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.

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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. 

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.

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.

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

In honor of the Grammy win, I present:

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

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.

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?)

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.

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:

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

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

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.

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?

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

Someone somewhere shared this lesser known, pre the Fleetwood Mac Fleetwood Mac song and…so good!

I’m going to try setting my blog to a stream layout for a while. In my blogging history I’ve always blogged with a list-of-posts style, which is where the original design of Pika came from. It was my preference: I have an idea and an idea fits nicely with a title and if the idea isn’t somewhat fully formed, why am I sharing it? At one point I even deemed that my blog was going to only contain deeply-considered, capital-E Essays, and so any sort of streamy vibe just didn’t make sense.

When my blog became about Essays, it may not surprise anyone to learn that within months I basically stopped blogging. Thankfully I’ve been off that trip for a long time. I’m a blogger, not an essayist, after all.

Maybe I’ll try this for all of 2026? Maybe I’ll actually write some short posts without titles? Maybe with this change I’ll blog most every day? I’m not sure, but I’m curious to experiment. I also think blogging in this way will lead to a lot of Pika feature refinement as I wrestle with any shortcomings I find.

When we visited Iceland a few years ago, I ran into the fascinating existence of a poetry book branded by Bónus, one of the grocery stores that we frequented. Paging through Bónus poetry by Andri Snær Magnason, it seemed to be a legitimate book with some light theming around a grocery store and the consumerism it can represent (and Dante). It made me giggle that such a thing existed and was sold in the grocery store. Though it made sense, as learned through that trip that the Icelandic population is famous for how prolifically it writes. I couldn’t stop commenting on the book to my family.

For some reason I didn’t buy the book while we were there, but when my birthday arrived after the trip, there it was wrapped as a gift. Thank you!

It turns out this book of poetry has a lot of edgy humor. By the time the series of “You Are What You Eat” poems ends, the protagonist is stuck on his ancestral farm with only Ikea Allen wrenches as tools and driftwood to eat. Their fate is sealed. The series of poems entitled “Couple” is filled with double entendres that would make anyone blush at the checkout.

A taste of Bónus poetry:

All Off

The slogan across the can of the All Off oven
cleaner says that it works better than in the
fairytales but I don’t think my storybooks
told me how Hansel and Gretel cleaned the
oven.

The book is very sharp in its critique of the products being sold in modern, consumerist societies:

Honour

My ancestors ate everything
They ate the blood and the brain
the spleen and the spine
and the fat and the feet
and the marrow

In their honor,
I reach for McNuggets

Yeah, this is a great collection of poetry!