Dan Hinze

Update 0: new website edition

Nov 12, 2025

I'm reviving my personal website. Despite my best intentions, it succumbed to the same lifecycle as many other personal sites/blogs:

• I wanted try some new code/design things while also increasing my outline presence.
• I made a handful of posts.
• Life happened before any sort of writing habits formed, and the site went neglected.
• Code dependencies fell out of date, adding to the inertia of the site.
• With the web domain up for renewal and the prospect of reviving the code for a stagnant website I had all but erased from my memory, I let it die, save for its preservation on the Wayback Machine.

I've wanted to revive this in the past, but perfectionism and leeriness of falling prey to the same fate as the previous cycle kept me from getting around to it. A renewed focus on a few things has helped this time around. First and foremost, I really want this refreshed site to focus on being designed for writing, insomuch that it meets two needs:

1. The look and feel of it should prioritizing reading, ideally a quiet and cozy corner of the internet.
2. The code of the website should be designed and arranged to make it very easy to push out new posts/chunks of text.

Do I have other fun ideas for things that could live here, too? Sure. But by focusing on the basics, it gets me over the hump of just having something live and actively getting updated.

Content-wise, I really like the model of Tom MacWright, who mostly pushes out posts titled "Recently", approximately on a monthly cadence. They cover most of the same things I want a personal site and blog for: current media diet, miscellaneous life updates, the occasional opinion. I guess that's the role that social media serves for a lot of people, but I've never been much of a poster, and I prefer the more freeform option here. For the small cost of being less visible (at least in the sense that algorithms and infinite feeds aren't directly surfacing this to anyone), I own it and can make whatever I want, within the much broader scope of a website where I control the code and design.

Without further ado, some actual updates...

I got married last May, but due to life and work schedules, my wife and I delayed taking a proper honeymoon until this past October.

Looking for a trip that could include both a big city with lots to see and do and something more relaxation-oriented, we opted for a two-part trip to Mexico, with half of the time in Mexico City and the other half in Puerto Vallarta.

While this made the logistics of everything a little more complicated (especially when also factoring in travel to the wedding of a dear friend immediately before commencing the honeymoon), this turned out to be a good way to portion things out.

Mexico City is huge; the city proper and urban area are both just a hair larger than New York City. While there's only so much you can do in 5 days, we explored a lot. A few highlights included:

• The parks and architecture of Condesa Roma. The Avenida Ámsterdam, a pedestrian walkway concentrically radiating out from Parque México, added a degree of foliage and general walkability to a neighborhood already full of restaurants and shops to explore.
• La Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo's birthplace and home for much of her life, was unexpectedly moving. While it was among the most touristy things we did, it was well worth going. The Coyoacán neighborhood it resides in was also really interesting, with its main center a short work away in and around Plaza Hidalgo and Plaza del Centenario.
• Speedrunning the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts) our last morning. While the square footage is pretty small, the second and third floors are primarily a bunch of massive murals, including a few by Diego Rivera. The scale and detail of them are truly incredible to see in person.

Puerto Vallarta, a beach town on the Mexican Pacific coast, is very much a tourist-driven economy, with lots of Americans amongst its visitors. We were there on the tail end of the rainy season. There were a few more overcast days than ideal, but we still had a few nice afternoons on beaches, and the Zona Romántica neighborhood we stayed in was super walkable with lots of good restaurants.

While there's plenty of other places I would like to travel to and see first, I would definitely return to both. While we saw a lot, Mexico City is so large that I feel like we just scratched the surface.

I've been in a reading slump for the past year or so, with my phone attacking my brain and attention span as much as everyone else. As such, I've been trying to find good page-turners as a catalyst to getting back into more sustained reading sessions.

After reading and loving Babel, I bought The Poppy War, curious to check out more of R. F. Kuang's work. A recent profile of her in The New Yorker revealed some of the backstory on its writing: during a gap year in college, she downloaded Scrivener to explore writing and figured it out as she went along, which is super impressive and shows more of a consistent process than I've ever had both now or at that age. As far as the book itself, this one proved to be a quick-ish but more frustrating read. The prose is a little clunkier in parts, but overall, it's impressive writing and world-building for the debut of a 19-year-old. I had more problems with the story itself. I didn't find the character arc of Rin entirely convincing, which makes me hesitant to continue with the trilogy. A decent enough standalone read, but that's probably all I want to commit to.

Slow Horses continues to be one of the most consistently entertaining comfort watches for me. The fact that each season is adapted from an individual book in a long-running series makes each season tight and economical. Gary Oldman is incredible, and the action is satisfying without being over the top. Can't wait for more of it.

Task is the HBO miniseries follow-up from the writer of Mare of Easttown. Where the ending of Mare left me a little disappointed ultimately, I found the conclusion of Task much more satisfying. There's a deep humanity to a lot of the main characters, with excellent performances on top of believable storytelling. Highly recommended.

I was already hyped for One Battle After Another before it received seemingly universal acclaim, but for me, at least, it lived up to the praise. Jonny Greenwood's score was the perfect mix of melodramatic orchestral pieces and minimal pieces propelled forward with nothing but staccato piano flourishes and thumping drums. Phenomenal pacing throughout, with some visual sequences I keep thinking about. I'm rooting for PTA to get his first directing Oscar for this one.

Geese is getting a lot of attention and hype as a generational rock band for Gen Z (including this Rolling Stone (GQ?) profile I enjoyed). I don't have much of an opinion on that, but the things that have drawn me to the band and their latest album, Getting Killed:

• Cameron Winter's unique voice, colorfully described in Anthony Fantano's review via The Needle Drop, "...leaves him sounding like a mutant Jim Morrison who swallowed a frog and was somehow allowed to sing a song on Abbey Road"
• Interesting arrangements that add depth to standard rock instrumentation.
• A rock band that actually grooves with feel. The slow burn of "Islands of Men" building into this propulsive march-like groove was the song that first sold me.

Their show in Saint Paul was sold out by the time I was clued in, but I'll definitely be catching them the next time they roll through town.

One of my favorite ambient albums from earlier this year was Totality, the collaboration between Bitchin Bajas and Natural Information Society, so it was great news to see each group release some great individual new solo releases in September and October, respectively:

• Inland See's standout track is the album closer "Graut", which takes a starting point of some new age drones and synths before a simple drum machine beat slowly builds into a 18-minute journey full of looping phrases that enter and exit like a series of undulating waves.
• Perseverance Flow is a hypnotic 35-minute swirl that centers around the same motif the whole time. It's something to lose yourself inside of.

Both albums excel at taking simple ideas, bending and twisting them over long runtimes into captivating results.

Recovery from my two hip arthroscopies (one in February 2024, the other this past April, both to repair torn labrums and FAI) has continued with regular lifting and a very slow return-to-run progression since mid-August. Progress is non-linear but still trending the right direction. I had a flare-up on the "more healed" side during the honeymoon but continue to work through it. Acupuncture and a medical team I trust goes a long way.

I've been going to 6 a.m. group lifting sessions twice a week for almost 3 months now. As a heavy sleeper with a long-standing aversion to mornings, I would have never believed this shift to be possible, but the desire to return to my pre-injury running form remains the ultimate motivator. My goal is to run a mile without walk breaks before the end of the year. Fingers crossed that things continue to progress in that direction.

That was a lot more than I had planned on writing, but I guess that's what happens when you don't update your website for years at a time. Here's hoping the next update is a lot sooner and a little more brief. 😌