Back from Seattle, where I had the immense pleasure of sharing a few days
with kind, passionate and most of all wonderful
individuals, some I had crossed paths with already, others, new faces that I am
now looking forward to see once more. Evenings were busied with conversations
that felt as easy as picking up where we might have left off despite not having
seen each other for years, or even when meeting for the first time.
I was curious to see whether using creative storytelling to give a talk about computation would resonate with the Handmade
attendees, fortunately, based on what echoed late into the night within the
halls of the Mediterannean Inn, above tables covered with zines and whiteboards ornate with hastily scribbled rewrite rules, most people got it. I hope that
my loveletter to the work of Borges, Conway and Wryl, will be an invitation to
explore the space of rewriting, while remaining critical of the trajectory of
computing.
Stuck in the middle of things are happening, outcomes are uncertain, and I can't talk about it. Not the worst place to be in, but then, well, that's not exactly easy to write a compelling journal around, is it?
I've heard that "infrastructure teams run on hope." That goes for people who make tools for a living and as a hobby. I suspect this goes for all creators on some level, with substantial variation in what that hope is.
This website appears to have become Write in Blood, inconsistently veering between fiction and reams of pagination documenting influences from a specific generation of video games. There are worse things to be.
2024-11-22 Stormy seas - a
This past month has been very stormy, and when I say this I mean that the recent weather in the Salish Sea has been a bit crazy of late(lots of 40-60 kt wind days), but also that I am witnessing a real life Idiocracy in the making. It's not all bad though, it was a very productive month!
ART. I illustrated some Atlantic Salmon and a Sea Louse for a presentation at MASTS's Annual Science Meeting about the effects of salmon farms on the wider ecosystem. The drawings will also appear in the accompanying paper! It is my first time contributing to a scientific paper, and that's pretty neat (I was even assigned an Erdős number).
Rabbit Waves was announced officially! I've since released two more pages, one about Morse Code and another on using flags to signal Morse Code. The project was well received, I got a lot of good comments. Devine & I put a lot of care into making the website accessible to people with screen readers (thank you Rembrand for your helpful feedback on this).
BOOKS. This month I've been reading yet another Arthur Conan Doyle book aloud to Devine, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. As always, it is a very entertaining read. I enjoy that perpetrators are not always prosecuted, sometimes people commit crimes out of desperation, or are victims of an unfortunate series of events, Holmes, despite collaborating with officials, is a very fair man(a rare quality).
TRICKS. I use YouTube often but I despise the interface, but I found a solution! I installed Untrap, a Firefox add-on. I turned off suggested videos, shorts, likes, comments, and tons of others buttons and distraction-ware on mine. My homepage is now just a blank page with a search bar — total bliss!
I stitched a pair of arm warmers for myself and for Devine to keep our hands warm. I used to wear arm warmers all the time as a teen, but never thought of making my own until now.
MENTAL HEALTH. I added a page on my site called happynothappy, which is just a very simple way to track how I feel from day to day. It would be more beneficial to track reasons as to why I feel a certain way on certain days, but for now I just want to keep it simple, otherwise I run the risk of abandoning the whole endeavour. Rostiger made their own version of my very basic tracker, which is a thousand times superior to mine, hehe!
MOVIES. I saw the Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time ever at the Vic Theater on October 27th. Of course, having never seen the film, most of the memes were lost on me, but thankfully I had read about what to expect so it was not too shocking to receive pieces of cooked toast and rice on my head. Tim Curry is absolutely brilliant in this role! He has such an amazing command of his expressions, it is evident that he has a background in theater. Luckily, I can watch the film again and again on my own because it is available for download on archive.org.
I also watched 2 french comedies I hadn't previously seen: 3 Hommes et Un Couffin by Coline Serreau(same person who directed the amazing La Belle Verte), and Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis by Dany Boon. The storylines of both films were predictable, but still very enjoyable(more so than their English counterparts).
QUOTESIf you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology — and you don’t understand your problems.
A quote by Laurie Anderson
CALL TO ACTION Trans people in the US are not likely to get support now that the orange man is back in power, and it is likely that some of the rhetoric will spill over our side of the border. There are many organizations that exist to improve queer, trans, and Two-Spirit lives in Canada. You can find organizations in your area using the Rainbow Action Hub on Egale's website. I've recently donated a binder to Qmunity in Vancouver.
If you recall, I recently shared Given and C.C.'s gofundme page, their funding target was reached and the campaign has ended, but they still need help. They will continue to share updates on Kofi, support them there if you can.
ARTICLES I READ AND LIKED
GREAT WEBSITES/PROJECTS
- Guerilla Girls, the website of the anonymous artist activists & feminists known as the Guerilla Girls.
- Zine Club, sign up to receive zines and/or mystery objects, handcrafted by multimedia artist Paloma Kop, in the mail.
- RJ, a re-enactment of Hanna Weiner's flag semaphore version of Romeo and Juliet.
As I try to grasp October, it slips through my fingers like sand in an hourglass. The month lingers in my memory, yet the details are few, the recollections minimal.
My routines unfold like well-rehearsed performances—some bring satisfaction, while most only add stress. My body follows familiar patterns, yet my mind drifts to places I don't even realize.
Conversations drift in from people scattered across different time zones and life paths, their stories collecting in my mind like artifacts from distant places. Archived, but not yet processed.
Over the entire month, all I see is an endless cycle of days bleeding into nights, sleep patterns dissolving into chaos, meetings stretching beyond their bounds.
In this frozen state of existence, books continue to be my go-to escape. Like in September, they create parallel worlds that run alongside a reality that has stalled.
Within their pages, I find movement. Stories unfold with their unique logic, each chapter revealing new possibilities I can't help but follow.
As October departs, leaving behind mere fragments of memories, something continues to shift beneath the surface. I'm still unsure about what is it.
So I persist, my mind continuously streaming input from books like data packets from a trusted source, finding stability in their structured chaos. Because sometimes, running in maintenance mode is enough, and there's beauty in the hum of a system in AUTO mode, preparing for its next deployment cycle.
I have gotten annoyed by timezone calculations for hopefully the final time. Here's a static html page you can download and save locally to roughly compare times in different timezones (just hours; you're on your own for minutes).
The way I'm naïvely imagining using this:
- Scroll to the timezone you know the time in.
- Click on the nearest hour.
- It'll highlight that column all over the page.
- Scroll or find the timezone you care about.
- If you're not in a whole-number timezone (Hello India), you'll need to do some additional mental arithmetic by comparing nearby rows.
That's it. Since it's almost entirely static, you can always be sure that you're seeing the same thing on this page as anyone else.
Unfortunately you need to know if you're in daylight savings time or not, something that is often beyond me. I'm not sure what to do about that without reintroducing dynamism that takes the current computer's time into account. Then I again end up wondering if others are seeing what I'm seeing.
There are a few abbreviations for America, Europe and Australia in both pages. You can see *ST and *DT on either page, which might help if you're not observing daylight time yet, but someone else is. There's a tension here between trying not to be overwhelming and emphasizing the Western or Northern hemisphere. My thinking is to only add codes for longitudes with lots of cities or with daylight savings time. Hopefully people in Bhutan or Nigeria or the Chatham Islands won't hold it against me.
Inspired by Bret Victor, but of course the inevitable mistakes are all mine.
October came and went, ideas piled up in notebooks, but I kept on drawing. I
knew already by the time I had finished the Pocket Rewriting zine that I would make a
dynamic implementation of it which, by the way, was very well received despite
my not having even had a chance of giving away a single one. I was delighted to
see folks print their own copies.
These past two weeks have been a throwback to the release of Orca, where the less programmatically inclined
started playing with it right away, and those with preconceptions about what
programming is, what it should look and work like, found it inscrutable and
opaque. To some, the booklet remains near undecipherable. I will try to help
bridge that gap with more approachable documentation and examples over the winter.
