Skip to Content

Kevin Kortum

225 posts

Posts by Kevin Kortum

šŸŽ² Just admit you’re playing the game

Manu

You either believe in something and you’re willing to power through, or you don’t, and you do what everybody else is doing.

I guess it’s safe to say Manu doesn’t believe in the idea that ā€œthe truest sign of intelligence is the ability to entertain two contradictory ideas simultaneously.ā€

I don’t know who or what this is in reference to, but as a general idea it feels like a shortsighted, heat-of-the-moment type statement that ignores the reality of the world millions of people are forced to reckon with everyday of their lives.

If I had to live 100% aligned to all of my beliefs, I’m not sure I’d be able to function. As a small (but extreme) example: I’m a pacifist—but if I want to put a roof over my head and feed myself, I’m essentially forced to help fund the worlds largest military that is contributing to a genocide and just blew up a school with more than 150 children in it. Just because I don’t uproot my life or go to jail for tax evasion doesn’t mean my stance as a pacifist is any less true.

We all make decisions like this everyday of our lives, some minor, some more severe. Hell, in some places living one’s truth could be a death sentence.

I get these are extreme examples when we are more likely talking about something like hating Meta, but using Instagram, or hating AI, but occasionally utilizing it—both of which I’m guilty of myself—and I’ve probably already put more time into this than the original post, but I can’t help but be irked by such vague and, frankly, inconsiderate generalizations like this.

🧩 A tricky wordplay game

Parseword

A new daily word game from the creator of Wordle. There’s a lot of fun and unique gameplay design that just shines. It took me a few go-arounds to really get the hang of it, but once I did, it just sort of clicked—although I’m sure to be stumped pretty easily soon enough.

😱 Screamer News Featured Post

screamer.news

So I built something on Friday and it's already gone through a ton of revisions, but it's at a point where I think I'm pretty happy with it. I wanted a simple place I could go to quickly catch up on the major topics of the day being covered by major publications to help avoid having to go to multiple homepages, troll social media feeds, or having to bog down my RSS reader with firehose feeds from big publications, in order to stay informed.

Right up front, I will warn you, the summaries are written by AI—sent through Claude's API, specifically. I'm not a fan of AI, but I wanted to try to challenge myself as well as learn how to use some of these tools, just in case. So AI seemed like the best approach in order to avoid adding yet another project on my plate to update on a daily basis.

Screamer News is essentially a dashboard of news summaries across four topics, which run at different times throughout the day. Sports in the morning to capture the news from the day before and last nights scores; tech and culture in the afternoon/evening to capture the days news; and politics late at night to capture everything that happened during the course of the day.

When the job runs, it collects articles from various RSS feeds (specifically chosen for each topic) from the previous 24-hours. It then passes the collection of articles to Claude, which uses some criteria to pull out the five or so most important storylines from the day, summarizes them, and provides links back to the original sources covering the story.

Clicking a box in the grid will open the full summary up, as well as mark it as read (saved via localStorage) so when you return, you can quickly glance to see what's new.

That's basically it... I've thought about a few ideas I could maybe add and put behind a paywall, such as e-mailing the digests (which the original idea had via a Ghost blog), complete history (for when the list of days becomes too long), and a few other things, but for now, I'm pretty happy with it and have bee using it myself daily during it's short life.

šŸŽµ Albini Sessions (Benefit for Letters Charity), by Fugazi

Bandcamp

Letters Charity is a nonprofit organization on a mission to use Art as a conduit to transform passive compassion into immediate assistance through the distribution of money given, without expectation or judgment, directly to families experiencing poverty.

Holy moly! A second charity album and this one from Fugazi featuring recordings they did in Chicago at Electrical Audio Studio with Steve Albini back in ’92.

šŸŽµ HELP(2), by War Child Records

Bandcamp & War Child UK

In addition to the stellar cast of musicians involved, renowned filmmaker and Academy Award Winner Jonathan Glazer acted as Creative Director for ā€˜HELP(2)’, working with Academy Films to assemble a team of brilliant creatives and overseeing the filming and art direction for the project.

If there’s one album you pick up today on Bandcamp Friday, it should probably be this one. Following in the footsteps of the ’95 Brian Eno- produced HELP, proceeds from HELP(2) go to to benefit humanitarian efforts to aid, protect, and educate children in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and Ukraine.