Ultranormal

100% AI-free half-assed writing hand crafted by Kevin Lawver about programming, life, cooking and random nonsense.

Recent Posts

  • Stop feeding the algorithm, stop feeding the billionaires

    I don't remember if I've mentioned this or not on the blog, and it's relevant to this post, so I'll say it again just in case. I have coffee every Tuesday morning with four guys in their seventies. I'm the "kid" in the group because I'm only fifty-one. We talk...

  • So It's August, Huh?

    I posted this in Slack at work on Friday and I'm feeling it today, so you're getting it too. I don't know why I feel compelled to share it with you. I don't know why I felt compelled to share it at work, but I haven't talked about this with...

  • How is 2026 going anyway?

    Back in January, not long after I moved this blog, I wrote up my post about my intentions for 2026. I was thinking about it this morning, and since it's almost June and that means we're almost halfway through the year, I figured it was about time to check in...

  • A Very Comic Book Redesign

    I woke up early, and there must have been something a little extra in my coffee this morning because I decided that today was the day that Claude Code and I would redesign my blog. Here's what it looked like before... boring, just like everything else, right? And well, I...

  • Thoughts on a new (old) web

    I rage quit LinkedIn about a week ago in a post about the whole Moltbook nonsense. To save you having to go to LinkedIn, here's what I said: The whole Moltbook farce, the engagement trap, the outright lies, and that literally every suggested post on LinkedIn for the past three...

  • Nostalgia is an Anchor

    This made me cry in my coffee. If you don't want to read it, it's basically a letter to senior engineers just like me about AI coding tools, and how they're just a fact of life now. He's right. As much as I, or anyone else wants to fight, at...

  • A Shiny New Bloggy Home

    This blog is almost twenty six years old (here's the first post from July of 2000). Just like me, it's gone through a lot of changes. It started on Blogger, moved to Movable Type, where I think I had to move it between hosts a couple of times, and then...

  • A 50 Year-Old Dad Confronts 2026

    I'm stealing my theme for 2026 from The Mountain Goats: "I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me." I've been trying to get healthier for a while now, and just this week, as winter is at its metaphorical and actual darkest, I hit a goal I thought...

  • 2026 Energy

    I have a draft post all about 2025, but you know what? Fuck 2025. It was a complicated year and I'm tired of thinking about it. I'd rather listen to music, hang out with friends and get ready to vote against every Republican I can for as long as I...

  • The Layoff Collection

    The layoffs in tech continue unabated. I realized that there's no one place where I've got all of the things I've written about them collected in one place (and I don't like Wordpress' tags page). So, here they all are, plus one bonus one about all of the ways that...