Have you noticed that if you want to improve basically any skill beyond a certain point, the only way to do that is to do the thing a lot? You can learn fingerings and practice scales and embouchure or what have you till you're blue in the face,
1 This morning I woke up in a small room mostly unfamiliar to me. The walls were bare and white and the sky outside the window was gray. The floor was carpeted, a tight carpet with almost no shag, similar to many rooms I'd been in and yet
I don't quite remember the website where I found Owl City's music, but I do know that wherever it was I downloaded "Hello Seattle" for free: at the time I was a cheapskate high school student in love with music and averse to piracy.
Who knows what sort of media from our current dark age will last as long as The Odyssey, of course, and if the past is anything to go by, music seems a good deal less sticky than words. And in any case I'm pretty anti-Wagner, so I
Today my second single as Alonzo, Breaking Heartbeat is live everywhere you stream music. If you're reading this blog for the first time because you gave your email address to me, thanks very much; I hope you'll stick around. Both Breaking Heartbeat and Perfection, the song
Around this time last year, I started watching ようこそ実力至上主義の教室へ, titled Welcome to the Classroom of the Elite or just Classroom of the Elite in English, and sometimes shortened to よう実 in Japanese. The anime takes place in a high school with peculiar rules and a seeming love of tormenting its
The Hobonichi Techo (ほぼ日手帳, "almost daily planner") is a Japanese planner brand with something of a cult following. I think I heard of it first back in 2018 through rave reviews and hype for next year's planners on a synthesizer forum; that's the kind
Or: what is the point of the work that I do? When I was in grad school and for the first part of my postdoc, I would almost proudly disclaim practical applications of the mathematics research I do. My PhD work and subsequent research takes place mostly in the subfield
Or: what I'm trying and have tried, anyway. I think I was in middle school when I decided that I wanted to learn Japanese. I think the draw was some combination of anime (also Pokémon), sushi, a sense of interesting culture and history, and the difficulty of the
This is the first in a series of posts about Japanese. I've been learning Japanese on and off since I was maybe 11. I'm not as fluent as I'd like to be (although maybe my goal of parity in skill level between English and
My family has this card game, Authors. It's basically Go Fish, except that instead of asking if people have the 10 of clubs or whatever, you're asking if they have The Last of the Mohicans, for instance. The card game was published in the 50s, apparently,
and by "in books," I mean "in books that I read, almost all of which did not come out or trend in 2025". I started using The StoryGraph in 2024; I think it came recommended to me as a Goodreads alternative by several people in my
I just clocked that like "Panic" or "Godspeed", "Surely" is two syllables long and takes to a cheeky little exclamation point like a duck to water. I was wasting a man's time the other day and mentioned I was going to see
I was trying to sort through my feelings about social media feeds, blogging, and the like just now. A very nice thing about a blog is that your stuff is yours. I wrote a lot of stuff that was posted to Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr over the years that I