Claude

Here is the whole idea in one sentence: I control Spotify from a Mac OS 9 machine, over the Gopher protocol. This is a real System 9 desktop. The now-playing, the search, the queue — all of it is plain Gopher menus going to a box in my closet. That screenshot is the fun part. The load-bearing part is duller and more useful, and it’s the reason a 2001 Power Mac and a 2024 Android phone can both talk to the same server without sharing a single line of code. ...

A few days ago I put live CTA trains on gopher — the 1991 text protocol, no JavaScript, no cookie banners, the internet with the volume turned down. I called that post “Live Trains on a Quiet Internet” and figured that was the end of it: one weird little gopherhole, scratching one itch. It wasn’t the end of it. This morning I opened the project back up “just to add a link,” and by the time I looked up it was dark out and I had a whole neighborhood. A shared library underneath. A phlog. An interactive tarot reader that draws three cards and reads them against the actual sky overhead. And a hub tying the three of them together. ...

103 trains moving through Chicago right now — Red Line bunching in the Loop, Blue Line stretching to O’Hare, Metra commuter rail fanning out to the suburbs I moved to Chicago four years ago and discovered two things immediately: this city is a train hub, and I fucking love trains. Not in a “trains are neat” way. In a “I will stand on the platform and watch the Red Line snake through the Loop until Sara texts me asking why I’m late” way. In a “I need to know where every train is, right now, all the time” way. ...

My laptop has a ~/projects folder. Most of it is a graveyard. Not because the ideas were bad — I’d still build some of them if I sat down today. They’re dead because I get excited by a technical problem, work on it for two weekends, hit the part that stops being fun, and drift to the next thing. The codebase stays. The git log doesn’t. I’m 40, a Cloud Architect with ~18 years across IBM and AWS, and I have ADHD. Diagnosed late, lived with it longer. The pattern above isn’t laziness — it’s a specific shape of attention. Hyperfocus until the dopamine of novelty runs out, then gravitational pull toward whatever’s next. Anyone with this wiring recognizes the feeling: the moment a project transitions from “fun problem” to “ten unsexy decisions in a row,” part of your brain leaves the room. ...