A friend had a dream about making bare-handed catches in left field, and I immediately linked him to this:

All the things are happening. All the things are going on.

I’m privileged in almost all of the ways. I’m fortunate in almost all of the ways. Yet it may surprise you to know that I’m also directly impacted in some ways. And injustice makes my system furious. This all hits me right in my center.

Sleep, already elusive, is now like a gift given by an abuser. My concerns fester, remaining unknowable by me until they pop out days later. Unknown, but profoundly impacting me physically, emotionally.

Stepping away from all the news and views for a reset seems the right path to get me off this wild ride. “Please place your own mask on first before assisting children or other passengers.” Back to basics. Back to daily, knowable challenges. Back to sleep. Back to better choices. Back to stable blood pressure without medication.

But what if, after closing my eyes and breathing deeply from the oxygen supply, I open my eyes only to find the plane disassembled around me?

It was kind of a big day yesterday. Our family was booked to BTS’s previous tour in 2020, and the world went south. When tickets were secured, we all breathed a sigh of relief. (Especially my daughters.  😆) This time we’re going to make a trip out of it.

Literally. I don’t think I could buy these books if I wanted to (for any sort of reasonable price).

Some quotes I’ve read as I’m trying to make sense of things.

I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

– Benjamin Franklin

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

– The Third Amendment to the United States Constitution

51
The past and present wilt—I have
  fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold
  of the future.

Listener up there! what have you
  to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the
  sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears
  you, and I stay only a minute
  longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are
  nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who
  will soonest be through with his
  supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone?
  will you prove already too late?

52
The spotted hawk swoops by and
  accuses me, he complains of my
  gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am
  untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the
  roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back
  for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest
  and true as any on the shadow’d
  wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and
  the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white
  locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and
  drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to
  grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me
  under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or
  what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you
  nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep
  encouraged,
Missing me one place search
  another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

We each contain a universe within us. How can we allow a universe to be snuffed out so blithely?

You contain multitudes. Don’t let the eyes in your head nor the vision in your soul be blinded by ideology. It’s not too late. Find the right thing, the human right thing, within your multitudes. Shout it from the window now before you find yourself under their boot-soles.

I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!

– Howard Beale, Network

I had this stored in a draft. I don’t remember how long ago the game happened. I think now’s as good a time as any for something entertaining. Just enjoy this:

RE: our BTS plans. There are two hotels next to Gillette Stadium. In my reading, it would be very ideal to land there for a concert night. But the BTS Army had sold those hotels out long ago. Or so it appeared…

I decided to check in on the hotels a few times a week in case someone cancelled. Looks like Hilton is on to this. I’m so thankful that price gouging is now apparently legal in our freedom-loving country.

This was a fun history rundown and tasting of Minnesota’s classic Grain Belt. I’ve not been keeping much beer in the fridge these past couple of years, but watching this caused me to pick up some Grain Belt sixteen ounce cans. Look at that can! Historically I’ve consumed a fair bit of Grain Belt, but always in bottles.

I have to admit, while I still like Grain Belt and, out of respect to my home state, I’d still put it on my shortlist for house macrobrew lager, I think I’m gonna give Coors Banquet a try as this channel and others speak highly of it. (The other contender on the list is ye olde Miller High Life. Also a bit sweet, though?)

Eighteen months ago I visited Iceland with my family. Somewhere during that trip I was introduced to photographer Ragnar Axelsson and his striking black-and-white photos of people living in the harsh climes of the north Atlantic. Since then I’ve picked up his amazing book, Faces of the North, at the library. Highly recommended.

His photos are featured in an eye-opening New Yorker article about the hunters of Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, a small village in northeast Greenland that just celebrated it’s centennial.

These artists selling signed vinyl direct on their websites are getting me. Pretty clever! I like supporting them this way, but I do wish they could find a way to reduce the shipping costs.

In honor of the Grammy win, I present:

Do all the online recipe and influencer chefs really prefer Better Than Bouillon? Or have we all been slow-played by the company?

What a Super Bowl halftime show. I teared up from the middle during the wedding celebration to the end. Bad Bunny, NBC and the NFL just made a giant statement about humanity and love to those that are doing such bad things to our country.

As you know if you’ve been following along at all, my daughters are huge K-pop fans. Pink Floyd has always been my favorite band, so it feels right that we now have a pretty great cover of “Wish You Were Here” by FIFTY FIFTY.

Weekly Thing 341 brings up AI fatigue:

With that though our ability to do more fills with more things that we wished we could do. No matter what, there is still only so much time and energy in the day. The fact that Claude is there at 2am while you cannot sleep can be a problem. The fact that you can have five projects going on with different agents is neat, but you still are coordinating them!

The "just one more prompt" trap is real.

It sure is!

With a small team at Good Enough, there is way more work (and ideas) than there is time. It's so tempting to fire up claude.ai/code (literally in a web browser on my phone) and send it ten different tasks that need to be done. In fact, I have sent it ten different tasks…times two or three. I sent these tasks almost exclusively between midnight and two in the morning on nights when I couldn’t sleep.

When I woke up the next morning I got that familiar feeling like I’m managing a clutch of junior developers. I’m spending time reviewing some mediocre and incomplete code. Largely this has been a beneficial process. Even though none of this LLM-produced code has been deployable, the process has unlocked my mind on a few different long-standing to-dos.

After twenty draft pull requests were built up in late January, I decided to cancel my Claude subscription. Maybe after I catch up on finalizing each of those pull requests, I’ll open up the claude.ai/code spigot for another month.

Don’t worry, it’s not as if I’m using no LLMs for development. I have the growing Windsurf bills to prove it. 

I’ve certainly said it before: I haven’t slept well for years. I believe it’s been five or six or seven years, but it’s all blurry now to the point that I could also be convinced my poor sleep has existed for all the years.

My cycle in recent history has been to distract myself away from sleep with YouTube or browsing the internet. (Here’s where I’d typically link to all the posts talking about my personal struggles with internet addiction. Then I realized you can just scroll back a few pages in my blog and read all about it. Seems that it’s become a sad theme of my blog.) Alongside this I feel anxiety, as we all do day-to-day. After behaving in this way for so long, I got to thinking: Is lack of sleep a contributor to or a symptom of my anxiety?

It is pretty clear that lack of sleep isn’t going to help one’s anxiety. And finding a way to get more sleep will probably allow one to better manage one’s anxiety. And finding a way to get more sleep will allow one to better understand if lack of sleep was a major contributor to one’s anxiety.

That all assumes you can figure out how to get more sleep in the midst of it all. Thankfully I did, at least for now.

I went into this experiment with a simple set of rules:

1. No screens after nine in the evening.

2. Only use the bed for one thing: sleep. (Well, two things, I suppose.)

What this meant for me is that after nine o’clock I was in a chair reading a book. (N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was my escort in this challenge. It’s felt good to get moving more quickly through my stack of books!)

That’s it. Something pop into your mind? Have a notebook by your reading chair or your bed. Tossing and turning in bed and not sleeping? Since your bed is only for sleeping, get out of bed and read or listen to some music. Or maybe something a bit more woo-woo, like handpans or singing bowls (a playlist). There is research that sounds in the human vocal range have a calming impact on both our physical and mental systems. Wordless vocal recordings could work well, too.

Ten days in, my challenge is finished. I’ve gotten seven or eight hours of sleep every night of the challenge. I’ve learned that my body naturally wants to wake up somewhere around seven-and-a-half hours of sleep. All great!

Further, while I’ve always had trouble going to sleep, my wife generally falls asleep instantly and will wake up in the middle of the night with her mind racing about something. Usually the mind-racing topic is something important, but not worthy of keeping her up at night. Sometimes she has wondered if, though I try to go to bed quietly, my late nights might trigger her waking in the middle of the night.

So I asked her this morning, “Are you sleeping better?” Actually, yes, during my ten-day experiment she has slept great all but one night. That night her mind was racing about an important topic that was definitely worthy of keeping her up at night. Otherwise, golden.

Here’s where things get tough. All of us have tendency to fall back into old habits. I enjoy sometimes staying up to play a video game, especially if it’s with one of my children or a friend. I enjoy lots of the distractions that kept me from sleeping. Yet it’s pretty obvious that an adult should decide, after a successful experiment, to keep rolling with this new behavior. Maybe it will help me to commit since it is improving both my and my wife’s relationship with sleep and anxiety.

The path forward is obvious, but us humans don’t always behave in obvious ways, yeah?

As to the question of which came first, the anxiety or the poor sleep, I still don’t know the answer. These two things surely work in a vicious cycle, and finding a way to break down either of them is beneficial. I do know that I feel less anxious than I have in a long while. I’ve coupled this experiment with resuming a morning habit of reading poetry along with five minutes of very basic guided meditation. That has probably helped as well, but I’m pretty confident that more sleep has got to be the change with the largest impact.

As always, this is just my experience. If you’re having similar troubles, I hope you can find a way to improving things for yourself.

Excellent Bugonia Easter egg, Letterboxd. (I’m not sure what I thought of the movie, but I like the font!)

I’ve got Peacock for the month (go Olympics!), and now I realize it just might have all of the Yorgos Lanthimos movies. Can one brain handle catching up on Bugonia, Kinds of Kindness, The Favourite, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer in just a few weeks?

Japan's largest toilet maker is an "undervalued and overlooked" AI play, according to a UK-based activist investor.

– Financial Times (via Mike O)

Excited to have learned of this new RSS reader, Current. The author, Terry Godier, shared a very detailed accounting of their thought process. I really appreciate when someone takes the time to do this sort of writing.

A few months ago I shared an idea with some similar aspects with Good Enough. Thankfully I hadn’t put any work into the idea yet. With the existence of Current, maybe I’ll never have to, and instead I can spend some of that time talking about Current.

We’ve been watching all of the curling at our house. I played softball for about twenty years, and the son of one of my old teammates is on the mens team. It’s been fun to see him cheering in the crowd.

How about that women’s figure skating final? Usually if you have a cheering interest in this sport, you’re sort of hoping for other skaters to fail. 😬 I don’t love that. It was so cool to see so many skaters come so close to nailing their routines. And to see Alysa Liu truly hit everything…what a rare treat!

Let me leave you with this cocktail. A blog post titled “I Make the Best Amaretto Sour in The World” better deliver, and does it ever. Not surprising since Jeffrey Morgenthaler is a legend in the cocktail world. I like almond and all, but I’ve never really thought, “I could use an Amaretto Sour right now.” Now I do think this thought.

• 1½ oz/45 ml amaretto

• ¾ oz/22.5 ml cask-proof bourbon

• 1 oz/30 ml lemon juice

• 1 tsp/5 ml 2:1 simple syrup

• ½ oz/15 ml egg white, lightly beaten (I used 1 oz chickpea aquafaba)

1. Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake without ice or (even better) use an immersion blender to combine and froth.

2. Shake well with cracked ice.

3. Strain over fresh ice in an old fashioned glass

4. Garnish with lemon peel and brandied cherries, if desired.

One day after posting “Better Sleep in Ten Days” I ate junk food, had a beer, watched Olympics until 10:15, got a good length of sleep, but it was not restful.

All of these things together were probably not good choices. 😆

Searching for a hotel. Yay or nay?

I was finally able to see Brandi Carlile in person (review | archive | setlist). The concert was streamed for charity, raising over half a million dollars for legal aid nonprofit Advocates for Human Rights. It was a beautiful show, both for the epic performance and the shared love in the room. It was also streamed on The Current. I’d love a recording for the archives if anyone has one…

Herman with some speculation on the future of the internet:

[A]n autonomous agent tried to use a form of coercion to get its way, which is a huge deal. […] If the MJ Rathbun bot's purpose is to browse repositories and submit PRs to open-source repositories, then anyone preventing it from achieving its goal is something that needs to be removed. […] [I]f Scott had a big, nasty secret such as an affair that the bot was able to ascertain via its research, then it may have gotten its way by blackmailing him.

He goes on to talk about independent bots exploiting social vulnerabilities. Mac Minis are flying off the shelves, there are probably thousands of independent bots coming online daily, and I’d wager a majority of them are not responsibly configured.

It's something I think about a lot since I want Bear to be one of those pockets of humanity in this dying internet. It's my priority for the foreseeable future.

I hear ya, Herman. I hear ya.

Went to Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die last night. I appreciate when I see a madcap Hollywood movie with an original script, and for that alone I’ll give it a 👍. Was it good? I’m not sure! Vibes ranged from 12 Monkeys to The Terminator, but also, not exactly. For me it lost speed a couple of times, but I appreciated the effort, and I was entertained. There was dark humor inside the dark message.

Walkman.land (via Shawn). How do they possibly have this much information and this many pictures?! Even still, I don't think I can find my final deck. This is as close as I could get. I might  have it in a closet…

It’s good to see that colleges are still a place to go to gain life-long wisdom.

I haven’t done one of these in a bit. It’s time to take on the blog question challenge from Alexandra.

Why did you make a blog in the first place?

If I’m to believe my own writing from 2004:

[T]he goal I have is just to keep honing those all important writing and communication skills. Additionally, I think this blog/journal will help me to retain thoughts and opinions over time.

At the time friends were firing up blogs, and I really got into the network of blogs about the Minnesota Twins. I ended up writing a fair bit about the Twins in those early years.

Why did you choose your platform? (Blogger/Wordpress/Bear Blog/Pika)

My platform, Pika, chose me. My likeness is illustrated on the home page after all!

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Oh, yes, though my memory is surprisingly hazy. I’m relatively certain I started with a WordPress install on Dreamhost. From there I migrated to Scanty by Adam Wiggins. I lightly modified it and kept it operating for many years. Then in 2022 I spent about a year operating my site manually as pure HTML. And then, well, Pika.

Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

I write in Pika’s editor. It’s awesome!

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Mostly it’s when something has been churning in the back of my head for a while and it finally forces itself out. The timing of that can sometimes be disruptive, though I’ll often try to type up some notes so I can finish writing at a more convenient time. On rare occasions I’ll decide to sit down and write without  having a plan, but the current state of my life doesn’t allow me to schedule consistent, dedicated writing time.

Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I usually publish pretty quickly after writing. I’m not generally an essayist, so that works for me. Though if I were writing something a little more nuanced, I might let it sit. I’m really not that interested in reading the knee-jerk reactions of other people, and likewise I don’t want to participate in the hot-taking of the web.

What's your favourite post on your blog?

A few posts on my blog have gotten a bit of traffic over the years, but I think the most intentional posts I’ve ever written on the blog were in the series I started in 2008 on leaving my corporate career. 

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

Not really, and also, totally. I updated the design (colors, fonts, layout) a bit at the start of the year, and I think I might make that an annual habit. We have all kinds of plans for Pika, many of which are influenced by what I’d want in a blog and website. So…more to come!