David Eisinger

Big chuffed about the election results this week. Not that I think a Democratic congress can do all that much for the next two years. I just appreciate the majority of Americans being like no, f–k this. My own state of North Carolina showed up big. Gives me hope for the future of our country.

In October, We spent about a week up in DC for some work + family time. We had the company all-hands and then team offsites. My coworker Nick put together this “dungeon crafter” activity, where we split into teams and created a party of adventurers and a multi-level dungeon, and then each team took their party through the other team’s dungeon. Super fun, and certainly more ambitious than anything we’d have done before the age of Claude/Codex. The kids got a few days with my folks (who live nearby), then we all spent a few days together.

We did our annual trip to Fairy Stone to camp with friends, which is always a great time. We gave Nev a walkie-talkie and let her range a little bit more than she has in the past (though one of the older kids must’ve gotten ahold of it at some point, because I awoke from a nap to someone calling me “diarrhea breath”). Then Halloween; Nev went as MerCat, Nico as Marshall.

Finally, here’s my boy upon finding a squishy toy inside some underwear Nev put onto a stuffed brontosaurus:

Huge progress on our new deck. It’s all framed in, the floor is down, and the roof (and skylight!) are on. Hopeful we can have this thing wrapped by the end of the year, though I’ll miss our house being the center of so much activity.

Music

I made some enhancements to the website to surface my music a little bit better: the most recent track displays in the site header, and the music persists between page transitions. If you’re reading this via RSS or email, check it out.

I’m in the process of taking the music I’ve made over the last year an a half and turning it into a proper album. I’m working with a local illustrator on the album art and learning a little bit about audio mastering to put extra polish on the tracks. Hope to have it up on streaming services by the end of the year. More to come!

Kindle Dashboard

Here’s a fun weekend hack. I read a post about loading KOreader onto a Kindle e-reader. I have an old Kindle, and while I’ve more than enough reading devices, it did make me curious about what else I could do with it. ChatGPT suggested using it as a dashboard, then Codex helped me set up Tesserae (and the associated plugin), then helped me with a script to extract and format my daily todo list out of Apple Notes that I could embed in the dashboard. Pretty slick stuff. Bonus: Overmind for managing multiple processes (Tesserae + the note bridge in this case).

This Month

• Adventure: Philadelphia + Albany for Thanksgiving
• Project: getting my album ready for release
• Skill: audio mastering (probably with BandLab)

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: The Thrice-Bound Fool, Christopher Buehlman
• Non-fiction: The Art of Organizing Thoughts, Shigehiko Toyama
• Music: Soft Bulletin, Flaming Lips

Links

• Slower Living Club: A field guide to disconnecting and the life that opens up

  How to be less online, and what to do with the time you get back.

• Most people are conservative | /dev/urandom’s dev site

  One of my strongly-held opinions, and one that helps understand a lot about both politics and real life, is that most people are conservative. This is distinct from as being a conservative in the way that those who want to deport undocumented immigrants or pay as little taxes as possible or allow prayer in schools are, but rather simply that (aside from whichever issues happen to specifically matter to that specific person) most people want things to generally stay the same or slightly improve, and not be bothered otherwise.

• Vivek Ramaswamy Is Going After The Abusive Parent Vote | Defector

  Some of that is ideological, but a great deal of it is just reflex. Trump, who only understands things in terms of size and leverage, would personally identify with that predation and the worldview behind it; he’s made his life out of that. But Trump would also choose abuser over abused because he would not ever want to be confused for the weaker half of any binary. Trump would identify, instantly and instinctively, with the person doing the most harm, because they would seem to him to be winning.

• The Brand Ledger | Worse on Purpose (via)

  Tracking the brands that got worse on purpose — and the ones that didn’t. The Brand Ledger tracks 466 brands, from the tools in your garage to the pans in your kitchen. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they’re still worth buying. Updated as things change.

• Vibe coding is turning the music gear world upside down | The Verge

  These sorts of custom firmware were exceedingly rare in the pre-LLM days and required both deep expertise and an incredible investment of time. It could take weeks or months to add a simple feature like velocity sensitivity to a Korg Volca. Now, hobbyist hackers are able to turn Temu synths into full-fledged grooveboxes in a matter of days.