Jack McDade

If anyone is looking for someone to help with your video work, may I suggest my brother Joseph?

Full on editing, sound/music/light motion design for long form, short/social, you name it. He's gotten so stinkin' good.

https://josephmcdade.com/

Alongside Statamic 6, we also shipped SEO Pro 7 — with a whole pile of new features:

🚀 Structured Data/JSON-LD
🚀 Search Engine/OG Image Card previews
🚀 Improved reports
🚀 Localizable site defaults
🚀 Support for URL trailing slashes

Statamic 6 is here! 🚀

A redesigned Control Panel, a modern Vue 3 + Inertia foundation, a new UI component library, a long list of architectural & performance improvements, and that's just scratching the surface.

This is a new beginning, ready for what comes next. ❤️

A new addition to my offline desk.

The evolution of the design continues.

I tinkered with a personal site redesign all Christmas break and never really got anywhere. Go figure — as soon as I get back to work the inspiration struck.

Ain't that just how it works? Even got to resurrect Kyle Steed's "Steedicons" for this one.

For 2026 I'm going (more) analog.

I'm making effort to do things by hand when I can.

Paper, pens, scotch tape.

I even set up a second, "offline desk" (a tip from @austinkleon) to make it easier.

I'm gonna spend money on art supplies instead of SaaS apps.

It's gonna get weird up in here. 🤘

Just like Florida, except gators.

I still love and use Photoshop almost every single day.

AMA

I got rid of my expensive, ergonomic office chair & now use this basic kitchen chair I bought off Marketplace.

It's firm & doesn't encourage me to slouch give into crappy posture. When my butt is tired, I get up and walk around. It's the perfect desk chair.

Rage against comfort.

Pursuing recovery from a mind & body damaged by tech. | Recovery Mode Pursuing recovery from a mind & body damaged by tech. A podcast hosted by Jack McDade & Marce K.

Years of sitting, coding, shipping, scrolling, and pixel peeping destroyed my body. I honestly thought I was DYING.

It took me 4 years and 22 specialists to figure out what was ACTUALLY happening and how to fix it.

Now I'm sharing everything I learned & more in my new podcast —  recoverymode.fm

I completed Jack McDade’s Radical Design Course. Am I a designer now? An honest Review. - miralytics A little while ago, I had one of these moments. You know, these situations when you somehow stumble upon new people online and all of a sudden you’re

miralytics.io/jack-mcdade-...

Radical Design – A Rebellious Web Design Course by Jack McDade Radical Design is a rebellious, potentially life-changing design course by Jack McDade

This is a *really* nice review of radicaldesigncourse.com 😊

Thank you Mira!

Just reply & let me know if you do want me to share more and I'll figure out what format it should be. I have a newsletter I never use (jackmcdade.com/newsletter), maybe that would be best? Or maybe it's a podcast, or a blog... I dunno. You tell me.

Thanks reading. ❤️

Let me know if this is something you'd want me to share more about. I have done tons of research, tried a crap load of stuff that didn't work, have had successes that conventional medicine says is nonsense, & am carving out a barely traveled path here. I cut out 99% of my story.

I've learned a ton and have even more to learn going forward, but if you're going through anything similar (and I've met a bunch of people like me/us, trust me) — nothing would make me happier than to be able to help.

Every day isn't amazing, and sometimes i feel like it's one step forward, two steps back, but looking back at where i was 6 months ago, 2 years ago, 5 years ago... and know I've absolutely found a path towards healing that is proving itself to be effective and fills me with hope.

So here I am, quite convinced that the *bulk* of all my problems stemmed from a slow-motion self induced injury of extremely poor posture which developed a severe disfunction in my cervical spine, all which can be addressed with patience and persistence.

TL;DR it's incredible how much damage you can do to yourself by hunching over a computer 8-10 hours a day for 25 years.

I started doing weekly Functional Patterns training sessions with a 15 minute cranial/jaw massage and within 2 months started to feel ALMOST normal again. ‼️

She actually has a wide range of unusual specialties, including Structural Energetic Therapy (*sounds* like voodoo but isn't, i think it's name poorly) and Functional Patterns.

We went through the list of things I'd been through and she told me she dealt with the same exact things.

I actually went back and read my "Struggle Bus" post to remember how all this started and thought harder on the TMJ/nerve side of things and went down a rabbit hole of research, which led me to deciding to go back to this one fantastic massage therapist I had been to a few times.

Now I could start focusing on the remaining issues — lightheadedness, migraines, fatigue, a hyper-sensitive Vegas nerve (touch the side of my neck and i almost pass out) and brain fog.

After a few weeks I was able to stop cycling in endless unproductive loops of worrying what was wrong with me, not to mention not having the sudden heart racing/passing out sensations and I felt more like a human again. Maybe not my former self exactly, but it brought hope.

SSRIs block the reabsorption of serotonin, which helps your body get rid of excess cortisol (stress hormone) and allows your brain to transmit proper mood signals to your body.

And it helped. A lot.

These symptoms compounded everything else going on and cause a lot of signal interference.

I saw a psychiatrist who promptly diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (as they do with probably everybody) and he put me on Lexapro, an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor).

When unchecked and imbalances, these neurohormones cause anxiety (not the only source, but probably the most common one) and can hijack your normal responses to stress.

This explained the racing heart, palpitations, panic attacks, and to at least some extent the lightheadedness.

Not only that, but our catecholamines (neurohormones that include dopamine, noradrenaline and adrenaline) can get completely out of wack for a number of reasons, like genetics, nutritional deficiencies, viruses, gut imbalances, and so on.

(This really resonated with me as I have some pretty severe trauma I have yet to fully metabolize, but I'm getting there thanks to good counseling.)

Anxiety is so much more complicated, and I'm embarrassed to even admit how naive I had been.

Our bodies keep the score — our unresolved traumas live inside us and change us, change our physiology. Anxiety can well up from completely subconscious sources.