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.
• Shooting
  On a shoot at a truck dealer this week. The thing I spent the most time on beforehand was one page I call a day sheet: six shots, and next to each one, the video it fixes. Their team sent good notes on a batch of cuts last month, and some of them I couldn't fix from my desk because the footage didn't exist yet. The page also tells me when I'm done, a feature I'd love on a lot of other things in my life.
• 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. It had a rough week recently: an email went out and the connection dropped before it wrote that down, and the Mac stayed on Eastern time while I traveled, so for four days it showed up an hour early to everything. So I wrote it a one-page rulebook. Check whether it already went before you send it again. Write down what you did before you start the next thing. If the internet drops, stop and leave a note. Say which time zone you mean. A good office manager does all of that without thinking. My coworker needed it in writing.
• Reading
  Out of Dante's Inferno and into Purgatorio, with a little Aquinas on the side. Right in the middle of it, Virgil explains that every sin and every virtue is made of the same thing, love: aimed at someone's harm, aimed too weakly at the highest good, or aimed too hard at lesser goods like money and food. I keep asking myself which of the three I see most.