Wednesday, February 18th, 2026

I am exhausted. I went to bed after midnight last night—for the fifth night in a row! To make matters worse, something fell with a loud thud and woke me at 2 a.m. I don’t know if it happened on my floor, the second floor, the basement, outside, or if it was all a dream. I’ve had Exploding Head Syndrome¹ for the last 10 or 15 years. Possibly longer. EHS means you hallucinate alarming sounds like bangs, crashes, gunshots, klaxons, etc., in your sleep. It’s both annoying and hilarious. I didn’t get back to sleep until at least 4 a.m. I’m feeling extra awful today.

I tried killing the time by reading a book, but couldn’t get into it, so switched to listening to a couple of audiobooks. That didn’t work either. I eventually resorted to watching nonsense on YouTube. During the day, I only watch comedy, cooking channels, and genuinely educational videos (mostly college lectures or academic talks). If I’m still up after 9 or 10 p.m. for some reason, then the odds are good I’ll be scrolling through police body cam footage or watching detectives interrogate murderers who imagine they’re not caught. It’s not a great use of my time, although I have learned lots of legal pointers.

What I’m trying to say is, I drink a tremendous volume of coffee. I’ll ease off the gas, starting now. And the screens need to go dark much, much earlier. Sleep hygiene is important. You stay up too late for a couple of nights in a row, and that threatens to expand to the entire week. Keep it up, and you’re liable to become a criminal defense lawyer totally by accident!

Watch "Bring on the Dancing Horses by Echo & the Bunnymen" on YouTube

Blog Updates

The embedded YouTube videos have been removed in favor of using an outbound redirect that opens YT directly in a new window. This has the advantage that Google can’t track your activity on this website so easily. Possibly not at all. (I’ll fix up the display soon.)

And I spent the last couple of days writing my own mailing list manager, admittedly with a little help from Claude Code.²³ It came out better than anticipated. The software runs locally, and I manage the adding and removing of subscribers myself. Not hosting the tool online provides increased privacy and security. Send an email if you want to subscribe or unsubscribe to the mailing list.⁴ It’s a private list, so please remind me of how I know you. (Unless it’s obvious.)

Footnotes

1. I didn’t make up Exploding Head Syndrome. It’s real. I swear! https://www.sleepfoundation.org/parasomnias/exploding-head-syndrome ↩

2. You can see the source code here. ↩

3. Here is a worthwhile video discussing the “AI bubble” everyone is quietly freaking out about: The AI Bubble is Worse Than You Think. ↩

4. I will automatically migrate users of the Ghost.io newsletter before shutting that down. ↩