Vulgar Poptimism Is Real In 2025

Palette, Rosa Bonheur

Two reading recommendations this weekend:

• Celine Nguyen has a thought-provoking commentary on criticism (literary and otherwise). She makes the point that art is formed in response to and in collaboration with criticism, while also often acting as criticism of its own — “Instead of the accusation that ‘All critics are failed artists,’ it may be more correct to say that ‘All art is successful criticism.’” — but professional criticism is slowly dying, which may explain why culture feels so stagnant. It definitely made me reconsider my own critical practice (lol @ saying I have a critical practice) — maybe I need to write more reviews like my loving tribute to Speed Racer and less quippy one-liners.
• James Somers presents “The Case That A.I. Is Thinking”. The article does a good job of balancing the excitement of “something genuinely seems novel here” and the cautious skepticism of “but intelligence is hard to define, let alone measure”. He ends up in a slightly different place than my own ‘If The United States Is Conscious, Then Why Not An LLM?”, but highly recommended nevertheless.

A distinction that feels important but under-discussed: being an appreciator versus being a snob.

It’s easy to slide from appreciating to simply being a snob. Distinction and criticism is important — vulgar poptimism is real in 2025 — but I think it’s important to stay on the side of appreciation rather than judgement — to celebrate what is truly great rather than simply putting down what is not great. Even that which is not great can have value! But I know many people who are, perhaps, over-eager to denounce that which they view as inferior, often without much explanation. The mark of a great appreciator is to have a refined palette and the patience to explain why something is not-great while still acknowledging its potential value.

(The other mark of a great appreciator is understanding why Speed Racer is one of the greatest films ever made, but I digress.)

Celine Nguyen and James Somers are both great appreciators, and I try my best to stay on the side of appreciation.

I used to be somewhat jealous of Celine Nguyen, who went from software designer to newsletterer to published-in-the-LARB, or James Somers, a software engineer who’s regularly published in the New Yorker. I’ve written something like a quarter million words on this personal site and newsletter, and I’ve written half a dozen novel manuscripts, but I’ve never really put the time into polishing enough to truly publish — nor do I put in the effort to self-promote. (Hey, you could forward this to someone! But I don’t really give you a reason to, do I?)

Reflecting recently (as I hurtle towards thirty…), I realized that I lack focus — I’m too much of a dilettante. But I also realized that I don’t mind. I was always subconsciously aware that fame and fortune is a fantasy, especially when it comes to writing. You need intense focus, yes, but also intense luck. But I’m simply going to write either way — after all, I’ve somehow ended up with a quarter million words on a website that nobody reads, except you 😉

This was hammered home when I talked to a friend about goal-setting. We realized we’re both intrinsically motivated, in that we care more about the process — entering flow state — than the end result, whereas most of the Bay Area is extrinsically motivated. It would be nice to professionally publish something, but that’s completely beside the point — I write to feel productive, or as a form of self-expression, or simply a way to kill time that uses my brain. That’s true in my career, as well — I’m not particularly motivated by promotions or pay or producing a product, but I am deeply motivated by having a day’s worth of bugs to fix.

If you check out rwblickhan.org, you’ll notice a fetching new color picker in the top right corner that lets you pick either a blue or red accent color for the site.

A few thoughts:

• This is the kind of low-stakes, unimportant, but fun project that Claude Code is perfect for. I built it with a minute of prompting and 10 minutes of tweaks, and while I probably could have built it myself given half an hour, I’m not sure I would have.
• It’s fun to build out a personal color palette. My main inspiration was Steph Ango’s Flexoki, though that’s a real color palette.
• For reference: my standard blue is hsl(208 100% 45%), my standard red is hsl(0 48% 45%), the other blues and reds are different saturations and lightnesses of the same hues, the background is “paper white” (hsl(42 0% 96%)) stolen from Robin Sloan’s website, and the text is good ol’ straight black. I used to support a dark mode color palette, but I don’t use dark mode and I don’t see why you should either 😛

Two new pieces of software I’ve been playing with:

• chezmoi, a dotfiles (and other configuration file) manager (if you don’t know what that is, feel free to skip this bullet point). I previously used (and was happy with) dotbot, but I saw a recommendation for chezmoi and, bored, decided to set it up. It works on a slightly different model than other dotfile managers — chezmoi maintains its own git repository of dotfiles, which it then copies to your home directory. Crucially, its own copies are actually template files that allow for basic scripting — for instance, I skip some installation steps on my work machine, and I use the 1password integration to retrieve API keys instead of committing them directly. Probably not worth switching if you already have a solution, but if not, it’s relatively easy to set up.
• helix editor, a vim-like command-line modal text editor. The main differences with (neo)vim are that its keybindings follow a more consistent selection-then-action pattern instead of vim’s action-then-selection and that it works out of the box with everything you’d expect of a modern editor, like a file browser and LSP integration. (It also features multi-cursor editing, though that still feels like a gimmick.) I’ve mostly been pretty happy — it’s nice to have LSP integration Just Work™️ without configuration, and the keybindings feel more logical after a brief adjustment period if you’re coming from vim. I’d recommend it if you’re interested in trying a command-line or modal editor but find vim intimidating.

I mostly haven’t been including key art in these weeknotes, because I’m lazy, but after Robin Sloan’s reflections on key art, I’m bringing them back. In particular, that article introduced me to Museo, which is a wonderful archive.