What I'm Doing Right Now
Last updated: 13th July 2026
Location
Chiang Mai, Thailand. The Hua Hin month did what it was supposed to do, so we moved north for my birthday. Settled in the quieter west side of the city, even though it gets more crowded every time I come back. Mostly just living: coffee, food, training, building. My local research assistant got its second real test here and found the good Khao Soi within a 2km radius before I'd even unpacked.
Creating
The brain prints me a newspaper now. Every Sunday it puts together a small paper of things I would never search for myself: off-axis reading, picked by something that knows what I already know and deliberately goes sideways from it. Designed like a real broadsheet, because if I'm going to read on Sunday morning it should feel like Sunday morning. Probably my favorite thing the system does right now.
The brain itself grew up. I wrote about the first version in The Librarian Who Never Forgets. Since then it stopped being a library and started being a coworker: it remembers across sessions, files my call transcripts on its own, and works through a task inbox while I sleep. I drop a task in a markdown file, an hour later it's done or there's a pull request waiting. Still fkn weird. Still great.
Bowls. Noela and I did a pottery workshop here. First thing I've created in months that doesn't compile. My hands were kinda good at it and it just flowed and felt great.
(plus the usual pile: an outreach machine, client dashboards, this site.)
A few snapshots from the past weeks.
Movement
The gym remembered me. Walked into my old Muay Thai gym in Chiang Mai and the trainer went "you have been here before, right? Harry Kane, right?" and then destroyed me. Training 3x a week now, hard enough that I nap again like a toddler. Getting a bit more in shape without trying to.
The back is holding this time. Partly physio, partly a lesson that took me embarrassingly long: relax the body actively instead of bracing through everything. There's also a fixed stretching routine on the calendar now, which past me would have found hilarious.
Reading/Learning
LISTERS. Two brothers live in a minivan for a year to compete in extreme birdwatching, and one of them films it with so much deadpan style and humor that 5 million people found it on a channel with 65k subscribers. The 2 things it left me with: absurd projects done wholeheartedly are deeply fulfilling, and when something is genuinely fun and well made, people share it for you. The playground philosophy, validated from the outside.
Also stuck in my head: a Philip Ball piece on whether life has any purpose beyond participating in its own persistence. The short version: in biology, the thing that always wants more is the tumor.
Listening to
The sound got more chill these weeks. This one on repeat while building:
Work
Closed my old engagements. Last update I wrote I was wrapping it up. It's done. I ended it the only way that felt right: I built a private little blog post, 8 years in pictures and stories, and sent it as a goodbye gift.
And the space filled itself. A new engagement started. It quietly answered a question I'd been carrying: whether I exist as a consultant outside the ecosystem I grew up in. Turns out yes.
nodacop is out of the lab. The machine works: scrape, assess, write the read, send. First cold emails are out in the world, and the first engagement came in via referral: 4 assets signed. Cold outreach itself isn't performing yet. Building the machine was play. Letting it be judged by strangers is the actual work.
What's Next?
Chiang Mai until July 20th, then to a known place: Hanoi. ❤️
Past Nows
This page exists because of the /now movement. This is just what's actually happening. Nothing more, nothing less.