Some IRL Friends
My old friend, a music professor and composer of both opera and rock music: Dan Sonenberg
A ridiculously talented friend and endless font of creativity who goes by many names, currently going by Piscadoro Kingfisher Mike Brown: music videos, and writing
Looks like my old friend Chris Simunek, whom I call Gene, was running a website of his countercultural journalism & writing for a while over at Paradise Burning. He never mentioned it to me. That's vintage Gene. Gene and his talented wife Rebekah Harris also run Shipwreck Montauk fine jewelery waaaay out on Long Island's eastern end.
My good friend, inspiration, and fellow traveler H. Dean Clark documents his adventures as a road scholar as h.deanclark6796 on YouTube and on his professional photography website, Clark Fine Photography.
My friend Nicole Gluckstern runs Substrate Arts, in-depth and experimental coverage of the Bay Area’s arts and cultural scenes, and chronicles her theater and journalism at Estrella Suerte Productions.
A dear old friend, Mark Irons, often known as Half, unfortunately passed away in 2012, but happily his extremely old-school website is still being maintained as of 2026 — meaning it has been online for 31 continuous years. http://www.rdrop.com/~half/. For a glimpse into the past of a truly wonderful and highly intelligent character, as well as a glance into the World Wide Web as it existed from 1995 until about 2010, have a look.
I've recently gotten involved with IndieWeb, a loose organization of developers and website owners dedicated to cultivating independently owned, interoperable web sites and services, free of the data silos and walled gardens of the big, corporate-owned sites and technologies.
Though I haven't talked to them in a while, I'd be remiss in not mentioning my very long-term friends and employers at Green Tortoise Adventure Travel and the Green Tortoise Seattle Hostel and San Francisco Hostel, where I was alternately in-house FileMaker developer, Webmaster, IT Manager, and guitar-strumming hippie resident (not in that order) for almost 20 years. I try not to spend a lot of time looking backwards in life, but when I do, GT is inescapable. I still owe them a lot of money.
Long ago I ran in parallel lines with some freaky San Franciscan troublemakers in the Billboard Liberation Front and the Cacophony Society. Check 'em out, they're good for a laugh.
Fabulist Magazine is run by a friend I will no longer mention by name, who I knew for a long time as a tireless supporter of the literary and visual arts, and the magazine had been well worth a look by anyone interested in speculative and science fiction, fantasy, myth, folk traditions, comics, magic realism, “literary fiction,” pop culture, film, music, and more. But I've removed the link because that friend has become knee-jerk, fanatical anti-generative-art hater, and is obnoxious about it—obnoxious enough about it that I was offended, which is no mean feat. So offended that I'm leaving this here to publicly say I no longer link to it.
I don't think anybody else I know IRL has an online presence outside of social media. Let me know I've left you out.
But, wait! There's more!
These are the home ages of a group of indieweb developers & techies I hang out with online. Apologies to anyone I've left out, it's a huge group so these are the people I've recently talked to most often at time of this writing.
Artlung - Joe Crawford
Lazarus Corporation - Paul Watson
Ragt.ag - Angelo Gladding
James' Coffee Blog - CaptJamesG
Life Of Pablo - Pablo Morales
Mandaris Moore
Mark Sutherland
Carrvo - Matthew Turner
Kevin Marks - Of note, kevin has a remarkable page called "Confabulation — I Warned You", of surprisingly accurate predictions about AI about 10 years before the dawn of the LLM era.
Al Abut - Product Designer & Founder
Zachary Kai
dead.garden - Jo
Benji
Thomas Vander Wal
Ross A. Baker
Brandon Pugh
Naty
I don't know Jesse Miksic but he's contributed to Indieweb Carnival (info) and his blog is fascinating.
Dave Goes The Distance - Dave Millar. This is an internal link to his Arby's page, which somehow doesn't have tags. If you're a web developer, his page code and CSS has some funny easter eggs. As I am typing this he is explaining in our user group meeting how the three Arby's potato products form a sigil that safeguards against alien DNA, if that gives you any clue what you're in for.
Miscellany
Some sites I have nothing to do with, but just found entertaining, interesting, memorable, or otherwise worth saving a link to.
Apple Rankings - acerbic reviews and trivia about apples. For real. Someone out there really is into apples.
The Last One A code generator, written in 1981, in which you would describe a program you wanted and the computer would create it. This was heralded as "The end of programming". Something about the whole scenario seems awfully familiar.
The Last Quiet Thing A beautiful meditation by Terry Godier about his 1989 Casio watch — the last thing he owns that has done what it is meant to do, without demanding anything of him, since the day he bought it, and how everything else you buy now means entering into a service commitment towards the device or its manufacturer. This resonated for me.
Alex Wright, The Deep History of the Information Age Steward Brand ruminating on Long Now in 2007 about the prehistoric biological precursors of the Information Revolution.
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