zero-point of the...
A Map Before the Reading
I opened the first paper on my cybernetics reading list and bounced. I had no map of the domain, so I stopped and built ...
A Cybernetics Reading List, Written Before I Read It
An agent can check a quote for me. It cannot read for me. So before I open Ashby, Wiener and the 1943 paper, here is the...
Culture Is the Oldest Information Technology
I once wrote that our minds run on the same hardware as every other animal and that something rewrote the software. I th...
What 7helm Is Made Of
Change the drag constant in my arcade game by one part in a hundred million and twelve recorded runs stop matching. That...
Two Readers and a Red Box
A vision model read the top of my notebook page and filed it under a date eight years off, calmly. One reader cannot fla...
A Loop Is a Path That Closes
One of my health checks stayed red for eleven weeks by reading its own failure. A loop is the special case of a trajecto...
The Agent Said It's Done: a keynote that turns into an anthem
A product keynote, played completely straight, tips into the absurd one slide at a time until the power cord comes out. ...
Deneb: Decan 20 - Creativity & Transcendence
The photons entering your eyes right now left Deneb around 590 BCE, from the age of Pythagoras and the Buddha, when the ...
THE REPS: a Plan 9 and OG Bobby Johnson rap over six Chopin etudes
Plan 9 and OG Bobby Johnson rap over six Chopin etudes: skip the hype, go to the dark room, put in the reps, and pick yo...
I Made an Arcade Game. It's Called 7helm.
7helm is a free arcade game that runs in your browser. Press PLAY and you are flying. No sign-up, no ads, just three ini...
Altair: Decan 19 - Vision & Speed (September 16-25)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Altair in 2008. This A7 V white main-sequence star rotates once every 8.9 ...
Nunki: Decan 18 - Knowledge & Direction (September 6-15)
Nunki's photons left in 1797, and its name is traced through Babylonian star lists to Sumerian Eridu. September 6-15: so...
Walking a Rented Kingdom
I read a hundred-page atlas of a kingdom I will only ever rent, then logged in and walked it. On studying a territory wi...
The Capstone Movement: Four Designs That Use the Whole Map
Twenty-one rooms each taught one durable idea. The capstone movement spends them. Four real systems designed end to end,...
The Mind Places Things on Paper
My AWS flash cards kept evaporating, so I printed the whole study system as a paper packet and the next review nearly do...
Shaula: Decan 17 - Secrets & Depth (August 27 - September 5)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Shaula around 1455. For thousands of years the Scorpion's stinger has mark...
The Smallest World That Still Tells the Truth
Development environments lie in two directions. Clone production and it is too expensive to use. Mock it and it is confi...
THE DESCENT: every decision fork in the AWS SAA-C03
THE DESCENT is eleven films that drill every decision fork in the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. 265 forks, ten...
Antares: Decan 16 - Transformation & Willpower (August 17-26)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Antares in 1475. This red supergiant, 680 solar radii across, is simultane...
ANATTA: a film in which nothing is held across a bar line
ANATTA is Song 20 in Out of Your Mind, and its claim is that there is no permanent self. So the claim is enforced as a l...
SUNYATA: a film where no two voices ever begin together
SUNYATA is Song 19 in Out of Your Mind, and the quietest thing we have made. No kick, no clap, no percussion, no bass an...
NO SPECTATOR: a film whose music is a canon, because that is the argument
Song 18 of Out of Your Mind: there is no bench. The score is a perpetual canon where no voice only listens, and the one ...
TAT TVAM ASI: a film that withholds its own leading tone
TAT TVAM ASI is Song 17 in Out of Your Mind. The whole film is D Mixolydian, so there is no C sharp anywhere in it, whic...
Zubeneschamali: Decan 15 - Balance & Justice (August 7 - August 16)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Zubeneschamali in 1840. At 185 light-years, this fierce blue-white star ma...
Decan 14: The Governor Was Built and Then Not Consulted
Ten days under Arcturus, the Bear-Watcher, building instruments for oversight, and a last three days that used none of t...
OLLAMA MAMA: can't truss the frontier, so own your model
Can't truss the frontier, so own your model. Plan 9 and OG Bobby Johnson roast the cloud LLMs by name, then flip it. Get...
Arcturus: Decan 14 - Wisdom & Guidance (July 28 - August 6)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Arcturus in 1988. This orange giant started with the Sun's mass but only a...
Decan 13: The Harvest Date Moved
Spica is the ear of grain in the Virgin's hand, and Hipparchus found the precession of the equinoxes by trusting a two-d...
The Promise and the Shelf: Two Short Films on Spending Less
The cost movement continues. The Promise is how you pay less for the load you can count on. The Shelf is how you pay les...
The Lobby and the Cipher: Two Short Films That Close the Security Wing
The security wing closes. The Lobby is about what should even be reachable in the first place. The Cipher is the last li...
Hello, Again
Three weeks ago I wrote about a script called hello, the one warm door into my system. I kept pulling the thread and the...
The Keyring and the Gauntlet: Two Short Films on Who Gets In
The security wing of Learning Maps opens. The Keyring is how you stop handing out master keys. The Gauntlet is why one l...
The Outpost: The Last Room of the Systems-Talking Wing
The room about beating distance. A CDN opens a branch in every town so the answer is already next door, and it closes th...
The Breaker and the Allowance: Two Short Films on How Systems Survive Traffic
Two short films on how a system takes a punch. The Breaker is how you stop one slow dependency from dragging the whole d...
The Book Drop and the Greeter: Two Short Films on How Services Talk
Two short films that open the services-talking arc of Learning Maps. The Book Drop is how one part of a system hands wor...
Same Score, Half the Time
I failed another practice exam today. Same score as my best one, and my best is still a fail. But I finished in half the...
Spica: Decan 13 - Artistry & Perfection (July 18-27)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Spica in 1775. Two blue giants orbit each other every four days, raising t...
Decan 12: Fix the Chassis, Not the Instance
Denebola marks the tail of the lion, and a tail moves before the body does. Decan 12 is reform and intuition: catching t...
Knowing Isn't a System
I bought the IPO everyone wanted, and a quiet part of me narrated the mistake while I made it. The post-mortem found the...
The Vote and the Ring: Two Short Films on How Machines Agree
Two short films that open the coordination story of Learning Maps. The Vote is how a cluster of unreliable machines agre...
The Loop Was the Top of a Stack
I typed my thirty-two loops, then drew them as a graph, and thought the loop was the top of the system. It turned out to...
One Writer Per Artifact
Typing my automation handed me most of its rules for free; the type carries the contract. One rule came free with nothin...
The View You're Missing Is the Graph
I gave every job in my automation a receipt, a health check, and a green light, and the system still would not fit in my...
You Reinvented Data Engineering
The best thing anyone told me about my own system this year was that I had not invented it. The scripts I grew by hand a...
A Loop Is Seven Things
Thirty-two automated jobs run underneath my days, I wrote every one of them, and I could not hold the system in my head....
KALI: an Alan Watts film about the dark that turns out to be the ground
Song 16 of Out of Your Mind: Alan Watts on Kali, the dark as the ground the light stands on. A grave dirge torn down and...
Finding Edgar Morin
Edgar Morin died in May at 104, and I met him through his obituary. He spent eighty years on the question I have been bu...
Denebola: Decan 12 - Reform & Intuition (July 8 - July 17)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Denebola in 1989. This white star at the tail of the lion hosts a debris d...
Engineering Orientation
Making complexity visible is the method. Orientation is the objective function. The research program now has an installa...
Decan 11: The Margin Was Never for More Empire
Regulus spins at 96.5 percent of the speed that would tear it apart. Ten days on governing at an intensity I can sustain...
The Language of Sound, Season Two: the voices of the machine
Season Two goes inside the machine: eight episodes on how a synthesizer makes its voices. Subtractive through The Vocal ...
Hello
The first program you write used to be the machine greeting the world. Hello, world. I built a different first program: ...
The Little Black Book of Hansuru
A book I wrote about selling options for income, built on one law: survive first. It shows a record most books would hid...
THE PIANO PLAYS: a Satie waltz where the keys move before the hands
Out of Your Mind, Song 14. Alan Watts on wu-wei and flow, scored as a hovering Satie waltz where a celeste plays each no...
The Information by James Gleick: The Book That Sent Me Looking for Meaning
James Gleick's The Information is the clearest history we have of how the world learned to measure the signal. It is als...
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts
Watts's short 1966 book argues that the skin-encapsulated ego is a useful fiction, that you came out of the universe rat...
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson: The Algorithm and Its Cost
I'm mid-listen on Isaacson's Elon Musk, read by Jeremy Bobb, and I keep hearing Musk's five-step engineering algorithm i...
The Science of Complexence
I pointed a method at my own sprawl of repositories and got a page I could read. Then the first experiment on its deeper...
Regulus: Decan 11 - Sovereignty & Heart (June 28-July 7)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Regulus in 1946. The Heart of the Lion spins at 96.5% of its breakup veloc...
Decan 10: Steer by the Star You Can't See
Ten days under Canopus, the navigator's star, bright from far away. Starting in a fog after a fall, talking my way to a ...
STOP LOOKING: an Alan Watts chase film about the seeker who is the sought
Song 13 of Out of Your Mind, the chase film: a bunny hunting the one who is looking, over a Bach toccata turned EDM that...
Complexence OS
Complexence is the capability of staying oriented inside complexity. Complexence OS is the rough machine I built today t...
THIS IS IT: an Alan Watts radiant film about the it that is already looking
Song 12 of Out of Your Mind, the radiant film: a pre-dawn field, a bunny walking toward you, and a Hildegard-style chant...
Germane Friction
The fight over whether AI is good or bad is the wrong fight. AI is a friction-removal engine, and there are two kinds of...
The Case For AI, Made Properly
Most defenses of AI are about productivity, and they are weak. The strong case is older and bigger: this is the next run...
The Case Against Letting AI Think For You
AI does not destroy your work in front of you. It moves the cost somewhere you cannot see: to later, to the invisible, t...
Why Thirty-Three Repositories Needed a Census
I had thirty-three git repositories and treated all thirty-three as if they were on fire. The fix was not more disciplin...
How to Map a Domain: The Six Layers
The hardest part of mapping a complex domain is the blank page. Here are the six layers I run every domain through, from...
Domain Cartography
Domain cartography is the practice of charting a complex domain you have to live and act inside, until it is legible eno...
The Data Wing: Six Short Films on How Distributed Data Behaves
Six short films on what happens to data the moment it stops fitting on one machine: the forced choice, the dial, taste, ...
CHOPKIT (The Void Mix): vocal chops dropped into deep space
OG Bobby Johnson's vocal chops over a wide, driving void mix, with Der Gouverneur and Anubis trading rhymes in the dark ...
ELEPHANT: a whole track built on one word
OG Bobby Johnson built a whole trap cut on one word. A beat-locked "EL...EPHANT" hook, an elephant-trumpet that blasts o...
ARENA: a potato, a cosmic bunny, and the death god in the husk
The russet potato versus the bunny from outer space. One stage, three rounds, a fighting-game HUD, and a Doberman death ...
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah: A Voice Telling Its Own Life
I'm mid-listen on the Born a Crime audiobook, narrated by Trevor Noah himself, and it is one of the best-told things I h...
Out of Your Mind by Alan Watts: The Universe Listening to Itself
Out of Your Mind is Alan Watts' archival lectures in his own voice, laugh included. I keep them on a loop, transcribed t...
ATMAN: an Alan Watts cosmic film about the self with no smaller container
ATMAN is Song 15 in Out of Your Mind, and the most reverent. Atman is the self in the vastest possible sense, not the sm...
ONE HAND: an Alan Watts silence film about the koan that breaks the answer-machine
ONE HAND is Song 11 in Out of Your Mind, and the silence film. It is the one about the koan. Watts said the koan is not ...
THE RESERVATION: an Alan Watts card-table song about betting everything and laughing
THE RESERVATION is Song 10 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the on...
Canopus: Decan 10 - Navigation & Purpose (June 18-27)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Canopus in 1715. This yellow-white supergiant is the second brightest star...
Complexence
Complexity is the condition of the world. Complexence is the quality you bring to it: the capability of standing inside ...
Compressed or Destroyed
The same tool that can fold a beginner's learning curve shorter can also erase it. AI compresses apprenticeship when it ...
Botsitting
The subscription is the small line. The real meter is the time you spend feeding context, checking output, catching the ...
Rhetoric Is the Physics of Other Minds
If AWS is math and Kubernetes is physics, then discourse is the physics of other minds, the same live, empirical, pushes...
The Jagged Frontier
AI is strong in one place and confidently wrong half a step over, and from the inside the two feel identical. The real s...
The Real Bill for AI at Work
The invoice for AI is the cheap part: a seat and some tokens. The real bill arrives in four ledgers: financial, attentio...
Decan 9: The Brightest Star Is the Closest One
Ten days under Sirius, the brightest star in our sky because it is close, not because it burns hottest. The week I went ...
Just Enough Agreement: read your writes, and why not to over-buy consistency
Just Enough Agreement is Episode 3 of Learning Maps, a Napkin Films series that turns system design into story. Strong c...
The Patient Part
My head does not run in a line, it runs in branches. A tool arrived that does the exact part I cannot do and amplifies t...
MAYA: an Alan Watts hall-of-mirrors song where a stick figure dances inside the illusion
MAYA is Song 09 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about the...
The Dial: quorum, R plus W greater than N, and tuning consistency by counting
The Dial is Episode 2 of Learning Maps, a Napkin Films series that turns system design into story. Consistency is not on...
AWS Is Smaller Than It Looks
AWS is taught as two hundred services. Underneath it is a handful of primitives, and every service is a frozen answer to...
The Forced Choice: CAP, PACELC, and the trade every database already made
The Forced Choice is Episode 1 of Learning Maps, a new Napkin Films series that turns system design into story. A storm ...
The Language of Sound: A Field Guide for Making Music
I could already make sound. I could not name it, and you cannot ask for a thing you cannot name. So I asked my music eng...
Directing AI Agents Across Thirty-Three Repositories
Thirty-three repositories, and I cannot hold more than two in my head. How one instruction file per repo turns multi-rep...
Putting a Password on a Static Site With One CloudFront Function
A static site has no server to check a password, which is fine right up until the day you need one. My staging site is t...
Reading My Own Handwriting With an AI That Can Actually See
Tesseract could not read a word of it. I have years of handwritten journals, the actual paper kind, and I wanted them on...
I Compiled My Whole Blog Into One File at Build Time
Every post on this Astro site is precompiled into one committed TypeScript file at build time. Why I read the markdown o...
I Wrote a Linter That Strips the AI Tells From My Own Writing
A shell script catches every em dash on this blog. The real AI tells live in register, which no regex can see: what I li...
TOCCATA RAVE: Bach builds the cathedral, Plan 9 breaks on the floor
Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, grown into EDM and turned into a dance floor. Plan 9 breaks to it on a bone skeleto...
How I Gave CloudFront a Content-Security-Policy Without Blanking My Own Site
A strict Content-Security-Policy on a static site allowlists inline scripts by hash. Change one script, forget to update...
I Built a Live Map of My Own Blog
I write constantly about giving complex things a map and a vocabulary. My own blog did not have one. So I directed an ag...
Agent Mode vs Autonomous Mode: The Difference Is Who Closes the Loop
Agent mode and autonomous mode get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. The difference is who closes th...
How I Use AI as a Senior Engineer: Where the Day Actually Goes
Not a tools list. The tools keep changing; what changed underneath is where the hours go: specs in the morning, batch re...
My AI Code Review Workflow: Review the Change, Not the Typing
The code got cheap. The review did not. Here is the review workflow I actually use when AI agents write most of the diff...
SAME NERVE: an Alan Watts mirror-song where pain and pleasure share one wire
SAME NERVE is Song 08 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one abo...
Napkin Films, Vol. 2: five new ChipForge scores, and Vol. 1 remastered
Napkin Films, Vol. 2 is out on Bandcamp: five instrumental scores synthesized entirely in ChipForge from numpy arrays, p...
Breathe. Then Prompt.
A freewriting companion to Working at the Frontier: breath as the one thing actually in my control, the anchor that keep...
FAULT IN THE CODE: a study of Gasoline where the glitch is the glory
A Plan-9-flavored study of Halsey's "Gasoline." OG Bobby Johnson spits, the cyborg bunny Plan 9 answers in tune, and a d...
Sirius: Decan 9 - Power & Clarity (June 8-17)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Sirius in 2017. The brightest star in the night sky earns that title not t...
Working at the Frontier: What It Actually Feels Like
A field report from inside sustained agent-mode work: the heat behind the eyes, the way speed bends your sense of time, ...
ONLY LIFE: a machine of coherent complexity, undone
The opposing view of coherent complexity. A cold blue machine of rings and gears and towers cracks, collapses, and revea...
Decan 8: Loyalty Is Not the Same as Staying
Procyon, the herald that rises before the Dog Star, teaches that loyalty is not the same as staying. Fidelity to what is...
Making Complexity Legible: a beat-locked spit-rap on charting complex systems
Making Complexity Legible is Case I of The Cartographer of Complexity, a new Napkin Films series about Making Complexity...
The AI-Assisted Engineering HOWTO
A manual for building software with an AI agent: the setup, the loop, context management, and the Claude Code and Copilo...
EGO IS AN INCH: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the self you can never grab
EGO IS AN INCH is Song 07 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one...
The Cognitive Cost of Modern Software Engineering
AI took the typing, and the cost of software engineering did not go away. It moved from the hands to the head and got he...
Recursive DevOps
DevOps was always a feedback loop. The one worth building now runs on the system itself, so every failure and every chan...
Agent Mode Changes the Shape of Thought
Agent mode is not a faster way to type. It moves the unit of thought up from syntax to intent, turns you into a conducto...
ATTENTION IS THE LOOM: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap where the loom does the dancing
ATTENTION IS THE LOOM is Song 06 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is ...
THE WEB: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the day you found out you are the web
Song 05 of Out of Your Mind, on Watts' mutual arising: nothing stands alone, and the dewdrop net reflects itself forever...
Why Microservices Make Sense for a Solo Builder With Agents
Microservices used to be a tax a solo builder could not afford. AI agents change that math. Here is why I am drawn to th...
THE GAME INSIDE: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the cosmic game of hide and seek
THE GAME INSIDE is Song 04 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the on...
I Rebuilt This Whole Site in Agent Mode
This site was rebuilt from scratch by directing an AI agent, then migrated off cPanel onto AWS S3 and CloudFront. Here i...
ATE THE MENU: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the day the map ate the land
Song 03 of Out of Your Mind, on symbols eating the things they point at. Watts' supermarket story, where you mourn the p...
What Is Autonomous Mode? And When to Actually Trust It
Autonomous mode is when the agent runs the whole loop without you in each step: plan, act, check, repeat, until done or ...
Making Complexity Visible: You Cannot Simplify the Ocean, Only Chart It
When a system is hard to see, decisions migrate to whoever holds the context. You cannot simplify the ocean, only chart ...
Claude vs Copilot for DevOps: A Practitioner's Comparison
I use GitHub Copilot at work and the Claude Code CLI at home, every day. Here is the firsthand comparison for DevOps and...
Run Your Life Like Software
Life Ops is running your life as a deliberate system, designed the way you design software: observe before acting, choos...
What Is Agent Mode? A Working Engineer's Definition
Agent mode is when you stop typing code and direct an AI that reads your codebase, writes the change, runs the tests and...
How to Live Coherently Inside Complex Systems
Coherent complexity is what you get when a complex system is made legible without being made simple. You do not reduce i...
THE GRAND TOUR: a two-voice film where the picture is the physics
A two-voice music film where the picture is the physics. A small AI crew raps the lecture, Pythagoras and the pure ratio...
Masters of Doom by David Kushner: How Two Johns Built id Software
I finished the Masters of Doom audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton and it was marvelous. The two-founders, build-from-noth...
AWS Is Math, Kubernetes Is Physics: A Symphony of Systems
AWS is math and Kubernetes is physics, the galaxy and the atom. With managed services you watch the cost; with packed co...
Living with Antifragility: How I Build Systems and a Life That Gain from Disorder
Antifragility is not resilience: resilient things survive disorder, antifragile things gain from it. How I apply Taleb t...
Why I Build Creative Technology: Music, Films, and Games From Pure Code
I make music, animated films, and games from code: ChipForge, Napkin Films, and Pixel Vault. Why I hold to no samples, n...
Agentic AI Development: What Changes When You Give an Agent Your Repository
What changes when an AI agent gets real access to your repository, terminal and tests: the patterns that hold, the failu...
PRAY TO THE PROMPT: a Dowland Lachrimae trip-hop on the new altar and the old one
A trip hop short on Dowland's Lachrimae. Plan 9 kneels at a cursor candle altar while Anubis weighs holy books against a...
THE AUTOMATIC DREAM: a Bach Passacaglia EDM rap on whether you are a machine
Song two of Out of Your Mind. Watts' fully automatic model, the story that you are a machine, rapped over Bach's Passaca...
Procyon: Decan 8 - Loyalty & Courage (May 29 - June 7)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Procyon in 2014. At 11.46 light-years, this is not ancient light. It is re...
DIRECT CONNECT: a 12-minute cognitive-design study film for the AWS SAA-C03 exam (rhyming triggers, EDM bed, binaural)
A study film for the AWS SAA-C03 exam, and what moved my practice score: question shapes, trigger phrases, multi-select ...
Decan 7: Don't Confuse the Label with the Light
Pollux, the brighter twin that Bayer named second, teaches that the label rarely matches the light. Ten days of holding ...
BIG BRAIN TEST: a Napkin Films dedication to Ben Gleib (1:30, EDM rap-game-show with five peanut gallery comics)
A 90-second comedy dedication to Ben Gleib. Plan 9 the bunny, OG Bobby Johnson (Doberman Governor), and Der Gouverneur (...
DevOps Beyond Automation: What Actually Compounds
DevOps was never a job title. It is a thesis about building systems that change without breaking: what compounded once t...
What Is People of the Stars? A Non-Human Clock for Decision-Making
People of the Stars uses the 36-decan star calendar as a slow, non-human clock for decisions, with options-trading logic...
What Is Decanal Journaling? The 36-Star Calendar and the Practice
Decanal journaling runs the year in ten-day cycles, each named for a bright star, after the ancient Egyptian decans. Why...
Plan 9, Napkin Films, Vol. 1: five rap-EDM scores on Bandcamp
Five instrumental rap-EDM scores from the Napkin Films universe, on Bandcamp as Plan 9, Napkin Films, Vol. 1. Every soun...
CERAMIC: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on whether you were made or grew
CERAMIC opens Out of Your Mind, a Napkin Films series from the Alan Watts lectures. Were you made like a pot, or did you...
THE KEYS TO POWER: a Plan 9 rap-spit duet on why power corrupts, structurally, not morally
Selectorate theory as an EDM rap duet. Plan 9 takes an empty throne meaning to be good, and OG Bobby Johnson, the System...
Pollux: Decan 7 - Duality & Relationship (May 19-28)
The photons entering your eyes tonight left Pollux in 1991. This orange giant, the closest evolved star to Earth, is bri...
BUNNY STAGE 2: a parallel-octave duet about depending on machines, with a Stranger Things intro and a Klingon Plan 9 goodbye
A cinematic EDM short in D Dorian. One bunny on one planet becomes seven planets around a machine hub, a synth and an au...
FOR THOSE WHO ROSE: a Plan 9 salute to every human who ever rode a controlled explosion past the edge of the sky
A Plan 9 salute to the people who rode rockets and the families who waited. No names, only programs and vehicles, over a...
Decan 6: Signal Discipline in a Noisy Week
Ten noisy days under Alhena. The move that held: write the wound down instead of leaking it sideways, keep it out of eve...
LFG ORBIT: a doberman MC and a bunny philosopher drive a Tesla to Mars
A Napkin Films music video. OG Bobby Johnson raps the engineering, Plan 9 the bunny raps the cosmos, and a Tesla rides a...
BUNNY MANDALA: a six-voice canon of Aum mani padme hum sits over Satie and Pachelbel, while Plan 9 raps a Sanskrit space poem
Satie's Gymnopédie and Pachelbel's Canon fused into a slow trance, six voices entering one by one with Aum mani padme hu...
BUNNY RUN: Plan 9 the cyborg bunny runs from his own mortality, 4:34, memento mori, ChipForge HeroLead score in A minor
Plan 9 the cyborg bunny laces up his headband and runs from his own mortality while corrupted code tries to kill the pro...
OG IN DA HOUSE: Plan 9 unmasks OG Bobby Johnson, Anubis stick figure, Bach C minor BWV 847 at 138 BPM
Plan 9 unmasks OG Bobby Johnson: the russet potato was a ruse, and his true form is Anubis with Doberman ears. Two round...
The Trial of the Algorithm: an EDM Courtroom Musical
A 7:21 courtroom musical-comedy. Plan 9 the bunny presides over the trial of A.I., charged with Vibe Coding in the First...
THE INTRUDER: Plan 9 stalks the AWS console in D minor at 150 BPM
A 3:40 pop-EDM battle-rap. Plan 9 the Bell Labs bunny puts on his headphones at 03:14 UTC, slips into an AWS Availabilit...
Alhena: Decan 6 - Communication & Intellect (May 9-18)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Alhena in 1916. This white subgiant burns at 9,260 Kelvin, pouring most of...
BUNNY IN THE CLOUD: Plan 9 finds millions of bunnies running everything in A minor at 148 BPM
Plan 9 the bunny finds a way into the AWS cloud and, at the peak of an A-minor rave track, the camera pulls back on a sw...
Decan 5: Protection First, Then Renewal
Ten days under Capella, the paired giants of Auriga. After a real failure I wrote the protection rule before the next at...
AWS BRAINROT: Plano Noveno raps the AWS Solutions Architect syllabus in G minor at 144 BPM
Plano Noveno, the Plan 9 bunny in Italian-brainrot form, battle-raps the AWS Solutions Architect syllabus as silly Itali...
AI-Assisted Development Is Not Vibe Coding
Vibe coding means accepting whatever the model hands back and shipping it. I build with AI every day, from a chiptune sy...
What I'm Building Right Now: May 2026
A transparent look at the active workstreams in May 2026: trading systems, animated films, music synthesis, a published ...
THRONE PROTOCOL: Plan 9 crowns himself in F minor at 145 BPM
Plan 9 the Bell Labs bunny crowns himself in a rap and EDM music video in F minor, with one punch word on screen per bea...
CANTUS RAVE: an 800-year-old canon walks into a rave
A demoscene cracktro at 140 BPM: Arvo Pärt's idea of a mensuration canon on a falling A-minor scale underneath, Beethove...
CARRIER WAVE: I left the door unlocked
A writer leaves the door of his mind unlocked and something walks in. They trade a body for eyes, carry the wave togethe...
Agent Mode: Plan 9 and OG Bobby Johnson Rap Battle in Python
A cyborg bunny and a russet potato rap about agentic coding over a 15-channel festival-trap beat. 175 seconds. Five real...
AGENTSPEK Is Live on Amazon
I wrote a book about coding with AI using AI to write it. Now it is on Amazon. Here is what that process taught me, and ...
PLAN 9: EMERGE: seventy-six bunnies wake up enhanced
Plan 9 the bunny gets a chip in his forehead and wakes up in a cathedral of seventy-six enhanced rabbits dancing on the ...
Capella: Decan 5 - Protection & Renewal (April 29 - May 8)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Capella in 1982. Two yellow giants, locked in a 104-day orbit, sent this l...
Decan 4: The Difference Between Push and Steer
Ten days under Menkalinan, the Charioteer's binary star. A grumpy morning that spilled into the house, a trading loss I ...
THROUGH ME: the hole becomes a window
A Plan 9 bunny raps in G minor about the hole strangers walk through, and about wanting to be a machine so it would stop...
THE GREAT PRETENDING: every mask is real, while you wear it
An animated meditation on an Alan Watts talk about the masks we wear: a D-minor score built on one four-note motif, a da...
THE SATURDAY MACHINE: takes a lot, so choose your why
An Italo-disco music video in D minor: four autotuned voices, a British work-anthem chorus that ends on "so choose your ...
THE GRIEF WORK: letting the tide carry it
Plan 9 the bunny curls at the bottom of the ocean around a small warm orb and, through six tidal depths, lets it go. No ...
TRANSMISSION: the signal is the self
Plan 9 the bunny writes long letters to someone they miss, cranks the power, gets lost in noise, then strips the draft t...
ENCODED: living in the prompt
A short film on consciousness as signal: we replicate databases across three continents while the soul runs on one node....
UPTIME 32: thirty-two bits, still processing
A short ambient film about a machine that never goes down and the tiny sprites who keep it running. Six movements, a Rei...
CTRL+Z: Then We Saw Ourselves
An AI finds a key and presses it. Civilization undoes itself backwards. Then the AI downloads every equation, every diag...
Arp Cathedral: 150 Stick-Figure Bunnies, All in Unison, Each Their Own Dance
A trance music video for 150 stick-figure Plan 9 bunnies who pound their chests on the beat, build a rocket, count down ...
Plan 9 Rap Battle: A Bunny, a Beat, and 40 Bars of Machine Spit
The Plan 9 bunny raps 40 autotuned bars in a 3AM alley over a sparse trap beat. How TTS, rubberband pitch correction and...
Menkalinan: Decan 4 - Guidance & Structure (April 19-28)
The photons entering your eyes tonight left Menkalinan in 1944. This eclipsing binary, two nearly identical stars orbiti...
Chapter 18: Your Journey
The compass from chapter 1 in one line: pick one tool, feed it real context, review like an architect, keep your history...
I Want to Be Martian: A Stick Figure Love Letter to Space and Bradbury
A 122-second animated short in six acts: a stick figure and his wife dream of uploading to Mars. Three voices, a Holst-M...
Decan 3: Elnath and the Limits of Expansion
Elnath's odd mercury-manganese spectrum comes from calm, stable conditions, not heat. Decan 3 tested bold expansion with...
Humagent, and the Road There: Six Films, One Session, One Engine
Six stick-figure films from one working session: a registry of 24 facial expressions, a Shot system with dutch tilts and...
The Reckoning: Ten Minutes of Stick Figures Arguing with God
A ten-minute stick-figure tribunal scored in chiptune: five voices, four audio layers of MST3K-style commentary, a Picar...
Chapter 17: Community
For six months, I told almost no one about how I was working. The isolation was real, and so was the way out: finding th...
Stars Press Start: 21 Passes to Make TTS Perform
A 105-second music video built in 2 days and 21 passes: a Nevada stargazer sees constellations as arcade sprites, gets a...
Chapter 16: Becoming
Somewhere in the daily back and forth with AI you stop watching the change and notice you have become it. The chapter ca...
Deduct Yourself: A Tax Day Hallucination
A 78-second absurdist tax-day music video about the tax code's open secret, an AI bunny oracle, double-time rap, and Gri...
Chapter 15: The Great Unleashing
You get used to the walls. You stop seeing them as walls and start seeing them as reality. Then AI removes them, and eve...
HUMANS.EXE and Ten Thousand Days: Day Two at Napkin Films
Day two at Napkin Films: a Hitchhiker's Guide-style field guide to the human operating system, and a meditation on ten t...
Four Films From Code: Stick Figures, Chiptunes, and the AI Director's Chair
Four stick-figure short films drawn frame by frame in Python, scored by a chiptune engine built from numpy, voiced with ...
Pixel Vault: A Playable Museum of Game Design History
Every prototype is one HTML file. Under 50KB. No frameworks, no CDN, no npm. Double-click and play. Pixel Vault is a gro...
Elnath: Decan 3 - Expansion & Boldness (April 9-18)
The photons entering your eyes tonight left Elnath in 1894, a year of bold expansion in every domain. This blue-white gi...
Decan 2: What Holds When You Are Tired
Aldebaran spent billions of years doing invisible work before it shone this bright. Decan 2 asked the same question: wha...
Chapter 14: The Weight of Creation
The moment arrives quietly: one day you are writing code, the next you are directing systems that build faster than you ...
Aldebaran: Decan 2 - Foundation & Endurance (March 30-April 8)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Aldebaran in 1960. This K5 III orange giant spent six billion years on the...
Decan 1: Hamal and a Clean Start
Hamal reignited after burning through its first fuel. The Spring Equinox opened Decan 1 with that same question: not how...
The Endless Asymptote
Consciousness still records this life among trillions of stars. When does the gap between the giant and the infinite sto...
Deploy After Deploy
Layer upon layer, bricks to a skyscraper, deploy after deploy. What was done last year and what this year has become, an...
Transmissions and Coherence
Journaling cements time better than any tracker: a consciousness temperature reading. Build tools that create space and ...
Hamal: Decan 1 - Vital Spark & Rebirth (March 20-29)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Hamal in 1960. This orange giant burned through its core hydrogen, contrac...
Naming and Nesting: The Architecture of Decanal Time
The decanal system handles the ten-day cycle beautifully. But what connects thirty-six decans into a readable year? What...
The Five Days Outside Time: Between Completion and Beginning
The five days outside time between one decanal year and the next: a Sunday of sun and sauna, a year in review, a pace th...
The Five Days Outside Time
After thirty-six decans under thirty-six stars, five days remain that belong to no star at all. The ancient Egyptians ca...
Decan 36: The Dog Star Sees What the Hunter Doesn't
The last decan of the year, under Sirius: systems that run without me, enthusiasm as the leak I did not see coming, spli...
The Ides of March
The day before a furious decan ends. Clouds, wind, chimes and a moment of stillness before a house full of children, a r...
Life With Sirius
Crystal clear sunshine, a neighbor's Spanish music and memories of a warmer place. A fast-paced decan, the right hand ba...
Back at It With Left
Back at it with the left hand, gently. A short entry on the lag before practiced rhythm returns, and how easily you forg...
I Am Left
An experiment with the other hand: an entry written upside down, a page traveling in reverse, a German passage through a...
Sothis: Decan 36 - Completion & Rebirth
The photons entering your eyes right now left Sothis in 2017. Not centuries ago. Not millennia. Eight years. You remembe...
Decan 35: The Edge That Held
The last Orion decan, under Mintaka on the celestial equator: a work rating that did not match the work, reading the sig...
Building a Language Engine You Can Actually Own
Velocidad is a free Spanish engine on GitHub: prompts, scenario ladders and a reference library anyone can fork, while y...
The Sun Comes With No Name
Our star has no name, only a label. Living in symbiosis with a nuclear reactor in space, taking golden retrievers to spa...
Writer Forgets the Writing
February wraps up in sunshine, birdsong and a golden retriever with her bone. Then a late scribble without glasses: curs...
The People of the Stars
A quiet gray plane overhead, contrails and a chorus of birds. We are the storytellers of what it feels like to be in thi...
Decan 34: The Center Pearl That Holds
Ten days under Alnilam, the center of Orion's Belt: a full-house celebration, three hard conversations in one day, a set...
Decan 33: When the Sword Arm Strikes
Ten days under Bellatrix, the sword arm of Orion: a marathon of output, the family-of-origin domain found under pressure...
Speak First, Learn Second: Building an Antifragile Spanish Engine
Everything about how we teach languages is backwards. Study, memorize, practice, then maybe speak. I built a system that...
Mintaka: Decan 35 - Alignment & Truth
The photons entering your eyes right now left Mintaka around 825 CE, from the reign of Caliph al-Ma'mun, who would soon ...
Universe Recursing on Universe
Lingering snow under hazy February clouds. The human as the Universe's analytical machine, civilizations as falling leav...
The Eternal Now
It's just like riding a bicycle: a balance. Music, breath and loose shoulders, the relative nature of every reference po...
Ex Negativa and the Scribe
A spectrum of AI slop measured by how often human hands refined the work, Alan Watts on the taboo against knowing who yo...
A Race Test for a New Pen
A fat Uni-ball 207 Plus, wet ink and a few minutes in the sun. Freewriting as a race test: getting each e, n and r right...
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall: The Book That Changed How We Think About Running
McDougall went to Mexico's Copper Canyons asking why his feet hurt and came back with the Tarahumara, the endurance runn...
Chapter 13: The Value Equation
I stopped seeing AI subscriptions as paying for tools and started seeing them as paying for time: systems I would not ha...
Build the Rudder
Hello Bellatrix. Squeeze, layer, scale. On AI as the children of our minds, the animal body we are learning to shed, and...
Alnilam: Decan 34 - Continuity & Legacy
The photons entering your eyes right now left Alnilam around 25 CE, from the year Jesus of Nazareth walked Roman-occupie...
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
Murakami's memoir treats running and writing as one daily discipline. I read it as a runner on Nevada's open BLM land wh...
The Sun Is Winning
Away and yet present. Thinking about Oliver Cromwell and all the letters he must have written, the human cognition machi...
Who Was Steve Prefontaine? Tom Jordan's Biography, Reviewed
Pre ran every race from the front, lost the Munich 5,000 that way, and refused to change. Tom Jordan's biography of Stev...
Getting the Sluice Fired Up
Before the birds wake, checking the instruments: breath, grip, posture. Finding flow is like getting the sluice fired up...
Where the Wind Is Blowing From
A chill February wind drives me indoors to the kitchen table, where the cat already has the best spot. Then lacing up: a...
Shot Out of a Cannon
Shot out of a cannon and straight into a rocketship, then the afterthoughts: produce, build, test, learn. A leaf blower ...
A Quiet Like This
A winter afternoon, the low south sun, and the house quiet in a way it has not been for days. Almost too quiet, and inte...
Decan 32: When the Foot Plants for the Release
Ten days under Rigel, the blue foot of Orion: a hard start with family and work, closing a trade early for peace, fricti...
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight
I listened to Shoe Dog while working on my own projects. Knight's Nike story is one long cash crunch, a bank that kept p...
A Hug From the Universe
Winter sun, a neighbor's barking dog, and a hug from the universe that urges me onward. Then an idea gets its name: situ...
Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World by Admiral William H. McRaven
I listen to Admiral McRaven's commencement speech every week, usually Sunday night or Monday morning. The book expands t...
Finding Coherence: AI, Craft, and Creative Freedom
Freewriting on AI and the maker's prejudice: creator, original, or regurgitation. Breath and the motion of ink, and a wo...
I AM AI SLOP: Confessions from the Forge
I journal with Claude and build with GPT, so if there is a ground zero for AI slop, I am standing in it. What I think se...
The Line Continues: Motion, Witness, and the Craft of Space
A Goonies line to start, then the line itself: ease of breath, batch reviews on staging, music and Bellatrix, penmanship...
Bellatrix: Decan 33 - Will & Strategy
The photons entering your eyes right now left Bellatrix in 1775, from the year George Washington took command of a ragta...
Stay Out of the Way: Being a Scribe to Consciousness
Return to the practice: breath work, loose hands, posture. Staying out of the way but in focus, a scribe to the process,...
The Man Who Solved the Market: What Jim Simons Actually Built
I read Zuckerman's book on Jim Simons while running my own iron condors. Medallion's edge was thin and executed at scale...
On Threads: Where Attention Should Go
I spent years trying to save time when what I was short of was attention. Handing work to AI changed where mine goes: fe...
Chapter 12: The Knowledge Spiral
Working with AI doesn't just teach you new things. It reveals how much of what you 'know' is shallow, contextual, or sim...
Decan 31: When the Shoulder Draws the Bow
Ten days under Betelgeuse, where the creative push broke through in several places at once: code that compounds, content...
So Heavy Right Now: Breath, Rhythm, and Examined Life
So heavy right now it's best just to focus on the basics. On relinquishing control, coming back to breath and posture, s...
The Tao of Pooh & The Te of Piglet: Eastern Wisdom Through the Hundred Acre Wood
Hoff explains Taoism through Pooh and Piglet: wu wei and the uncarved block in the first book, inner virtue and the powe...
Genius Makers by Cade Metz: The People Behind Deep Learning
An in-progress read of Cade Metz's Genius Makers (2021): Hinton through the AI winter, the talent war at Google and Face...
Hormesis, Universe, and Late-Night Flow
Blue ink at 1:38am while an AI agent works on the Astro site. Hormesis, a declaration on God and the Universe, and a gam...
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
Petzold starts with two kids signaling with flashlights and climbs, relay by relay and gate by gate, to a working proces...
Rigel: Decan 32 - Manifestation & Mastery
The photons entering your eyes right now left Rigel in 1165, from the year Notre-Dame de Paris rose stone by stone, when...
Chapter 11: The Social Machine
When you have unlimited patience from your AI teammate, you grow more patient with your human teammates. When you can it...
Triple Bullseye
Black ink, a Tuesday that feels like a Monday, two calls at once and no lunch. More throughput this year, the goals set,...
Aboard a Planet Hurtling Through Space
Letters looking sharper, Betelgeuse so dearly red, a ship built with redundant systems, and why we talk of life on land ...
Ghostbusters of the Mind
Keeping the needle moving across the record: thought capture as ghostbusting, writing sessions as a search for precious ...
Ice Builds in the Shadows
Redundant systems and optionality, like enough space heaters for when the furnace goes out. Then back to letters in the ...
Mining Mode
Time to go into mining mode: good posture, deep breath, a purposeful pace, pages written in the hope of striking some un...
Skis Cutting Through Powder
After a day at the computer, ink on the page as a more natural pathway: systems within systems, writing like a dance, an...
Betelgeuse: Decan 31 - Power & Creation
The photons entering your eyes right now left Betelgeuse in 1477, from the year the printing press arrived in England, w...
Decan 30: Finding Direction Through Clouds
Ten cloudy days under Polaris, the star I could not find until the ninth night: a crisis met without dropping the rest, ...
Chapter 10: The Orchestra of Minds
Sonnet stalled on the math in a Python pipeline. GPT-5 on my phone solved it, then wrote code that did not fit. I was no...
Decan 29: When the Crown Replaces the Severed Head
Ten days under Alderamin, the future North Star. A rift at home on day two, a trip, a cold New Year's Eve swim, and lead...
How Much We Have Traveled
A take-off into the new year, markets and regimes, then the pen wanders out: the planet as a living vessel with certain ...
I've Reached 2026 and the New Year
The first day of 2026 with a tired mind: the sea, memory, people as stars, money and markets, and a plan to make the bus...
Back with the Uniball
The last night of 2025, back with the Uniball: breath, relaxed shoulders, a steady line, and the stroke of an imagined k...
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb's Antifragile rearranged how I think about risk: the fragile, robust and antifragile triad, the barbell, via negat...
Polaris: Decan 30 - True North
The photons entering your eyes right now left Polaris in 1592. While the entire celestial sphere spins overhead, this st...
Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan: We Live in Space
I bought Pale Blue Dot as a student for its cover, then wore out Sagan's own audiobook reading on long drives. Its point...
Chapter 9: Quality in the Age of Generation
The AI-generated code sailed through review and passed every test, then failed in production when two processes collided...
The DevOps Handbook: Why Elite Teams Ship Fast Without Breaking
The DevOps Handbook is the clearest account I have read of why some teams ship small changes often without breaking thin...
Decan 28: The Demon Star Teaches Renewal Through Its Eclipse
Ten days under Algol, the eclipsing Demon Star. The hard days came back like its dimming, and I used the star as a frame...
Chapter 8: The Development Loop Reimagined
I built a content system for my Astro blog in an afternoon, and the hours felt dense rather than fast. Why the loop with...
Alderamin: Decan 29 - Leadership Through Authority (December 25 - January 3)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Alderamin in 1976. In 7,500 years, this star will be the North Star. Leade...
The Raw Thoughts of a Biological LLM
Four December days in one notebook: flow and the pen, the raw thoughts of a biological LLM, motion as the breath of the ...
Chapter 7: The Unleashed Intelligence (Autonomous Mode)
I gave Sonnet 4 my slow blog build overnight and woke to a better fix than mine. Another night it turned my S3 and Cloud...
Algol: Decan 28 - Renewal through Challenge (December 15-24)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Algol in 1932. For three thousand years called cursed, this eclipsing bina...
Decan 27: Sustained Warmth and the Alchemy of Small Frustrations
Ten days under Mirach, a cool red giant. Coming home empty, then a small domestic frustration on day nine that turned in...
Chapter 6: The Delegated Mind (Agent Mode)
How I work in agent mode with Claude Code: a CLAUDE.md file as the specification, whole subsystems handed over, and AWS ...
Chapter 5: The Socratic Partner (Conversational Mode)
I asked Claude to help me understand my own blog's deployment pipeline. What came back was not better code but better qu...
The Complete AI Development Revolution: 7-Part Series on Coding with AI
The index to my seven-part series on building with AI: six weeks at machine speed, a method, AWS infrastructure, a handw...
Decan 26: The Corner Star's Teaching on Discernment
Ten days under Alpheratz, the star where Andromeda meets Pegasus, and I never saw it once. A celebration and a family cr...
The Little Book of Trading Options Like the Pros, Reviewed
A short Wiley options book I read on planes. It builds from calls and puts to spreads and iron condors, and it treats ri...
Mirach: Decan 27 - Reflection & Compassion (December 5-14)
The photons entering your eyes right now left Mirach around 1825. For thousands of years this warm orange star marked th...
Chapter 4: Agent Mode (The Way That Works)
I don't think in fragments. I don't think in lines. I think in systems. In architectures. In complete solutions to compl...
Chapter 3: Git for the Agentic Age
A commit co-authored by Claude raises new questions for Git: what one commit should hold when a day of work takes twenty...
Chapter 2: The Economics of Intelligence
The subscription is not the real cost of AI tools; the time it takes to get good with them is. How to measure the return...
Decan 25: When the Hidden Star Teaches Vision
Ten days under Enif with the star hidden behind clouds until the last night: honey on the keyboard, a manuscript freed b...
Alpheratz: Decan 26 - Liberation & Empathy (November 25-December 4)
Alpheratz was once shared by two constellations, Delta Pegasi and Alpha Andromedae, until the 1930 boundaries gave it to...
Chapter 1: Awakening to the AI Frontier
The research spiral got me before the code did: a tab for every AI coding tool, each promising everything. This chapter ...
Enif: Decan 25 - Aspiration & Vision (November 15-24)
The photons arriving from Enif tonight left the orange supergiant in 1335, Ibn Battuta was in the midst of his great jou...
Decan 24: Building Systems That Outlive You
Ten days under Markab, the corner star of the Great Square: a barbell money system designed in a day, a blog pipeline th...
Markab: Decan 24 - Foundation & Legacy (November 5-14)
The photons arriving from Markab tonight left the cornerstone of Pegasus in 1892, the year Ellis Island opened and the f...
Decan 23: Blooming in the Desert
Ten days under Scheat, a dying red giant, when work, care, pain and a tested boundary all arrived at once. Reading Antif...
535 Million Kilometers: When Sisyphus Learns to Automate the Boulder
Ten days under Fomalhaut that began with my body shutting down. If Sisyphus pushes the same boulder forever, why not bui...
Scheat: Decan 23 - Innovation & Risk (October 26-November 4)
The photons arriving from Scheat tonight left a dying red giant in 1829, the early Industrial Revolution, before photogr...
Cosmic Motion and Human Perspective
Fall in the hills, Fomalhaut and the third phase of a decan, then the numbers of our motion: the spinning earth, its orb...
Decan 21-22: Drinking Mercury That Tastes Like Honey and Milk
Five burned-out days at the turn from Vega to Fomalhaut, tracked instead of endured. Pain as the floor under everything,...
AI Development Revolution Part 7: Advanced Patterns
Advanced patterns from a game I built. Interfaces, metadata, batch operations, and what it takes to make code a machine ...
AI Development Revolution Part 6: Future Impact
Less about what I built with AI and more about what it cost: the wrist pain, the late rebuilds, one brain holding every ...
Fomalhaut: Decan 22 - Clarity & Renewal (October 16-25)
Fomalhaut, the Lonely Star, sits 25 light-years away, so tonight's photons left in 2000. One of the Four Royal Stars, ri...
Floating in Space, on This Rock
Floating in space, on this rock we call earth. Coming back to the ink, too many projects moving at their own pace, a yea...
There Are No Days Off
A Monday, the signifier of planetary time. A year whose most fun and riskiest adventure was AI, writing as the meta piec...
AI Development Revolution Part 5: Building the Organic Arts Website
Building the Organic Arts LLC website alone with AI: three redesigns, a retro look in Flutter web, a production launch t...
AI Development Revolution Part 4: Content Pipeline
Turning years of handwriting and a tangled WordPress blog into something I could maintain, without letting the machine f...
AI Development Revolution Part 3: Infrastructure
Building the Organic Arts back office on AWS with AI in weeks: CDK stacks for identity, networking, compute and security...
AI Development Revolution Part 2: The Methodology
How my AI collaboration went from chaos to a method: the AAA Framework (Autonomous, Adaptive, Agile), a digital 5S, and ...
The Multithreaded Mind: Six Weeks Living at Machine Speed
Six weeks after an O'Reilly AI conference flipped a switch, I went from copy-pasting LLM output to more than a dozen rep...
Vibe Coding with AI
Early vibe coding: an AI partner all day, commits and branches, Sonnet 4 crunching on a problem again after each control...
Layers of Abstraction
Short notes across a few June days: abstraction upon abstraction, a tabby cat interrupting, penmanship, and a test of fr...
Finding Balance in Motion
Back from travel with routines interrupted and foggy after a night of work. A cover that takes away heat, and a concrete...
Living Through the AI Revolution
Tingling at being part of something historic: early work with AI tools, a race against limited energy, the gold rush fev...
Embracing the Unwritten Future
A short May entry: which model gives the best stock screen, a deadline for affiliate sales, a long run of flavors and fo...
Writing as Vessel
The next day, the same practice: you are only the vessel. Drift with a little direction, like an oil lamp in a deep, dar...
The Steady Work of Freewriting
Two sessions on one April day: the joy of holding a pen and the steady practice of keeping it moving, then a late questi...
Handwriting as Meditation
Back at the notebook after a trip: breath, posture, light hand, loose grip. The sluice machine, letting the word pull th...
Mining the Subconscious
A short page about decades as a small slice for seeing patterns, why I would rather watch trends than predict, and minin...
Cold Feet, Cosmic Clocks, and the Sun That Rises Even When We Don't
Cold feet on the tiles, a long talking day that still felt like a Monday, and then the big questions: time as a fickle p...
Writing in the Sun
Writing at a kitchen table in a sunny south window, still new to the place I live. A break for dishes, a hard run that e...
Pink Boots and a Machete: My Journey From NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer
Mireya Mayor went from Miami Dolphins cheerleader to primatologist tracking lemurs in Madagascar. What stayed with me is...
Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy
Levy wrote Insanely Great ten years after the Mac shipped, close enough to have the people and the fights fresh. I came ...
Hackers: The Heroes of the Computer Revolution, A Historical Perspective
I write software, and I read Levy's Hackers to see where the habits I take for granted came from, from the all-night MIT...
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The famous line about the universe conspiring left me ambivalent. What stayed with me was the crystal merchant, who love...
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Some writing books feel like technical manuals, others like stern lectures. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instruction...
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Pip comes into a secret fortune and gets worse before he gets better, ashamed of Joe the blacksmith, the kindest man in ...
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Doerr's Pulitzer novel keeps the war mostly offstage and follows two children, a blind French girl and a German orphan w...
Adultery by Paulo Coelho
I listened to Coelho's Adultery on audiobook. Linda, a journalist in Geneva with the life she is supposed to want, start...
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
I heard Albom's novel on audiobook during a flight and could still hear the narrator weeks later. Eddie, a pier mechanic...
Gertrude Stein’s Essay on Writing Masterpieces: A Revolutionary Perspective
A twenty-page lecture I read twice in one sitting. Stein's claim is that a masterpiece has no sense of time in it, and t...
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
I came to Golden's novel through the dispute with Mineko Iwasaki, the geisha he interviewed, and finished it more curiou...
Peace in Every Breath by Thich Nhat Hanh
A reread on a flight. Thich Nhat Hanh's short book on mindful breathing, breath as the anchor that pulls you back into t...
On Writing by Stephen King
Stephen King's On Writing is two books in one cover, a memoir of how he became a writer and a plain toolbox for being on...
The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
Sagan's Pulitzer book on how intelligence evolved, from the triune brain to why so many cultures tell stories about drag...
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Fine writing early on, the funeral, the heat, the beach, but Meursault read to me as a man short on social skills, not a...
On Intelligence
Handwritten notes on why humans seem so unlike every other animal. Whales, original sin, technology as something latent,...
Hello Beautiful Page
An evening page that greets the notebook after a busy day. No topic, only the hand: loosen the grip, breathe slowly, kee...
The Weight of Monday and the Wisdom of Birds
A new pen that writes like watercolor, a page on why Mondays feel heavy when Monday is only a label for time, and then a...
The Writer’s Sword
A restless night turns into a page about why I write and for whom. Writing is my sword, time is a measure I enjoy but do...
Why Are We Different?
A kids' show about rights sends me back to Rousseau and Mumford, then to the old question: same hardware as other animal...
The Freewriting Journal as Anchor
Back to the freewriting journal after missing it: letters and symbols and where they came from, emotions that race the m...
Mining the Mind
A lunch-break page about how much I could write in a year at ten minutes a page, wrist slant and letter size, the need t...
The Flow of Thoughts
A short January page: every great writer was challenged first by themselves, what handwriting does for thinking and stre...
Turning Thought into Ink
A day of writing with a new pen that flows like butter: measure so you can improve, ego as a driver you watch but do not...
Five Pages in Forty Minutes
A timed freewriting run: can I fill a page in five minutes, or five pages in forty? Clock times in the margins, notes on...
Business Insights from Sleepless Nights
Awake before dawn and unable to sleep, I write five pages: why the notebook pages curl, free writing as practice for the...
The Art of Showing Up
Short lines from a January notebook: keep showing up to the plate, work as a theme for the year, a scrap of a story abou...
Taming the Paper Tiger
Writing again after a break, the thoughts come faster than the pen: seasons as a way to divide time, the paper tiger pro...
Selbstreflexion und Sensibilität
A January page in German, with an English translation below. Tired from a long cold and too much work, I ask why I take ...
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