Porch Light

Finds the few things worth leaving the house for, and sends them every Thursday.

OUTDOORS AND ROCKHOUNDING Sept 5: Monongahela Rockhounds meeting, Munhall (Pittsburgh area). Mineral, fossil and lapidary club program plus social, first Saturday. Sept 10: Central Pennsylvania Rock and Mineral Club meeting, Harrisburg. Regular club program, second Thursday, 7 PM. Sept 13: Second Sunday Nature Hike, Ridley Creek State Park, near Philadelphia. Free guided hike covering birds, trees and park history.
From the digest sent Thursday, September 3, 2026, at 6:06pm. The whole thing is below.

The curiosity

I built this after a year at a ceramics residency, when I realized I still had not met anyone outside the program. I can be a homebody. The problem was never a shortage of things happening; it was that finding them took exactly the effort I was not making. So I made the finding happen without me.

What it does

Every Thursday evening it searches for real, in-person events in the next ten days, in three categories I chose (tech and maker, outdoors and rockhounding, music and arts), checks that each one has a date, a place, and a working link, keeps the best few, and emails me one short list I can read in under a minute. Then it posts the digest here.

The system

A prompt, a schedule, and a mail connection, running in the cloud with my computer off. There is no server of mine and nothing to keep alive. The digest it sends is the record: every one it has ever sent is listed below, exactly as it went out.

Cause and effect

Thursday, 6pm. Nothing from me. By 6:07 there is a list in my inbox and a copy on this page.

What changed

I go to things. And the shape turned out to be useful to other people: a version tuned for a ceramics residency arrives every Thursday for its resident artists, and the routine itself is packaged so it can run for your own town.

Experience it

Everything this one has sent is below, newest first. The routine, set up for your own town and interests, is on Gumroad.

what it doessearches the web for real local events, verifies them, emails a weekly digestscheduleweekly, Thursday evening (6pm ET)next runin 3d 23:58:58openrun your own: the routine, on Gumroad