Nothing's going to make me change | 11 January 2026
kirkkittell.com/newsletter
Walk-up song: Morphine, "Mile High", Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead Soundtrack (1995)
And everything that happened to me
Happened to me for the best
I hope I never get so old and tired that I don't appreciate the throwing out of a new calendar and the gently-pinning-to-the-wall of a new calendar. Those who grow up today, without actual grids on actual paper on an actual wall wouldn't understand the feeling of just cold yanking that old thing off the wall and two-handing it into a trash can. Through the trash can. I know where the lighter fluid is. It's winter. It's in the basement now with the other things that would freeze or create some other nuisance in the garage were I to give them the opportunity to do so. But the trash can is plastic and it's 1°C outside, even if the sun through the window suggests something more like spring. I'm not allowed to start fires in the house anymore. It's bad for Home Equity, whoever that is.
I love the New Year. I'd order one every day if it was served that often. I try not to maintain too many superstitions but I believe in the naïve power of a Brand New Start. (My other superstition is that I can use Mind Power to achieve favorable dice rolls when playing craps. It's not much of a superstition, or a superpower, but it pays the bills.) Maybe this is the year when I Get My Act Together. Probably not. If past is precedent, then the odds may never be in my favor.
But it's nice, anyway, to open the door on a new year, to look out at all the deep, unmarked fresh white powder, and imagine the possibilities. To pause in anticipation before taking the first step, then the next, and so on, transforming plans for the future into the debris of the past, look upon my own works, alrighty, and despair.
New year, new effort to toss words via email into the void. See you every two weeks or so. If not, there's always next year.
-kirk
Daniel Miessler. "Keep the Robots Out of the Gym". danielmiessler.com (2025-11-24).
This more or less aligns with what I think about using AI software tools. Instead of moving versus lifting, I think of it as having versus making. In Miessler's analogy, performing labor at work is moving a weight from one place to another because that's the job to be done; lifting a weight in the gym is actually about lifting it in to increase your own capacity to lift things. For me, having something means simply buying or using the thing, which isn't all bad. I do not want to go down to the river and wash my clothes on a washboard. But I do use tools—software and hardware and cookware—and make things, often when it's not necessary, so that I have some more capability later, to say nothing of the feeling of fun or accomplishment (or frustration, etc.) while making.
Robin Rendel. "So Many Websites". robinrendle.com (2025-12-14).
The premise at the heart of these conversations is that websites deserve and require a mass readership to be important or worthwhile. But what if they don’t?
Like good, classic punk rock, it's not the number of people you play to or that hear you, it's the those. To steal from Henry Rollins' journal (Get in the Van):
05-10-82 OKLAHOMA CITY OK: We played this bar where people in the parking lot were looking at us funny when we were pulling in. We loaded in and soon after we were getting ready to play. I wondered when all the people were going to turn up. There was no one there. Finally we start playing and I think there were about five people there at most. They stood all the way back at the bar in the darkness and observed us. It made me mad but I played anyway. After the show Dukowski took me out to the parking lot and straightened me out on a few things. He told me that even though there were only a few people there, it didn't matter. They were there to see us and that was good enough. He said that you never pull a bullshit attitude on stage and you always play your ass off or don't play at all. He taught me a lot.
Margaret Carrigan. "Woman Behind the Viral ‘Beast Jesus’ Restoration, Cecilia Giménez, Dies at 94". Artnet News (2025-12-31).
Giménez’s story underscores life’s beautiful unpredictability, in which sometimes disasters are simply miracles by another name.
Also, a one-hit wonder has at least one hit, however it comes.
John Scalo. "Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?". Made By Windmill (2025).
123.45: on the hunt for easter eggs.
Maria Popova. "Middle Age and the Art of Self-Renewal: An Extraordinary Letter from Pioneering Education Reformer Elizabeth Peabody". The Marginalian (2019-07-05).
I got this link—and the entire quote that led me to follow the link, I'm not even trying to add anything—from Austin Kleon's newsletter.
The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth. The holy sensibilities of genius — for all the sensibilities of genius are holy — keep their possessor essentially unhurt as long as animal spirits and the idea of being young last; but the perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth; when the world comes to them, not with the song of the siren, against which all books warn us, but as a wise old man counselling acquiescence in what is below them.
Katherine Brodt. "The Legacy of the Annapolis Liberty Tree". Boundary Stones (2026-01-02).
While Bostonians created memorials around the stump of their original tree, Annapolitans prided themselves on having theirs intact—one of a handful that survived throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Keith O'Brien. "The Slow, Inevitable Death of the Bowl Game". The Atlantic (2025-12-28).
his postseason involves 11 playoff games, with high stakes and big crowds—as well as 35 other bowl games, played for the most part by mediocre teams with mediocre records, with very little fanfare at all. These games aren’t the Rose Bowl of yesteryear. They aren’t even the Holiday Bowl circa 1989. They’re the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl, the GameAbove Sports Bowl, the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl. And in the years to come, you can bet that more college programs will skip them.