Links, December 12, 2025

§ADHD (explained by ducks)

A twelve-minute video that I wish I could have seen thirty years ago.

§The Colonization of Confidence.

An amazingly good short nonfiction story about what it means to make art by Robert Kingett, a “totally blind, gay, author and accessibility consultant”, who I hadn’t heard of before this story came across my purview:

“Tonight, you’ll hear grit,” I say. “You’ll hear mess. You’ll hear first drafts. You’ll hear bleeding onto the page. Nothing will be polished. Nothing will be sanitized. I admit, some things won’t make a lick of fucking sense. But you all are here because you love the mess. You love artists. You love art. You love the chaos of a human mind trying to explain itself to another human mind.”

§imperfect notes & my second subconscious

A bit about note-taking, organization, and the dread some of us have about not getting it “right”:

People like me tend to always want to design the perfect system before we start to use it. Or somehow there is an internal gauge of a completeness of a note: each note has to seem complete or else we cannot move forward.

A few years back, I decided to “just start” using Obsidian, and now I can’t imagine not having it. Are my notes “organized”? Hah! But I have full-text search and hyperlinks, and that’s proven good enough.

§They Killed My Source

Journalist Shane Harris with an absolutely bonkers tale about Iranian cyberespionage:

In blunt fashion, he was expressing how both our businesses work. Mine eschews deception, but journalists collect sources, then assess and second-guess them, just as spies do. A journalist and an intelligence officer are both trying to piece together a coherent story from confusing fragments of reality. And very few journalists, if any, could count a senior Iranian intelligence officer turned American spy as a source.

§The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play

I didn’t enter this field and take this type of job only to not do the job. My red line is conceding the things I am—we are—uniquely good at to a product, platform, or bot. My red line is trading in the parts of the job I am both an expert in and enjoy for tasks that make the job something else entirely.

This is, nominally, a piece pushing back against use of LLMs in User Experience research. But it’s more than that.

The thing I’ve come to realize about my own cycle of work and burnout, is largely in part that the problems I want to work on require someone to care; not just about doing the job well, but because the consequences for a job done poorly are unacceptable, and work environments often demand compromise on those consequences.

§Portals must bend gravity, actually

A second Youtube video for this week, making I think a first for these links. The creator of this video attempts to reconcile the titular mechanism from the game Portal to make them work inside our understanding of physics, which the author asserts would apply to the science fiction concept of wormholes as well. Lengthy (45 minutes) but fun if you’re into this sort of nerdery, and it has subtitles to help watch at 1.5x speed if you’re like me.