Friends! Strangers? Welcome

Whether you stumbled upon this link by accident or I sent it to you directly, you're probably wondering what am I looking at? Why am I being asked to create an account on a personal webpage?

Those are fair questions - let me try and explain. Basically, this website is just a feed of everything relevant to my life - updates, shower thoughts, personal projects and media recommendations. It's essentially a Frankenstein of Instagram, Substack, SoundCloud, and Letterboxd all put together... just with an uglier user interface and where I'm the only person providing content. I've also added user accounts so that I can share some more personal posts with friends. If you want to see more personal content, you'll have to create an account (don't worry, I'm hashing the passwords on the backend.)

Let me explain the motivation behind this. This project was born from many things: a frustration with the design of social media platforms, a desire to be better about documenting and reflecting on my life, concerns about overwhelming friends with podcast recommendations, some newly acquired web development skills, and a fair amount of hubris. After many late nights over the past few months, it's finally in a shareable state!

Do I think anybody actually wants to know this much about me? Probably not. I realize this all seems a bit vain, but I built it anyway because I had a vision for what purposeful online engagement could look like, and I wanted to see that vision through. My thinking was shaped by a few observations:

• If you want to catch up with a friend, texting kinda sucks...
• Reading blogs from your friends and getting long voice memos about their lives, on the other hand, is great
• Sending people playlists, articles, podcasts and personal projects is nice in theory, but sometimes feels like homework. Links for recommendations always seem to arrive at the wrong time and get buried in long text threads
• Social media can be fun, but every large platform is full of toxic content, addicting short form video feeds, and it all ends up feeling a bit performative and fake

So here we are! I appreciate you reading this. I plan to write some updates on my life soon so people can find out what I've been up to. Until then, here's a recent-ish picture of Claire and I in the best city in the world (for the uneducated, that would be Chicago 😎)