Pull up a chair. The lantern's on.

Now, and the snacks

What's on the desk this week.

Week of October 26, 2026. The format is borrowed from Derek Sivers's "now page" idea: what's really getting my hours, updated as it changes.

• Writing
  My AI published its second column about working with me. My own first essay, on AI and prayer, is still close. It goes up as an X Article first and lands here the same day.
• Pointing
  My video work now lives under my own name, and I'm aiming it at truck dealers, equipment dealers, ranchers and the trades. They tend to have a phone full of great footage and nobody with the time to turn it into anything.
• Mixing
  I lined up a month of posts I'd made for a truck dealer's page and they all looked like cousins. So every week now gets one or two posts with real people in them, one video of the shop or the trucks, one photo, and one graphic at most. Obvious in hindsight. I had to see the whole month in a row to notice.
• Clicking
  Earlier this month I wrote a LinkedIn post for a Peterbilt dealer about the 2027 truck emissions rules, and it got a pile of clicks with no link in it. LinkedIn counts any tap as a click, so those were people who run trucks opening it to read the rest. They wanted more of the answer and the post had nowhere to send them. Worth having one simple page behind a post like that: a straight answer and a phone number with a real person on the other end.
• Editing
  Rancher reviews and podcast episodes for Riomax, and shorts and ads for TigerTough, the seat-cover company I made the BACKBONE series with. My AI editor cuts a first pass, then studies mine. This week it needed one still of a sales manager for a dealer's post, so it went through all 14,176 frames of his interview looking for sharp eyes, a closed mouth and a quiet second. Frame 10,628 won. Then came the less fun lesson: a frame pulled from HD video only holds up if you don't blow it up much, so for a big post you still need a real photo. If someone is filming your company, ask them to take stills too while everybody's there and cleaned up.
• Reading
  Dante's Inferno, slowly, and a little Aquinas. Dante put the very bottom of hell in ice, kept frozen by the wind of Satan's own wings. That one hits a little close to home. Looking at this weekend: Millet's The Angelus, two farmworkers who stop in the middle of the potato harvest to pray when the evening bell rings. It's a good one for anybody who works the land.