Wednesday, June 10 2026
Published
Hi, Jeff here. I want to let you know that this website is still alive. I’ve been writing a lot, but it’s not clear when that writing will ever land. So I wanted to publish a proof-of-life.
I’m almost two years in to this website and I haven’t figured out what I want it to be. I know what I want it to be about, but the frequency, length, and type of posts is still up in the air.
Every page of Confabulator features links to three top-level categories of posts. Internet Media, Future Garbage, and Digital Ownership. These are like the Confabulator canon. They’re the big ideas that I’m chewing on all the time, the things I’m trying to collect my thoughts about. They’re why I have this website and why I’m excited about it. I expect that as my thinking progresses, I will change and make changes in my life, at least changes that matter to me.
When I started out a couple years ago, I imagined that every post would add to a foundation of ideas and they’d build on each other as I went. But adding to the canon of ideas is slow. It’s taken me around five or six years to arrive where I am now. Given that, it’s unreasonable to expect that I’ll have major breakthroughs that require a blog post several times a year.
For Confabulator to be the kind of website that I would follow, it needs a more predictable cadence, but I’m not in the business of creating content. I follow people on the internet who put out a brand new podcasts or YouTube videos every single week. I have great respect and admiration for their abilities. That’s not how I am.
My little tinkering projects (like my old Android phone media player) lend themselves to being content, but only briefly. A goal of these projects is to escape the tech upgrade hamster wheel. I expect to use them for years or until they break. If I’m successful, there won’t be many updates to give about them.
Still, I’d like to publish more. I think I’d benefit from having shorter status-style posts in between the bigger posts. Publishing more often would at least help my writing, even if it doesn’t advance the other goals of the website.
Anyway, I’m still figuring out what I want this website to be. This time of year is usually a time for reflection anyway. It’s mid-year and the weather is nice in Chicago, so I’m outside on my bicycle more, soaking up the sun and being a weird tourist in the area.
I’ll leave you with this. I’m thinking a lot about the future as both a narrative of progress and the promise of tomorrow. The future that we live in is a complete mess. It’s easy to call it a dystopia. A little too easy. I can’t shake the feeling that dystopian and apocalyptic thinking are part of a broader con-job. Not to dismiss the very real and bad things that happen, but I’m skeptical about this specific kind of despair.
More to come. Thank you for reading!