Moon Tiger

Solstice Happenings 2025

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 04:00:00 GMT

Now that I am entering my third year of only using this blog when the sun is at its zenith, It’s simultaneously easier to update when the time comes and harder to any other time. On the bright side, I’ve found a sustainable release cadence!

Looking at my last update, I don’t see many changes. I’m still juggling my day job, client work, and childcare, and wishing that I was able to do more to care for my body and control my focus. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a Panera (where I’m pleased to report I have become a member of the Unlimited Sip Club) where an unholy remix of Sixpence None The Richer’s “Kiss Me” is playing too loud right above my head, and I’m keeping an eye on the support channel for my real job while kid is doing trapeze tricks at her indoor summer camp on the hottest day of the year (so far!). The Eternal Hodgepodge.

I guess that’s what I signed up for, and every time I get jealous of the engineers that can put in a 12 hour day and really get into a flow state, I remember that they are the monastics, and my householder status permeates every iota of my life. I told a friend that I need to remind myself at the end of the day where it feels like I didn’t move the ball forward at all, that I took care of my family and spent time with my kid, and that’s is an irreversible investment of attention and care that reverberates forward, forever.

I’m feeling that big time due to wife’s cancer episode, which thankfully is coming to a long-tailed conclusion after a successful surgical procedure. I’m so grateful we caught it early, the procedure went well, blah blah blah. It sucked, and I doubled the plates I was spinning knowing I was going to drop a few. Learned a lot about apologizing, but also a lot about demanding the grace and patience that I extend to others when they fall short. Just like after kid was born, I relished asking for help, knowing that it’s as much a favor for the helper as it is for the helped.

The other big change is that kid is in some form of school now, which gives wife some time to collect her thoughts and pursue her projects after 3 1/2 long years of full-time parenting. I don’t know what full-on School is going to look like but in retrospect September of last year was a chapter break, and now kid has a social scene and a place to get a break from us. I’m finding it easier to relax while on duty; instead of kid needing entertainment from me she is finding other kids to play with, or activities to puzzle over. There’s a sense of balance that simply wasn’t there before.

My public social media presence has mostly dried up, but I’ve been spending a lot of time in closed groups, where there is a frenzy of activity. Due almost entirely to my decision to review every season of Survivor I watch, I’ve gotten some writing practice in the past year, that I sense will pay off in the future for something more tangible. It feels good when I can sit down and bang something out that’s been burning a hole in my to-do list for weeks, like the words you’re reading right now. What I’m learning is that writing and coding are two different activities, and I need to decide which I’m doing at any given point and get into that zone. I have too many web sites, with more on the way, but Phil’s Web Site is accreting into my main web presence, and I’m having a lot of fun figuring it out.

Intention time: I yearn to bounce and wiggle and sit again. I want my poor feet to be healed one day. I’ve broken ground on a private web site platform designed for families, and would love to look back on a year of progress on that front. I also maybe want to be on Survivor, which would involve a lot of major life changes to even be in a position to be eligible. On the other hand, I would get to make a new web site for that...

Solstice Happenings, 2024

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a while since I updated this blog, and I’m grateful to the solstice for giving me a nucleation point, since I checked in on myself last time the sun was at its apex, and now I have some writing to reflect on.

My memory of last year’s solstice was that of a mighty burst of energy and willpower, centered around an ambitious workout plan, that immediately fizzled out but nevertheless provided a feeling of forward motion at the time. I was prepared to contrast that to my present feeling of extreme lethargy and burnout. There’s a number of factors at play: I am in the long tail of caffeine withdrawal, I’ve started to walk more after my Apple Watch told me I’m so sedentary it can’t tell if I have a medical condition, and this go around I’ve added an actual company to the chainsaws I’ve been juggling. After multiple nights of 9+ hours of sleep, Luree checked my hair for tick bites, but I think my lifestyle of extreme householding is just catching up to me.

A typical workday for me now is some combination of carting kid to her various babysitters and activities, finding a loud coffeeshop to settle in for a few hours of work, attending my jobby job meetings, trying to use any surplus time to work on web sites for the job I want to be doing, and despairing at how fast the clock moves when I finally get in the groove. Before I know it I’m pulled back out to attend to an obligation and the cycle repeats. Rapid context switching is something my brain refers to as “bad”, and so it’s no surprise that it needs more rest than usual. Unfortunately that rest sometimes happens when I really need it to be doing something productive instead, bringing my velocity down to a snail’s crawl.

This is extremely demoralizing, and last year’s writing touches familiar themes: my struggle to take care of my body, feeling “too busy” to properly rest and relax and practice, a never-ending battle against The Morning. A lot of the struggles look the same.

But what I forgot completely about was the tail end of my post, where I note two things related to my work:

First, I stop trying to tie my professional identity to the boring financial services infrastructure clusterfuck that cuts my paychecks, since it sucks and saddens my soul proportionally to how long I spend thinking about it. I was coming to realize how the enterprise-sized inefficiencies in org structure and team dynamics created a golden opportunity for time theft, and how much better I felt after I stopped trying to make myself a willing participant in that system.

But then, look at this shit:

I am also speaking aloud a dream I’ve kept safe for some time: one day I want to own my own software consultancy. There’s one of those brick suburban office buildings like 6 doors down from me and I want to rent a space there and then walk 50 feet to work. I want to be able to take on a gig for a lot of money, or turn it down and do nothing. I want to own my work, and be proud of it.

I completely forgot that I had formed this intention, and am delighted to have Law Of Attraction’d my way into exactly the circumstances that I dared to dream. Tiger Pajamas is not (yet) a load-bearing income source, and due to a legendarily shitty job market I am stuck DevOpsing for the foreseeable future, stealing bits of time to chip away at my dream, but seeing where I was a year ago puts the journey into perspective. Last summer solstice all I could do was form an intention, and 365 days later my name is on registration papers for an LLC and real money from a real job that we completed is sitting in my bank account, and every day, in between meetings and code spelunking and worries that I’m not doing enough, I’m ideating with my colleagues with wild abandon, forming the intentions that, for all we know, may just pop out of the universe, fully formed, directly into our laps.

Let's see what the next year brings.

A Gaggle of Solstice Happenings

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

New things are happening today. Is it the new moon? The solstice? The cusp of Cancer? Who's to say, but I went into this weekend exhausted and confused and came out with a new burst of energy that is going to carry me somewhere new.

On the homefront, I've had trouble fitting in a routine for doing nourishing things for myself. This includes lots of stuff that falls into the "spirituality bucket," but more importantly the basic things that are necessary for baseline physical health. I have been prescribed a dizzying array of movements, stretches, muscle releasing exercises, and equipment to battle Plantar Fasciitis, and it's extremely demoralizing to have not made much progress since it first reared its head last summer. I need to carve out time for this stuff, but I procrastinate constantly through work, childcare, household chores, and leisure activities.

Waking up early is a good trick, but our household routine revolved around Kid's wakeup time, which varied wildly. The breakthrough happened when we solidified our morning schedule, which gives me a guaranteed "off the clock" window until 7:30, when I wake up the family and make breakfast. I was inspired to join the local community center gym based on this guarantee, and was able to spring out of bed this morning at 6, hop in the car where my gym bag awaited, and do my stretches and whatnot, plus some bench presses, while the local clientele took potshots at the news. This feels very good.

Also, I am cutting loose the idea that I am trying to be a DevOps Guy, even temporarily. My soul recoils from the endless business bureaucracy that creeps over any technical work like poisoned molasses. I've barely written any code! And by releasing myself from the expectation that I'll be working here for much longer, I can avoid feeling like I should learn how the specifics of this megacorp's team structure actually work.

I am also speaking aloud a dream I've kept safe for some time: one day I want to own my own software consultancy. There's one of those brick suburban office buildings like 6 doors down from me and I want to rent a space there and then walk 50 feet to work. I want to be able to take on a gig for a lot of money, or turn it down and do nothing. I want to own my work, and be proud of it.

Nothing about my present circumstances gets me closer to that, so I need to change things up. But for the past 3 years I've also been content to sort of passively gain technical experience. Having a kid made work seem very unimportant, but as she gets older, optimizing for loafing seems to be more of an excuse to not try hard than an earnest plea for work-life balance. Wherever I end up next, I want to kill it and I want to be rewarded for killing it.

Maybe doing some learning in public will help grow my network, or maybe the work itself will be valuable to my resume, but I am going to have fun in the coming weeks testing the limit for how little work I can get done at what is ostensibly my full-time job.

Should be fun!

Zagways

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This site, like many other projects of mine, has not gotten a lot of love in the past few months. Usually this is a sign that my ambitions have predictably crashed to earth in the face of the effort required to sustain them, and that is certainly a part of the story. Thankfully this time around the cycle of willpower I have something to show for it.

Jesse and I have been friends for 20 years and bandmates for 10. Our band has been a reliable creative engine for a long time, and it's a natural fit to take some of our conversations (which can take on the properties of a vaudeville routine) and put them on the internet for others to hear. We have both struggled on creative projects in the past (including not one but two failed podcasts before this one) and it's been immensely rewarding to make a stable container for us to dump our minds into.

Our mandate is simple: we find things to share with each other. This has given us the flexibility to figure out what the show is while we're doing it, and it's taking on its own character as we get our podcasting sea legs (episode 10 is being recorded tonight). Spontaneity is a big theme, as we show up having not fully prepared or surprising our cohost with a topic out of left field. There's a habitual tendency to keep each other on our toes, and the best moments of the show are when we are thrown off our game enough to let some new energy through.

To give you a flavor of the kinds of things that happen: Jesse has had an ongoing fascination with a tiny local newspaper, I go into some detail on my qigong practice and the struggles of being a parent, Jesse invented a game show called AI or Cool Guy that is impossible to win, I watched the worst-reviewed movie on rotten tomatoes and lived to tell the tale, and so on. There is a small but dedicated "Zaggurat" of listeners, which is endlessly cool, and the fact that we have two audio projects that can reference one another is going to open a lot of fun doors.

Search "zagways" in your podcast app of choice to check it out, and check out our meager web site to see all the places you can find us.

the why of the tiger

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

hey man. what's with the tiger

well,

in my current online incarnation, i am a part of Tiger Twitter. what is Tiger Twitter? people who have tiger pfps. but why do people have tiger pfps. many reasons, but i am one of the ones that have tiger pfps because they do tiger qigong.

ok so what is tiger qigong

well,

it's the tiger-style ancient chinese shamanic form of qigong practice, as taught by a guy named Zhongxian Wu who learned it in China and then came to america and wrote a book and recorded a dvd and then moved to sweden. in chinese it's called laohugong, which is roughly "old tiger qigong"

hold on. what's qigong

well,

qigong is a chinese movement practice. if there is a spectrum of intensity between tai chi and kung fu, qigong is kind of in the middle. it's not SUPER fast, but it is kind of bouncy. you do it to cultivate qi.

wait. what's qi?

well,

qi/chi is energy. not physical energy, but it can become that when it interacts favorably with a human. you can say spiritual energy if you want, or life energy if you don't. kind of like the Force.

you ever know you need to do something and can't bring yourself to do it? like there's some sort of motivational battery and it's currently drained so you're running on autopilot, letting more automatic subsystems take charge and go through the motions?

that's qi. or at least, the lack of it. i spend most of my time in that mode so personally i feel its absence more acutely than its presence. when you're getting shit done and living life and not thinking about how you could be doing something else? that's qi power.

to me, at least. maybe it's something different to you! i'm not trying to be scientific. it gives me language to express my inner state that feels much more precise than whatever i'd get from psychology.

so why do qigong? that's why! imo it's better to feel like i do when qi is flowing than when it's not. i'm prone to procrastination and qigong is something i especially procrastinate on because when i do it i procrastinate less. procrastination hates this one weird trick!

so how did you get into tiger qigong?

well,

the cool thing is i can't really say WHY i started. i can say that when i didn't have a tiger pfp i stumbled on a thread of buddhist shitposts collected by a guy named taalumot who did. and he posted about zen and being a dad, which i thought was cool

and he made a thread about tiger qigong and i thought that was cool too. and that thread had links to other people who were doing tiger qigong so i followed those people too.

and then one day i was like "i want to do something with my body and mind that is good" and i bought the book online and started doing it. and i liked it!

so i was like hey i do tiger qigong and all the tigers said cool, you can be a tiger on twitter too if you want. and then i did

what do you like about it?

well,

i like how focused it makes me. for a long time, during the dark Omicron days, i did it every day, and sat in zen meditation every day, and i felt like i was bursting with energy.

i don't like how there's a part of me that tells me that it's me, and how often i believe it. and qigong helps the bigger quieter parts come out and do their thing.

i like how it collects power in my gut, which is where my best ideas and instincts come from. many remarkable opportunities have come my way and i like to think that part of why is that i'm loosey goosey enough to see them as they arrive and grab on.

i like the people who also do tiger qigong. they're a friendly bunch and i have become friends with many of them and been introduced to lots of tiger-adjacent people through them.

that, i think, is what's up with the tiger.

wanna try doing the tiger stuff?

well,

hmu

Humans Using AI

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

oops, i made another web site.

this is one of those situations where you have an idea, and the idea sort of unpacks itself in your mind for a while and it becomes a Big Idea and then it is so cumbersome and fraught with emotion that by the time you begin to work on it the mismatch between the complex shining beauty in your mind and the lump of crap you have started to make is so disappointing that it fizzles out completely and you deny it ever happened. does that ever happen to you? happens to me all the time.

only! except! this time! i struck while the iron was hot and made something and put it out there. i did so following the wise counsel of the heavenly spheres which helped me fell the first domino before i talked myself out of it. even though i haven't made much headway since then (ironically i expect my personal project productivity to skyrocket when i am working at a job again), i've been mulling over what kind of writing i want to do. i don't have a voice yet over there so i'm going to dump some thoughts here and maybe that will help.

every time i've given the "elevator pitch" for this site i have started with a negative definition. like the eternal flowing Dao, it's easier to describe what it is not:

hype
content marketing for a startup
AGI doomerism
is it a Mind? is it a Guy?!!
get rich quick bullshit
make a toy app in 30 seconds bullshit
robot makes all the decisions and i am its human thrall bullshit

i just realized tonight that i am doing this precisely because i want to be very clear about the feelings i am trying not to induce. all the shit above has really bad vibes!! it brings up in me a strong mania, like a cosmic godlike power is within arm's reach and i should either grab on and try to claim its power or tear my hair and weep and beg it for mercy. or it pisses me off, like clearly this thread is aimed at a16z so why is it even in my feed.

what if ai but chill though. like 'oh yeah that's cool'. or even 'wow that's exciting!' it just might be possible to squeeze some good vibes out of this technology but i will need to be severely discerning about what kind of personalities and projects i am platforming. it has to be baked into the bones.

so what does get written about? i don't know. how about this?

i know my first actual post will be about my request for a script to help me start new blog posts on this site, one that i ran right before typing these very words. my personal touch with a power that awakened a latent curiousity and empowered me to do things that i long ago told myself i couldn't. removing those sorts of restraints can change a person, lead them to make things they otherwise would have let sit, crystalline and perfect in their heads.

and then i guess i'll see if anyone else has a story like that.

The Aeon

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I slept fitfully last night. Waking up and checking the timeline, it seemed like I wasn't alone. There was an obvious culprit: the release yesterday of GPT-4, the latest large language model from OpenAI had erupted onto the timeline, bringing unimaginable utility to our fingertips without warning.

I had been sitting on the sidelines of AI discourse, content to let it happen but wary of getting caught up in a hype bubble. There have been a few booms and busts over the years and it remained to be seen if AI chatbots were the vanguard of the future or somewhere closer to a fad. One session with GPT-4 has convinced me of its —and surely its successors'— disruptive potential.

This site has a modern look but I interface with it as a codebase, and each new post is a markdown file in a certain folder with some frontmatter metadata at the top. The header image lives in another folder and needs to be pointed to in the frontmatter, and after I find the image I need to move it to the right directory. These are all simple things but there's a lot of steps and sometimes I mess them up. This is the sort of thing a script might be able to help with.

I asked GPT to generate a groovy script that would, given a filename slug, generate a markdown file with that name in the correct location, with the frontmatter template. And then it did.

In all of 10 seconds I had a script that is immensely useful to me (it's the reason this post exists now vs when I would have had time to make it later) and that would have taken a fair amount of syntax and library research for me to write on my own.

I went back and forth, asking for adjustments that would get the behavior I was looking for, and each time the model spit out a new script that incorporated the changes I asked for in plain english.

When I was ready to run the script I got an error. I just copy pasted the error message into the chat window and the model apologized for using the same variable name twice and spit out a new version of the script that worked. I made the changes by hand, but later I discovered buggy behavior and manually traced it back to me not making the change in all the places I should have. I should have trusted the model!

Now, after maybe 5 minutes of work, I have reduced the amount of copy/pasting, file dragging, and context-switching required to write a new post. This is likely to increase my throughput since the context switching required to get a new post set up is a big friction point to writing at all.

Machines can do this now. This is not a group of early adopters thinking about what things will look like if trends continue, this is here now. I wrote a silly little script in 5 minutes, next I'm going to see if I can write a full-stack app in an hour. I feel like I have to grapple with this right now because it's going to change everything and I'm mostly terrified it's going to make me unemployed again in the near future.

Like what happens now. What do we do with all this surplus product. What happens to the people who don't need it anymore. What do the giant corporations and nation states that run the world do with this technology. How can I protect my family against this, much less get value out of it.

I'm in a position where I can use this to help me make a living, which is exciting. But thinking about the positives or negatives induces mania. I think we all need to be very careful about how we interface with this new thing. It's going to drive some of us crazy.

the drag

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

i have a sense memory this morning of waking up after a night of drinking with the taste of stale cigarettes in my mouth. it's been years since i smoked cigarettes and months since i drank, but i know where it's coming from.

i've been indulging lately. thankfully my addiction no longer attaches itself to a substance or behavior that is acutely destructive and overwhelmingly difficult to change, but the base layer is still there. maybe it never goes away, idk. it tells me that i lost my fucking job, of course i can skip all the stupid things i do to make myself feel better and stress eat garbage food and get zooted on caffeine for no reason and live on my phone and etc etc. the language of self-compassion that has something...else underneath.

well guess what i got a fucking job and the stress underlying these impulses has been gone for a few days now so now i just feel my body sagging and shuddering under all of this mindless consumption. but i can't just cool it, no! i have to pick a day and go all out in a crescendo of gluttony, saying goodbye to all my favorite vices with maximum catharsis.

that was yesterday, as i took the kid on an all-day adventure. much fried food and aspartame was had and we had a great time. this morning i get the house to myself, and there's 2 weeks of downtime in my calendar before the rat race begins again, so the coffee is decaf, the chocolate chips are gone, and my phone once again is a boring brick useful for very specific utilities, and maybe my nervous system will once again slowly unlearn the habit of being one tap away from the online shitshow at the expense of any awareness or presence in my actual life.

this is, i'm coming to learn, the raw material i have to shape what my life looks like, today. it's the prima materia. i think about and tweak it all the time and sort of study the outputs. it turns out getting good at breaking cycles makes you aware of the meta-cycles, and maybe that just goes on forever.

i would love to do some qigong, maybe sit for a bit. but there's so much internal resistance. the other day i sort of landed on the idea of qi being the opposite of...whatever this is, and when i can get a regular practice of just being in my body and cultivating energy, this force loses its grip and a torrent of virtuous cycles can germinate after long dormancies. i don't think i'm strong enough today, but maybe i can build a container of mild restraint that will help me get there tomorrow.

how to meditate

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

there's been lots of discourse recently related to meditation and how it is apparently some level up techno mind power thing and it's gone far enough. That's not what it's ABOUT. allow me to enlighten you

ok so you gotta retreat to a calm, quiet space. preferably with cool art on the walls, incense if you've got it. do you have a little bell you can ring? hit that shit

sit on your cool cushion, sit cross legged with your back straight. CLOSE YOUR EYES. it doesn't really matter what you do with your hands, as long as your wrists are resting on your knees and your fingers are twisted up into some cool mystical shit

breathe in, breathe out. you shouldn't have to wait more than 5 seconds before your consciousness is translated fully into a dream realm. it's going to be really zenned out. probably a grassy field or an old tree at night. maybe a fuckin sweet temple with lots of wind chimes

anyway, did you have an old mentor figure that was super important to you? did they die recently in a tragic murder/accident? they're going to be here, waiting for you! if not, idk like an old wise man and/or lady

give em a hug, cry a little. you know you want to. say the thing that you didn't get to, get that closure. that's the good stuff. they'll probably tell you that they're proud of you and you're doing great. you can stop here if you want to

unless you're after a macguffin. you know, the magical artifact that could destroy the world if it falls into the wrong hands. and the bad guy is about to use it. you have one of those? probably. idk if this will apply if not

well the mentor will tell you something like "it was in you all along" or something cool and mind-blowing like that. at this point one of two things happen

scenario 1: you overcame the psychic block that was holding your powers back. snap out of it, buckaroo, because you're basically invincible at this point. go save the world

scenario 2: they're being cute and the macguffin is LITERALLY INSIDE OF YOU. obtain the right OTC medication and get to work

ok I think that just about covers it. lmk if you have any questions

quitting

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

i’m logging out of twitter for a few weeks while I look for a new job. last time I took a break from social media I found a job, so this is sort of a rain dance situation. but it’s also sort of what I do. i’m consistently interested in habits, and i’m constantly fucking around with my own to see what happens and to try to feel better about what i’m doing on a more regular basis.

since the kid arrived, I no longer have the willpower to START things frequently (though I guess this blog would disagree) but STOPPING things feels like it takes much less effort. just don’t do it! right now I am currently not consuming caffeine, processed sugar (this one really comes and goes), alcohol, video games, and now twitter.

there’s a thing that happens where you take some dissociative activity out of your quiver and then a time comes where you usually just reflexively do that thing and then you just sit there and notice yourself instead. the downside is that this is hard and it sucks, but turning these moments around goes such a long way toward feeling like you’re spending your time well.

something about being a remote information worker with a toddler in These Times makes me feel like a deep sea fish, my physiology held together by massive atmospheric pressure. take me to the surface and I immediately fall apart. there have been time where my environment has massively depressurized me and I sort of have to keep it all together in a way that seems unintuitive. like having a kid makes it hard to get quality alone time for long stretches, but I know that without my family to take care of I would have sunk into the couch on layoff day and not gotten up for a few weeks.

all of which to say, I don’t really know what relaxing is anymore but denying myself the ability to compulsively remove myself from presence helps. maybe one day I won’t have to do that.