Hey there. So I'm starting a newsletter. I've been journaling almost every day for a few months now, and it turns out that when you write a lot privately, eventually you want to write something for other people. This is that. Just whatever's on my mind, sent to people whose opinions I actually care about. Since I've been using Instagram less lately, think about it as Instagram stories for the month, minus the memes. *note to self: include meme section in future issue* Here we go. ## Building Things I Have No Business Building I've been on a tear lately with AI coding tools. Specifically Claude Code, which is basically a programming partner that lives in your terminal (non-technical folks: that thing with the green text in *The Matrix*). I'm not a software engineer. I don't have a CS degree, and my coding experience is sparse and incredibly as-needed (read: copy/paste). But this month I've built: - A **health web dashboard** that pulls data from my Oura ring, CPAP machine, as well as manual logs of my caffeine and nicotine intake. Displays all this info in one place. I still need to you know.. make better actions on the data that is being collected. But it's still pretty sweet that it's one screen and not half a dozen. - A **recovery meetings log/finder app** - built during my lunch break at the office on my phone when I had an (otherwise fleeting) idea. When I got home and checked it out it was functional already and I've been iterating on it little by little. Really looking forward to getting this solid enough to feel happy sharing it with someone that could use it. - A **SQL practice repository** with real Caltrans transportation data. The hardest thing about learning SQL is that fake or boring data is boring. If it's data that I can have some interest/investment in, even if it's work-related, concepts make more sense and stick faster. - A **silly idle game**. Ever since I first played Cookie Clicker I figured an idle game would one day be a fun coding project, but with assistance this was a quicker reality. Simple web game with retro graphics where people walking on the street enter your coffee shop, you can raise or lower prices, hire new teenage derpy employees, and the time just goes by whether you have the game open or not and you just see what happens. Started to insert a storyline where an underground leftist organization starts using your coffee shop and you have to decide whether to kick them out or support them. People call this "vibe coding." You describe what you want in plain English and the AI writes the code. It sounds like a gimmick until you're staring at a working app you made in an afternoon. The software world is going to be in for a real shake-up when regular people realize they can replace half their subscriptions with tools they build themselves, no ads, no features they don't want. The dirty secret, right now anyway, is that it's not all smooth. The YouTube video titles will say **BUILD YOUR $20K/MO BUSINESS IN 3O SECONDS** but it's not all that fast, cheap, or easy. Especially if you're not willing to hop in the terminal and learn some programming concepts. I burned through $18 in API credits in two days unintentionally, from a background process I forgot about that was doing nothing but waking up every 5 minutes. Oops. I've tried four different AI agent platforms and most of them are janky in ways that the YouTube evangelists conveniently leave out. But when it works, it genuinely feels like a superpower. It lets you dip your toes in things that would have previously taken months and months of extreme dedication of time and effort, just to get to a point where you might get a glimpse of the inspiring stuff. I might not be giving myself enough credit in some respects. I am learning a lot of the zoomed out / bigger picture elements of software development. I built a functioning app during lunch. At my government desk job. While eating a tri-tip sandwich from the office's new cafeteria vendor "Mikeyz Mealz" (I've been trying to find out which one is Mikey). ## The Paradox of the Boring Job There's a weird irony in my work situation right now: the slow-moving government org that's just now going paperless in some contexts is probably the last place AI will displace workers. Meanwhile, friends at cutting-edge companies are doing more interesting work but also watching over their shoulders. I genuinely don't know what career skills to invest in. Microsoft could lose its enterprise dominance, the entire tech stack could shift, and the LinkedIn Learning course I'm taking on AI in Excel at work might be obsolete before I finish it. The irony is that I'm probably pushing AI tools harder in my personal life than most people in Silicon Valley. I just happen to do it after 5PM, from a house in Temecula. I should say, none of this is uncomplicated. A lot of it makes me uneasy. I love what these tools can do. I don't love what corporations want to do with them, which is mostly extract more value out of people and then kick them to the curb when it's convenient. The future genuinely scares me. I just happen to be poking at it anyway. ## What I've Been Into ### Reading I finally finished the James Baldwin biography this month. Audiobook on the commute, ebook when sitting still, the only way to actually get through something that size for me these days. Emotional, worthwhile, irreplaceable writer. Baldwin's ability to be simultaneously furious and tender is something I don't know I've ever come across before. I've also been getting more into Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher who writes like someone interrupted a brilliant lecture to start a different brilliant lecture, and somehow it all connects. If you don't follow his philosophy or politics you still might have seen him being memed for his genuinely ridiculous speeches on occasion. But he published [a piece recently](https://slavoj.substack.com/p/iran-from-heidegger-to-kant) on the US-Israeli war against Iran. The hook that got me wasn't the geopolitics. It was the fact that the man who may now be running Iran, Ali Larijani, has a PhD in Western philosophy. He wrote three books on Kant. The ideological architect of the Islamic Republic was a Heidegger disciple who coined the term "Westoxication", the idea that the Iranian society was becoming culturally toxic with supposed Western solutions and ideas. I'll be honest that I'm not conversational in Kant and Heidegger. But what struck me is that this isn't a westerner projecting western ideas onto a foreign conflict (honestly what I thought when I read the title). The Iranian leadership specifically chose these thinkers, wrestled with them, and in some cases built an entire counter-ideology around rejecting them. The cable news version of any war flattens everyone into positions. The actual version is people being made into something by circumstances, and then the circumstances getting worse. Less good vs. evil, more: here's the combination of factors that leads to people killing each other, and here's all the catastrophe that ripples out from there. ### Listening This month's listening has been all over the place in the best way. The new *Gorillaz* [record](https://youtu.be/a2IdAW2A1ug?si=IykhLtesuk7Oq085) on repeat, a lot of this Dutch/Turkish psychedelic rock band *[Altın Gün](https://youtu.be/6vVJJBQyqc0?si=5WPcyuRi3BBEamXu)*, another (coincidentally) Dutch psychedelic artist [*Jacco Gardner*](https://youtu.be/YDSiImxP6Vw?si=zLb8SFnaSexQ7rA7), and an old favorite [*Jaga Jazzist*](https://youtu.be/HVIFUQV20NM?si=dAxlPZONWbHDzavu). On the more extreme end of the spectrum (what I feel like people mostly associate me with) I've been jumping back into a lot of [powerviolence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerviolence) and grind: [*Despise You*](https://youtu.be/12SPIn2PGXc?si=ZCYIIiwe54whnuR_), [*Scalp*](https://youtu.be/eJzaoZUddcc?si=3Dp0RERJvybVW2YL), [*Weekend Nachos*](https://youtu.be/lhKAyvdGw-k?si=-W95XE4kxd0tuHWw), [*Agoraphobic Nosebleed*](https://youtu.be/jNXh8_gDyhU?si=Zzwd0ddMpPxOktB1), [*Pig Destroyer*](https://youtu.be/uJ5HxdNlpMk?si=T3HcrgCwxetfSZtz). Riff masters [*Crowbar*](https://youtu.be/AGXxQ1QMhYw?si=FjSR1r9TRH7OI34p) are starting to reach the normies via becoming weirdly popular on TikTok and Instagram? Anyway I'm all for it, and as a result of coming across them in more and more videos I've been throwing them on a lot as well. ### Watching I am definitely not watching as many movies as 2024 and 2025 so far in 2026, but I've still seen some great ones. *Bugonia*, *One Battle After Another*, and *Pillion* were all fantastic. *Wuthering Heights* was... okay. ## The Part About Sobriety I wasn't sure whether to include this section, but honesty is supposed to be the whole point of this thing. This time last year I was drinking again. I remember the anxiety at work every day. Whenever I had to do anything. Anxiety. I suppose not a lot of people know the extent to which I had a problem with alcohol. The signs were there I'm sure, but the people closest to me were the only ones that had to see the real ugliness. Every day I think I am learning to grapple with that past version of me, because it truly feels like it was a different person. That person didn't appreciate much of anything, and especially not himself. I was on a really dark path. I started seeing a new therapist back in January and a lot of what I've been doing in therapy lately is based in the "homework" my therapist has been giving me: journal prompts about relationships and self-compassion. I've been journaling a lot anyway, so this has made this most recent round of therapy feel very natural. She had me reflect on some formative book reads recently and I landed on *Slaughterhouse Five*. My favorite high school teacher Mr. Carey put it in my hands, and Vonnegut basically showed me that other people shared my sense of humor and my way of looking at the world. Before that I thought I was just kind of weird. Turns out I was just a humanist who hadn't found his people yet. One thing that keeps coming up in these sessions: I'd forgive literally anyone else for the things I can't forgive myself for. I know that intellectually. Feeling it is a different project. The best framework I've stumbled into (my therapist confirmed this is a real thing but I accidentally explained it like this in therapy and felt like, super duper smart) is that: depression feels like obsession with the past and anxiety feels like obsession with the future. Biochemically these things are directly related Google tells me, but in an amateur "vibes" kind of way they are directly related too. --- That's issue one. If you read this far, I owe you a coffee. Or a tri-tip sammich from Mikeyz Mealz, if I can figure out which guy he actually is. More next month. Or whenever the itch hits again. — Alec