Axel Valdez

The worst possible thing I can do when I'm having a bad AuDHD day is start organizing my office, and that's the main thing I'm inclined to do, probably to somehow reclaim a bit of control. The process is the same every time. I wake up, maybe tired after having only a few hours of sleep, and the tiredness throws off my morning routine. Maybe I didn't feel like brewing coffee, or I wasn't hungry and postponed breakfast. Or I overslept a little bit and I'm rushed to start working. Whatever it is,…

When Andrés, my oldest son, was 9, we were watching a video about Logo, the programming language. He got especially excited with Turtle Graphics, where you have a "pen" on screen that you can draw with using commands to move it. That night I started a project using p5.js and my limited programming skills to do just that, drawing with commands, replacing my missing knowledge with unnecessary overcomplication and spaghetti code. But hey! It worked! We called it Tortuga, honoring the Logo concept…

Smartphones have made traveling immeasurably easier. And I don’t think that was entirely free. Almost 25 years ago I was in a city that wasn’t my own. I’d never been there before. I was there along with my best friend, who lived in a different city, opposite ways from mine. We traveled there by bus to meet with a web design client. When we arrived we met at the bus station and took a cab to the hotel restaurant where we were meeting with the client. The meeting went well. After lunch, we had…

A couple of weeks ago I read The Last Quiet Thing by Terry Godier, and it made me very conscious of what my devices were asking from me. I keep talking about seeking calm to everyone who’ll listen, and still I hadn’t seen it like that: our devices demanding work from us. We tend to think it’s only the big, evil, soul-shrinking companies demanding our attention, but on our side, a secondary-effect of having a tech device always communicating with the world is that it demands our intervention…

A life organized around a to-do list takes the joy out of living. There's always stuff to do, obviously: somebody has to wash the dishes, sweep, go grocery shopping, get that cabinet door fixed. The problem is not the to-do list itself. It's the timing of tasks. I tend to do things whenever the stars and my brain chemistry get aligned and I actually want to do them. When I was living alone, dishes tended to pile up, laundry got unmanageable, the fridge was empty and I had to push things over on…

I experience a sense of grief every time a great TV series ends. The sadness that there isn't going to be any more of it, the irrational feeling that there's never going to be anything as good, and the sensation of emptiness inside. It's a strong emotional response, not very different from losing someone you love, with the obvious differences in intensity. I don't like things becoming other things, or going away suddenly. When I find something I'm content with, I want that thing to stay the…

It was ten, maybe eleven years ago. I was picking my oldest kid from school, he was 4 or 5. When he came out, I gave him a hug. We walked to the car, I buckled him into his car seat, and hugged him again. "Hey, dad, why are you hugging me so much?" "Because I love you so much. I want to hug you as much as I can, because someday there'll be a moment when you won't want hugs from me anymore. And that's ok, but I want to do it all I can while you still like it" He didn't ask more. I could tell he…

In the last week I've found myself in two situations where I had to explain that despite all the crap I've been through, I wouldn't change a thing. That I love who I am, and I'm the product of everything I've lived, hence, I shall love all that past shit as much as I love past sunshine and rainbows. Amor fati is a Latin phrase that means "love of fate", or "love of one's fate". The concept is rooted in the Stoic philosophy, with people often linking it to Epictetus and/or Marcus Aurelius. The…

I've always been a hoarder. I refuse to get rid of things, and that goes both for the box of cables and old electronics down in that cabinet in my office and for the files in my Google Drive, external hard drives, on my computers and phone. A couple of years ago I felt the urge to reinvent myself. It may have been caused by a midlife crisis, the extreme changes in my life (separation, new house, new dynamics), or my mental health diagnosis, or all of the above. But I slowly started getting rid…

We'll, I've been thinking a lot about photos, as you might have noticed. A few months ago I published Memories, my photo-blog-kinda-thing, and I loved it, but as it was a separate project from this website, I ignored it most of the time. One of the things that I never liked about Memories was the fact that the website was on one place, and my photos in another. That was necessary in order to upload them directly from a web interface. Turns out that there are things more valuable for me than…

When I came back to blogging after years of being in and out of it, I did so mostly because I wanted to leave social media behind. Sure, some people never stopped. There are people who have been blogging for twenty-plus years while the rest of us were tweeting away. I admire (and envy) them. I wish I were one of them. Because I wasn't, I ended up carrying a lot of social media assumptions into blogging. It's only recently that I've started noticing them. Having a blog isn't a replacement for…

Something that has proven beneficial for me, as an ADHDer, is to isolate activities. My brain works better in single-task mode, and I stay calm and more focused. I'm also more productive when I do these things, but that's not really the point. The point is that they make me calmer. I'm relaxed when I get shit done. That's one of the best things about listening to music on vinyl records, for example. It's an isolated activity. Of course I still stream music. Or listen to my iPod Classic, but the…

This past Saturday I was fighting the comments embed on this site, trying to adjust it for some changes and make it look like it belonged with the rest of what I have going on here. At some point I looked at the giant list of overrides I was maintaining just to make it feel somewhat integrated and realized it didn't make much sense. I had two options: Stop fighting it and leave the embed as-is, sticking out like a sore thumb and ignoring the dark/light mode setting Remove it completely The…

I've been thinking a lot about publishing photos for myself and my close circle, and in a second iteration of memories. The principal lines of thought are these: Privacy This is obviously the main thing, but to put up photos online we kinda renounce the notion of privacy. I already settle for owning the platform where they're published, and really there's not much else we can do about it if we want to put them in a public setting. Once we do, we lose control and we can't recover it. "The files…

A couple of nights ago, I was about to post a song on The Headphonist, my music journal, when I decided the design I'd put up a couple of months ago wasn't doing it for me anymore. And because who needs sleep?, I went ahead and started hacking together a whole new structure for the website. Well, the last sentence is a little unfair. I did plan the structure, and I had something semi-clear in mind. I went from paper to Figma to code, something that I don't do often for these tiny projects of…

Taste dictates what music you listen to, your favorite food, your drink of choice, your clothing style, the books you read, the TV series you follow, the movies you watch — and rewatch. How you speak, how you flirt, how you react to other people. How you present yourself to the world. Beyond that, taste dictates who you're friends with, and that's either because they match what you value, or because you appreciate their own taste. In some wonderful cases, it's both of these things. Social media…

Back in 2019, before the world ended, I was trying to learn JavaScript. Serious JavaScript, not just hiding and showing things like I'd always done for microinteractions in websites. As one of my exercises, I published an app to collect people's favorite things. It was centered around a single sentence saying "My favorite [a] is [b]". There was no purpose other than having fun, it was totally anonymous, and I didn't know what I was doing at all, so as soon as it started breaking apart I had to…

A few days ago I stumbled upon this blog post by Matizeta where he talks about "the alive internet" and shares several ways to bring humanity back to the web. His focus on human interaction, and especially the part about comments, left me thinking about how at a certain point in ancient history, circa 2003, comments on blogs were almost as important as the blog content itself. We were blogging to get our voices out, but also to let other voices in, interact, and create connections. And we did.…