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brent bailey's personal weblog

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In my last one of these I alluded to there being a final stretch of travel ahead of me. I was, you will be shocked to learn, foolishly overconfident on that front. I am, once again, coming off of a month of being out of town at least every weekend. It is likely no coincidence that I am completely fucking exhausted, but one of my goals for this year was to crank out at least one blog post a month, so here's a low-effort recounting of the last couple of months to keep that promise to myself. Thi

every now and then i am reminded that things shouldn't be like this

This morning I found out I owe my dentist $1200. This is, arguably, my fault: they presented me with a treatment plan while I was sitting in the chair last week and I scanned it and said "yeah, go ahead", without clocking the part where my dental insurance doesn't cover 90% of what they were doing. It's hard to focus on the fine print when you're actively sitting in the chair, but I should have known better. It is also my fault that I'm in this position: I didn't go to the dentist for several ye

slowly, then all at once

A fairly embarrassing development of the past year is that I talk about Atomic Habits a lot now. It's the kind of airport book that I usually sneer at, and it is not what I would call a good book: it's poorly written, it makes a lot of assumptions about my life goals and personal capability that I do not appreciate, and most of the advice in it did not really work for me. I just want to enjoy my life and be able to do things I care about well, and I look to advice books to help me do that, but t

Greetings from my second heat wave in as many weeks! Since my last update post I have been extremely busy - I moved into a new apartment, and have also not been home for more than two weeks straight since May. Things I did * Cleaned out my mom's old house in WV, finding a lot of fun mementos. * Moved: arguably this does not count as "done", since we still haven't hung the art and I am still setting up my closet and office, but the new place is at least livable now. * Went to Nova Scotia a

Low Agency, High Consciousness

A couple of months ago there was a minor thinkpiece trend about the push, especially among Silicon Valley types, to be "high agency". It feels somewhat appropriate to be writing this after the hype cycle has passed since I consider myself at best a "medium agency" person, but I've been chewing on it for a while and figured I should finally write this down. I'm not sure if people are even still talking about it this way or if they've moved on to Marc Andreesen's favorite self-improvement techniqu

Still Processing

A thing people tell you a lot when someone dies is that you need to process it. It was never very clear to me what that actually means. I know everyone meant well but mostly when people told me this, or asked me how I felt, it felt like I had failed some sort of test. There was some process I was supposed to be going through, some new understanding or perspective I was supposed to find, but all I ever really had to say was some variation on "my mom died, it sucks, I'm sad about it." This remaine

When Craft Matters

Late last year I experienced a period of existential terror about the rise of AI in programming. I did not want to be left behind, unprepared for a world where all code is written by LLMs and the role of a programmer shifts to something more like overseeing an assembly line. So I bit the bullet, plunked down $20 for a Claude Code subscription, and got to work vibecoding away at a few different projects. My initial work with Claude was pretty mindblowing. I was able to crank out in a day project

March Update/Links/Screenshots

I got diagnosed with ADHD this month. This will likely come as no surprise to anyone who knows me even a little bit - I've already been getting treated for it on and off for the last few years, and given my entire deal it's not a terribly shocking development. They had me fill out a survey about how often I forget things and how much my struggles with executive function cause me difficulty in my personal life ("Highly Agree" in both cases) and then do the Conners Continuous Performance Test, whe

Live Forever As A Time Worm

Or how I learned to stop worrying and hate Interstellar Originally given as a talk at MindSwap #4, 2/7/2026. Ever since I was young I have been obsessed with time's arrow. This is in large part because as soon as I became aware of the possibility of eternal death - around age 8, if I remember correctly - I have been consumed by both terror and the desire to outwit it. The strategies most commonly recommended to me are to "make peace with it" or "find god", but neither has proved particularly

January Update/Links/Screenshots

After averaging 9 posts a month last year, I have gotten off to a slow start this year. Mostly this is because, at least for right now, I have no daily project to write about. One of my takeaways from writing at such a frenetic pace last year was that it would be nice to actually take my time drafting and editing things. I have been doing this, but it's a bit of a monkey's paw: when I don't just immediately hit "publish" after writing something I often end up either deciding it was a bad idea or

personalscreenshot-dump

I have made several stabs at writing this post this week, none of which really felt like they stuck the landing. It is very hard to cleanly capture a year that contained both my marriage and my mom's death. Some days I have felt better than I have in years, some days like I will never see sunlight again. Focusing on one or the other side of it feels like an incomplete picture, but writing an essay about how sad I am that's also about how happy I am doesn't really mesh tonally. So: it's been a he

Lotus Farming In Another World

Like many people who live in cities and spend most of their time on the computer, I fantasize a lot about leaving it all behind and touching grass forever. I try my best to be cognizant of just how much of a fantasy this is: I find it easy to get bored in the biggest city in America, so I'd probably go insane within days of moving out to a farm somewhere. Boredom aside, there is a reason manual labor is something people often try to escape, and that the ability to do it in a leisurely fashion is