michael-dean-k/

1. A new journal is born, said for the hundredth time. I am either liar or amnesiac. But alas, this time is real! I need to shed stale forms. I shed the wall of logs, but now I’m locked into mini-essays. Why not have fragmented blurts from each day, unrelated? Not all thought can be essified, but all thought can be prosified. Each night a list on a day's reflection.
2. I imagine a list of 5-10 bullets clumped under a simple headings; can I do this until death? This breaks the “atomic” container rule, and will lead to chaotic embeddings, but why limit myself for an unrealized, unproven system? (I need to increase my chaos tolerance.)
3. These really need to live as “notes to self” otherwise they are dishonest and lame. I have other places to care about reception. This is the cave.
4. What floats up from today? An ambiguous-looking man approached, potentially homeless, trying to interact with my daughter, and I was possible rude to a friendly man. I’d have no problem talking to him man-on-man; I’d shake his hand; but now with a defenseless little thing, I glimpsed myself as maximally cautious, maximally paranoid. If I don’t expose my daughter to some danger, I risk becoming a suburban mom.
5. Listened to Wilco’s first album earlier today; exclusively focusing on the lyrics, and used that to brainstorm my own ideas for songs. Again, I started a note that will likely get lost. I have 10,000 little song demos from the last 15-20 years, so many shards of bad lyrics, but no immediate plans on trying again. Yet I do have this vague hope to approach songwriting again from a lyrics-mentality, to be aligned with my larger writing project; the songs will just auto-emerge around the poems. I should vow to only listen to albums; never a podcast again.
6. At the start of July I was fed up with my own vibe-coded apps, and digital productivity in general, so I bought a new analog notebook, big and blue, and vowed to keep it simple, to do it all by hand. It was a disaster. I’ve never been so disorganized. And the sluggishness led to an uncharacteristic dip in mood too. There is a romantic spirit around analog, but I’m finding over and over again that the friction is not necessarily worth it. The idea is that it cultivates some secondary quality, like “presence,” in lieu of efficiency. I had neither. And so in the last day I vibe coded a new app to manage my projects, based on past failures, and it feels very right. Today was my first full day with it, and I feel great. Is it sad to say an app I made makes me feel less hopeless? Was I hopeless? I suddenly have new energy on my fronts, remembered enthusiasm that hibernated for a bit. Maybe I finally figured out how to not strangle myself in complexity. The larger meta-lessons are 1) make sure a system is output-focused, otherwise you’re yak shaving—I have 5 projects scoped for August (not thirty); and 2) don’t build “forever systems”; treat it as a one-month experiment—you will naturally build anything wrong the first time, and so you need to shed quickly and iterate on your original assumptions at the same rate that you scope projects.
7. G’s wedding invite got lost in the mail, and I just found out today that the wedding is in 5 weeks. The whole family was invited. At first we thought it would be too hard, considering we haven’t flowed with a baby yet, but then we remembered we vowed not to let having a child hold us back from doing normal things, so we leaned into it and are all going.
8. I heard millennial dads are more involved parents than ever. I asked Claude how much time per week new dads spend alone with their child: 85% are less than 10 hours a week. I’m spending around 40 (my wife and I are each working full-time and we haven’t hired a babysitter), which is more than 98% of dads. It’s a lot. I don't share to brag of my over-involvement, but to shed light on the fact that my tiredness has a known cause; yet also, this is what I've wanted (to design a life where I can raise and teach my kids instead of outsourcing it). The real issue I think is the nuance of our schedule, which is changing next week. Instead of having to wake up at 4am to work (which I rarely pull off), I’ll be starting my day around 3-4pm. (In hindsight, it was this new prospect that inspired me to get organized; this brings the hope, not the little app, though the app is weirdly pleasing.)
9. I need to find the right spirit for this. The last few have felt too informational, where the first was more like a poetic fragment.

What would a 3D essay look or feel like? The "video essay" is a format, but that's really more like a performed/spoken essay with picture and video over it. I'm curious what it could be if we keep reading prose as the core mode.

Here's a prototype where scrolling brings you in instead of down. Instead of feeling like you're just reading a wall of text, it feels like you're moving forward into a series of spaces.

This breaks the essay into paragraph blocks, where you only see one at a time, which works something like focus mode (and I suppose there could be a way where you could preview the paragraphs behind and ahead). There's opportunity for each paragraph to have unique color, imagery, a distinct vibe to match the content. Additionally, each paragraph can have portals to jet out from this essay into different ones, making it something like a choose your own adventure.

Is anything gained from this? Or is it just a novelty? Best case, it's a new medium to bring prose into the short-form video era; it's much less intimidating to be presented with a single screen of text than a whole wall of it.

I like the word experimental because it fuses two halves of a process we don't usually link. What we typically mean is divergence, deviance, tinkering, norm-breaking. Weird stuff. Think avant-garde John Cage soundscapes where he makes music with only kitchen appliances. But also, the word points directly to the scientific process: to run an experiment means to set boundaries, gather insights, and test a hypothesis. Either mode alone falls short. Endless mutations burn you out, and rigid systems can't take you anywhere interesting.

Many of the original experimental artists were scientific. Kandinsky didn't just make abstract shapes, he developed a systematic theory on how colors/geometry provoked specific feelings, and then at the Bauhaus he used questionnaires to test which of his theories were true. I don't know exactly when this happened, but as weird works became mainstream, the word shifted from a process to a genre; the way it was made mattered less than the fact that it was unusual.

Experimental drifted into a contronym, a single word that contains opposite meanings. The power in the word comes when you re-unite both halves, entering strange territory with an analytical eye.