Espresso Shots 6-7-26

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• Punk Is the Way. Greg Storey leads off this week with a great piece on why leaning into the cues from a punk rock mindset is more relevant than ever. 'Punk is grounded in refusal. It said no to the gatekeepers and the gospel of what's required or even normal. This is where we start. The first move isn't optimism, it's just deciding to stop hoping, blaming, hiding, or making excuses. Move, even if it's ugly. Especially if it's ugly! That's the signal we're doing the thing. Don't seek to make big moves. Don't learn karate, learn wax on, wax off. And then learn paint the fence or that sweet crane move.' I've spent a lot of time musing how rebellion/refusal is tied to the pirate code, but Greg makes it a call to arms. 'The only reliable way through all of today's bullshit is punk. Move, make shit, and put it out there. Pick up your "three chords" and bang out a song. Ditch the network and find a tribe. Create your own venues and distribute your own zines. We've got to rewire our brains. Yesterday isn't coming back, and we don't need it to.'
• How to Be Defiant. 'My research has shown that a key reason defiance can be so hard, even when it’s clearly called for, is that we’re remarkably good at calculating the risks of defiance, but remarkably poor at calculating the risks of staying silent.' I'm still processing this one, because there is so much good advice in it. I've never really thought about the cost associated with not saying something. 'When we repeatedly suppress our authentic responses – our opinions, our preferences, our boundaries – we create an ongoing conflict between who we are and how we’re acting.'
• The Sin of Noticing Reality. 'When a person sees some topic of discourse they don’t like being noticed, the following is what happens after. First, they say: it’s not happening. Then, if that doesn’t work: okay, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal. If that doesn’t stick: why do you even care about this? And the latest one, which might be my favorite for sheer audacity: yes, it happened, but it’s over now, so you can stop talking about it. Ironic that the expiration date on noticing a thing is set by people who didn’t want you noticing in the first place.' A really interesting post on how there's a recurring pattern of dismissal that people use when they encounter uncomfortable cultural observations. Worth thinking about.
• You Should Worry Far Less. 'The numbers on worry are even more absurd than you think: 91.4% of worry predictions did not come true.' A really interesting piece that reminds me of the core lesson of The Dichotomy of Control. 'The modern world is engineered to keep the worry machine running hot. The internet delivers a fire hose of amplified catastrophe from across the entire planet 24 hours a day. These are real pressures, and I won’t be annoying today and fully dismiss them. But here’s the thing: even with all of that, most things are fine.' A good reminder.
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. This quick retrospective/music video, called Stay Alive, popped up in my feed this week, and it was a great reminder to re-watch The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. When released, Richard Roeper called it 'one of the more disappointing efforts of the holiday season' and Roger Ebert piled on his feelings with 'I hated, hated, hated this movie'. But as is often the case with critics, I completely disagree. The lessons from this film are more important than ever in 2026: You need to let yourself go a little, as time is easily wasted. Highly recommend, despite what the critics said.
• Mini-Comics: My Guide to Cutting and Folding an 8-Page Zine. Speaking of making zines, I thought this quick guide to 'cutting and folding an 8 page zine' was useful for the archive.
• My Son's Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon (gift link). When my kids were younger, I already saw a radical difference in how they teach math today, to what I was taught growing up. Really, does any adult even understand how common core math even works? But this take from the Atlantic highlights a new trend: the gamification of learning. 'On Blooket and several other platforms, students can create their own quizzes from existing templates. Some have cleverly learned to design them so that any answer is designated as correct—they simply mash the first answer to each question as soon as it appears to maximize their in-game rewards. The internet is full of hacks for Blooket, Gimkit, Prodigy, and others—such as browser extensions that automatically answer every question correctly. When I ran this by Stewart, he flashed something between a smile and a grimace. 'Kids are creative.. they try to cheat our games as many ways as they possibly can.' If there’s one thing that all of these years of tech-centered education has taught schoolkids, it’s how to game the system.' Great. Maybe schools should get back to teaching critical thinking or curiosity?
• The Solution Might Be Canceling My AI Subscription(via). Ok, I said I wouldn't write much about AI, but here's a quick personal shift. I let my OpenAI ChatGPT subscription expire yesterday and have deleted it from my personal devices, so this post was timely. 'On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated "projects" they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.' I am still keeping Claude, though, for now, but I totally can see the relevance to what the author is experiencing. 'These experiences have opened a new perception of all tool use, because beneath it all, this is not about faster development = more apps or faster email = more communication being a desirable goal. Generically, it's about a unit time of life and how it is spent meaningfully.'
• Personal Software. On the flip side of the coin from the last post, I've been building a ton of personal software lately. 'But I get more excited about the personal side of software development, the bottom of the market. It is now far easier to write one-off personal apps for exactly your needs and your needs alone.'
• Personal Search Engines. Speaking of personal software, I've been spending time reducing my reliance on 'big tech' in general and expanding out my own home lab. I haven't gone this far, but found the concept interesting: a 'personal search engine' for your interests. 'It provides personalized search results by indexing only the things you are interested in, not by spying on you. Instead of crawling the entire web and then looking for what you've searched for, A PSE crawls only the parts of the web you are most interested in and looks for what you're searching for there. The result is a list of hits that are relevant to your interests that point to websites you are more likely to know and trust. A PSE can run locally (on the same computer you use to browse the web) and in fact I expect this is how most of them will be used. A local PSE is exceptionally fast and by its nature exceptionally private.' I believe we're going to see more and more of this happening over the next few years - but it's always balanced with how hard it is to do these things versus the convenience of using big tech.
• How One Founder's Bet on the Old School Web Is Paying Off (gift link). Here's a great website, Past Maps, where you can 'Travel back in time; Uncover lost roads, forgotten towns, and the history hidden beneath your feet.' But what's even more interesting is its backstory. A former Meta engineer, Craig Campbell, built the site with the idea 'this is how the web is supposed to work.' By focusing on organic search traffic and specific user interests, he's built up a large following by focusing on a need, not the ad revenue.
• The Disappearance of the Public Bench. 'Benches, like other public amenities, are places where optimistic visions of civic life meet messier realities. They’re sites of leisure and contestation that invite a range of constituencies with vastly differing needs and desires. Office workers may lunch and seniors may rest, but teenagers might socialize at decibels unwelcome by their elders.' A really good post on why urban areas are removing public benches, and why it's not a good trend. Also check out, and contribute a photo to Open Benches, a map/photo project of almost 42,000 memorial benches.
• Current Rothko. Today I learned about the abstract painter, Mark Rothko, who is best known for 'color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color.' This fascinating site dynamically creates your own Rothko based on a location's weather data, combined with various color registers, brightness, temperature, and mood, and its engine can match/generate a unique one to a moment. Wild! Also check out the entire collection.

Amor Fati ✌🏻