What I Read

I started the year off strong with Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part masterclass from the King of Horror, there are so many great nuggets of advice in this book, but the real meat of it is in the endnotes where King shares his recommended reading list and provides an in-depth breakdown of his editing process. I'm currently working on transcribing my highlights and notes into Obsidian using the Zettelkasten method, which you can read more about below.

Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price recently published a young reader’s version of Haidt's best-seller The Anxious Generation called The Amazing Generation. Despite being written for kids aged 9 to 12, I think it should be required reading for all ages. It does a phenomenal job warning about the dangers of social media and too much screen time without shaming the reader. You can see the full review on my reading log, and there are some wonderful free resources available on the book’s website, including an extensive list of notes and sources, discussion questions, a guide for educators, and more.

What I Watched

In December I owned zero typewriters. Today I have three, including a Smith Corona Electra 120 I picked up at the thrift store that has quickly become my daily workhorse for writing. While looking for cleaning and maintenance tutorials on YouTube, I stumbled across the 2016 documentary California Typewriter about a typewriter shop in Berkeley, California struggling to stay afloat in a world that is becoming increasingly digital.


Can documentaries be cozy? This one felt cozy with its showcase of typewriter artists, repairmen, apologists, and enthusiasts including Tom Hanks, John Mayer, and David McCullough. I was most taken in by Martin Howard’s typewriter collection. I love learning about peoples’ special interests, and I could watch an entire documentary just on Howard’s reverence for typewriters and his hunt for especially rare ones. You can watch the documentary for free on Pluto. California Typewriter unfortunately closed in 2020, but some of the staff featured in the documentary moved to Berkeley Typewriter where their talent and passion live on.

What I Listened To

January was a busy month, so I didn’t have much time to listen to music (aside from what I played while building my favorite music pages), but I did listen to a few of Cal Newport’s latest podcasts, including his recent episode on reading.


I have an extensive reading list for 2026 and I recently signed up to review ARCs (advanced reading copies of books shared for review before they're officially published) from NetGalley, so this episode was timely. TBRs are always daunting, but I’m also working on creating an external brain for my notes using Obsidian. This includes learning how to extract as much as I can from what I’m reading in order to form new connections and thoughts for my writing, so Cal’s suggestions for how to integrate reading were especially helpful.

What I Thought About

Is it weird to say I feel my brain atrophying? I think that’s the root of the personal curriculum movement I’ve seen take over my feed, and it’s also driving my media consumption this month. I mentioned last month how much I love the fresh start of a new year, and this unfortunately translates into my being a master at making plans but falling short when it comes to executing on those plans. To try and stave that off in 2026, I’ve broken my yearly goals down into quarters. I’m currently in the middle of Quarter 1 which is focused entirely on research and “learning how to learn.”

I’ve started using a typewriter because I’m too distracted by my laptop. I’ve started setting screen time limits and spending less time on social media because it’s too easy to fall into doomscrolling. And, like I mentioned above, I’ve been working on learning how to use Obsidian as an external brain. Odysseas has a phenomenal tutorial on the Zettelkasten method and using Obsidian which can create a mindmap of connected concepts.

What I Did

I launched a few new pages on my website, including a dedicated About Page designed to look like an old MySpace profile. I repurposed code from William Wittenbrock’s static clone of Tom’s original MySpace page from 2006. This includes the shell of the HTML and CSS needed to create the page. There are a few fun Easter eggs to discover. Just don't try to block me!

I also launched a page dedicated to my massive physical music collection. Putting that together made me realize that I have over 500 albums! I received some questions on the code I used and how I was able to produce the page so quickly. The short answer is that I was able to repurpose the code from my book collection page with pretty minor tweaks to the HTML and CSS. The long answer is that a lot of what I do on my website mirrors what I do in my professional life as an archivist. I spend most of my days at work writing or refining Python scripts to process massive amounts of archival records. Some of these scripts are designed to help people bulk download records related to interesting topics. Other scripts take massive data sets and translate them into HTML. I’m able to repurpose a lot of the same code logic for pages on this website, including one that can take a CSV full of hundreds of music albums with columns for decade, genre, and format and turn it into HTML within seconds. I actually originally created this website to practice with HTML, CSS, Python, Visual Studio Code, and GitHub to help improve my work, and it’s amazing how it’s grown into something so much more.


I’ve received quite a few requests for the resources I use on my website as well as a deeper dive into how I bring everything together. One of my goals for my website this year is to add more resources including code snippets, learning guides, and more. If there is anything in particular you’d like to see, please send me a message and let me know!

What I’m Looking Forward To in February

I'm heading to New York to celebrate my birthday! I'm also looking forward to hopefully seeing some warmer, sunnier days.

I recently launched a newsletter, which you can subscribe to here if you'd like to receive this post as an email. I have some fun writing projects planned for this year including a manifesto in defense of an autonomous internet identity (or why you should create your own website), why kids deserve to have an online space like Yahooligans, what Y2K can teach us about AI panic, and more. As always, thanks for reading and I hope you all had a wonderful new year!