My head is full of songs, my fingers spilling letters, my eyes lost in landscapes →
Latest Writing
2025 Music Report
Happy 2026, y’all. We made it, for better or for worse.
I’ve started off the last couple years in a bit of a musical lull, thinking there’s surely nothing new under the sun that could send me down new rabbit holes, and—so far—I’ve been happy to be wrong every time. Seek and ye shall find, right? 2025 turned out to be yet another year full of exciting discoveries. I continued to be drawn to heavier music, found some great new-to-me bands, and enjoyed plenty of new music from my tried & true favorites.
Switching from Spotify to Apple Music really jacked with my listening patterns, though. The downgrade in the app experience also really threw off whatever listening rhythm I had settled into, and I don’t think I ever recovered. As trash as Spotify is as a company, the software is a well-oiled machine, and I miss it a lot.
This year’s report is just a tad different. For the last few years, I’ve essentially been mirroring my favorite artists, albums, and songs from my Last.fm statistics. That approach has been fine, I guess, and the Notables section picked up the slack for music that didn’t make it into the top five, but now I feel like inverting the format: starting with the more organic takes and ending with the metrics-based stuff. I know, so riveting.
Let’s get into it.
Featured Work
Roxo Delivery Bot Touchscreen App
DEKA is a research and development company that has been working with FedEx to create Roxo, an autonomous delivery robot. Build atop DEKA’s iBot wheelchair base, Roxo will be able to easily navigate urban terrain like sidewalks, curbs, and even stairs.
Roxo has a 6-inch touchscreen for use by both employees who will prepare Roxo to make a delivery and ordinary folks who will be receiving deliveries. Users will either type a PIN code or scan a QR code to securely open Roxo’s doors. DEKA’s strength lies in its talented hardware development teams, so in order to produce a user-friendly proof of concept touchscreen application for FedEx to use in its initial delivery tests, they reached out to my employer.
Over the course of 3 months, I worked with DEKA’s Roxo team to produce an optimal user experience for both user types. This project was really fun and presented challenges that I hadn’t come across before. For example, Roxo will be used in a variety of lighting environments, from dim, indoor fluorescent lights to full-on sunshine, necessitating some branching of the FedEx design system to increase the size and contrast of text and buttons.
Latest Links
The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer
Joan Westenberg: “We have ‘growth hackers’ but no ‘stability hackers.’ We have ‘disruptors’ but no ‘preservers.’ The entire vocabulary of modern business is oriented toward the new, the unprecedented, the revolutionary. What we lack is language for the equally difficult work of keeping existing things from falling apart.”
Holy Hell: Tanya Donelly Talks About Belly (20 Years Later!)
I was looking up articles about Belly after seeing them play live, and ran across this gem from 2013. I never knew that Star was originally supposed to be the second Breeders album! Tanya Donnelly: “The genesis of that band was going to be that Kim [Deal] would have an album and then the next one would be my songs. And in fact all of the demos for Star say “The Breeders” on them. Like, on the reels and on the boxes. Because that was supposed to be the second Breeders album originally.” What??? I'm glad the universe or whatever intervened, because it gave us TWO seminal 90s albums: Star and Last Splash.
Lush: A Far from Home Movie
“One of the defining bands of the shoegaze wave that washed over the indie-rock world in the 1990s, Lush mesmerized with their otherworldly vocals set against a swirling wall of sound. Assembled by former bassist Phil King from Super 8 footage he shot during the group’s time on the road, LUSH: A FAR FROM HOME MOVIE offers an appropriately ethereal behind-the-scenes record of the Britpop stars at their impossibly cool peak.’
2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web
A fun look back at origin of these influential platforms and the beginnings of collaborative filtering.
Beyond the Machine: Creative agency in the AI landscape
Another excellent essay from Frank Chimero with too many quotable passages, so this one will have to do: “[AI's] danger comes because it operates inside systems with no sense of “enough.” AI needs boundaries, and so do we. The question isn’t just “what can this machine do?” but “what should it serve?” and, most importantly, “when should we stop?”