originally shared here on
↩
sharing a video from
youtube.com
Watching Jon Batiste improvise over a song he’s never heard before is magical. If you need a shot of pure joy in the arm today, give this a watch.
Yeah, I know... February's almost over. But I finally sat down and wrote this out this weekend, so good enough, eh?
My boy is crushing it at swimming lessons.
The other night during dinner, I unconsciously started drumming on the table. I was startled when my son started singing Imagine Dragon's "Believer," and then my daughter joined in on the drums and vocals as well. It was supremely dope.
Following an unbelievable burst of motivation, I cleaned out the crawl space in my basement. It honestly didn't take that long (maybe a total of 10 hours), and it is so much more usable now! I'm trying to figure out a way that I can wire up some outlets in there so I can turn it into a little cave for jamming and 3D printing lol
I get so mad when I'm in flow and my kids come up and interrupt me. I think it's because achieving flow is painfully Sisyphean; it takes so much effort these days to get into that state, and when I'm suddenly yanked from it, the ball rolls to the bottom of the hill and I have to start all over again. It's probably how my kids feel when I make them stop playing Minecraft.
I was trying to explain the concept of money to my son, and after I stopped talking, he looks at me with the most confused look and says, "Dad, you keep expanding my thinking bubble, and I don't like that." I hear ya, bud.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching It's In The Game, a documentary about the history of the Madden NFL video game franchise. In one scene, they bring a full body capture setup to the NFL combine and scan every player. As they go in and out of the rig, you can tell how honored these guys are to be included in the game. It reminds me of seeing people use my apps out in the real world. Saying "I see you" is one of the dopest honors we can bestow on our fellow human.
I highly recommend Puttshack. I was geeking out over the use of technology, it's brilliant.
The bourbon wings at the Minnesota Burger Company in Apple Valley instantly landed in the top 3 wings I've ever had.1
SEO is the digital equivalent of snake oil. I've held this position for more than two decades, and I'm waiting for someone to convince me otherwise.
You can hit a nail into a board with a hammer, or you can use a nail gun to go faster. But you still need to combine two boards. No tool is going to take that assembly step away, that's simply part of the deal. Similarly, AI isn't going to take my job away; AI is simply a(n extremely powerful) nail gun. It takes the sting out of the parts of my job I find arduous and makes them go faster so I can get back to doing what I enjoy doing: building cool things.
30% of me still feels like a tool for buying a brand new 2024 Toyota Prius. The other 70% is loving it.
The car is one of my only outlets for anger, and that's not something I'm proud of. It's weird that it took buying a new car to evaluate that, but I guess it's better than continuing to take my anger out while wielding a 10,000 pound death machine.
For the first time in my life, I looked up at the stars and noticed that one looked a little different. Turned out to be Mars! For the last several nights, when we get a clear sky, I look up and see if I can find it. That might be the thing I'm the most proud of from this past month.
A couple years ago, I decided to get back into broomball. I ended up joining a rec league and played every Friday this month. I'm certainly not as fast as I was 20 years ago, but man, the feeling of running on the ice is as exhilarating as ever.2
I've been walking up to the library near my house to get work done during the week. During one of those walks, it started snowing, and the flakes were huge and fluffy. I stopped and caught a few on my tongue, and it reminded me of when I used to do that during football games.
Lately, when I go on walks around my block, I've felt like I'm walking with some loved ones who have passed away. I can't explain it, and it could totally be a hallucination... but at the same time, who am I to keep denying my feelings? If there's one thing I've learned over the past couple of years, it's that I need to lean more into my feelings and trust them.
I wrote this down during a meeting at work: "You listen to the very first thing someone says and then your mind runs wild." Is this normal?
"I looked in the mirror while showering today and I saw a 37 year old. And I was really proud of him. The dude is happy. He’s out still playing broomball. He plays with computers all day. He listens to a ton of good music, watches interesting/compelling movies, has a sense of purpose and direction, knows what he wants his house to feel like... And I saw the whites in my beard, and I thought it looked pretty damn good. I’m here! I’m aging, and I’m successful, and I’m comfortable, and I will try my hardest to feel this content every day for the rest of my life."
I saw a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial that said, "We live in a time that you can get into a vehicle and go to a place where you give someone a piece of plastic and they will give you a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup." I think about that all the time.
This line from Anh's blog feels ironic to post here given how long these posts become, but for future reference: "not every thought needs to be immortalized on my website."
My only resolution for this year: find more ways to open my heart.
At day 50, I don't feel too terribly different. It still sucks to knock out the first one, and it still rules when I hit the hundredth one.
The only noticeable improvement so far is that I no longer make old man groans when I get up from a prone position.
It's annoyingly hard to let go of things for some reason. Even if it's an MP3 of an artist you never actually liked. Am I mourning the loss of the part of me that really wanted to be into Tiesto?
The more I prune my digital garden, the more I find myself wanting to spend time in it. The more I hit shuffle on all 28,000 tracks in my library, the less frequently I run into turds.
Bobby Fingers - Joe Rogan and The Black Keys Diorama
Current Vibes in January 2025:
| Artist | Album | Thoughts |
|---|---|---|
| The Beths | Expert In A Dying Field | |
| Bonnie Light Horsemen | Keep Me On Your Mind / Set You Free | |
| Doechii | Alligator Bites Never Heal | Holy crap, insanely good rap |
| EKKSTACY | EKKSTACY | Still enjoying this, but got rid of "Misery." Don't need that anymore. |
| Green Day | Dookie | |
| HNNY | Light Shines Through | I took Kiasmos off my list, which felt weird given how hard I bumped it, but this album still gets me |
| The Linda Lindas | Growing Up | |
| The Linda Lindas | No Obligation | I like Growing Up more, but I'm finding myself enjoying more of these songs as I give it more rotations |
| No Vacation | Intermission | I need to find more No Vacation stuff, really digging this |
| Phoenix | Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix | God, just perfect indie rock |
| Presidents of the USA | Presidents of the USA | I missed this album |
| Pynch | Howling at a Concrete Moon | Still such amazing lyrics, really relating to them at the moment |
| Magdalena Bay | Imaginal Disk | Thinking about removing this, but the songs are super catchy and good, so I'll keep it around |
| Wishy | Triple Seven | Same as Magdalena Bay. I could see revisiting this album in a few years and see if it hits harder |
| deafheaven | Infinite Granite | I think I need to listen straight through this album and focus on it |
| fanclubwallet | Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines | Sounds really fresh to me, I want to explore more of this band |
| Sabrina Carpenter | Short 'N Sweet | This completely slaps. Insanely witty lyrics, big fan. |
| STRFKR | Parallel Realms | This hits extremely hard, feels like listening to Cut Copy back in the day. |
| Wild Pink | Dulling The Horns | Another one that would benefit from a focused listen, but rather enjoying the individual songs as they pop in. |
I misspelled "bourbon", and I accidentally added the misspelling to my computer's dictionary. At some point down the road, this will 100% come back to bite me in the butt. I look forward to it. ↩
I scored five goals one game, and then one for the rest of the season, which means I got progressively worse as the season carried on. But no matter how poorly we did, I put my entire self into those games and left every single one happy. Oh, and I got to watch a fist fight break out, which I've never seen before during a recreational broomball game. ↩
I had a blast making this mix CD for my wife for Valentine’s Day.
Yeah, I know, it’s 2025. But who cares? Mix CDs are way cooler than giving someone a playlist (which of course I did).
The process of acquiring a blank CD, meticulously crafting a playlist of songs that made me think of my wife, making the album art in Pixelmator, and handing it to her when I was done gave me the biggest feeling of pride I’ve felt in years.
And yeah, it was just a dumb, impractical CD filled with mushy songs.
But it was fun as hell to make, and that’s what it’s all about.1
Here’s the track list:
Well, it’s also about showing my wife how much I love her, too. Like they say in the movie Dog Man: “Love isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you do.” ↩
originally shared here on
↩
sharing a video from
youtube.com
This makes me miss playing in an orchestra, and it also makes me miss playing Pokémon as a kid.
I feel like I am still trying to figure out who I am. I feel like I can get along with anybody, but in order to do so, I have to contort myself into the shape I think is most acceptable to the other person. There aren't very many places where I feel like I don't need to contort. The internet promises to be that place, but now that the internet effectively has an infinite memory, I feel like any minor mistake I make will haunt me forever, which has a depressingly chilling effect on me.
My brand for the past few years was "neurotic, scared nerd." My brand going forward is "kind, confident, and fair nerd."
I wore my Windows 95 ugly sweater through the skyway and six different people told me how much they loved it. I think a big part of my purpose in life is to find ways to spread joy, even if it's by doing something as dumb as wearing the most bad ass Christmas sweater ever.
I got my son to try eating pizza. This is huge; he does not like pizza and refuses to even try. This is completely my fault, I've been horrible at encouraging my kids to be brave and adventurous with trying new foods. I, admittedly, am not exactly adventurous in that department either. My son told me he needed strength to be brave to try it, so I helped him bring all of his stuffed animals and cars downstairs into the kitchen, and we blased Sara Bareilles's Brave over the HomePod. And guess what? He put a piece of pizza in his mouth and kept it in there for a few seconds! Later that night, to much less fanfare, I bravely tried an Airhead. I didn't like it, but I tried it. It's cool to face scary situations together, even if that fear comes in various forms of high fructose corn syrup.
I have this idea to build a mini website which functions as my music library. I have a very specific vibe for a design (bad ass 70s-looking lounge area but with 2025 technology). There would be this record table console with records mounted on the wall such that you could see their faces1, and flanked on either side are the spines of records with the names of the albums on there. Clicking on a record would put it in the record player (maybe having it display some streaming widget dingus in view) along with why I like this record (interesting stories I learned about the production of the record, meaningful memories associated with it, vibes I get from it, recommended similar albums, etm.)
There's a fun AI project that I'm working on right now, but I am finding it so difficult to drum up the motivation to work on it. You know why? Because getting computers to do anything useful is so, so, so painful.
I watched this video called Why creating is crucial to human existence and it highlights the fact that what we do everyday is who we are. So in that spirit, I started a 100 day sit up challenge this month, because I wanna be the kind of guy who does stuff like that. I'm only a month into this challenge and I'm already able to knock out 100 sit ups without stopping in a little under 3 minutes.
The formula for discipline is (1) Create rules and standards for yourself; (2) Never break these promises to yourself; (3) Keep these promises at all costs (so start small!); (4) Build up slowly to a disciplined lifestyle; (5) Be on guard for at least a year.
For years now, I've had this recurring nightmare where I am being ushered out on stage in front of a huge crowd for a theatrical performance. I do not know the lines or the blocking or the choreography, and I feel this massive wave of embarassment and shame. This past month, I went to see a musical at my wife’s school, and I was unexpectedly asked to go on stage as a character. I had exactly zero idea what the show was, nor did I know the lines or blocking or choreography.2 Sometimes, life literally presents an opportunity to directly face your nightmares head on, and that rules.3
Direct passage from my journal from a year ago: "It's hard to write publicly about the things I am suffering with because it always seems like I look back on it in a couple of years and realize how silly it was to be stressed out about it."
I tend to avoid the trance style of EDM. It amplifies my anxiety because of how logical it is; I find myself hyperfocused on the technical aspects of the music, completely ignoring how it makes me feel.
The first big snowfall of the year rules when you have kids. The road coming back from the small sledding hill in our neighborhood was still covered in ice and snow, so I put the kids in their sleds and pulled them behind me. It was hard. My heart was pounding. My legs kept slipping on the slick road. But it was easy to continue, because I kept thinking: "why do you work out, if not for this?"
Running is more meaningful to me lately. I've been using it more as a meditative period in my day, a moment to disconnect from technology and notice as much as I can in my neighborhood.4 Ten years ago, I would've been mortified if I didn't push my hardest every single time. Now, I will often stop in the middle of a run and stare at the fog traveling across the pond, or watch the color of the sky subtly change as the sun comes up.
“Finns det hjärterum, så finns det stjärterum” is Swedish for "If there’s heart room, there’s butt room."
I love learning new slang. This month, I learned two new phrases: sksksksk and ijbol.
Christmas Eve felt particularly bittersweet for me this year. It feels like my parents are getting closer to downsizing their home, so I tried my hardest to soak up the ambiance. And when you're in a "soak up this moment" mindset, it seems like there's never enough time to do it.
"It's time to stop researching and start living."
Before the sermon on Christmas Eve, my pastor said his words don't matter. What matters is what you hear. Sometimes, the thing you take away from a story is not what the artist intended, but that is okay.
The most nutritional part of a potato is its peel. Apple peels are also nutritionally important. Nothing of note is lost in a carrot peel.
These would be my "current vibes," or albums which I have in a dedicated collection that I play as my default. ↩
This is embedded in the script for the show. It's supposed to be like a "work/shoot" in wrestling where the real life beef between the actors playing these wrestlers becomes part of the show. Again, I knew none of this until after the show was over. ↩
I'm glad my nightmares contain public performance anxiety and not, like, a fear of falling from a plane without a parachute. ↩
Well, as meditative as I can be while ensuring I am not flattened in an intersection by an SUV. ↩
originally shared here on
↩
replying to a post on
bradfrost.com
I’ve said this throughout this entire experience: Frostapalooza is simultaneously the most and least selfish thing I’ve ever done. On one hand, I threw myself a ridiculously grandiose birthday party and demanded to command the spotlight. Total Ego Fest.
On the other hand, I know for a fact that my ego was not what was driving this. Not in the slightest. I’ve seen so many people struggling and suffering, constantly contending with anxiety, guilt, dread, stress, and overwhelm. I feel an urgent mission to emind them of the wonder, joy, fun, love, and transcendence we’re capable of experiencing in our finite time on earth. I want to help people (re)discover their potential as human beings. I want to connect people and lift them up. I want people to feel the boundless love and positive energy that is always there even though it’s often elusive in our day-to-day lives. I want to do creative things and help people.
Say, that sounds like some pretty good meaning-of-life shit.
As the heading for this section goes: “greetings from the top of Maslow’s pyramid.”
My 40th birthday is in three years, and I’ve also considered doing something epic to celebrate. A big party was what I had in mind, but getting all my musically-inclined friends together to have an epic concert together so much more fulfilling.
originally shared here on
↩
replying to a post on
colly.com
I’ve come to trust my instincts. When I see something interesting, I can simply observe, appreciate, and move forward. If something I’ve encountered holds value, it should resurface naturally in the most fitting form when the time is right.
I’ve been approaching my media libraries like this. If an album doesn’t interest me now, then why continue to hold up space with it? It should surface organically when the time is right.
It’s why some of my new favorite albums of the past year speak to what I experienced in the past couple years (grieving the past, discovering myself, reckoning with my decisions, simply being, etm.).
originally shared here on
↩
replying to a post on
albumwhale.com
I've been wanting to make a blog post that I keep updated with what albums I'm currently bumping, and then I saw this website get linked the other day and figured it would actually force me to do this.
For now, head over to Album Whale if you wanna see what albums I'd recommend you check out. Many of these are from 2024, so go ahead and call it my "best of" list even if it includes Dookie and Nevermind lmao
originally shared here on
↩
sharing a video from
youtube.com
If I walked into the Dakota Jazz Club and heard this, I’m not sure how I’d be able to go about living the next day.
originally shared here on
↩
replying to a post on
amzn.to
System of a Down holds a very special place in my heart.
I was in seventh grade when Toxicity was released. I remember sitting in church on Good Friday a few months later and hearing the story of Jesus' execution on the cross. When my pastor, who was reading from the scriptures, got to the part where he shouts, "Father, why have you forsaken me?", my sister and I looked at each other and shared a knowing realization: "oh man, that's from the bible?"
I've been drawn to System mostly because of the instrumentals. Lyrics have not traditionally captured my attention when listening to music.
It took me a few years to discover that all the members of the band were Armenian-Americans. Until reading this book, I didn't give Armenia much thought. The last time I recall giving much consideration to the Middle East in general was in tenth grade world history class. I couldn't have picked out Armenia on a map if you had asked me.
Serj Tankian (the lead singer of System) recently released his memoir, and the title adeptly appends "of sorts" to that noun.
Yes, there are plenty of great stories in this book about Serj's experience with System of a Down, but I'd argue more than 25% of the book serves as a history lesson about Armenia for ignorant Westerners like me.
Even though I'm not much of a lyrics guy, it's hard to miss the humanitarian messages when they're shouted at you by Serj.
Like in "P.L.U.C.K.", from their debut self-titled album1:
Revolution, the only solution,
The armed response of an entire nation,
Revolution, the only solution,
We've taken all your shit, now it's time for restitution.
Or "Cigaro" from Mezmerize2:
We're the regulators that de-regulate
We're the animators that de-animate
We're the propagators of all genocide
Burning through the world's resources
Then we turn and hide
Reading this book made so many of these songs come to life in a new way for me, especially reading of the horrible atrocities committed by the Turkish government. Serj really opens up about some deep, painful generational trauma that explains his drive for justice.
I also loved his reflection on what System means to him today. The closing chapter of the book talks about the 2023 Sad, Sick World show in Las Vegas. He went into the show feeling like System was nothing more than a cover band at this point, but came out of it feeling joy.3 I sure hope I can see them perform live one day.
If you're a System fan like me, I could not recommend this book any more highly. If it weren't for the fact that it's currently 6:15am, I would be blasting them in my house right now.
P.L.U.C.K. is an acronym for "Politically Lying, Unholy, Cowardly Killers," which sort of tells you how they feel about the Turkish government. ↩
I have a hard time selecting my favorite System album because they all honestly hold a special place in my heart. But with Mesmerize coming out my senior year of high school and "Radio/Video" becoming the theme song to many of my favorite memories of that time, I would be hard pressed to not stick with that one as my favorite. ↩
Sad, Sick World was put on by the same group that did When We Were Young. During WWWY, I couldn't help but wonder if the artists felt the same joy we did. I'm pleased to read that it did. ↩
