Long Read

I've been writing blog posts on and off for over 20 years. I survived the Blogger era, bounced around platforms, and eventually landed on Micro.blog — where I've been happily tinkering ever since. I dabble in HTML and CSS for fun, I'm a perfectionist about how my posts look, and I have a long history of going down rabbit holes trying to get things exactly right. If you've read my post about wrestling with Micro.blog, you already know how this goes.

Three browsers on Mac. One on Android. Each has a specific job and I like it that way.

Brave is my daily driver on both platforms. It handles pretty much everything — general browsing, research, shopping, social media. Privacy-focused out of the box, fast, and I never have to think too hard about it. On Android, it’s the only browser I use. Simple.

Arc on Mac has one very specific role: it’s what opens when an external app fires a link. My email client, Talanoa, sends links straight to Arc — and it opens in Little Arc, a small floating window just for that quick look. No full browser, no tab clutter. Read it, close it, done.

There’s a patch of wild grass behind my tiny house I’ve never mowed. Something always shows up there — a beetle, a moth, a spider doing its thing. So I made a quiet deal with that patch of ground: I leave it alone, it does its thing.

It’s a small thing. But on Earth Day, small things are what I think about.

Yesterday was Earth Day 2026, and the theme is “Our Power, Our Planet.” I like that. Not “our crisis” — our power. That framing matters. It says the story isn’t over.

And honestly, the news backs that up more than you’d think.

The past few weeks have been less about writing posts and more about building the thing that holds them. If you’ve visited the blog recently and noticed things looking a little sharper, a little more intentional — that’s not your imagination. I’ve been deep in the code, and I want to tell you what that actually looked like.

This past week, the world watched four astronauts climb into a capsule called Integrity and fly to the Moon and back for the first time in over fifty years. Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific on April 10th, carrying Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen farther from Earth than any crew since Apollo.

It was a big deal. And watching it, I kept thinking about eleven men most people have never heard of — men who quietly helped make all of this possible. I knew the Gallaudet 11 were involved in space experiments. What I didn’t know was just how deep that involvement went — that their work quietly laid the foundation for human spaceflight as we know it. That’s the part that got me.

So, it’s actually happening. Starting in 2027, Greece is banning social media for anyone under the age of 15.

What happened?

Prime Minister Mitsotakis went on TikTok today to break the news. He’s doing this because he’s seen a massive rise in anxiety and sleep loss in kids who are addicted to their screens. He even sent a letter to the EU asking them to make this a standard across all of Europe.

Tal Anderson said it plainly. It’s past time we listened.

April is Autism Awareness Month. Some people are calling it Autism Acceptance Month now. Either way, it still doesn’t feel like enough.

Tal Anderson would tell you the same thing.

You might know her from Atypical on Netflix, or as Becca King on HBO’s The Pitt. She’s also a filmmaker and children’s book author. And she’s autistic.

I’ve been a geek my whole life. I just didn’t always have the word for it.

It started early. It survived a Tandy, MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and decades of blogging across more platforms than I care to count. Eventually it even became the name of this blog.

Which made me start wondering where the word actually came from — because it clearly didn’t start as a compliment.

I didn’t plan to build an AI writing stack. I just kept getting curious.

That’s usually how it starts with me. One tool, one question, and one thought that won’t leave me alone: could this actually help?

Over the past year, I’ve messed around with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Notion AI. Not because I wanted to hand my writing off to a robot, but because I wanted to know where these things actually fit into my process. Could they help with research? Wrangle my notes? Or would everything start sounding like it came out of a corporate press release?

I’ve spent a few posts lately talking about how robots make me uneasy. Automation eating jobs. AI making decisions nobody asked it to make. The creeping sense that we’re building things faster than we’re thinking about them. I stand by all of that.