Welcome to my site! I recently re-designed and am trying to post more stuff more often — please pardon some dust!

Dopamine Was Never Enough

2024-03-28 // 1116 words // 6 minute read

In the latest issue of The Convival Society, L.M. Sacasas responds to Ted Gioia’s essay “The State of the Culture, 2024”, and they both have interesting thoughts on distraction and technology use. I like both and also disagree with them, and I wanted to get some thoughts down. Let’s take a look at the source essay first. Gioia, in his frank style, makes the argument that distraction is subsuming all other forms of culture, and that the peddlers of said distraction are a “dopamine cartel”, solely focused on creating users who are addicted to the low-quality content on their platforms.

I’ve been trying to keep my phone away from the bed for years, but I’ve been blocked by the dumbest, should-be-simplest functionality: alarms. Standard alarm clocks are totally inflexible; my Fitbit has a Smart Wake functionality, but it’s centered around the time you set for the alarm. Only the horribly named, very Android-core Sleep as Android has what I would consider the correct way to do things: You tell the app when you’re going to sleep and it sets an alarm, monitors your sleep state, then gently wakes you within a 30 minute window of the alarm. The problem? You have to keep your phone next to you, under your pillow, all night long. Everyone else is doing it wrong and it’s driving me batty.

> 2024-03-18

I’ll probably write a proper post about this at some point, but in “launching” yet another new design for my site (hopefully this one will stick, I actually built it for content, now I just need to make content!) I looked at tons of inspiration. Here’s some of it: the Own Your Website newsletter by Matthias Ott, Dead Simple Sites by Arcade Labs, “100 things you can do on your personal website” by James Coffee, and of course my dear friend nathan wentworth’s personal site. The breakthrough came, however, from remembering the perfection that is Indexhibit, which I obviously took tons of inspiration from.

> 2024-03-17

Mass Audubon’s Rocky Hill Wildlife Sanctuary

> 2024-03-14

ARLO

> 2024-03-06

Your Life is Too Beautiful to Use Shitty Headphones

2024-03-01 // 999 words // 5 minute read

The average person listens to between two and four hours of music a day. Then there’s podcasts and audiobooks, YouTube videos, phone calls - we listen to so much stuff all the time, yet most people simply don’t care about how they listen to stuff and that makes me sad. Wired earbuds returned for a moment in 2021 so TikTok makers could whisper dramatically into the in-line microphone, but this one random report points to the “true wireless stereo earbuds market” reaching $243.

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