2025-06-21 - Beginners - Cutting Tofu
Before I met you I was so scared of dying. Was I ever happy? I couldn’t tell. I look at my hands and see new wrinkles forming. The weight has me weak in the knees, but just let me catch my breath, and I’ll keep holding on. In the dead of night I’ll let out a loud sigh as proof of life.
I wait for the sun to rise before I watch my distance. I see the redness under my skin glow against the light. It’s a universe inside of me and I can feel old cells die, and new ones born again.
I am always ending. And then beginning, once again. Again, over and over, again, and again.
Weather stayed capricious throughout mid-May; at least we're done with the political drama. Been working on my web directory again (got rid of so many dead links thanks to the spider mode in wget; highly recommended). Been talking to more people about my fiction, too. Oh, and blogging. Three times in a week, even. Between my paper journal and this one, I've been writing a lot lately. Too bad it's mostly ramblings. Spent some time doing research for my newest sci-fi setting, too. Worldbuilding is a lot of fun, but frankly unlikely to result in a story. Wouldn't be my first failed attempt this spring. Could still prove useful down the road.
In other news: courtesy of an infographic posted on Mastodon, I spent half a morning researching e-mail providers with a free plan. So far the winner for me is mailo.com, a no-nonsense French service; runner-ups were:
- mail.com, which looks good but is US based
- Mailfence, a Belgian company that's almost there but not quite
There was also a Swiss company, but they were pushing AI. Hard pass.
It's summer now, the last week of school, and I'm in a much better mood than last year when it was one bad thing after another. Even the weather has been fine, aside from one early heat wave. There's been rain and trees are leafy, so the ground hasn't started to burn yet. Let's see how long it lasts.
I’m at another low point. A couple days ago, my mum phoned me
and I had the chance to introduce the idea of quitting my
internship early, graduating and then spending the summer as an
audio/FOH engineer in some holiday village somewhere. She didn’t
like that idea, it was clear. She didn’t want to tell me directly,
but I could hear her struggling not to say “This is a terrible
idea, and you should aim to something else, something better”.
I can’t blame her: after all this work, after going to university
and so on, who could waste all of that and go towards a job that
pays poorly and has no real carreer?
I’m tired. So tired.
2025-06-09 Whack Follol Le-Dah - a
It appears that I have been too busy to work on my site of late! I managed to miss a monthly update, and it is because Devine & I have left the Victoria docks and have been sailing northward to Texada for a haul-out. The timing with the weather was difficult, it's been very windy ever since we arrived on the water. We left on a very blustery day, and the blusteriness has not let up often. We arrived to Texada a few days ahead of the haul-out, staying ahead of strong northwesterlies. Pino became a land creature for a few days, while we repainted the bottom, changed the zincs and did other out-of-water maintenance. Now, Pino is back in their element, we are in Ballet Bay waiting for some strong weather to pass so we can head back southward.
HEALTH. Since leaving the dock, I have been working my way to making a single pull-up. It is not easy, I have long neglected my arms in favor of my legs. After a bit of practice, I am able to pull myself up when standing on a low step and heaving my body from there, but I cannot do it from a fully hanging position. To work my way to a full single pull-up, I've been doing reverse pull-ups, which involves starting from the finished position and lowering myself down slowly into a full hanging position. My arms and shoulders are tired, but I have a lot of time to practice and work my way to make one.
Devine bought an elastic so we could turn Pino into a floating gym. We get restless aboard a lot, especially when anchored in places where we cannot walk ashore, so this will help.
I feel good currently, in my head and in my body and I hope that it lasts.
ART. I finished a yet another page for sabotage study for hakum, in which Hakazi and Dae sign together in silence some more, and have a friendly visit. I really like shading and drawing with pencils. I'd like to work my way to making many more full pencil illustrations like my self-appointed sensei, and pencil-shading master Hiroaki Samura. I recently completed a pencil illustration for mindbird, featuring the characters together.
Also, Bill Atkinson, who created Hypercard, and who was the creator of my favorite dithering algorithm, has passed away. RIP Bill. Your work lives on.
BOOKS. I have finally finished reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I read aloud to Devine most nights, and I very much enjoyed reading for Boris. His "flow of speech" was really quirky and fun. Although, the Goldfinch could have been 300 pages shorter. Most of the characters in this book are a bit of a mess, that is fine, but even walking alongside Theo across 800 pages wasn't long enough to warm up to him as a person. In all, I like Tartt's writing, and I enjoyed her descriptions of artwork, people and places, but this is not a book I would ever care to revisit.
Next, I read through Andy Weir's Artemis, my least favorite of his works. Weir is Mark Whatney, he is Ryland Grace, he is also Jazz Bashara... the problem with him being the hand-puppet and voice of Jazz Bashara is that she is a 26-year old Saudi Arabian woman. With his voice, she sounds like a rude pubescent boy. Once you look past Andy-Jazz, Andy-Dale and Andy-Svoboda, the world of Artemis is actually very rich and fun. Weir truly shines when describing the city, its innerworkings, and the complexities of manufacturing material and welding in space. It his evident from his writing that he spent a lot of time designing this world. Solving problems in space continues to be what he writes best.
MOVIE. I went to see the movie Sinners twice at the theater. Yes, it was that good! I saw it with Dev in Victoria, then again with another friend in Sidney. Films like this give me hope for the future, that there are still directors out there who love what they do, and collaborate to make beautiful original creative projects with their friends. The music in Sinners is excellent, I've been humming Sammy's and Remmick's songs for a few weeks now. Whack follol le-dah!
I also watched The Boy and The Beast by Mamoru Hosoda, not a new film, but I had not yet seen it. I loved the first 3/4's of the film, but was disappointed with the climax and resolution. It will be difficult to want to watch it again because of what it becomes, I felt the same way about the second half of the movie Your Name by Makoto Shinkai. In the Boy and the Beast, there was an opportunity to do something great, to talk deeply and seriously about chosen families, but Hosoda instead insisted on heart swords and dark chest vortexes. Damn it... Kumatetsu deserved better.
As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book. Be yourself. Be imperfect. Be human. Care.
Dan Sinker
ARTICLES/VIDEOS I LIKED
submitted a workshop proposal for Algorithmic Pattern 2025, qiudanz technique: computational manipulation of minimalist movement sequences
algorithmic pattern 2025 workshop proposal
Before casting off, we wondered if it'd be enjoyable, or even safe to work out
aboard Pino. It did take a bit of getting used to at first, but we've
eventually both fallen into a daily habit of doing pull ups from the
companionway, dips with the cockpit seats, seated rows by trapping a resistance
band around a winch and lat pulldowns from the boom.
One of my projects for the next few years is to raise my grip strength enough that
I can reliably close down a 70kg hand gripper, so every evening, I pull out a
book or a video(solar permitting) and do hand exercises for an hour or so.
Though the website it's hosted on continues with updates here and there, this tiny journal's reached its end. I'd rather let our own work speak for itself.
For more journals around Nightfall City, have a look at The Neon Kiosk.
For all prior entries, they'll remain at Past Interilogs.
While we are hauling out Pino, my laptop is safely
storaged in the chart-table. In this idle time away from the keyboard, I
daydreaming about strange finite-state machines.
- Expanded documentation on Uxntal Validation.
- Created an interactive Modal Playground.
- Implemented Modal in Uxntal and improved examples.
- Enjoyed re-reading Loeliger's Threaded Interpretive Languages.
