Hi Crowd!
I decided that December was going to be my month to get my digital life in order. Or at least somewhat better organized than things had become over the last few months/years. My initial grand scheme was to divide the month by weeks, each week tackling a different aspect and then spending all week working on just that. While I haven’t stuck to this roadmap exactly, I’ve made a ton of progress and I thought I’d send out a little note about it as some of the changes are public and at least this way it’s documented.
The most obvious outward facing part is my website seanbonner.com
I’m hesitant to mention it because it risks feeling like an announcement, but it’s really more like second Death Star, functional but not completed. The problem I wanted to address was that I had bits of my life everywhere, and it was getting hard for me to keep track of what was where and when I wanted to point someone to something the chances of them finding the other relevant or related things were slim to none. I wrote previously about being less than thrilled with changes the host of my newsletter was making. I was also unhappy with the portfolio & gallery options available to me to show off both my own work and art that I’ve collected from others. So I thought, in the past I’ve build wordpress websites to solve similar problems and it’s taken me months but it’s mostly worked. I wondered if I could offload a lot of the heavy lifting writing template code and custom plugins to ChatGPT and Claude Code. Turns out I could, and in just over a week I have a full new custom theme with custom plugins for the collection and galleries. I’ll write more on those later, but I’m just delighted about how it’s come together.
Even better, while in the past I’ve maintained a folder full of txt files with random code snips that I’d use to try and fix/modify things and then fight with css for hours to get them to work. Then next week try to remember which code worked (I was bad at version control). This time I had AI do everything properly with a github repo and explicit documentation. So going forward when I need a change (as happens when I notice something or remember something I’d forgotten). I fire up terminal, tell Claude what I want, it checks the code, makes the change, and pushes it live in moments. It’s revolutionary. Literally things I would have spent days trouble shooting and weeks trying to fix, are perfect a few minutes after I think of them leaving me much more time to write and focus on the art.
Beyond the site I’ve also reorganized my email accounts and revisited security and privacy set ups. There’s personal migration and habit forming that I still need to work on, but I’m optimistic that I’m in a much better shape going into 2026 than I have been in a very long time.
While I can speed load the code, for the archives I actually have to sit down and write things (I love writing, even when I’m stuck, so that’s not something I have interest in offloading to AI). There’s a lot that wasn’t documented well and I have a large collection to curate, so I expect this next part to be ongoing.
Speaking of AI, in building out one of my archive pages I stumbled across A Christmas Carol, a project a released almost 3 years ago to the day. It got me thinking because I really like this collection. There’s 28 pieces in it, curated down from I don’t even remember how many I made. This was early days and I was really struggling with prompts, desperately trying to get the images in my head onto the screen through just words was a new challenge which was both exciting and frustrating, but ultimately rewarding. Looking at it now, one of the things I noticed is only a few of the pieces ever sold. Most are still listed for sale at the original price. This got me thinking because there so much pressure on artists (in web3 but also elsewhere) to sell out an edition or a collection or exhibition. That’s seen as the marker of success. The Market deems you valid. Or some bullshit like that. I have always hated that framing and that’s one of the reasons I always push back when people talk about success as if it’s a singular thing everyone agrees on.
For me, and I imagine for many others, making the work and building up the courage to release it to the public is the challenge. Actually putting it out there for people to see is the success. That’s not easy, and comes with so much risk of people hating it or shitting on it copying it or loving it or whatever else. A million things could happen and they are all terrifying for different reasons. So it really does take courage and guts to finish the thing and then say, ok, now I’m putting it out there for the world to see. That’s the win. If it sells to someone, well that’s a bonus but I could never let that be the goal. Selling things can be soul sucking and while of course it’s required from time to time, making them in the first place is so much more rewarding.
Going back to the redesign, one of the things bringing The Crowd back in house (if you are getting this by email the migration was successful) allows me to do is be more stream of consciousy with it, while also keeping the Articles more long form focused, which means I can send things more often. Something you all know I’ve been trying to find a way to do for a long time and finally admitted/figured out that it was my own mental walls standing in the way not some tech hurdle I needed to figure out. Getting the tech out of the way I think is the answer.
Also, officially, I’m a Canadian now. So that’s fun.
More soon, thanks for being here.
-s