Improved Means for Deteriorated Ends

Bar Records

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

My friend Laurette recently asked what 5 records I would play the most if I owned a bar. That is a 10/10 question, the sort of thing I'll happily spend an hour sorting through my record collection to answer ... and so I did. Though I was unable to pick just 5 so I upped the count to 10 and threw in 20 honorable mentions to boot.

For the record, my favorite bar has always been H Harper Station. I would take myself for a drink and a burger after work on Fridays when I was living on my own and chat at the bar with Mercedes. It's where I learned about cocktails and it was the place I took Norma for our first date. It closed down 8 or 9 years ago unfortunately. If I ever do own a bar, the Bufala Negra and Girl from the North Country cocktails will be staples on the menu in honor of H Harper.

The Big 10

Hank Mobley - Dig Dis
Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus
Sea and Cake - Oui
Real Estate - Days
Leon Vynehall - Music for the Uninvited
Floating Points - Shadows
Air - Premiers Symptomes
The Avalanches - Since I Left You
Iron and Wine - Woman King
case/lang/veirs - case/lang/veirs

These accidentally came in pairs of two. 2 classic jazz records, 2 records that have a summery beach feeling to me and remind me of dad, 2 records of comforting house music, 2 records that could soundtrack a rooftop party, and 2 records that remind me of home and Norma.

Honorable Mentions

spoon - kill the moonlight
broken social scene - you forgot it in people
ambulance ltd - ambulance ltd
the stills - logic will break your heart
the radio dept - clinging to a scheme
tokyo police club - champ
nilufer yanya - painless
jay som - anak ko
clairo - immunity
james k - friend
sza - sos
amon tobin - supermodified
flying lotus - los angeles
j dilla - donuts
four tet - rounds
anthony naples - orbs
sam wilkes - wilkes
resavoir - horizon
nala sinephro - space 1.8
daniel villarreal - lados b

I don't know if I'll ever get out of tech, but if I do I hope it's to participate in a community space like a bar, record store, or a code school. There's something about cultivating a space and having a community of regulars that makes every day better.

2025 Reflections

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

See also: 2024 Reflections, inspired by: insom and manuel

Personal 💜

2025 was a largely uneventful year and that was a huge blessing after 2023 and 2024. To quote Milosz:

So that for a short moment there is no death

And time does not unreel like a skein of yarn

Thrown into an abyss.

Mila's constant presence and boundless energy was wonderful. We also made some home improvements, especially refinishing the floors, that have really made the house a cozier space to be in. There's a sense of calm with my approach towards middle age. I'll be 40 in August and I find myself gently curious about what I want to do with the time I have left. There's room for reinvention still.

I'm on a plane right now to Mexico City. Today is Norma and my 13 year anniversary. It's incredible to think that we've been together that long. It feels like yesterday that I was taking her on a date to H Harper Station, or chasing Jurgen around the backyard together while Seyla reclines in a pile of leaves. In another 13 years, I'll have spent as much of my life with Norma as without her and that's something I'm really looking forward to.

Work 💼

It was a busy year at Investnext but not overly stressful. We grew the engineering department from 5 to 11, adding a third squad. I was particularly pleased to hire some top-notch former Calendly folks. I still like my boss, Michael, who allows me a lot of autonomy and respectfully hears out my occasional rants.

I'm still struggling with what I want to do. Investnext is a good place to work but I find myself uncertain of how to add real value a lot of the time. I miss teaching or my team lead days on Flamingo where I both had more clarity on what was important and felt more connected to the work and the team.

Some of this is just difficulty being full remote and being a less technical manager than I was at Calendly. But there's also a declining interest in startups and software trends. I want to build something that lasts and more and more I struggle to believe that tech companies are anything but vehicles for financial arbitrage. That just doesn't interest me.

I miss teaching at The Iron Yard and Flatiron. Some of that is because my knowledge was useful though these days I'm probably far behind the trends. But more than that I appreciated the community building and the physical spaces that we brought life to.

Travel 🛫

Santa Barbara in Feb for Valentine's Day
Philly in March to see Tez
Palm Springs and Santa Barbara in July
NYC and Halifax in August
Santa Fe, Philly, Santa Barbara, and Oakland in October
Tiger, GA for New Years

There was a lot of travel this year. Too much, in fact. The October block in particular was just too dense. I spent more of that month out of town than at home, I'm pretty sure. But I am very glad I made an effort to go to Town Con 2025. I enjoy the community but I also love Nate a lot and it's worth it to have that face time.

Norma and I traveled to see the "gang of six" in California for Valentine's Day and then we all got together again in a cabin in the mountains for New Years. That chosen family is precious to us both and the time spent together is always great.

Music 🎧

As always there was lots of great music this year but there's a dedicated post for that.

Food and Drink 🍲

Not much to report here this year.

We're still going to Sosofed often. I do hope we start visiting Kimball House more regularly. I've been trying to take Norma on more date nights and Kimball House has always been our favorite spot but the frequency of our visits has waned in recent years.

Games 🎮

Silksong finally came out and I enjoyed sinking 100 hours into it. It didn't wind up charming me as much as the first game did and I have a little bit of a hard time nailing down why that is exactly.

I will say that I think the expansive world and adorable NPCs are fantastic. The Tool and Crest system is a deeper and more effective way to experiment with character builds than Charms were in the first game.

The boss fights felt more uneven to me but I might just not be remembering how much I struggled with Hollow Knight back when it first came out. The music didn't leave a strong impression this time around which is a sharp loss.

I finished Act 2 and got a bit into Act 3 but stalled out in Novemeber with other life stuff. I imagine I'll get back to it at some point but I don't feel much urgency. There is already a DLC expansion in progress that is supposed to release this year so I imagine it won't be too long.

Hacking 💻

There was a lot of good Collards hacking this year but not much else. The most notable improvements were support for markdown pages, an overhaul of the serve command, and incremental builds, plus some refactoring to make it easier to define custom collection types.

So my hacking mostly exists to support my writing and this website at present. I'm not too bothered by that in the end.

The one other hack of note was my interactive Record Library. I have had a lot of fun collecting vinyl the past few years so having a nice way to visualize, sort, and randomize it was a really fun project.

Habits ♲

The biggest change to my habits in 2025 was probably taking Mila to the dog park more regularly, working out more, and blogging more.

I picked up a personal trainer at the end of November so I expect there will be more exercise, maybe too much, in 2026. I really want to spend more time experimenting with music in 2026. Maybe it'll just be making mixtapes, maybe it'll be fiddling with Elektron boxes or bitwig. I don't really know but it feels like something I still need to explore.

Conclusion

2025 was a good year overall, a space to catch my breath after rough waters. I hope this year gives me more clarity on what I want to do career-wise. Beyond that, if I have lots of time with Norma and friends, it'll be a good year. Hopefully I'll squeeze some exercise and writing in as well. Cheers.

Favorite Albums of 2025

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I didn't get around to doing one of these lists last year. In fairness, the 2023 edition ballooned to 3000+ words and was a bit of an undertaking. I'm still listening to lots of electronic music with some jazz, rap, and indie rock sprinkled in for flavor. I didn't manage to discover much "guitar music" this year but hopefully I'll catch up next time. It was still a great year with album drops from many artists and labels I'm a fan of.

As always, I advocate for buying music physically or digitally whenever possible. Bandcamp and Discogs have remained my preferred methods of purchase though I'm grabbing more albums direct from record stores that traffic in my esoteric wares like Diskono and Absorb. As far as lists go, I'm following David James and Philip Sherburne among others to help with discovery.

I also still want more time with all the records on this list and more that I'm only now finding. I've listened to a lot of music this year but I don't feel like I've managed as much "deep listening" as I did in 2023. I'm not sure if there's actually any justification behind that or it's just intuition. Sections this year are "Rap & Trip-Hop", "International Anthem", "Dub Echoes", "Techno", and "The Rest".

I'll flag albums that were particularly noteworthy for me with a 🌟. Maybe I saw them in concert or maybe the album really gave me something I needed. Whatever the case, it was in heavy rotation for me this year. It doesn't mean they are the best, only that they stood out for me just a little bit extra.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't call out the new Radio section of my site, operating as a bit of a music journal. It was only started in late October and I'm not diligent about posting there but it's been fun to get into a habit of sharing smaller updates more often.

Continuing Influence

Amos Roddy - Citizen Sleeper (2022)
Haroumi Hosono, Mixmaster Morris, Jonah Sharp - Quiet Logic
Xenia Reaper - Luvaphy

As always, there was some carryover from last year though it was less pronounced for me than in 2023. I discovered Citizen Sleeper in October of last year and its soundtrack (and overall aesthetic) has kept a hold on me. The Quiet Logic album was a brilliant slice of 90s ambient techno and despite poking through the back catalogs of Morris and Sharp, I haven't found anything that feels quite like it. Xenia Reaper's debut really turned my head at the end of 2024 and set me up to properly listen their follow-up when it released on Delsin this year.

Now, without further do, 25 great albums from 2025:

Rap & Trip-hop

What stands out from 2025 most is what a great Unc Rap year it was for me. I've been a huge JID fan ever since he dropped The Forever Story, still my favorite rap album of the 2020s. Between new albums from JID, Clipse, Freddie Gibbs, and Aesop Rock, along with a sorely needed Supreme Clientele repress, I was a very happy camper. The long-awaited follow-ups like Supreme Clientele 2 and Light-Years didn't land quite as well for me but were welcome additions to a heavier rap year than I've had in some time.

🌟 JID - God Does Like Ugly (Dreamville)

Youtube playlist

Standout tracks: Community, Gz, VCRs, Sk8

JID has always been technically proficient, able to deploy killer alliteration, a nasty double time, internal rhyme schemes and more. What was refreshing about the new album is seeing where he steps back to let the song as a whole breathe rather than trying to prove anything or pack it more densely with wordplay.

This album dropped right around my birthday in August and I spent a ton of my autumn listening to it. It doesn't eclipse The Forever Story for me because I find it harder to listen to front to back, jumping in tone a bit more. That said, the quality is uniformly great and there's a lot of range. It is probably my most played album of 2025.

Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist - Alfredo 2 (ALC Records)

Youtube playlist

Standout tracks: 1995, Skinny Suge II, Gas Station Sushi, Gold Feet

Freddie and Alchemist really do feel like they're made for each other. The sumptuous beats from Alchemist match with Freddie's smooth flow in a way that just feels like a leather chair to sink into. The vibes are immaculate and for my money Alfredo 2 is actually more consistent front to back than the original Alfredo even if the highs on the first album are a little bit higher. Plus, JID's guest verse on Gold Feet is absolute dynamite.

Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out (Roc Nation)

Youtube playlist

Standout tracks: Chains & Whips, So Be It, Ace Trumpets, M.T.B.T.T.F.

I don't have much to say about Clipse's album that hasn't been said better elsewhere. I will say it was a great surprise to have a new Clipse album drop at all and I didn't have any complaints about Pharrell's production either. Pusha and Malice have proven that great rap albums can be dropped at any age.

Aesop Rock - Black Hole Superette (Rhymesayers)

Standout tracks: Checkers, So Be It, Send Help, Black Plums

I stopped paying attention to Aesop after 2007's None Shall Pass. It wasn't intentional but when @alexr started raving about the new album that got me to sit up and figure out what I'd missed in the last 15 years. I was fortunate to discover that he's still dropping killer albums from 2016's The Impossible Kid to this year's Black Hole Superette. And he's still dropping couplets that stay stuck in my head for days.

    I can hit a moving target from a moving target,
    It's a rabbit from an equine, it's an ET from a starship.

🌟 Erika de Casier - Lifetime (Independent Jeep)

Standout tracks: Miss, December, Delusional, The Garden

I hadn't listened to Erika de Casier before this year and I didn't know how badly I needed her to drop a trip-hop album. I was hypnotically soothed by the lilting tunes on this record for most of the summer, spinning it repeatedly. I had tickets to see her in Atlanta and missed it due to an impromptu trip west for Town Con 2025. I'll catch her next time around and maybe I'll have caught up on the back catalog by then.

International Anthem

It feels like International Anthem has become sort of inescapable in the music circles I monitor and travel in. While they nominally release jazz records, it certainly feels like their work wanders into areas like fourth world ambient, strange krautrock / funk experiments, and post-rock. Most of the jazz-adjacent things I listened to this year came from them.

🌟 Uhlmann, Johnson, Wilkes - Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes

Standout tracks: Marvis, Unsure, Fields, The Fool on the Hill

I got to see Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes play Public Records in NYC as part of a birthday trip. I've long been a fan of Sam Wilkes since his eponymous album back in 2018 and while this ambient-ish trio album feels quite different to that, particularly due to the lack of drums, it really worked for me and put a smile on my face a lot throughout the year. This music isn't bombastic, it's soothing and relaxed but that has suited me just fine in the chaotic times of 2025.

Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Hofner - Different Rooms

Standout tracks: Mean Solar Time, Before and After Signs, Mean Solar Time (reflected)

I don't have a ton to say about Different Rooms. I still think my favorite album from this duo is their initial effort, Recordings from the Aland Islands. But their records always create a real sense of place betweens Jeremiah's synth manipulations and Marta's viola and violin playing. That transportive effect is always welcome.

Resavoir & Matt Gold - Horizon

Standout tracks: Canopy, Diversey Beach, Hazel Canyon

I remember being almost shocked when the slide guitar comes in on Hazel Canyon. Matt Gold's influence brought subtle pop and folk influences to this album that really made it sit beautifully with Erika de Casier as an early Summer mood. Perfect for a road trip or just enjoying a beautiful day with your dog. It feels like the cover art looks.

SML - How You Been

Standout tracks: Chicago Three, Stepping In / The Loop, Mouth Words

I need to spend more time processing this album. SML is a quintet of bass, drums, guitar, saxophone, and modular synthesizer. Their debut album was a restless and fascinating excursion that I struggled with on first listen but really enjoyed by the second or third. I pre-ordered the new album on sight and am confident it will grow on me similarly.

Tortoise - Touch

Standout tracks: Layered Presence, Elka, Oganesson

Strangely, I can't think of Tortoise without thinking of my childhood. Tortoise reminds me of the Sea and Cake due to band member overlap, which reminds me of dad because he really dug the Sea and Cake. Plus the first track off TNT was the credits song of my all-time favorite skateboarding video, Photosynthesis, which I watched religiously in early high school. This might be their most approachable album yet. It's propulsive but relentlessly pretty and after 9 years with no releases it sounds like they're just enjoying playing again.

Dub Echoes

Carrier - Rhythm Immortal (Modern Love)

Carrier · Rhythm Immortal

Standout tracks: Outer Shell, Carbon Works, Amber Circle

Carrier was a big discovery for me this year but I still need to spend more time with this debut album. I stumbled on their releases for FELT and their own label while record shopping in NYC. The early stuff is much higher tempo, carving out a unique space between dub and experimental IDM. The debut slows the tempo down considerably while still playing with negative space and low-end spectra, sketching impossible spaces.

🌟 ex_libris - 001 / 002 (ex_libris)

Standout tracks: #25 (below surface), #3 (running out), #32 (walrus)

ex_libris is maybe the big discovery of winter for me and I want more people to know about it. I find these records completely entrancing. They serve equally well as background music for a focused activity or as active listening. Dave Huismans constructs beds of organic samples, perfectly situated in acoustic space, and just as your attention begins to relax he starts adjusting the mix and swapping samples to draw you back in. The pacing is absolutely marvelous. The first and last tracks on the EPs wind up feeling like miniature suites. Highly, highly recommended. I would love to hear about his process coming up with these EPs and I'm hungry for more.

I should note there is also a more ambient In Transit LP that he released this year. My copy just arrived and I'm eager to spend some time with it.

Mammo - General Patterns (Short Span)

Standout tracks: Gost, Traversing a Raincloud, Azahar

Short Span is a new label that was brought to my attention this year and while both Mammo's album and Sa Pa's album were candidates for this list, it was Mammo that made me sit up and decide to start following the label in the first place. There are ample gorgeous sonics on hand from ambient textural washes on the opener Gost, to hypnotic dub on Traversing a Raincloud and beyond. Definitely check it out if you've enjoyed work from Echospace/Rod Modell or more minimal excursions on Incienso like Marco Shuttle. I still need to check out Mammo's more techno-oriented record as 2501 as well.

Vehicular - Vehicular (False Aralia)

False Aralia is a relatively young imprint of Peak Oil records that has been devoted exclusively to releases from Izaak Schlossman. I harbor suspicions that Schlossman is in fact the man behind Topdown Dialectic, a secretive techno project of the 2010s and origin of some absolutely stunning machine/process-oriented compositions.

The False Aralia releases arrive in sets of 2 and thus far there have been 6 EPs. They are vaporous and beautiful, striking me occasionally as a dub-world ghostly reduction of R&B. All 6 releases are worth checking out, but Vehicular has been a recent favorite. It is a 3-track EP so I haven't bothered with standout tracks. Just let it play.

Voices from the Lake - II (Spazio Disponsible)

Standout tracks: Eos, Bespin, Manuark

Voices from the Lake released a landmark ambient techno record in 2012 that was minimal, hypnotic, and simply without flaw. If you have the patience and time for it, it will take you places. This follow-up is the band's first release since and one I pre-ordered on sight. I still want to spend more time with it and I doubt it will eclipse the monumental reputation of its predecessor, but Neel and Donato haven't lost their touch at all.

Techno

Andrea - Living Room (Ilian Tape)

Standout tracks: Timeline, Streamline, Impress

I might just like Andrea better than Skee Mask. Compro is still the best album that Ilian Tape has released for my money and I like Pool and Resort too. But I find myself more at home with Andrea. There is a comfort to his albums, especially Due in Color, that makes them work a little better for me as long-players usually. Living Room doesn't reach the heights of Due in Color, which I still think is his best, but it's another beautiful album from Andrea and a killer way to start the day.

Barker - Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound)

Standout tracks: Force of Habit, Reframing, Fluid Mechanics

I was a big fan of Barker's 2019 album Utility but I think this tops it. The music is highly evocative, playing with rhythm and timbre in a way that just begs you to close your eyes, listen, and let your mind's eye conjure what it will. Philip claimed in his list that it "feels as much like sculpture as music" and I really hear where he's coming from.

Djrum - Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth)

Standout tracks: A Tune for Us, Galaxy in Silence, Three Foxes Chasing Each Other

I really, really loved Portrait with Firewood. It got some good press but I still think it is one of the most underrated electronic albums of the 2010s. Under Tangled Silence feels like a fuller realization of that same vision. Djrum still balances acoustic instruments paired with rapid-fire breakbeats. But as much as I love his piano playing, the highlight for me has to be Three Foxes Chasing Each Other with its lighthearted endless staircase of ascending polyrhythms.

🌟 K-Lone - Sorry I Thought You Were Someone Else (Incienso)

Standout tracks: Someone Else, Fauna, Slk

I was pretty confident that either Barker or Djrum would make my techno album of 2025. Over time, they may win out, but there is a tenderness to K-Lone's album that had me coming back to it more often. I sometimes needed something gentler than Under Tangled Silence or less arresting than Stochastic Drift. Without any obvious tricks, this album managed to evoke an escape to a secluded beach with chosen family and that was an escape I needed.

Xenia Reaper - Nept Polarisation (Delsin)

Standout tracks: ( ' ∀ ')ノ～ ♡, Pulsing, Static Kiss

Xenia Reaper just tickles a certain part of my brain that wants to hear huge artificial spaces filled with fractured rhythms, like a dance party taking place in the impossibly cavernous hanger of a massive spacecraft. Pulsing especially found a sweetspot for me, a completely overwhelming torrent of sound shot through a dense fog of spectral pads.

The rest...

Anthony Naples - In Studio Magic (ANS)

Standout tracks: Harmonie, Whisper, On Your Own Again

In Studio Magic is the second Anthony Naples release to arrive this year. Most folks are more preoccupied with his more club-ready effort Scanners. Scanners is a wonderful album but I'm most enchanted by Anthony Naples when he does more downtempo, trip-hop leaning work like his 2023 album orbs. His guitar-led tracks like Whisper and On Your Own Again are simply wonderful.

Jonny Nash - Once Was Ours Forever (Melody as Truth)

Standout tracks: Walk the Eighth Path, The Way Things Looked, Green Lane

Not quite folk and not quite ambient, I discovered Jonny Nash's dulcet guitar tones through 2023's "Point of Entry". Once Was Ours Forever is an album that feels like a natural continuation of that effort and putting the vinyl on first thing in the morning is a gentle way to ease into your workweek. An album that sounds like the cover art looks.

🌟 james K - Friend (AD 93)

Standout tracks: Doom Bikini, N'balmed, Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream

james K landed in a sweetspot between trip-hop, shoegaze, and pop. It had "add to cart" energy. The sort of thing where you push play as you're idling checking out some new records on a Saturday morning and then spend the rest of the day trying to figure out where the hell it came from. If the 90s revivalism we're living through gives us more stuff like this, I'm onboard with it.

Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer (Warp)

Standout tracks: Bumpy, Cherry Blue, Tranquilizer

I've been waiting for Oneohtrix Point Never to put out an album like this for a while. Tranquilizer is a consciousness-altering trip through warped samples and lost memories. While I had hoped from an early sample of the title track that it might be more dub-inflected than it wound up being, the shifting soundscapes are captivating and lovely. This is another great OPN album to get lost in.

Youth Lagoon - Rarely Do I Dream (Fat Possum)

Standout tracks: Football, Gumshoe, Seersucker

Another band I saw in concert with Norma this year. I really liked the first Youth Lagoon album I heard, 2023's Heaven is a Junkyard. Rarely Do I Dream has more diverse moods, interspersed with samples from a recovered family VHS tape. But it's strongest for me when Trevor Powers worn vocals are applied to somber piano-led stories as on Football. Heaven is the more consistent album for me, but Rarely Do I Dream is an evolution worth keeping an eye on.

Discovered, not from 2025 (reissues, etc)

ERP - Afterimage (late, electro)
Hank Mobley - Soul Station (late, jazz)
Intrusion - The Seduction of Silence (reissue, dub techno)
Move D & Benjamin Brunn - Songs from the Beehive (late, house)
Wanderwelle - Lost in a Sea of Trees (late, dub techno)

ERP was a particularly notable discovery from this year. I found my way over from his work as Convextion and am super taken with Afterimage. I had struggled with electro previously, often finding it too cheesy aside from the brilliant but sometimes too abrasive flavors of Drexciya.

Hank Mobley wound up being one of my most played albums of Georgia's brief 6-week Autumn in October and early November. I was aware of it as yet another killer Blue Note record but it really cemented in my mind this year.

I'd heard good things about Songs from the Beehive for a while and it clicked for me this year. Originally released in 2008 during the heyday of microhouse + minimal, it slowly wormed its way into my head, groovy, delicate and restless.

Finally, Intrusion and Wanderwelle are more excursions into dub techno from labels I'm already familiar with, Echospace and Silent Season respectively. The Intrusion stuff was fun because it was a first-time vinyl edition of a classic 2009 album though I think I spent more time listening to Wanderwelle in the end. And I still need to listen to the repress of cv313's Dimensional Space that echospace put out. There's always more great music to discover.

Thanks for Reading

TADA! 🎉

Once again, I've completed a giant end of year music post. Check out a few records and feel free to let me know if anything strikes your fancy!

Make me CEO of Mozilla

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I have a proposal: Make me CEO of Mozilla instead of Anthony Enzor-DeMeo.

Hear me out. I have absolutely zero experience in an executive capacity and I'm already fucking up less than he is.

I know, I know. That sounds harsh. But at least if I was CEO I would start by acknowledging the problems Mozilla is facing: steady 4th place marketshare, a lack of revenue generating ideas, and insufficient awareness of how to leverage the existing goodwill that they have to galvanize a new path for the organization. Hey, at least the Department of Justice says they can keep sucking at the teat of the mainstream tech industry to stay alive for a while.

Maybe as the new CEO, my first step could be to repair our relationship with the organization's base, perhaps by shutting down Mozilla.ai. Sorry, John Dickerson.

And look, I'm sympathetic to Anil Dash's position that regular consumers need a trustworthy platform to interact with LLMs. I just don't believe in negotiating with terrorists. (But please don't cite usage numbers to me when dark patterns are being used to shoehorn this in everywhere without easy ways to opt-out.)

If the organization funding model makes it incapable of sustaining itself without doing things that are directly beneficial to "Big Tech", like embedding AI that can't be disabled without changing 7 settings in a debug menu, then how is it supposed to take any principled action to protect its userbase? You know, those "regular consumers" Anil is so worried about? Oh, that's right. Those people are using Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome anyway. Whatever came pre-installed on their machine.

The unfortunate reality is that Mozilla today exists as a convenient way for monopolists to shield their companies from legal scrutiny and unpleasant discussions.

What Mozilla leadership has continually demonstrated for the last several years is that they not only fail to understand the values of those who believe in and use the product, but they also have no intention of figuring out a non-parasitic financial basis for the organization to operate.

When the fundamental value your organization should defend is the existence of the Web as a commons and an egalitarian space but you are beholden to interests that do not value the web because they can't profit from it, it makes sense that you mention AI more times than the Web in your inaugural address.

So yeah, I don't know, make me CEO of Mozilla. I've at least got that part figured out. I would at least try admitting the dire threats the organization is facing and publicly call for help. But meekly repeating the bland hopes of venture capitalists and tech at large is getting Mozilla nowhere.

In the absence of that leadership, I'm continuing to donate to Servo. Hopefully one day it might be, or power, a browser that cares about the Web as a concept. In the interim, I can only hope the tech industry stops assuming people want whatever "future" they envision shoved down our throats.

An Overcomplicated Music Setup

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Intro

Some friends encouraged me to write up my system for managing my music collection so here we go. Let's start by going over my goals and hardware:

No dependence on cloud services to listen to my music.
Be able to listen via laptop, phone, or turntable.
Be able to share music with friends easily via Library and Radio.
Pay the damn artists.

It isn't very relevant but since many people share their listening setups, I'll briefly summarize that:

For headphones I mostly use the AKG K371
On the go, I listen to Opus files via an Android Phone or Flacs using my beloved Tangara
On my laptop, I listen to Flacs via Emacs (using EMMS, not great but good enough)
In the garage, I listen to records using a U-turn Orbit turntable hooked up to a ZED-10 mixer shared with the desktop that go out to Frontier Output speakers. They are unnecessary but lovely.

If it isn't already clear, Fuck Spotify in my opinion.

An Aside on Film

Why the hell isn't there a bandcamp for film? Seriously. I've recently started trying to build up a physical media collection for film and I would love to primarily buy from independent vendors or just not Amazon!

It would be wonderful to have a service where I could buy DRM-free digital copies in addition to steelbooks and follow studios or directors I know I like. If you have a place you like to buy films, by all means send word. I'm aware of Orbit and Diabolik but there's a lot not on either store.

The Process

One thing I'll freely admit is not great with my setup is discovery. I read a few online publications, am subscribed to a few substacks, and use nitter to check some X feeds without sending traffic to that hellhole. Acquisition is very well covered between Bandcamp and Discogs. I'm okay to rely on those services for buying music though like all SaaS they are at constant risk of enshittification.

I won't cover discovery as part of this article. I just want to talk through the wildness that is my library process. Alright, so we've found an album worth grabbing, maybe on bandcamp or maybe on discogs. We'll assume bandcamp since you automatically get free Flacs with physical media purchases. Okay, it goes like this.

Run beets import to copy the Flacs into the music library.
- beets is very good. It normalizes the folder and file naming, standardizes the tags based on what is in musicbrainz, and ensures album art is present. Brilliant.
Copy normalized flacs to the tangara, add them to emacs with M-x emms-add-directory.
- My kingdom for EMMS to support filesystem watching my music directory.
Run beets convert to create opus files and load them on the phone.
Add the new album to records.dat
- This is a goofy S-expression based list of my record collection that lives in my emacs config and powers the bandcamp embedding and album art on radio.
- One annoying part is getting the bandcamp release IDs, running this on the album page will do the trick: JSON.parse($("[name='bc-page-properties']")[0].content)['item_id']
- At some point I'll extend this to support youtube embeds also.
Run the covers.lisp script and collards deploy to make the album available on radio.

I won't claim that this process isn't a headache. I won't claim this is something that reasonable people should want to do. I am happy with it for my needs. And there are upsides.

I own all my music.
I can listen to my music at any time, on any device I own, with or without network access.
I can easily share my music with my friends, write about it, and let folks browse my library.
It would be pretty easy to set up self-hosted streaming using jellyfin or funkwhale and tailscale, I just don't need to.

Beets config

import:
  log: beet-import.log
  copy: yes
  write: yes
  resume: ask
  languages: en
  incremental: yes

paths:
  default: $albumartist - $album ($original_year)/$track - $title
  comp: Compilations/$album ($original_year)/$track - $title

plugins: convert fetchart mbcollection missing

convert:
  format: opus
  never_convert_lossy_files: yes
  embed: no
  copy_album_art: yes

fetchart:
  minwidth: 500
  maxwidth: 700

missing:
  count: yes

musicbrainz:
  user: somefin
  pass: LOL,NO

Slow and Steady

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Update: I gave a talk on collards at Town Con 2025 that may be of interest, slides are here. I should've talked more about incremental builds and the CLI logic probably. Will try to write that up soon.

It's been months since I managed to write here. It's hard to remember all that's been going on but I have been finding some time for collards hacking again. There have been lots of collards improvements since my last post in February. The largest of which is probably default templates and support for incremental builds. There are other small goodies like support for custom markdown extensions, lots of bugfixes, and more polish to the command-line tools.

Ever since a co-worker mentioned I should have my own web radio station I've had an urge to spin up a "radio" subdomain. Having somewhere to write about my constant music exploration is very appealing. Generating music posts on a subdomain with collards had some pain points though which motivated me to hack.

Most of the pain came from deciding whether to reuse existing content types and collections or create new ones. It should be pretty easy to create custom post types: subclass post, define a custom render method, and add a type: my-subclass attribute to your yaml header. I was already doing this for slide decks made with remark and followed a similar approach for a "radio play" type.

It was less straightforward to create new collections. Largely because existing collections were tightly coupled to both: 1) the kind of content they contain, and 2) the way that they expect to order content chronologically and cross-link. In my experience, writing a static site generator is mostly straightforward but coming up with a good API for collections is one of the tricky parts. Collards had two collection rewrites I remember, both striving to make the collection support more flexible.

The first time I refactored them to make it possible to opt out of collections or control their URL generation by representing them in the filesystem like other content. My first attempt failed because I forgot that collections couldn't be generated during the build step like "normal content". Since they might include other content that isn't yet loaded, you have to build them after everything else is loaded. Thinking of static site generators as compilers from markdown files to HTML is a nice perspective, but you have to remember that as soon as collections come into play you're effectively building a two phase compiler!

The second refactor is the one I just completed to support the radio subdomain. I knew that I wanted a "playlist" collection type for music content and was surprised by how much code I needed as I tried to create it. The new code isn't perfect but it's less coupled and easier to extend.

A lot of the coupling was done to just get my site off the ground initially. Engineers often fall into the habit of building for future use cases that can be pretty speculative. I was trying to follow "YAGNI". Unfortunately, that meant there was a lot of implicit behavior both during the build step as well as during rendering because the only content type I had to begin with was posts. All the helpers for cross-linking and sorting chronologically expected posts.

Now that the refactoring is done, making a custom collection type is much simpler. It requires subclassing collection, implementing a populate method that can add whatever content is relevant, and defining a render method that serves as your template. A chrono-sort method to enforce ordering is optional. Hopefully now that the dust has settled, I'll get into a groove of writing more. Cheers.

iLL oMens

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I keep getting dragged into conversations around LLMs. Whether profesionally or personally, it seems everyone in the tech periphery is suffused with discussion about them. I thought writing a short note on llms would be enough for me but here we are. (Somehow I've been working on this post for 2 months.)

I have personal, technical, social, and ethical objections to LLMs, but I think the more important motivator to write is to lay out what I believe computers are for: what harms they can cause and what good they can create. Or at least what I value when thinking about what I want from software. I'm going to do my best to start from the frame of LLMs and maybe write a follow-up about the more general questions. Let's get into it.

Starting Assumptions

I need to touch on some foundational beliefs that inspired the title of this website. The masthead reads "Improved Means for Achieving Deteriorated Ends" in reference to this Aldous Huxley quote:

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

There is another quote by Alfred North Whitehead that I find inseparable from the Huxley quote. I've paired these quotes together for so long (over 20 years now) that I'm unable to say where I discovered either.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

There is a beautiful tension between these quotes that still animates me. On the one hand, I find it very difficult not to agree with Whitehead. Being able to focus on high-level tasks instead of inconsequential details is a huge part of why most technological advances are valuable. On the other hand, when I read the Huxley quote I feel it in my chest. It isn't a question of whether the science or technology works but a question of what we are trying to achieve. And who we want to empower.

A Few Objections

Disclaimer

I have not used LLMs whether for summarizing content, writing code, writing prose, or generating media of any kind.
A consistent theme in my own critiques and other critiques is that AI cannot possess intent, leading to a host of risks. It pretends to see and we yearn for that sight to be real.

TL;DR: Read this critically since I have spent little time with LLMs.

Personally

On a personal level, this just isn't the way I wanted to write software. I don't write much code professionally now that I'm an EM and part of the reason for that is I want to be really passionate about the code I write, agonizing over every detail. It makes sense that with that kind of control freak attitude, LLMs wouldn't have a ton of appeal. But even separate from that, I really enjoy the puzzle of understanding the various abstraction layers in systems and doing things for myself. I think there is value in knowing why every dependency and method is needed. It is difficult to imagine the satisfaction would be the same if I was issuing minor corrections or alterations to "someone else's code".

Professionally

On a professional level, my biggest objection to LLMs is that the ways they fail work against rather than with human talents. LLMs are designed to show me code that looks sensible enough to trust, regardless of whether it actually works. And "mostly works" is the worst kind of code, more expense than asset.

Put simply, the risk of hallucination makes it more difficult to judge if the code works or not. Tests and types can provide some safety here but I should probably write the tests myself, carefully checking the generated code.

Everything I've read leads me to believe that LLMs can serviceably write code that would have been boring for you to write in the first place because you know the underlying tech stack, understand the problem domain, the business logic can be clearly stated, and the code patterns the project uses are in the training data.

That is a lot of constraints! I get the appeal for MVPs and prototyping, or being a contractor jumping between projects for a dozen clients, but for most other scenarios these trade-offs seem troubling. And the technology is always on so we're expecting an extraordinary amount of vigilance on the behalf of developers to not get bitten by laziness or trusting plausible output.

There are some smaller objections I have as well.

Recently published research funded by Microsoft states that knowledge workers gradually see their skills and critical thinking atrophy if they rely heavily on generative AI as a tool.
We haven't seen what it looks like yet to live for a long time with the output of models. 15 years in industry has led me to believe that the maintenance demands and costs of systems are greater than the costs to establish the system in the first place. If engineers are mostly contributing code that they did not write, I question how detailed a mental map they build of the system. It is easy to imagine an incident call where the team is struggling to suss out why the system is falling over.
Cloudflare recently released an OAuth provider for their CF workers written with Claude. Claude was guided by a very senior engineer, yet the library was shortly found to have pretty basic flaws. There has been some positive analysis about the effort, but the main takeaway even a sympathetic author had was that: "you need to have a clear idea in your head of the kind of code you’re expecting the LLM to produce to be able to judge whether it did a good job."
Finally, AI constitutes a sort of "end of history". In choosing to use it, who becomes responsible for developing new languages, libraries and tools that improve our lives as developers? Am I to wait for the LLM to be retrained on new tools and techniques? It is an entrenching of current practices and patterns (without their surrounding context) into a harder to question future.

Socially

Companies looking for ways to build faster with AI to me just begs the question of "why is speed the determining factor for your business"? In my experience companies aren't failing to profit because they can't deliver fast enough but because their ideas aren't good enough to move the needle. Among other issues. Being able to experiment quickly is valuable but without careful measurement, thought, and preparation, it turns into flailng.

For example, I've heard reports from a friend that they were asked to "use AI" to come up with UI prototypes but the product requirements and goals were so unclear that he didn't know how to prompt the agent. I genuinely believe that in situations where companies believe AI can magically speed things up what they actually are suffering from are process and communication flaws that disempower their R&D teams. AI simply cannot fix that.

It's understandable how we fall into this trap though. Speed feels good because it can be used to power any other goal. Velocity is a quantifiable metric. But the worst dysfunctions I saw in my time at Calendly had nothing to do with speed and everything to do with internal communication, alignment, and ownership. I'm willing to bet that at most SaaS companies, the part where the most value is being lost is understanding the customer problem and communicating about it, not the build step. But that's much harder to observe.

Besides if AI had the level of impact that is claimed by its proponents, it should be absolutely trivial to determine which companies or engineers are using it and which are not. I don't think we're seeing this clear differentiator where those who have not adopted AI are simply unable to compete in the market. I genuinely have not seen any evidence of that.

All of this is separate from the question of "eating our seed corn" and whether or not the improvement in LLM technology will outweigh the undoubtedly negative social impact of disrupted labor markets.

Tools like anubis and iocaine are designed to give website administrators a way to fend off crawlers used to feed the LLMs hunger for data. Plenty of sites have found that the majority of the traffic they receive is from crawlers, even recrawling the same page dozens of times a day. Even as a consumer of the web I notice this. I'm seeing more cloudflare alerts to ensure I'm human, more things like anubis and iocaine before a page loads. Not to mention the declining quality of search results among other things.

From my perspective, making the web an actively more hostile and misinformation filled space and unemploying large quantities of competent creative workers is not a great tradeoff even if LLMs improve beyond their current abilities.

Ethically

I won't get into questions of climate impact here as I'm simply not well-read enough in that area and there are so many ways we are complacent in legitimate harms that focusing on LLMs here feels unnecessary.

I will say that as a child that grew up in the era of the RIAA suing children for using Napster, the argument that AI companies should be able to trawl the collected creative works of mankind in the name of scientific advancement or product development is horseshit. (Meta is actually torrenting in case you were unaware.)

Now, legally, I can see an Intellectual Property argument that no sale would have occurred to these companies and so there is no lost revenue. Or perhaps, that the output of LLMs is sufficiently novel to qualify as new work. But isn't that the point?

The intent of Intellectual Property Law is to promote creative human works and protect creators. The intent of creating LLMs from all existing text and audio or visual media is to enable the low-effort creation of derivative works by guiding the LLM to produce something similar to its training data which you, the user, can deliver as original labor!

I really fail to see this in any other way than disempowering artists, actors, designers, photographers, programmers, and many other professions whose human ingenuity and expertise is now being resold by someone else while the vendor simultaneously insists that they can be replaced for $20/month. That certainly sounds like robbing someone of future earnings to me. We'll see what the courts do.

In short, LLMs completely upending the landscape of creative labor and insisting it is in society's best long-term interest to allow it to transpire is a hell of a position.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I see LLM proponents assume a set of values the population doesn't hold. I have seen technologists I respect express optimism about the forward progress of AI that ignores the fact most people do not want to manage prompts or agents. I find that a lot of smart people are captivated by this thinking but unable to imagine the perspective of someone who disagrees or feels differently. Most creative people did not enter their field to guide an incompetent intern.

Is this what my parents felt like? I'm left with uncomfortable questions about my youth. Was I excited by technology simply because it afforded me a chance to have more agency? At the end of the day, I'll respect my engineers if they decide they want to use AI. They're the ones responsible for doing the work. But I hope that I, and leadership figures above me, don't start telling people the best tools to use to do their job.

Skateboarding - A Memoir

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

It all started in a Blockbuster video. For those of you under 30, that was a place you could go to rent movies and games. Kind of like if there was a Netflix store that had tapes and discs but you had to return them after 3 days. So now that I feel a million years old, let's continue.

I was hanging out with my friend Chris Blair. His parents would rent us two videogames for our sleepover, a true decadence. I decided we should rent Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi, an ill-advised star wars fighting game. (I wasn't always a bright and discerning child.) Chris looked over the available wares and settled on "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater".

I was dumbfounded. I was sure this was a horrible misallocation of resources. What would you even do in a skateboarding game? Just roll around? Race? It was beyond me. But I could see Chris was dead set on it and I was a guest after all. I don't remember how much time we spent playing Masters of Teras Kasi. I'm not entirely sure we did play Masters of Teras Kasi. What I know is that I fell in love with skateboarding very quickly after that.

Burgeoning Skater

There have been a pretty surprising number of skateboarding games that came out since the formative THPS in 1999 and I've played most of them. But I also wound up skateboarding for many years. Skateboarding was an obsession through high school and college. I watched dozens of skateboarding videos, I had subscriptions to Transworld and The Skateboard Mag, and I skated with friends as much as I could. It was the first physical thing I remember doing without caring if I was any good. At town con, Nate told me I should write about it so here we are.

I was hooked on THPS almost immediately. The gameplay was addictive but I think the soundtrack and videos of the different skaters made a bigger impact on me. I truly hadn't realized that you could perform tricks while skating and I was struck by how aesthetically oriented everything about skating was. It was just cool.

I quickly had my own copy of THPS but I think it wasn't until THPS 2 came out and was somehow, thanks to manuals letting you extend combos, even more fun that I admitted that I wanted my own board. I know I got an Alien Workshop board first, just because I liked the board graphics.

It took me a while to learn to ollie. I spent most of my time skating the roads and driveways around our neighborhood and there wasn't a park nearby that I remember. For years, on Sundays as soon as youth group let out, I would go to the Taco Bell near the church with friends and skate a small 3 stair by the drive-through. It was great.

Fully Committed

My first videos were Transworld's Feedback and Alien Workshop's Photosynthesis. To this day those are favorites of mine, especially Photosynthesis. I could go on about photosynthesis for ages. The filming, the skating, the soundtrack. All of a sudden, I was as into the culture as I was the videogames. I had favorite skaters and board companies and video parts.

There were a handful of other skateboarding games that came out in the PS1 era. Grind Session was decent to my recollection. But THPS 2 took the bulk of my time until I discovered Thrasher: Skate and Destroy, amusingly published by Rockstar Games before the GTA era. Thrasher was the first game I played that was more "skate sim" than arcade-style rack up the points skating. I spent a lot of hours on Thrasher. I liked when I had to work to land realistic tricks at a real world spot which could be a bit awkward to pull off in THPS 2. In fact, I remember a period when I was reducing my stats in THPS 2 to make it easier to skate in a style like the videos I was watching rather than rack up a high score.

A ton of other iconic videos came out in this era. Es footwear's Menikmati made a huge impact and is also in my all time top 5. Aside from legendary video parts from Arto Saari, Rodrigo Texeira, and Eric Koston, it also introduced me to one of my favorite electronic musicians, Amon Tobin. What a blessing.

Flip Skateboards' Sorry came along two years later and shook everything up. I couldn't believe Bastien Salabanzi's double part. He came out of nowhere and was throwing out jaw-dropping tricks left and right with grace and style. Arto and Mark Appleyard were amazing too, of course. I rinsed the tape enough that David Bowie's Rock n Roll Suicide still makes me think of Arto's part.

It feels like only moments later that Girl's Yeah, Right released in 2003. That video still feels like a high water mark for the entire era in terms of skating, soundtrack, and production. It was what happened when a triple AAA lineup spent 2 years saving up their best footage, got celebrity cameos, filmed genuinely entertaining skits with special effects that made boards and ramps invisible, and so on.

During this time, skateboarding games got worse from my perspective. THPS 3 + 4 came out and they added reverts so that you were able to continue your combos after doing vert tricks. From a gameplay perspective, I had been pretty disincentivized to skate vert previously. Since I couldn't continue the combo after a vert trick, it wasn't a good route to a high score. Thanks to the jump to the PS2 the graphics also improved a fair bit.

But the level design was feeling pretty uninspired and any connection to skateboarding as it actually happened was feeling increasingly tenuous. I played THPS 4 for a little while but went back to Thrasher pretty quickly.

College Years

Habitat's Mosaic came out not long before I went to Oglethorpe and competes with Photosynthesis for my favorite video of all time. AWS and Habitat were sister companies so this makes a good amount of sense. There's a huge overlap in style and approach. The soundtrack and editing are perfect. Some skaters just look great without even doing tricks. They could be pushing around hopping curbs and doing an occasional 180. AWS + Habitat videos capture that for me.

I wound up going to Oglethorpe university and tearing a ligament in my (I think) left ankle the night before classes started. I was ollieing a long five set on the upper quad and kicked the board away midair one attempt. Unfortunately, I rolled my ankle very badly catching the last stair as I came down. Limping to math class in moccasins the first day because I had a giant swollen purple thing where my ankle should be is pretty funny in retrospect.

Oglethorpe was in many ways some of the happiest years of my life. I was finally on my own. I had constant friends or companions around. But critically, it was such a better place to skate than my neighborhood growing up or the church. I played skateboarding games much less. College was the era of smash bros with roommates (and later tournaments). But I was skating the quad every day and grinning like an idiot. I was probably in the best shape of my life.

Modern Era

A few years later, I moved out of the dorms to live with friends and transferred to SPSU to study Computer Science. I was briefly in a house in 2008-2009 and working full time after I found out about dad's cancer. There was precious little skating but I was lucky to discover EA's Skate for the PS3 which is tied with the follow-up Skate 2 as my favorite skateboarding game of all time.

The Skate series is a skate sim done right. It paired the fantastic graphics the PS3 made possible with a novel control scheme where the analog sticks represented your feet as a skater. Rather than practicing button combos to learn tricks, you were practicing leg movements.

It had an EA-level budget and participation from the biggest board companies and pros that were active when it was made to boot. The biggest knock I can give it is that it didn't run at a silky smooth 60fps on PS3 but for the best skateboarding game of all time I could give a damn.

There's been a "Skate 4" in development for 4 or 5 years now but from my perspective they could just re-release or remaster the existing games for modern systems and I'd throw a pile of money at them.

Anyway, by 2010 I was living in an apartment complex with my friend Ben. I was back in school and staring at code as long as I could stand it and then going and practicing tricks in the parking lot until my brain cooled off and I'd worked through any latent anxiety about my future. Whenever Burke was in town we would go spend an afternoon at Brookrun skatepark and then get sushi. Those were the days.

Focusing on building a life

The amount I skated dropped drastically in 2011. Burke and I were living together in an apartment but I'd just started my first job as a working developer. Within 12 months, Burke moved up to Indiana for a job and the era of trips to the skatepark ended. Norma and I started dating not long after that in 2013. There was one time I convinced a former Engineering Manager, Jason Bruce, to go skate at Brookrun with me though. That was great fun. I got some video too. But that was more or less the end of my heavy skateboarding era. It was a nice 12 year run.

There are some current gen skating games: Skater XL and Session and a THPS remaster. Session is my favorite of the bunch, a skate sim with significant real world spots and lore from NYC, SF, and Philly. Playing those games is like doodling in a notebook for me. I can turn my brain off and just doodle but it wastes time in a way that I'm not always happy with.

I've skated a little in the last two years in the parking lot across the street. Enough to make sure I can still kickflip even if it takes a minute. Burke and I even managed to skate together a bit over the holidays while he was in town from Michigan. But every now and then I daydream about cruising around the Oglethorpe campus and playing games of skate with Burke. Maybe I'll rewatch Mosaic later.

Announcing Collards

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

You may have noticed my site going through some substantial changes lately. I've been working on another static site generator. Collards is a pseudo successor to coleslaw which I wrote ages ago just to get off wordpress.

I started working on collards properly back in August and switched over to using it in production in December. I've been surprised how much I enjoy noodling on it. Part of it is probably that I don't program nearly as much as I used to as an engineering manager. Part of it is the joy of scratching my own itch as I rebuild my site.

Either way, I just released version 0.5 and I think at this point it might actually be useful to other people. There is a healthy amount of documentation but not a terribly easy way to install it yet.

At some point, I'll likely try to provide static binaries for linux but there are some more tweaks and "ease of use" things I'd like to handle first. If you're willing to install sbcl, git clone the repo, and run make, you may find a useful command line tool for building sites quickly with CSS and a bit of markdown.

Then again, you could always be sensible and just use Eleventy, Hugo, or Jekyll. 😉

The primary motivation for writing Collards was to support Static Pages which coleslaw never handled all that well. I didn't want to hack on coleslaw either because I bequeathed it to the existing users (and it never grew a test suite, mea culpa). But I also felt confident I could do a better job now than I did 10 or 12 years ago when I wrote coleslaw.

Along the way, I grew features like a nice CLI interface, a local server to live preview content, post summaries, wikilinking between pages to allow easily publishing personal Notes, and so on. I'm a bit proud of where the project has wound up. Now I just need to write more about the music I'm enjoying and share some pictures of the family dogs.

Cheers.

2024 Reflections

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0500

See also: 2023 Reflections, inspired by: insom and manuel

Personal 💜

Last year was heavy. Both of our dogs died and I left Calendly after 4 and a half mostly happy years. I have really struggled not to construct a story of death following me around the past 2 years since 2024 was preceded by the death of both my paternal uncles, my father, and my stepmother in 2023.

There were plenty of good things in 2024 too, chief among them travel and our new dog Mila that we adopted before Jurgen died. But I would be lying if I didn't say that grief and exhaustion were prominent emotions for me throughout the year. Norma, regular exercise, and music were helpful stabilizing forces.

Travel 🛫

California (for work and pleasure) in Jan and Feb
NYC + Halifax in May
Switzerland + Italy in late August
Chicago in October

There was a lot of travel to see people I loved this year.

It started off poorly though with a work trip to Palm Springs for the 2024 Calendly Kickoff. Morale wasn't great but the real blow came on Wednesday morning when Norma called from the vet because Seyla was having trouble breathing and she had to be put down. We knew she'd had cancer for a while that we weren't able to treat but it had been progressing slowly. Saying goodbye over the phone was awful. The dogs, and Seyla in particular, were the foundation of our relationship. I hated having to be far away not only from Seyla but also from Norma for a work event that seemed far from the sort of honest and frank conversations that could right the ship.

A month later I was back in California for one of the largest smash bros tournaments, Genesis X, with my best friend Max. I think we both played decently, going 2-2, but mostly we were just happy to be there. We've always been on a slightly odd fence between casual players and competitive ones, both watching and attending tournaments but not worrying about climbing the ranks. We're pretty old by the scene's standards after all. We went without expectations, which I've struggled with some, and just had a good time.

A few months later, I knew I was leaving Calendly. I had put in my 3 weeks notice after getting fed up with an inability to drive change at work. Norma and I went to NYC to visit Roni, who taught with me at the Flatiron School. Afterward, Norma stayed to attend the Westminster dog show with her college roommate and I flew to Halifax to visit my other best friend Aaron in his new digs. I got an offer to work for InvestNext while I was there.

Switzerland and Italy were a much needed reprieve. I had started at InvestNext which was going alright. But Jurgen died, very unexpectedly, the weekend after my 38th birthday. He had a very good recent health checkup, he was happy and playing with our new puppy the day before he died. But then he laid down and he didn't want to get up. I think his death was the most intense grief I've felt since my stepfather John died in 2009. I still miss him. Getting out of the country to see beautiful landscapes and relax with Norma was deeply needed.

Finally, I went out on a limb to Chicago for Town Con. I have a deep love for Nate, who founded Tilde Town, from working with him at my first job and for his poetic spirit and his sense of aesthetics. If everyone in tech thought about the way computers impact people the way Nate does, I think we would live in a better world. I had been an (inactive) member of town for a long time but didn't know the community that well and hadn't kept in great touch with Nate over the intervening decade. Mostly, we attended each other's weddings.

Going to Town Con, meeting people, and sharing about who I was and what I was up to was a good reminder of my need for community and to have projects, even if the projects are just to satisfy my curiosity.

Music 🎧

I might write a whole separate post for this at some point like I did last year. Music has always been a great source of joy and discovery for me. My music listening has been strongly oriented towards electronic music and indie with a sprinkling of jazz and rap for several years now. Similarly, buying music through bandcamp and discogs has satisfied my urges to curate things as well as support the work of artists I like.

I wound up buying over 60 records this year and if I'm completely honest I don't feel I've been able to give them all the attention I want to. As with last year, a number of those acquisitions are albums I've loved a long time that I finally had the opportunity to get on vinyl whether that was because a deal came up or they were reissued. I'll list a few standouts below.

Dubbed Out

Andy Stott - Faith in Strangers
Ghost Dubs - Damaged
Shinichi Atobe - Discipline

I'll write more about all of these in a separate post, but damn do I love good dub techno. Shinichi is the most upbeat of these and I've historically not been the biggest fan of his work but this album did the trick for me. It straddles the line between dub and house in a way that is fun and satisfying.

Ghost Dubs was the unknown find. Well produced, monstrously heavy sub bass, and steady rhythms to get lost in. I'll be returning to this album for sure.

Andy Stott's Faith in Strangers is a total gem that I discovered 10 years ago, then forgot about. Andy Stott's trademark is contrasting really beautiful and ethereal sounds with grimy and distorted ones. Sometimes the severity of that juxtaposition is too much for me which is why I hadn't returned to this album in a while. But the sense of light and shadow in his work and the emotion he coaxes out of his tools is great. I'm really glad this was repressed.

Ambient Techno

CiM - Reference
Haroumi Hosono, Jonah Sharp, Mixmaster Morris - Quiet Logic
HVL - Nonlinear

I'm a sucker for a certain strain of ambient techno or IDM. The witching hour stuff that gets played once most folks have gone to bed or you're riding home at 3am. I think this is the subgenre of electronic music that is most alluring for me.

HVL is an artist who has released something like 12 hours of music in the last 5 years. He may be my favorite techno artist. I don't think he is my most listened to but I'm always captivated by his work and a huge fan of the sonic landscapes he constructs. I wish he would get both more notice and more physical releases of his work. I've probably enjoyed Nonlinear more than anything he's done since Aura Fossil a few years ago.

CiM and the Quiet Logic repress were surprises for me. I had preordered the Quiet Logic repress last year off of two demo tracks, knowing little about the artists work. I wound up loving this record and it may have made the biggest impression of anything I heard this year. I have poked around the discographies of Jonah Sharp and Mixmaster Morris a bit but not found anything quite this captivating. A perfect fusion of breakbeats and 90s IDM sounds.

CiM on the other hand I stumbled onto through some random instagram post. It was repressed on Delsin which is a label I respect and after hearing a few tracks I was hooked.

Proper Ambient

Photay with Carlos Nino - An Offering
Vladislav Delay - Anima

Two slower albums that really opened up for me this year were Anima and An Offering. I really got into ambient more seriously last year than I ever had before. Both of these albums came out in 2022 and Anima was originally released way back in 2000. Both are still beautiful works that can excel as background music while you hyperfocus on an interesting task or thrive as nearly psychedelic experiences with lights down and quality headphones or speakers driving the experience. Highly recommended.

The Other Stuff

GZA - Liquid Swords
Nilufer Yanya - My Method Actor

My non-electronic listening was at a minimum this year. Most Rap and R&B came through time at the gym. I wasn't listening to as much cathartic indie as I had the previous year, or I was retreading albums I already had on vinyl like Jay Som's Anak Ko and Japanese Breakfast's Sweet. Nilufer Yanya was one new release that really grabbed me with classic songwriting and hooks. Bindings and Mutations were standout tracks for me.

Aaron and I have always shared a love of Ghostface Killah. I missed a lot of 90s rap the first time around, mostly catching Master P at military school and a bit of Biggie and Pac prior. Outkast's Stankonia and Jay-Z's singles in the 1999-2000 period were when I started finding my way in a bit more. But visiting Aaron in Halifax, we spent some good time working out and listening to Liquid Swords together and I found myself fondly returning to it a lot throughout the year.

Food and Drink 🍲

Sosofed - Laotian pop up with delicious Mapo Tofu dumplings
Samwitch - Insane wizards of deliciousness, don't sleep
@pinchofyum Ginger Chicken Meatball Sandos - Easy, reheat well, delicious.
- Best made with Yuzu Mayo, Mini Naans, and some chili crisp.
Lao Gan Ma on Mac and Cheese, Avocado Toast, and damn near anything
Ode to Viceroy - Scotch, Ginger, Falernum, Lime. What could fail?

Games 🎮

I struggle a lot to enjoy single player gaming these days. Melee with Max is a near weekly occurrence and I still enjoy it a lot. But otherwise, where games brought me tons of joy in my younger days I mostly just fool around in Session or another skate game when I can't muster the energy to do anything else.

The notable exceptions this year were Ghost of Tsushima, Citizen Sleeper, and Star Wars Outlaws. I had bounced of Tsushima a few years back when 10 hours in too many open world objectives opened up at once and I was busy with work at Calendly. But this year, I played it on a 3 week break between leaving Calendly and starting at InvestNext. Having dedicated time to just look after our newly adopted Mila and play video games was really great.

Citizen Sleeper was an unexpected surprise. I don't really remember how I stumbled across it and I confess I've only played about 6 hours worth but I was really captivated by the game world and soundtrack. It's a turn-based cyberpunk RPG and the world building, art, and dialog really drew me in. There's a sequel coming in late January that I'm very excited about.

Outlaws has gotten a lot of flack and it isn't perfect. It launched with bugs and subpar performance as I understand it. But I've been waiting for them to make an open world star wars game where you play a smuggler with a spaceship since I was like ... 12? It might not be everything I dreamed of but to quote a certain infamous smuggler, I can imagine quite a bit. It's worth a chance if that's your thing.

In 2025, I hope Silksong finally releases. The original Hollow Knight remains my favorite game of the last 10 years. It would be wonderful to finally have a sequel to sink my teeth into.

Hacking 💻

The big event in my programming life this year was unquestionably writing Collards and using it to revamp my blog/personal site. I want to write a post announcing it more formally. I'm probably more excited about making further improvements to it and adding more content here in the near term though.

Building collards was a several month process, starting in earnest at the end of July and finishing in late November or early December. It is easily the most well-documented piece of software I've ever written but I also think it's nicely tested and factored code.

In a year where I'm not sure how much I still consider myself a programmer and am acutely aware of how unsatisfied I am with almost all software, I'm still pretty pleased with it. And that's definitely a victory.

I've also enjoyed some emacs fiddling this year, with highlights being configuring email with Mu4e and music handling via EMMS.

Habits ♲

I think the primary good habit this year was starting some new classes at the gym. I've primarily been cycling but branched out into Yoga and TRX classes this year. I've really enjoyed those and am looking forward to continuing in 2025.

Insom had some good reflections around focusing on reading instead of using his phone, writing weekly notes, and practicing music regularly. I hope to try making some similar adjustments in 2025.

Conclusion

Ultimately, a lot of things were hard in 2024. I'm still having to do a lot of work on myself and therapy is a focus for me right now. I'm used to both being completely unreasonably self-critical and also struggling to articulate what it is I want or am trying to do. I can wind up stuck and beating up on myself pretty easily.

I don't really want to set firm goals for next year. Instead, I want to be less afraid. I want to appreciate myself more. I want to recognize all the things I do well. I want to know that even if I'm unclear on my career path, I have built a solid life for myself. I want to allow myself to really be here and enjoy it, instead of worrying about losing it all.

I think that's about it. I hope I spend more time with Norma, more time with friends, more time reading than scrolling, more time writing than lamenting, and make sure to use my turntable and synthesizers some.

Happy New Year. I hope you get everything you're fighting for.

Improved Means for Deteriorated Ends

Bar Records

The Big 10

Honorable Mentions

2025 Reflections

Personal 💜

Work 💼

Travel 🛫

Music 🎧

Food and Drink 🍲

Games 🎮

Hacking 💻

Habits ♲

Conclusion

Favorite Albums of 2025

Continuing Influence

Rap & Trip-hop

🌟 JID - God Does Like Ugly (Dreamville)

Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist - Alfredo 2 (ALC Records)

Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out (Roc Nation)

Aesop Rock - Black Hole Superette (Rhymesayers)

🌟 Erika de Casier - Lifetime (Independent Jeep)

International Anthem

🌟 Uhlmann, Johnson, Wilkes - Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes

Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Hofner - Different Rooms

Resavoir & Matt Gold - Horizon

SML - How You Been

Tortoise - Touch

Dub Echoes

Carrier - Rhythm Immortal (Modern Love)

🌟 ex_libris - 001 / 002 (ex_libris)

Mammo - General Patterns (Short Span)

Vehicular - Vehicular (False Aralia)

Voices from the Lake - II (Spazio Disponsible)

Techno

Andrea - Living Room (Ilian Tape)

Barker - Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound)

Djrum - Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth)

🌟 K-Lone - Sorry I Thought You Were Someone Else (Incienso)

Xenia Reaper - Nept Polarisation (Delsin)

The rest...

Anthony Naples - In Studio Magic (ANS)

Jonny Nash - Once Was Ours Forever (Melody as Truth)

🌟 james K - Friend (AD 93)

Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer (Warp)

Youth Lagoon - Rarely Do I Dream (Fat Possum)

Discovered, not from 2025 (reissues, etc)

Thanks for Reading

Make me CEO of Mozilla

An Overcomplicated Music Setup

Intro

An Aside on Film

The Process

Beets config

Slow and Steady

iLL oMens

Starting Assumptions

A Few Objections

Personally

Professionally

Socially

Ethically

Conclusion

Further Reading

Skateboarding - A Memoir

Burgeoning Skater

Fully Committed

College Years

Modern Era

Focusing on building a life

Announcing Collards

2024 Reflections

Personal 💜

Travel 🛫

Music 🎧

Dubbed Out

Ambient Techno

Proper Ambient

The Other Stuff

Food and Drink 🍲