Checkpoint

2026-01-04

Just dashing off a quick post to say that I’m still here and will be back to posting again. I’m not going to do much editing on this so expect it to be pretty sloppy.

The holidays involve a lot of travel for me and it always throws off whatever habits I have going on. My routine is annoyingly fragile. Since I’ve been back home I’ve actually written quite a bit (by my standards), but nothing that I feel good about posting yet. I typed up a weekly yap before this and just didn’t think it would be that interesting to read. ¯\(ツ)/¯ For the time being, here’s a little about what I have going on.

• Another little piece of music for the website called “Transmutation Tutorial.” I’ve got about a minute of it so far but I’m a little blocked. If I start actively working on it again I’ll break through. It’s just a fun little doodle.
• A story about a journalist named Henry who is forced to move back to his hometown and reckon with his failure. He reluctantly takes a job at the local paper. One day, he has a run-in with a guy who tells him that he’s running for mayor. Something is extremely off about him; he doesn’t seem quite human. Henry sets out to discover as much about him as possible and the more he digs up, the less the candidate tries to hide that he is an otherworldly being. Worst of all, no in town seems to notice or care. Henry must decide if uncovering the truth is worth his sanity.
• A write-up about the book 1984 and Orwell’s complicated relationship with socialism/collectivism.
• A personal essay about 20th century dystopian literature. So far I’ve read Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984, and I’m planning to read We, Player Piano, and re-read The Handmaid’s Tale. I might re-read A Clockwork Orange although if I recall correctly, it tends to center Alex’s progression as a character and the question of evil moreso than it speculates on the future¹. Idk, it’s been a while.
• I started reading Journey to the Center of the Earth on Friday. I wanted a fun popcorn read to break up all the dystopia. The humor in the book surprisingly still hits despite being written like 150 years ago and translated from french.
• I learned about “plot grids” and I’m currently stoked on that idea. It’s a clean way of keeping up with your story’s plots and subplots.
• I bought a thesaurus because I watched a YouTube video about replacing doomscrolling with flipping through dictionaries, even though I don’t have a doomscrolling problem; I have a YouTube problem. The irony is not lost on me. I bought a rhyming dictionary too because the urge to try my hand at poetry/songwriting has stricken again. And it was $5.99. Anyways, I can happily inform you that caliginous rhymes with fuliginous. Hope that helps.

I think that more or less brings you up to date. Posts may come slower than weekly (though that remains my goal), because my wife and I noticed we had slipped into to doing too many parallel activities instead of actively doing things together and we’re correcting for that. We both have ADHD so this is not unexpected behavior lol. I’m going to try to be more economical with my writing time in the mornings to compensate.

Some Recs For Ya

• Open Syllabus - This website rips. It compares syllabuses from tens of thousands of universities and ranks books by how often they appear. You can pick a subject and find the most used texts for that subject. Combined with Anna’s Archive, it’s an incredible resource for self-education.
• JummBox - A fork of BeepBox, an in-browser music tracker that’s super easy to use and has lots of great preset instruments out of the box. It’s useful for rapidly getting ideas down. You don’t even have to save a file or make an account; each time you go to the website it generates a unique URL that you can bookmark. Then you can open it up in any browser whenever you want to work on it. Highly recommend. It’s what I used to make the site theme, “Prima Materia.”
• Writing With Andrew - Andrew has lots of concrete writing advice that I’ve found really helpful.
• The Devil You Know podcast - Sarah Marshall (who you may know from the Podcast You’re Wrong About) interviews people involved in different ways with the Satanic panic of the 80’s and 90’s. It’s a great deep dive into one of the most notorious moral panics in modern American history and it’s enduring relevance.
• The Emperor of Ice-Cream - This poem is an old favorite. I first read it in high school for English class (like pretty much everyone else.) I can’t remember how I felt about it then, but the words stuck with me. The line “Let be be finale of seem” in particular has wedged itself into my long-term memory both for the meaning it expresses and for the beauty of the words together; it has such lovely rhythm and assonance. The idea of authenticity has been on my mind a lot lately and letting be be “finale of seem” seems to sum up the ideal nicely, however impossible it is to achieve. The context for this line in the poem warrants a slightly different interpretation, but the line by itself seems to perfectly encapsulate the notion of really being authentically. Stay tuned for more posts about authenticity, I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.(._.`)
• Catbox - Catbox.moe is a site that lets you upload files to link on your website for free. It’s where I uploaded the picture and music for this post. It is entirely user funded so consider supporting them!

Anyway, hope you’re having a good 2026 so far! See ya next week!

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