An idea that stuck with me from class this week was the fish out of water concept that we revisited from the first day. In particular, I found this impactful: “When you’re in your water you know how to swim really well. But who do you become when you’re not in that environment any more? Your routines and actions are going to change meaning your purpose and, undoubtedly, your identity will too.” This was something I thought a lot about when I first moved to college, but in the opposite way. I was intent on constructing a new identity for myself and knew that I would naturally become associated with the clubs and activities I participated in. By my second year I was a member of the running and rowing club and worked at the climbing wall and as a SOAR leader. Since then these things have become my water- they start and end my response anytime I am asked to describe who I am; they give me a purpose. Moving to Barcelona completely detached me from this purpose. Right now I don’t have any jobs or belong to any clubs. The superficial layers have been stripped away, leaving my purpose bare for everyone to see… It’s just me! This realization is exciting and fun and terrifying at the same time: Without all that extra stuff latched on, what does “Hi, I’m Mazie!” even mean anymore?

POAP 7571531 at Elixir | POAP KINGS.

Watched: Hamnet. Really great. Won’t ever see Hamlet the same way again. 🍿

Yet another great Spurs win, coming back in the 4th quarter down a bunch. This team is unique. They just get it done. 🏀

Hard to believe this many fall leaves survived such a snowy winter. I welcome their color as gloomy rains begin to take over the season.

Elixir has come a super long way and is very agentic. In usage though its intelligence was really limited due to the data layer. In the midst of a total refactoring of the data and tools with Codex using GPT-5.4 and it is pretty amazing.

1. I asked Codex to do an analysis of the current data and tools and provide me an ERD to see as well as an assessment of shortcomings and gaps. It found so much that was problematic.
2. I asked it to do a full reconnaissance of the Clash Royale API to get a better understanding of what was available.
3. We redesigned the entire tool set to represent state better.
4. Claude and I developed a list of 50 test questions that we used 10 at a time to test the new data model and tools.
5. Codex finalized the new design and data model and is now refactoring.

Pretty amazing for 45 minutes.

Ratcheteer DX looks fun. I saw it was produced by Panic but didn’t realize until now that Shaun Inman worked on it. Very cool… Going to get it for Switch but feel like it should be played on a Game Boy Advance. 🕹️

OpenAI delays adult mode:

We still believe in the principle of treating adults like adults, but getting the experience right will take more time.

A good and fairly obvious call, this was a distraction for a company that is pulled in too many different directions. GPT-5.4 released last week is a great model, but it’s lost in the noise.

OpenAI has an infrastructure advantage and so should be focusing almost everything on model thinking quality, background agents like Pulse that require enormous compute, and the upcoming device from Jony Ive. A new device with a good brand would help too.

Started watching House of Guinness. Really like the look of the show. Good so far. 🍺

At Fat Pants Brewing watching the Australian GP and the start of the 2026 F1 season! My cousin Quinn and I cheering for Ferrari and Tyler for Verstappen and Red Bull.

Tammy and I saw Jason Isbell tonight at the Armory. This was our first time seeing him perform which is a little suprising given how much I like various bands he has been in and around. I was so glad to hear him perform Dress Blues as well as Outfit from his Drive-By Trucker days.

I designed this RSS app for the web first, and then added Mac afterwards (in beta soon). I think that worked out well. Helps push the web to be as feature-rich as possible, and lets me rethink what should be different for the Mac.

My wife gives the best gifts.

• 4:35 - Alarm goes off. All Mazie wants to do is go back to sleep. Sad.
• 4:53 - Walk out the door of the hostel. Refill our waters.
• 5:10 - Bolt car to bus stop
• 5:22 - Bus stop to Zürich HB train station
• 5:37 - Spend a while being really confused, finally ask a train conductor and the helps us find our platform.
• 6:02 - Train leaves to Bern. Didn’t realize we were sitting in first class and almost had to pay an 100 CHF fee. Whoops.
• 6:58 - Train arrives to Bern. We walk to Platform 10 to board the next train.
• 7:04 - Train leaves to Interlaken.
• 8:00 - Arrive in Interlaken. First destination is the hostel to drop our bags off in their “storage room”.
• 9:00 - Walk over to a nearby bakery for a light breakfast. I got a delicious pretzel bun.
• 9:30 - Walk into the city center, shop around, stop for coffee at Dunkin Donuts
• 10:00 - Stop at this really expensive and fancy chocolate shop but of course I’m gonna get chocolate. The Dubai chocolate here was amazing.
• 11:30 - Photo shoot at this cute bridge with incredible views.
• 12:00 - Stop at Toblerone and Lindt stores. More and more and more chocolate (and free samples!)
• 12:30 - Brief rest sit at a bench
• 1:00 - Long rest sit in a park watching paragliders land and talking about politics, power, and the history of Barcelona (and practicing our Spanish and eating a lot, lot, lot of really amazing chocolate)
• 3:00 - McDonald’s for a late lunch (don’t worry I didn’t get anything)
• 3:30 - Stop at the Edelweiss gift shop again. I bought some people some things…
• 4:00 - Walk back to hostel to check in. Everyone else takes a quick nap, I take a walk and sing (because finally there’s no one to see me being loud and obnoxious).
• 5:10 - Walk to a really pretty lake to watch the sunset. Sky was very foggy/not clear, but we skipped rocks, had more good conversation (this time about car accidents), and took quite a few pictures despite the lackluster colors in the sky.
• 7:00 - Walk back to hostel. Includes (probably illegally) climbing a fence (ish).
• 7:30 - Drink water, colect more layers
• 7:45 - Walk to bus stop
• 7:50 - Bus to train station
• 8:00 - Train to a lake with the gigantic floating boat that we selected as our dinner spot (they have.a very nice restaurant on board however it is only Gracie and Mya who eat because everything is insanely expensive. The water was tasty though).
• 9:45 - Catch the bus to the train station.
• 9:50 - Stop in a small supermarket for Natalie and I to buy dinner right before they close (we kinda didn’t think about the fact that things may not be available to us 24/7 in a small ski town.
• 10:10 - Walk back to hostel. Commotion in the hall
• 10:30 - Get ready for bed
• 12:00 - Almost ready for bed

Goodnight!

I can’t believe I’m only just now learning that Luke Kornet has a blog. Guess I need to officially offer everyone in the Spurs organization free Micro.blog subscriptions. 🏀

As I like to note every year, today is the anniversary of starting my blog. Good day to release some new web software!

Looks like ChatGPT is back at #1 in the App Store. Claude had bumped it out of that spot for about a week. App Store rankings are just recent trends, so maybe we’ll see some flip-flopping going forward based on the news cycle.

Four full weeks of paying more attention to phone screen time are behind us, and it’s time for some closing thoughts on this experiment. But first, a quick recap of how the final week went.

The average was slightly higher than the previous 3 weeks, and that was mainly due to what happened on Tuesday and Friday, which, as you can see from the weekly recap, saw higher-than-usual phone usage.

On Tuesday, I passed 1 hour of screen time for the first time since the start of this experiment, and that was because of a…phone call? I’m not entirely sure why screen time registers a phone call as screen time, but that's why I passed the 1-hour mark on Tuesday. I had a 30-minute phone call for something work-related, and that apparently is picked up as screen time. Go figure. Aside from that, as you can see, usage was business as usual: about half an hour of messaging and a minute here and there for a few extra things.

Friday, I passed the 1-hour mark again, and this time it was actual usage, and it was just Telegram. As you can see from the time distribution, I spent almost 40 minutes chatting with a few people late in the day and aside from Telegram, I barely picked up my phone. The rest of the week was very uneventful.

Looking back at these past 4 weeks, I feel like, for me, the way my life is structured at this moment, 4 hours of weekly phone usage is the sweet spot, and I intend to keep it that way. I’m happy I managed not to consume content on my phone. Podcasts, music and RSS are gone from the site, and I feel like my relationship with this stupid object is in a much better place.

I have deeper thoughts I want to share, but those will get their own dedicated post, likely tomorrow.

How about the others, though? I started this thing to help Kevin get off his phone, and I succeeded so well that he jumped off iOS entirely and moved to Android. Not exactly the outcome we wanted, but hey, at least it's a change. He'll be back using his phone 5 hours a day now that nobody is paying attention. Kev instead is too busy vibe-coding blog platforms to pay attention to his phone, and he abandoned us after one week. As for John, Thomas, and Alex, they all did great, I'd say, and I love that Thomas tracked time spent in front of his computer and not just the phone.

• Read Kevin's week four recap
• Read Thomas' week four recap
• Read John's week four recap
• Read Alex's week three recaps

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Ran into some last-minute problems with my bridge to Feedbin. Going to have to disable that feature for launch. I’m a fan of Feedbin, so not happy to do this, but it’ll be something else we can roll out in the future.

Today we’re releasing a new RSS feed reader called Inkwell. It’s a companion product to Micro.blog, so you’ll sign in with your existing Micro.blog account.

Inkwell is a special take on RSS. It has many features you’d expect in an RSS reader, but it also adds integration with Micro.blog conversations and text highlighting. While reading a blog post, you can highlight passages to blog about later.

Inkwell is built around three main tabs: Today, Recent, and Fading. Today is for the latest blog posts. Recent is for posts yesterday or the day before. And Fading is for posts up to a week old. After a week, posts fade out of Inkwell, so you’ll never be overwhelmed with unread posts. If you missed them, it’s okay.

But Fading also comes with a superpower: Reading Recap. Reading Recap takes all of the blog posts in Fading — some you’ve read and maybe some you’ve skipped or just skimmed — and groups them together by website, summarizing what the recent posts were about. It pulls an interesting quote from one of the blog posts and includes it directly. It adds topics so you can tell at a glance what the blog has been focused on.

Reading Recap helps surface interesting posts in your subscriptions that deserve another look. You can also have Inkwell automatically send the Reading Recap in a weekly email.

(There are new costs for us to host Reading Recap, so it and the Fading tab require a Micro.blog Premium subscription.)

I’m excited to announce that a new version of Unread for both iOS and Mac is shipping today with Inkwell sync. Add an Inkwell account to Unread just as you would add Feedbin or other RSS sync services.

Jon Hays has also developed a new app for iOS called Silverleaf. This came together very quickly because Inkwell has an open API. I expect other apps to follow, including the official Inkwell apps.

Inkwell completes the suite of products that make up the Micro.blog platform. For nearly a decade we’ve worked on short-form posts, photo blogs, cross-posting to other social networks, and much more that encourages people to post on their own blogs instead of silos. And now we have long-form reading and discovery, integrated with the unique strengths of Micro.blog.

Can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks. Thank you!

P.S. While I’m working on a new video to introduce Inkwell, you can also watch this video I shared with beta testers. It’s a little out of date but still covers all the basics.