Hey it’s Brandon.

I just had nearly two weeks off work thanks to my employer’s wonderful policy of shutting down at the end of the year, and a lot of ideas came out. I’ve been overdue for a newsletter update, so here is a very big one recapping everything I wrote in the last bit. I’m committing to writing more frequently (writing is thinking!) so there will be more of these moving forward. Hopefully the following will give you an idea of where my head is at, music and otherwise, going into the new year.

2025 and 2026

I woke up to the first day of 2026 sick with a head cold. I felt better than the day prior, on which my family ended up doing nothing exciting to celebrate the end of days end of the year because of all the sick & burnout pervasive in our house. But we still made for a nice little celebration pretending it was midnight at ~6pm to give my daughter the feeling of a new year celebration before her bedtime (credit to my wife for this idea).

I’ve been physically down because of the cold (just almost fully recovered as of posting this), but my brain has been spinning with ideas for the last nearly 2 weeks. I wrote a lot here, felt a lot of feelings, and explored a lot of ideas while also getting good and very necessary rest. I am yet again grateful for the time in late December when the company that employs me closes down for more than a week. I seriously don’t know what it’ll take for more of the US to wake up to how toxic our capitalistic tendencies (and relationship with work overall) are.

Anyway, I slowly pulled together some thoughts about last year (as it relates to myself) and what I’m thinking about for this new year.

2025 self-review

I wrote a lot, and read more too

I posted on this here website 56 times, and thousands of times across my social media profiles. The latter is notable because I effectively wound down my presence on video channels, instead leaning hard (with the help of Buffer) into Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky for a time, and Mastodon more recently.

My best writing is also my favorite writing, between some of the longer pieces (like me getting real about AI in art) and the shorter, pithier pieces (like my realization about music reviews). Plus, it’s been great to be educational again — my post about setting up a Patreon-style offering with Faircamp got some attention on Threads and in the Mastodon indie music community, and is now featured on the Faircamp marketing site!

I didn’t just create; I also consumed, and I’m happy to report that more of that consumption than before was reading good ol’ books. I read 7 books in 2025 — not nearly enough to be a bookworm, but I’m proud for having started somewhere, and I’m holding myself accountable to keeping up the habit publicly.

My work at Buffer hit a nice stride

I accomplished a lot at work. We shipped some great little features like Streaks, posting goals, a revamp of the post scheduling flow, and started work on a total overhaul of the navigation and analytics features. I’ve also started to take on more of a strategy role in the company, working across more projects and with fellow PMs to refine our priorities and user experience across the whole app. The larger team did a whole lot more beyond the few features I mentioned. And we’re growing nicely! But we still have so much to do and a lot of (challenging but in a good way) problems to solve this year to have the impact we want, both within the social media space and as a business.

If I think about what that impact is / should be, it’s about proving that we can offer social creators a different (better) way. Social platforms have become a flooded and often rageful zone, made more so with AI, and the algorithms only exacerbate this problem. I think we can make Buffer into a calmer way of working with those platforms to find an audience & community and thrive in spite of the flood. I’m speaking in a lot of metaphor now, but tangibly we’ve started already demonstrating this with our work on the Buffer interfaces, the new Community features, and goal setting features, and the reaction is overwhelming positive - so I want to lean harder into these things.

Kid Lightbulbs got weirder, and still grew a bit

I stopped trying to push myself to market music in ways that were neither working nor energizing. I instead strove to Be weird as hell, and significantly evolved some older material into what became my 4th album, INFINITE NORMAL. This is the longest album of music I’ve made, and embraces the things I feel I can stretch the most in: piano, slow burns, re-embracing field recordings, and (surprising to me) my voice. I intend to use more of each of these moving forward.

I thought it would be fun to continue my trend of showing my material in other lights, so I also made SOLO PIANO 2 and ALTERNATE NORMAL — brother and sister to INFINITE NORMAL.

I also had the wonderful privilege of collaborating twice with fellow musicians on two releases: REMIXED CASTLE and, later, the second volume of THREADS ON MY ART. These raised a little money for some causes and I’m proud of that.

My (online) audience grew, though it was a slog and I think I know why

I broke 2500 followers on Threads and 6000 followers on LinkedIn. Threads was stagnant for a long time but a few admittedly thoughtless posts went slightly viral and kickstarted some new audience growth…though my community there is still a pretty consistent group of maybe 50-70 artists who all stay in touch.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a whole different beast. I started posting every Friday a list of decent remote product management jobs and THIS MADE EVERYONE WANT TO FOLLOW ME. These are not jobs that are impossible to find, and it takes me 2 minutes or less now to pull this together each week, but people seemed to love it. I took a break from it in December, but I want to start it back up because people love other people who are simply helpful.

I also have maintained about 105 subscribers to my newsletter, which is about where I was before, but I think my current audience is more aligned with the content I write and therefore engaged. (I had a bunch of old coworkers who subscribed a while ago and naturally dropped off, and I’m not that surprised because they’re not really music people.)

Building a newsletter audience is really really hard when you’re not writing consistently (which, even though I wrote frequently, I’m very inconsistent!), and increasingly I’m realizing that the audience of people interested in independence of the arts is quite small. It’s not zero though, and I think it can become a large sustainable audience with time, but it’s not the same lucrative endeavor as becoming a creator for professionals on LinkedIn (which I could do but not what I want to spend spare time doing) or in politics (yuck).

So I ended up leaning into just being myself in the ways that feel closest to myself — writing rambly text and short silly takes on text-first platforms. And it feels right!

Lots of family time

I continue to have my mind blown about how much I am able to see and be with my family while maintaining a full-time job, thanks to my employment by Buffer. I have breakfast with my daughter every morning, do her preschool chauffering 3 days a week, and we have dinner as a family every night. I often have very busy days but to be able to spend so much of it with them is truly the greatest thing.

In 2025 we traveled to Boothbay Harbor, Maine and took Talia to see the Boston Ballet’s performance of The Nutracker, but otherwise embraced a great deal of homebodyism. We worked a lot on our vegetable garden and made some smaller improvements on the house. There are things my wife and I would like to be doing more of that we simply haven’t found the energy to do. Family hikes, more days/evenings out doing something, more traveling. There is a distinct lack of community we’ve found locally, and it’s been difficult to find the energy to actively seek any, which is a conundrum.

theme for 2026

I don’t like setting concrete goals for myself to achieve because, especially since having a kid, I’ve often set myself up for failure trying to achieve something concrete I don’t end up having the time or energy for. I’ve liked the idea of using themes (credit goes to the Cortex podcast for this idea, which I don’t listen to anymore but the idea stuck).

My theme for 2026 will be The Present. The important thing here is not just “being present”, but embracing the present as it is, warts and all, while letting my values and principles inform how I navigate it. There are a few areas that come to mind for me about this:

• Minimizing distractions and maximizing listening & reflection. This applies universally. I did okay here last year but I can draw a harder line with distractions. At work, it could be as simple as closing apps when I’m on a Zoom call to make sure I’m really listening and being more aware of how much space I’m giving others to talk. At home, it could be taking the extra 5 seconds to put something away that might be a distraction to more than just me rather than putting that off for later, but not letting that spiral into a cleaning frenzy. (I’m good about avoiding the latter, but almost at the expense of the former - need a better balance here.)

• Financial cushion for now. Several months ago I made a difficult decision to contribute less to my 401k each month in order to have more money available as the world got more expensive. This hasn’t gotten any better, I’m not expecting it to soon, and life keeps throwing challenges requiring money our way. To be clear, I am grateful that I can do this and I recognize that many people don’t have the option.

• Deep consumption. Fewer feeds, less volume, more books & deep thinking about what I consume. Immersing myself in what I am consuming.

  • Deleting most of the social apps from my phone this holiday break significantly lowered my anxiety and jumpiness and I want to keep to this. Instead, I intend to use Buffer (& other tools) in lieu of social apps themselves where possible (I’ll write more on this later), and consume more outside the world of social - especially books.

• Community. The community I’ve built online is amazing, and I want to dial this up in light of the last topic. Spending less time consuming social feeds should free me up to spend more time in discussions with people in places that better facilitate that, like Discord servers, reading and responding to newsletters, and good ol’ phone conversations. I think there will be an IRL component soon, as embracing conversation with my neighbors recently has led me to a few open mic opportunities that I intend to explore soon.

• Fewer due dates. This is both concrete and abstract. I have a bad habit of assigning arbitrary due dates to menial tasks on my list, which creates unnecessary urgency around those things. That in turn cascades to feelings of anxiety, defeat, and angst that are completely self-inflicted. I’ve started to change this and it’s already having a small but noticeable effect on my daily anxiety. Abstractly I want to more deeply accept the idea that so little of my day is 100% in my control and let things go a bit more that aren’t truly critical.

• Embracing the reality of the technology moment we’re in, when it comes to LLMs. I recently wrote about being tired of debating the nuances of AI, even though I know my feelings about it are quite complex. The truth is, I can exit ecosystems where it is damaging and do my part to promote alternatives, while still gaining value from it in specific ways, such as accelerating my thinking and filling skill gaps of mine in practical contexts (like software coding, where I kind of know my way around how software is built but I am not an adept programmer). I am optimistic about Anthropic’s Claude as a business tool, and the development of open-source, on-device models as a more ethical & economical alternative to the sprawling and destructive approach being taken by OpenAI and its collaborators.

• Emotional intelligence with my family. I need to be honest with myself here — I still struggle with this a bit. Despite feeling like I’ve been more present by reducing my phone consumption and general busyness feeling, but I still miss opportunities to be more emotionally available, incorporate more of my wife’s input into what’s important, and find opportunities for true connection that haven’t happened due to the general busyness feeling I do still feel. Ultimately all of the above come down to this as the most important thing for me to work on.

Note how I have no goal for music or projects in there. I don’t have a plan for Kid Lightbulbs in 2026. I’ve even humored dropping the alias in case it no longer makes sense with the music I end up making. I’m still waiting for inspiration to strike for my next thing, and I have no urgency to force it nor do I want to force any urgency. I want to continue challenging myself to Be weird as hell creatively, but not as a primary theme in and of itself. I am optimistic that slowing down will bring about the creativity I strive for when it comes.

And I’ll keep writing about all this stuff. If anything I’ve fully realized the idea that writing is thinking, and that means more of it in my future.

I don’t think I like live music

I don’t think I like live music. This is a realization I came to a few months ago, and now I’m making it official by posting about it here.

I came across something in Derek Sivers’ bio that stopped me in my tracks – the idea that he does not like live music, and instead much prefers “great recordings.”

This is exactly how I am. It’s probably exacerbated by the fact that I have not seen much live music in the last few years.

I’m just going to quote Derek directly, because I identify so closely with this:

Like my preference for one-on-one conversations, my relationship to a piece of music is personal — it’s between me and the music. I don’t want to have a bunch of other people around, and don’t want to be distracted with other things when listening. Ideally, instead of a one-to-one relationship between listener and musician, it would be one-to-zero, where I can’t even know who the musician is. Then I could focus just on the music itself, and not be distracted by any personal information about the musician.

Most of my interest in music has been as a music-maker. I’m fluent in that language. I graduated from Berklee College of Music. I know almost too much music theory. I ran a recording studio for 12 years, and produced and engineered hundreds of recordings, often playing all the instruments myself. When listening to a piece of music, I’m usually too analytical. If you play something for me and ask, “What do you think?”, I’m almost always thinking about what I would have done differently if I had written it.

I’m not bragging about this. It kinda sucks. It makes me incompatible with most music situations.

So what do I like?
Innovative arrangements. I love a unique combination and intersection of instruments. New sounds I’ve never heard before. It’s hard to listen to yet another guitar-bass-drums rock band. I need more creativity than that.
Song craft. I admire it like a carpenter admires a well-made table. I worked hard for 15 years to write the best songs I could, trying to learn everything about that craft, and so appreciate a good one.
Great recordings, for the same reason. After years recording music, I so appreciate something well-produced and well-engineered.
New ideas. I’m unimpressed by emoting, because emotions are not impressive. I’ve heard all the regular wailing with the same-old palette of sounds and words. I have to be hit with a new idea, a new angle, to be interested.

I’m not completely averse to it — I’m even starting to (finally) explore playing live again myself, and I do still enjoy watching my friends play music — but the joy of a live show doesn’t get me excited anymore.

I think this is partly influenced by the shitty reality of the live music industry in 2025, in which there are so many middlemen looking to extract wealth from said industry that an average show is economically inaccessible to most people and financially worthless to the artist. That said, I do realize the power of live music both as promotion and as an enabler of community & belonging. So I can’t rule it out entirely.

The giving-up internet

One of the other things I like to do toward the end of each year is review & clean up my saved logins & passwords for things. I’ve accumulated a lot of logins over the years, and having resisted the temptation to Sign In to everything With Google has made this a bit of a sprawling problem.

So I go to review Apple Passwords’ security recommendations, and there are over 250 warnings - some of these are cases where I reused the same or a similar password before the advent of randomly-generated strings, but in most cases the site suffered a security breach in the last few years.

And on top of that, there is a surprisingly large number of the websites on this list that are dead. Either they’ve been acquired & shut down by a larger company, replaced by a blog-looking thing of AI slop content, or are fully dead dead (like Cloudflare can’t even resolve the url). This is what remains of a free service I guess I signed up years ago for called LaunchKit.io:

This is what happens when I go to perfectfitprotein.com, a website my wife bought some protein powder from once (note how it seemed to redirect to a “mancavepictures.com”???):

There are some sites that are still around but they’re barely recognizable, or I suspect the crew maintaining those sites are akin to a skeleton now. I think that’s the real shame of the Dead Internet Theory — not that most activity is by bots & for bots, but that the bits run by humans are gradually giving up & shutting down, leaving the giant conglomerate platforms in their wake (and the few independent websites fighting to keep it alive).

Streaming, owned & rented media

As I’ve posted about on Threads, I am keen to get as much out of the streaming ecosystem as possible given its enshittification and, more specifically, my concerns with the streaming model as it pertains to artists. I’d rather give as much of my hard-earned money as possible directly to the artists & their collaborators that I want to support, and minimize how much of my hard-earned money goes to enshittified corporations. (This applies to virtually all forms of art & media.)

I’ve already reflected this ethos with the music I make: when I release new music I only release to Bandcamp and my self-hosted site, Cult of Lightbulbs. I’d rather promote my music as art products that folks can freely experience (without having to pay a corporation to do so), with the option of directly supporting me if they like.

In my personal life, I’m aiming for a similar end state for the art & media I consume. My family is no longer paying for any streaming services outside of Apple’s. Though in transparency, we do share and occasionally use HBO Max and Netflix accounts with extended family members because of a few select shows that are exclusively available on these platforms and/or we haven’t had a chance to purchase our own copies yet (for example, Succession, which I would rewatch but haven’t come around to spending the $50 for the full box set).

Instead we’ve been gradually building a collection of mainstay movies and shows, mostly via secondhand purchases on eBay and taking better advantage of our town library.

• We recently bought a collection of 8 Studio Ghibli films and a set of Tinker Bell movies my daughter loves, both from eBay. I have a shortlist of Disney movies that we’d like to buy secondhand, but honestly Talia hasn’t asked to watch them in a long time so I haven’t seen the point.

• We also have picked up a few digital movies and shows from Apple’s TV (iTunes?) Store, including both seasons of Fleabag (arguably the 1 thing we miss about having Amazon Prime) and all of Party Down (the only reason for us to have ever paid for Starz, a network I forgot existed).

My wife & I also finally decided to downgrade our Apple One bundle to the mid-tier plan, eschewing Apple News+ and Fitness+. We almost never used these services, and I’d rather support a news source or two that I trust directly rather than give Apple half of the fee plus a bunch of news outlets owned by right-wing billionaires. (Our Verizon smartphone plan comes with an extra $6/month discount on this tier, which is nice!)

My ideal end state is to abandon Apple Music (and Arcade) as well, and instead having a large library of music and games we own.

• Truth is I never play Apple Arcade games; I rarely if ever actively seek out new video games, and my favorite games are all ones I’ve already purchased on iOS or other platforms. I also dug up my old Nintendo Switch and 3DS (!) for which I have a ton of old games I’d totally forgotten about.

• Apple Music is a bandaid I am afraid to rip, but I am gradually realizing the sheer number of artists I love whose music is on Bandcamp for sale. Accounting for this and the library of music I already own, there isn’t too much music I’d lose access to (like, fewer than 40 albums), and there are ways of purchasing those artists’ albums if I truly want to.

  • I also recently learned I can (get this) rent albums from the library, including digital copies, via the Hoopla service. I just found Fountains of Wayne’s classic album Welcome Interstate Managers on there, which I listen to once or twice a year.

That would leave us only paying Apple for iCloud+ with 2TB (which I also use for custom email and iCloud private relay) and Apple TV (when there are good shows running). I’m open in the future to moving our big cloud storage somewhere else, though iCloud may continue being useful if only for the cloud photo library.

Instead, I’ve already set up a private Jellyfin server (it’s an open-source alternative to Plex) to host music, movies and TV. This works wonderfully and I’ve been impressed with the 3rd party app options for making a good media-first experience (eg. Infuse on the Apple TV).

We’ve also been listening to the larger-than-I-realized collection of CDs and vinyl I’ve accumulated through inheritance, childhood, thrift shops & occasional Bandcamp purchases. The CDs in particular are doubly useful thanks to a $29 DVD burner/ripper.

If I think about it, the thing we probably miss the most from streaming is a select few playlists that serve a particular purpose. Many of these we can partly (or fully) recreate with music we now own, but there are a few “mood” playlists (like one called Pure Calm that’s all highly ambient piano stuff) that consist of hours of the stuff. But I’m also realizing that suitable replacements exist on Bandcamp, or… hey, I’m a musician, I could always make the stuff I want to hear.

Lastly, we’re all just reading a lot more, taking advantage of the town library, a local used bookstore we like, and my e-book benefit at Buffer. Books are eating up more of our leisure time than staring at screens, which is nice.

Tracking my reading

I am trying to read more, and in 2025 I’ve actually been somewhat successful: I read 5 novels and am deep into a 6th, plus a bit of nonfiction. I generally find myself immersing myself into engrossing fiction (mostly science fiction these days), while simultaneously making my way gradually through a nonfiction book.

I wanted to track my reading publicly, to both celebrate this newfound joy of mine and hold myself accountable for keeping up the habit. But I also didn’t want to use a whole app for this (especially not something like Goodreads which as a reminder is owned by Amazon and has a pretty much singular goal of trying to get you to specifically buy more books from Amazon.)

So I quickly spun up a reading tracker on this site. It’s public and will force me to keep reading by way of my refusal to let this site go stale.

I was inspired by my colleague Rathes who’s been publicly sharing his reading list for years. I manage it in a single text file stored within my Blot instance, and it renders in nice Kanban-style columns using my minimalist site aesthetic, and is fully responsive to mobile devices!

Bandcamp as Sam Goody

If streaming is the hyper-capitalist next stage of radio (payola scams & all), then Bandcamp (and its alternatives) in 2026 is the at-scale equivalent of a Sam Goody or Tower Records in the early 2000s.

Every artist has their music in the listening station & you can listen to almost as much as you want, but there is a clear/obvious way to directly patronize the artist, rather than a conglomerate-owned system where you barely influence what you hear, rules are opaque, & the artist always loses.

Whew, that was a lot. Talk soon ✌️Brandon