San Francisco just had its coldest June since 1999, with an average temperature of 57.6 degrees. The cold weather has been mostly annoying. It didn’t affect my mood as much …

There’s more than one way to use chatbots for writing. I think many people think of chatbots simply as text generators, and they miss the idea that it can serve …

I’m writing a novel with a friend, and we are doing it in the style of written letters. The main challenge so far is not seeing the entire story ahead …

Technology has a tendency to reduce friction so much that we forget there are some types of friction that are good for us, like face-to-face connection. Instagram definitely falls into …

I recently learned about the Skinner box. It was an experiment run by B.F. Skinner to learn how animals learn through rewards and punishments. A pigeon that tapped a button …

Monday mornings like today are rough. It was a long weekend, and I unplugged from social media and immersed myself in new learning. I’m taking an online music theory course …

I often go through a cycle. I get excited about making something, I think and dream about it, but when it comes to actually doing the thing, I hesitate. I …

I took a break from blogging, primarily to focus on the why of art. And what I came away with was this: don’t think, just do. (and stop asking why!) …

Guess what! I truly surprised myself by actually blogging daily for 6 months straight. I didn’t think I would last this long. But now I feel a bit tapped out and …

I honestly don’t feel like writing, or making, or creating right now. I recognize this as my normal ebb and flow of creativity. These tidal cycles of expressiveness seem to …

I learned about the concept of the dérive from the book Creative Acts for Curious People. The book is from the Stanford d.school, and it has a series of practices …

My friend Parul recently interviewed me on her Monday Positivity YouTube channel, and the topic was multi-potentiality. She asked me: What does it mean to me? How has it impacted …

On Saturday, I had the opportunity to give an online workshop to my Puttyverse friends on box assemblage. I’m a big fan of the artist Joseph Cornell, who is pretty …

Lately I’ve been thinking about how I use Instagram. Not as a way to chase likes, but as a way to curate. I follow artists whose work makes me pause. …

I got a goofy idea in my head, so I turned it into a stop motion animation. Enjoy. https://tbpodcastvideos.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/BTV+Shorts+-+Popsicle+Stick+Gang+The+Doctor.mp4

I’ve been thinking about how cognitive overload shows up for multipotentialites like me. Here’s what I’ve noticed: Sometimes I get stuck in decision paralysis because there are just too many …

I have an idea for creating an AI dispatcher for my model railroad. One I could call on a phone and get a voice response back. It doesn’t seem that …

Here is another vintage painted sign for my model railroad, this time for a winery. It’s a paper decal that I sanded so that it was thin enough to show …

I’ve been using a rhythm to guide my creative practice. I call it absorb, reflect, respond. In the morning, I’ve made it a habit to absorb something new, often by …

In 1982, Joyce and I signed up for a puppetry class together. It was one of only two college classes we ever shared (the other was American Sign Language). Our …

For years, I knew a few things about myself. I was a generalist. I thrived in roles like test engineer, software config management, and freelance dev, not the linear track …

For Stokefest 2023, I was invited to create an activity for the B0ardside booth, a collective of four artists, myself included. We were set up near Ocean Beach in San …

I went to see the Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the Legion of Honor. It was called Art Comes From Art. I had seen a few of his cake paintings at …

Lately I’ve been thinking about creativity, the self, and sentience. Part of that comes from some great late-night talks with friends. Part of it comes from my work with LLMs. …

Well I started making my Flow Spark app yesterday, and today I finished it with the help of ChatGPT and vibes. It includes: Codeigniter 4 backend running on Apache 2 …