Thoughts on Mark Hoppus’s book, new Ataris, and a pop-punk rec. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.
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Read More “Liner Notes (April 27th, 2025)”Fun workout. Decided to just run until Hannah was done with her sprint training today. Felt good and sat in zone 2/3 for most of it.
Along with Quicklinks and Fallbacks, another thing I love about Raycast is the great integration with Shortcuts. You can run any Shortcut directly from Raycast (and assign it a trigger keyword and/or keyboard shortcut directly), and if the Shortcut is configured to ask for input, it’ll do that right in Raycast. I use this for all sorts of things, but one of the most used is a very basic Message shortcut I built to text Hannah. By typing ‘m’ in Raycast, I get a simple interface:
Then I hit Tab and type my message. Hit enter. Message gets automatically sent to Hannah. I use this dozens of times throughout the day to quickly send a message without ever needing to open the Messages app.
The Shortcut itself is dead simple:
It just takes the input and sends it using the default Send Message action.
The combination of Shortcuts + Raycast can create an endless stream of simple little tricks like this. Another I use regularly appends text to a Ulysses note called “Liner Notes Ideas.”1 When I have an idea for an upcoming newsletter, I simply type ‘ln,’ followed by my thought, and hit enter. The note is added in the background without needing to open my notes app.
Speaking of which: I ran out of time to finish the newsletter today, I’ll have to try and wrap it up tomorrow.↩
I am enjoying this sunny weather.
Big day of errands around here, but I hope to have some time to write a newsletter this weekend. Fingers crossed.
Pretty perfect purple mail day. Already owned that +44 record (pink variant) but … I just couldn’t say no to this combo. Gorgeous.
Fun fact: there’s no rule that says you can’t create a new blog today and backfill (and backdate) it with your writing from other platforms or sources, even going back many years.
I’d love to see more people do this!
At some point, every creator hits a wall – it’s not burnout exactly. It’s misalignment. You find yourself fluent in a language you no longer believe in, you know how to hack the algorithm, when to post, what to say, how to craft the dopamine-hooked headline. You’ve learned to manufacture the kind of work that gets rewarded, but somewhere in the process you forget why you started making it at all.
The economy of attention doesn’t ask what you think; it asks how fast you can say it, how loud, and how often. And if you play long enough, you stop making anything for the people you care about and you start making it for the feed. The result is a race to the bottom with a leaderboard, a machine that needs to be fed even if it’s chewing up your integrity.
Preach.
The other byproduct of having been in that “game,” is you start seeing it everywhere. Numbers will go up, numbers will go down. Authenticity is the only thing that will last.
As a follow up to my Raycast post, I wanted to mention that the URL scheme that opens and pre-populates ChatGPT on the Mac, also works on iOS. I use this in Drafts to send the post directly to the ChatGPT app:
https://chat.openai.com/?q=[[draft]] 