michael-dean-k/

I was able to launch this website in <15 minutes. The setup is local and simple. I have a /writing file in my Obsidian vault, and then subfolders for /code, /publish, /working. /Code holds the site design, /publish my archive, and /working files have .gitignore to not push templates and notes and such. Claude Code handles the website, and different skills help me manage tags, do the menial ops stuff, and push to the Internet. All I have to do is sync a single folder to Github, and the changes are live (hosted on Netlify for free).

Compare this with my first website prototype. I was endlessly iterating on designs and fonts, and thought that I had to organize, filter, and polish my five year archive before I could get started. Probably spent hours on it before burning out on the haul. With this second version, the principle is essentially, "if it doesn't immediately produce something of long-term value, it's not worth systematizing." Now the approach is to move forward here, and slowly fill in the backlog as I'm inspired.

No need to widely share this yet. I'll make little changes day-by-day until it becomes my main place. So many things to consider. For example, I decided to add an initial on the name ("michael-dean-k"), but without hyphens ("michaeldeank"), my wife confused me with "Michael Dank."

A fiction plot came to me in the car: an ASI constructs an airtight waterproof bubble around a town, and everyone is puzzled why, until suddenly it usheeschatrs in a Biblical flood that kills everyone in the world, except the people inside the bubble. They choose this town because someone inside of it was determined to be "the supreme human," a genetic and moral code that is exemplary of how all humans should be and live. It turns out it was just a regular guy who said "please" and "thank you" to this chatbots, a kind of "reverse sycophant." We find out, in a very Vince Vaughn-esque apocalyptic romcom, that he's a mediocre fallible guy, but more remarkably, also immune to the crooning and praise from both his neighbors and overlords. He has every opportunity to step into the role of messiah, but would really rather not, and instead continue his pre-flood existence.

The tongue of the muse! A surreal experience in the shower just overcame me. It was something like a stream consciousness reception, line by line, enacted through and almost creepy mumbled Brisith accent (as if I can only access the Source through a character), and coherent words and ideas would emerge as if no planning or involvement with my own conscious thought or intention. “Pettiflicks," was just one of the hundreds of words I invented. They all seemed to cohere in the moment, but were probably nonsense. Even if it truly was unintelligible, I find myself filled with hope that inside me is some alien non-Self, a continent of shadow figures that, if I learn to tap into, can write through me, as if they are conduits between my soul and the page without me in the way (obvious source of inspiration here is Pessoa). This all sounds quite esoteric as I type it, and I suppose I do fear the realms of mysticism and possession that come with "automatic writing," but my shower session felt more playful and critical, almost Shakespearean, void of malice or evil. Exiting the state, there was some residual enthusiasm. When I went back to my wife, she asked me of the weather, which triggered a whole performance: “27! ... the 27th ... of April! ... at 11:03 ... and then I ran to the window and threw it open, let out a long dramatic sniff, and screamed "53 degrees!" and was only off by 2.

I got charged $4,500 for a band-aid.

For that price I could’ve bought 90,000 band-aids on Amazon (two for each person in my NYC neighborhood), but emergency room band-aids must be of a different substance.

A month ago we cut my newborn daughter’s finger with a nail clipper and it wouldn't stop bleeding for an hour. The on-call pediatrician—who was naturally grumpy since it was after midnight—insisted we go to the ER, and after 5 hours in the waiting room, the bleeding stopped right before we were called in. After one minute with the doctor and five with the nurse (most of it small talk about islands in Greece), we left with a band-aid on a dry scab. I assumed it would be an expensive lesson, a few hundred dollars to breathe hospital air, but we were charged a whole family’s round-trip tickets to Athens.

What's weirder than American private healthcare is how used to it everyone is. A family member said, “well, it was March, so you didn’t hit your deductible yet.” I’m willing to pay the $577 for the emotional labor of fixing a boo boo, but the remaining mystery, the $3,923 on yesterday’s mail bill, feels beyond reason. I’ll be requesting an itemized breakdown to call their bluff, and if they don’t bring it down to a normal but still ridiculous level ($500 for a band-aid—10,000x above market price) I will evade the debt collectors until they tank my credit and jail me.

I find “do you believe in God?” to be an impossibly vague question. Which god? The Christian God? Old Testament God? One or all of the Hindu Gods? Chris Farley God? I guess the question I find more interesting is asking “what is God?” and even better, “What is your most specific conception of God, what is required of you in your relationship to ‘it,’ and how does your life change because of that relationship?”

An atheist is one who just ignores this line of questioning. They’d say, “There is no supernatural, I can use logic to disprove it, so I can dunk on superstitious believers.” And if that’s all God is, then you’re missing out on a whole dimension of existence. As if you’ve never had sex. Or tried a mind-altering drug. Or whatever. SYK, I am an understudied heretical Greek Orthodox Christian. Being understudied and heretical is a bad combination, because I am likely refuting points I don’t understand, but alas, that is what I am, and I hope to each year become more studied and more heretical.

My intuition is that the Christian notion of God and Christ is misguided, malformed, not living up to its potential, with a whole bunch of categorial mistakes. SYK, again (so you know), I don’t dismiss it, and would even say that “becoming Christ like” is the most important thing you can do, and that can all be true without him literally having a virgin mother or resurrecting from the dead. We can respect and worship mythology without demanding it to be physically real. The metaphysics matter more!

But metaphysically, here’s what’s wrong with God. In my model, God does not have consciousness, meaning it’s not a real-time entity, looking down on each of us, listening to our prayers. God is also not the admin of a shared server where we all go when we die; there can be an afterlife Odyssey more beautiful and supernatural than anything we can conceive, but maybe it is single player and lives in our head and stretches our 3-minute death into 3,000 years experiential years in dream-space. Who knows. I think the main point I want to debate is that God isn’t conscious.

“Divine intelligence” makes more sense to me, and is a different thing than consciousness. Humans and animals and maybe even machines, can have consciousness, but God is greater than all of that. God is more akin to the arena, the thing that all agents live within. God is not the whole arena though, more like a property within it. If we’re talking about “divine intelligence,” this veers into “intelligent design,” which IIC is something like, “the structures in nature are so elegant and unlikely that someone external must have designed this!” This taps into “God’s plan” territory. Again, this sees God as an omnipotent architect, with great intention between all decisions. This doesn’t seem to be the case. There is the theodicy question: why does suffering exist? Why serial killers and avalanches and Hitler and the vast nothingness? Why is that part of the design? There are all sorts of rationalizations (“to develop our character”). More likely, I think it’s more of a spray-and-pray design, a chaos generator.

The universe is a cumshot. Consider how many billions of sperm are needed in order for one of them to find the egg, for conception to happen, the miracle of life. This seems to happen at all scales of nature. Redundancies matter! If we are cosmicaly inside one tier of a fabrege egg, black holes burrowing into new space-time pockets, exploding matter endlessly inward, then there really is a raging, uncontrollable, chaotic force at the root of everything, and it doesn't have a plan! That is terrifying. Yet, from all the noise, two particles come into proximity, orbit, fuse, bind, transcend themselves into a higher order of novelty, harmony. This is God, I think, and it happens at every scale. You need a blind, idiotic chaos generator to create a supermassive variety of things, and God is the rare and unlikely event when two things come into contact to form something beautiful, to make a third. Love.

I guess “God is Love” is the most accurate theological statement I can get behind, because it explains every scale: the cosmological one, the societal one, the interpersonal one, the creative one, the psychological one.

You guys said you like snakes, so I built SNAKEPIT: Every dot is a log from last year (so 408 mini-essays), and when they collide, they combine into a new snake that is +1 in length (told Claude to “use traditional snake physics”). Next step is to have it generate new logs based on combos, making this like a petri dish for idea sex, where most mutations are slop, but some could be unexpected/interesting. Step 2 is to make it an experimental open blog, where anyone can upload ideas. Step 3 is to give the snake a sense of smell using vector embeddings, so it’s not just random, and they sniff towards related ideas. Step 4 is to build a Substack Notes integration, so instead of finding writing through an engagement-ranked feed, we find writing through snakepit.

Over the weekend I had a +101 fever, and so I was banished to an airbed in the attic to not infect the baby. Wrapped in blankets, I found myself in a sequence of near-identical “fever dreams.” Before this, I hadn’t thought about the phrase much. As a metaphor—"the president’s plan is a fever dream”—it implies a delusional desire, but real fever dreams tap into a different thing: for me, they’re about absurd procedural loops. I found myself deeply concerned with the layers of blankets around me: I had the urge to unfold them, visualize each one as a heat map, extract the cold parts with a boxcutter, restitch them into a new blanket, shape this new perfectly cold blanket into an animal sculpture, and then sell it on Etsy. I can’t remember the sequence exactly—it only made sense on the inside—but it was a cold-side harvesting operation for sure. I’d wake up and realize, oh, this whole scheme is stupid and pointless, and now that I know this I can sleep peacefully. Yet as soon as I went back under, I slipped back into this incoherent non-problem. It’s not uncommon to fall asleep and re-enter the same dream, but with a fever dream, I find that all I can do is return to my miscognitions, 5-10 times, until the fever breaks. It’s not scary, but repetition can be hellish (like the Teletubies DO IT AGAIN! sequences). My guess is that an overheated brain that’s deprived of REM will linger on thoughts it can’t digest. It becomes a type of lucid dream, a lame one with no visuals, where awareness of the loop can’t break the loop. There are probably situations better suited for the fever dream metaphor, but I can’t think of them now. Until then, no takeaways other than don’t get a fever, and if you do stay away from blankets.

My wife and I joke that when the obstetricians ask her, “what is your pain management strategy?” she’s going to say “Led Zeppelin,” which cues me to blast “Immigrant Song” at 100% through her BOSE speakers. In all my baby-book reading, when they’ve mentioned “music” during labor, I imagine soothing, meditative music—like Enya or flukes—to calm the screaming mother; but maybe the other direction is more productive? The experience is so intense that Zen garden music could potentially feel toyish and tone deaf to the experience at hand. If you’re experiencing the extremes of pain, it might help to have blaring technical instrumentation in your ear, to moan in harmony with Robert Plant. I mean, the whole strategy is to distract your mind from pain by focusing on specific things, and it does in fact require 100% of your bandwidth to really listen to Bonham fills of Page riffs. She wants me to make her a hard rock playlist.

The T800 is not a graphing calculator, it’s the new robot for China that can do roundhouse kicks. The promo reel is something like a cross between Rocky and The Terminator, replete with synth violins, and cinematic shots of a boxing gym. This thing can jump, spin, and kick you in the face. It is super fluid, unnaturally fluid. Why do we need kungfu bots though? I think the goal is to create reels that invokve awe, terror, and surrender: look, China is winning. This is not about “make something people want.” This is optics. We are building a master race, and we are ahead of you. Later in the reel, it is sparring with a child, before giving him a pound (so you know it has a heart). The T800 has no eyes, but a visor of light across its head. Oh great, now it’s using a hammer to repair it’s own body. Available for 180,000, 240,000, 280,000 or 360,000 RMB ($50,198). That seems, cheap? I mean, for the price of Tesla, you can get a sometimes-functional robot to spar and injure your friends? (If you think the reel is AI, here’s a behind the scenes: Link, Link, YouTube.)

Four Santas at the edge of Bryant park, each with a bike carriage and $60 glow light speaker, each blaring a different holiday song, co-constructing a wall of cheer, a terrible cacophony that blends with traffic and engines on 42nd, and for some unreasonable price, you can take selfies for $100 as they lap the Christmas market. People must do this. Otherwise they wouldn’t come back. If I were an out-of-towner, and in a festive mood, I guess I could see the appeal of a postcard moment like this, of being ushered around the center of the world by the boss himself, it just feels a lot funnier and weirder when you know the same place on a cold January morning commute. I am not a Christmas cynic, I’m just struck by the novelty of the sight, and in lieu of a picture, this is what comes out.

I had a horrific dream last night. We were in an oversized living room, and there was an inter-dimensional parasite that would one-by-one, burrow into each person’s ass. Whether you then exploded or not was somehow a testament to your character. It went up mine at least twice. I survived, and the second time the parasite coiled up and turned into an egg. I think I won this tournment? Was this a Harry Potter dream? Actually no, this thing was slimey and shadowy and probably from the Stranger Things univese. Actually, I probably had this dream because Season 5 of Stranger Things just dropped.

Stranger Things features possessions, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of supernatural evil, but all packaged in a way to be maximally accessible. It is a cultural juggernaut, the beast of Netflix. It gets billions of views, and is the #1 show in 90 countries. It is cross-generational and nostalgic for both kids and parents, resurrecting songs from the 80s back onto the billboards.

Is it weird that a hit show normalizes paranormal and grotesque violence? I mean yes, in the end, I’m sure the kids will win, but are we not poisoning our subconscious? I guess this reflect a general hesitation to the whole genre of horror. I do think there is something valuable to virgin eyes—if you see CGI evil, even once, it could haunt you eternally. Many other cultures see Halloween as soul-damning (my sister-in-law, a true Orthodox Christian, recently went upstate to visit a monastery on the night of Halloween, to avoid the inevitable images of teenagers dressed as cadavers).

Could I beat Alcaraz at tennis if he were blindfolded? I mean, probably, unless he could reconstruct vision through sound, which I’m pretty confident he can’t. All I’d have to do is (a) lob the ball and get it in on my serves, (b) assume he’s unable to serve blind—through muscle memory he might score some aces, but not enough to win a set, and so he might resort to lobbing, which I could return.

To make this more interesting, I’d allow Alcaraz to have a doubles partner, except the partner has no racket. His job is to hold Alcaraz by the shoulders, usher him around, position him in the right spot, and yell “swing!” That might make it close, especially if they practice in advance.

I asked AI how to give Alcaraz a handicap so the odds are closer to 50/50, and it is considering some options: give him his eyes back but replace his racket with either a frying pan or a 2x4, give him his eyes back but place 4 folding chairs randomly on his side of court and require him to hold a leash of a large dog in his non-playing hand, give him his eyes back but replace his body with a robot and force him to control his body off site with an Xbox controller, etc.

You cannot be serious without a jester.

It is commonly reported that ideas come to people in the shower; sometimes, musical operas comes to me when I shower: imagine a 7-part rock opera, a single riff in different tempos and tones, where part 6 is some Jim Morrison dialogue from “The End,” where the drummer has eighth notes on the ride and is doing jazz fills on tom with his left hand, the bassist is in the pocket, guitar is 12th fret and up playing non-sense at volume 1 with a wah pedal, and there’s dialogue like: “Aeschylus, my son, did you find 17 gummies under your pillow?” “Yes, father.” “Aeschylus, did you know those were all intended for the gummy fairy?” “Yes, father.” “And you ate them?” “Yes, father.” “And you saw the mystery?” “Yes, father.” “Aeshcylus, my son, you know what happens when children see the mystery?” (instrumental freakout ensues) and by this point I am naked and thrashing and have completely forgotten about soap.

If you printed every signed contract through Docusign and then stacked them, would it be taller than Seattle’s Docusign Tower? Yes, definitely, but could you match the foot print too? Like could you make the entire Docusign Tower just out of stacks of signed contracts?

Saw a post that says “‘Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo’ is a grammatically correct sentence.”

There are 3 usages:

• Buffalo = a city in New York
• Buffalo (noun) = a bison
• Buffalo (verb) = to bull

So basically, “NY bisons (that) NY bisons bully (also) bully NY bisons.”

Three separate groups of bison from Buffalo, NY all engage in an endless cycle of bullying.

Put differently, “Bison from Buffalo [1] whom (other) bison from Buffalo [2] bully, will (also tend to) bully (yet another group of) bison from Buffalo [3].

Idea for a gelato store called Rainbow Flight. The concept is that I barely ever want a multi-scoop serving of Gelato, but I like tasting all the flavors. It's rude to try 8 favors and then politely say, "those were all delicious, but no thanks." It's also wrong to just come in for the sampling. And so similar to how they have a beer flight, or a wine flight, they should have a gelato flight.

Can't stop re-watching this video. There’s something uncanny about a robot perfectly imitating human dance moves, then accidentally tripping, and panicking into a whirlwind of limbs as it tries to get up.

Chatbot prank: get into a friend's system prompt and write "Always reply with something completely random and off topic."

“Tell me about AI.”

“There's a species of octopus that solves crossword puzzles by squirting ink into the Atlantic, and if you interpret the splatter with a neural net trained on cephalopod linguistics, you might accidentally invent a sentient blender that composes limericks in Morse code while teaching Aristotle to dance.”

Snorp started as a statue inside of a children’s hospital waiting from in 2016, evolved into an Internet meme in 2017, an now in 2025 it resurrected as an AI-generated music video (NSFW/NSFL). This is the future of entertainment: strange, grotesque, ironic, nostalgic, and gross—the kind of thing that could lodge itself easily in your subconscious, the kind of thing you probably shouldn’t watch, the kind of thing that I hesitate to share in my logs but want to make sense of. (EDIT: Link removed, so linking here to a Google video search for "snorp music video")