paloma's journal

i am mostly making this journal entry to share two photos i took, both at golden hour. one of them is of some geese, and i took it today while taking a long walk in the park with a friend. the other one was taken near central park between some a/v shifts last week.

i also will write a little bit about what's been going on, but since it's already getting late, i will be brief.

we played the show in boston the weekend before last and it went well! i still have not succeeded in gathering any visual evidence yet, but when i do i will make a blog post about it. i really enjoyed the change of pace of performing live music/audio instead of visuals, and i will likely try out a few variations of similar ideas, letting andrei handle the visuals for the next few collaborative sets we do.

then, i spent 3 days in the city last week and did a bunch of a/v work. some of it required a radical shift of my sleep schedule, but i seem to have handled it pretty well. i spent a lot of time reading in central park in the long break between setup and strike calls. and i think that working long shifts doing very physical work actually jump started my metabolism, in a good way?? really did not expect that but it seems to have happened.

this past weekend, i did very little besides clean my (office) room (ending the reign of post-show chaos), reset my general systems/to-do lists, and spend many hours reading in my hammock. it was incredibly warm and nice outside, in the shade beneath the maple tree in our backyard. i have been very engrossed in the book i'm reading, but it's very long so i'm still just barely halfway done. even when i am doing other things, in my mind i'm looking forward to when i get the chance to read more.

i found out that a thing i was really hoping would happen is not going to happen. and not only that, but i also found out that the chances of it happening were much lower than i previously thought. sorry for being vague, but i don't want to go into specifics here right now. what i will say is: i've tried taking a few different paths in my "career", and i'm still searching for what feels like a right direction to take for the longer term future.

a part of me is jealous of people who have been doing the same thing for many years in a row, such that other people can look at their job history and see them as qualified for something. but then again, i can't change the part of my personality that seeks breadth over depth and can't stay on a single narrow path. and i think that it is actually kind of a positive quality, though it's not one that society seems to reward. i have some ideas of things i might try to do, but i'm not sure yet. thankfully, things are fine in the short term so i've got time to stew on it.

on wednesday we went to troy, ny to see a show by secret chiefs 3. it was really good, wow! as one would expect from them, there were microtonal guitars, crazy time signatures, and ridiculous synchronization. it was the kind of show that makes you wish you spent 10,000 hours learning an instrument. but they're not just good in a navel-gazey intellectual way. they also make you want to jump around!

now we are back home, but we have to go to the boston area tomorrow to perform a show ourselves. i'm doing live music(? it's not the most musical but it's sounds for sure!) i finally figured out exactly what i'm gonna do, and it involves live sampling a radio with granular synthesis, vocals(!), and a continuumini (a small controller that you play with one finger and it also has a synth built into it). i was thinking of incorporating some pre recorded sounds/samples but i was able to get enough variety from my live techniques that i didn't feel the need to. so it's all live... and pretty improvisational (since i don't know what will be on the radio, and then i have to play along with those samples). i hope it goes well!

here's my setup/plan so far for performing live sound this saturday. among other more computer-y things, i will have a foley box with a microphone, and black cloth in the box to damp the sound, and so that the feed from a camera pointing into the box can be keyed in with the visuals / interact with the video feedback.

i keep starting journal entries with a note about how busy i have been. so when i say now that i've continued to be very busy, i want to state that it is no exaggeration. as someone who thrives on having at least some time each week for unstructured existence, this is not my preferred mode of operation... but there are some times of year when everyone seems to agree that everything needs to happen all at once, and this part of spring seems to be one of them.

here is some of what has been going on:

i worked two more AV event gigs at the natural history museum in manhattan. one of them was a strikedown that went late and i was there until 3am. i felt kind of hungover for a couple days after that; though i consumed no alcohol, it was the same feeling.

a couple days after that, i helped out with a show that andrei organized at ely center here in new haven, which we had 3 friends from out of town come and play at. so we were also hosting a bit, and i shot video footage and photos of all 5 performers in the show. i didn't expect to have as much energy for that as i did, but everyone did such a great job that i was very engaged throughout. i will include some of the photos i shot from that below.

i interviewed and prepared more materials for a still-currently-secret thing. i hope to find out soon how that is going to shake out. i will say more about what it is later if things move forward...

we hosted a party in our backyard yesterday in celebration of andrei's birthday. we did tie dyeing and lots of people came over, and much chips and dips were eaten. i drank half of a 3mg THC-infused lemonade (so 1.5mg). for someone like me who has no tolerance, that was a perfect amount to be enjoyable without actually impairing any of the functionality i needed for post-party cleaning. we also had another friend visiting who stayed over (two weekends in a row with houseguests!) we watched southland tales, which is a pretty terrible but funny movie. then, this morning, we all went to the diner near the west haven train station, which is the best diner we've found so far in the area.

i also participated in capitalism! i visited several thrift stores over the past few weeks, and i found some things that i was very pleased with, including:

• a vacuum cleaner that normally retails for at least $400, which is from a brand who claims they design their appliances to last 20 years. (it was in brand new condition!)
• some clothes
• a new hat (in the "baseball cap" form factor)
• a new bag — i suppose you could call it a purse — which i like because it holds its shape when sitting open, so i can easily fetch items from it while at work
• one of those kids' science kits for growing your own crystals (i gave this to andrei for their birthday so they can make time lapses!)

i also purchased something that was not from a thrift store: namely, a new e-ink drawing tablet / digital notebook thing. i have another one that is older and larger form the same company, which i have been using at my desk, but which was too big for me to want to carry with me anywhere. i sort of use hand-written diagrams and sketches as an extension of my thinking process, so i was previously using pieces of scrap paper, but i grew to really enjoy using the e-ink notepad as a sort of whiteboard (like, "disposable" notes, as opposed to notes i actually want to keep and reference later, which would be in my obsidian vault.) i also like the ability to erase things, since as a left-handed person, pencils are my enemy. and also, i stopped accumulating little crumpled-up pieces of paper.

long story short, after some deliberation, i decided to buy another digital e-ink notebook in a smaller form factor so i can carry it with me. so far it's been nice!

i must admit that a lot of the draw for me is that using them is more fun than a regular analog notebook. that's part of why, somewhere in my mind, it feels a bit wasteful to purchase a new electronic device for such a purpose. but if drawing notes is more fun, i'm more likely to do it, so perhaps i shouldn't criticize myself for that? it feels very nice to use a digital device that isn't connected to the internet. (i leave the wi-fi off on both of them, which also helps the battery life. for my use case as a thinking-scratchpad, there isn't much point in backing up my note files.) sure, a regular notebook doesn't have internet either. but the ability to just delete pages at will makes it feel like one of those stones that you paint on with water, and the image fades. there is a kind of low key zen magical-ness to it.

in less fun news, i have been having pain in my foot arches. because i have been so active, i haven't had time to pause and recover, so i've been experimenting with different shoe/insole combinations, and trying to remember to stretch more. i think i have plantar fasciitis? but i don't really want to go to an actual medical person at the moment (u.s. healthcare system, enough said) so i'm hoping to figure out how to manage it on my own for now.

i guess i'll wrap this up, as i'm not sure what else to write about. bye for now!

i've continued to be extremely busy, so i haven't taken much time to sit down and write in this journal lately. but lots of stuff has happened!

last weekend, andrei and i went to philadelphia to participate in a conference called electronics faire, which happens each year at temple university. we led a workshop on analog video glitch, and i got to attend (most of) a workshop by lee tusman about the new L5 creative coding library. i also saw a bunch of friends, including ragman (who i met & attended a workshop by at last year's conference), mika from coaxial arts in LA, and sam, my friend from grad school who we stayed with and got to see their new house. i also bought some fun electronics parts from the iffy books table; iffy books is a great infoshop that hosts the local permacomputing meetups in philly.

a lot of my time has also been occupied by zine-making, work, and doing an application process for a thing i'm hopeful about but don't want to say much more about until i see what happens. paperwork is a big thing! i'm actually running a bit late on the march edition of my e-zine for zine club. but i've very pleased with the parts i've finished so far, so hopefully it will be worth the wait. also, this month is the two year anniversary of zine club's existence!

between doing those things, i've also found time to spend some time outdoors and enjoy the newly warm (and occasionally even hot!) weather.

right now, i'm on the train to nyc, to work an AV event gig. i ran into a snag on the way here because the parking lot at the train station was 100% filled up (that's never happened to me before!) luckily, i found a free carpool lot a ten minute walk away, and had given myself enough extra time that catching the next train should still get me there on time.

hmm, what else is there to say?

• i am in the process of helping a friend try to recover as much data as possible from a failing SSD. so ddrescue has been running for over 36 hours on my computer back at home. some of their video work will likely be corrupted, but we'll salvage what we can. always remember to back up your data!!
• i read some fairy tales in spanish which were published as an "interlinear" translation. that basically means that each word appears in both languages; the main spanish text above, and a word by word literal caption in english below. very helpful for being able to read in spanish enjoyably without needing a dictionary nearby. many sentences i can understand without looking at the english text at all. my mom said my conversational spanish has been improving as well.
• i got a thunderbolt dock for my laptop, so i was able to remove a bunch of tangly wires and dongles from my desk. this will be especially helpful for when i want to use a bunch of video captures and midi stuff at the same time.
• i learned how to remove powder coatings from old stainless steel water bottles and coffee cups by wrapping them in acetone soaked paper towels and putting them in a sealed baggie. so i've been enjoying using my newly refurbished, shiny stainless steel drinkware :D

i haven't had that much time to write lately. i've been working extra days and i also worked in nyc last weekend, and visited a friend. but there were a few really nice, warm days, so we explored some state parks near new haven over several hikes. we found a strange, hexagonal tower that turned out to be an air vent for a tunnel where the highway goes under the small mountain on the west side of town. you could hear the faint roar of engines echoing up through it. we also found some lakes, cliffs, and radio towers.

this post is mostly a photo-based update. bye for now...

i'm posting again even though my last one was only a couple days ago. hi!

i ran into a couple of glitches when trying to post my last post, so i ended up having to dig into the code for this journal for the first time in a while. in addition to making it so photos from my phone show up with the correct rotation, and fixing some configs on my reverse proxy server, i decided to do a bit more and implement something i had been musing about doing: adding an image-only rss feed so i could join a webring made by some folks on my fediverse server. basically, it's an aggregated feed of images that come from a bunch of different people's websites. part of the point of this journal is to have a place to share photos i take, so it seemed fitting to have this be the source of my contributions to the image webring. anyway, i also added a page on here that shows them in a gallery format. i also just like being able to go back and see all my photos!

in other news, we spent saturday puttering around in the van, testing it out on the highway since it just got a new transmission. it seems to be working well. we went to the beach and walked around (though i was still hobbling a bit, due to my the poison ivy blisters on my feet), went to some thrift stores, and a donut shop, and visited some friends who live in a town east of us near the shore.

sunday was a little bit random. i spent some time troubleshooting stuff for the scanlines peertube instance, talked to my family, did the tiniest bit of spanish practice, and watched raining in the mountain with andrei.

today, monday, has been cold, wet, and generally uneventful. i did a little bit more work on this journal, then decided to actually put it to use. so here we are!

i am writing this journal entry from an armchair in the corner of the ely center, while andrei and some other people are setting things up for a "weird music night" show. i'm not performing in this show, but i did help out a tiny bit by bringing some cables and falafel over.

it's been a minute since my last entry! my week has been somewhat colored by the fact that i got poison ivy. the previous week, i did some work outside, and i'm usually pretty good at avoiding it, but there is no foliage on the plants yet, so i wasn't really able to identify things. i'm highly sensitive to it, so whatever oils i picked up from touching a vine or root were enough to give me a pretty annoying and uncomfortable rash. i've been going about life mostly as usual, but everything feels just a tiny bit more irritating. hopefully it will heal soon and i can have a newfound appreciation for not being itchy.

meanwhile, andrei got back from the house-sitting trip, and we've been watching a ton of movies together since then.

last weekend, i began a personal archaeological expedition into my digital past because i am re-doing my artist/academic CV. i have had an HTML version of my CV as the definitive version where i keep track of things, but i never put in exact dates for things, and there were some things that never got added. i am making a new version that's actually a spreadsheet/database in grist (a web app I self-host), which will then be formatted into a document by a custom script i'll build, probably with typst. i'm entering all of the data of my performances, exhibitions, screenings, etc. in grist with more precision and specifics, so i've had to go back in time via archives on my hard drive, data exports from social media accounts i deleted years ago, email threads from the stone age, and versions of my website that only exist on archive.org. (not to be melodramatic — i'm not actually that old — but 15 years of Being Online feels like an eternity in internet time.)

i got things started pretty well last weekend, and i'm hoping to finish it up this weekend. it's not the most exciting project to talk about, but it's one of those things that just needs to be done, and i'll be very glad when it's finished.

oh yeah, also, last weekend, we went to an indoor ropes course / zipline place which we had a gift card for. i have never done a ropes course before, but apparently it's not an uncommon thing. i enjoyed it, especially the zipline part. my only complaint was that the harness didn't move as smoothly as i would have liked; i kind of had to hold it in my hand and drag it around, which meant i couldn't fully try to balance on my own without it. regardless, it was fun to be high up in the air and in weird colored lighting.

a couple other misc things:

• a friend commissioned me to build them a custom-coded artist website. my favorite kind of website to make!
• i've been continuing to practice spanish. i might go on an immersion trip with my mom this summer.
• i upgraded our peertube server (the OS, database, and peertube itself). it was a slightly more painful process than i was hoping for, but i didn't have to revert to my backup, and it worked out in the end.

OK, the show is starting now, so that's enough journaling for the moment. till next time...

it's sunday night, my new preferred time to journal things out as i end one week and begin another one. but last weekend, i didn't end up journaling at all because i was sort of ridiculously busy. i left a zine deadline until the last minute, and then it also coincided with another deadline to submit a workshop proposal, along with some schedule things that couldn't be moved. i was up late on sunday night submitting the proposal that was due at 11:59pm, and then on monday i stayed up late again to finish the zine so i could mail it out on tuesday. i was like a college student during finals week!

thankfully, everything i had to do came together in a very satisfactory way. i am especially pleased with the zine, which won't go into too much detail about since it is supposed to be mysterious. but what i will say is, the technique i used to create the imagery was very exciting, and i want to use it to make some more things soon!

i got snowed in by the blizzard last week, so i worked 5 days this week to catch up (i usually work 4 days at my art studio job). i finished setting up a really cool parametric design system in grasshopper / rhino, and i was able to automate way more than i expected to. now that i've set up parametric design for the laser cut tools, i have some ideas for how i can automate the creation of the graphics (that we use to draw/simulate the tools in use). those kinds of things are my favorite thing to do at this job, so i didn't mind spending an extra day at work.

my partner left to go house sit for their family, so i have the apartment to myself for a few days. over the weekend, i wanted to focus in on more art-related things. i did everything that my last batch of idea cards gave me ideas for, so i decided to draw some new cards. which was also a good opportunity to print new cards of the things i've added to are.na since the last time. i ended up updating my script that creates the cards to support the new v3 are.na api. then, i started thinking about how annoying it was to try to shuffle this very large stack of cards that i have now, and how it would be nice to have something like my tarot app but for my idea cards. i briefly considered integrating the idea card deck into subtle.cards as an option, but i built that one as an experiment in working with "modern" javascript frameworks, and i sort of never want to look at the code for it again. i'm much happier working with "vanilla" javascript, such as the website editing tool suite i built a few weeks ago (that i've been using!) and what's more, i already have a place where i keep weird, easter eggy javascript things. so i put it in there.

well, building that took most of my afternoon and evening yesterday, but i was very excited to see it taking shape and couldn't stop hyperfocusing on it, so i just embraced it. it was probably 9pm or so when i finally got around to actually using the tool to pull some new idea cards. the cards i pulled felt very thematically appropriate for what i've been thinking about lately, which is maybe not surprising since i made all the cards, but it still kind of feels like magic.

this morning i worked on documenting what i did and going back over things with fresh eyes. then i worked on a few smaller things for a while and did some chores and talked to my family on the phone.

i definitely have a bit of tension between my desire to create and perfect infrastructure vs. my desire to actually use the things i've made and stop tweaking them so i can focus on making art and just like, living normally? but i think that's actually kind of a natural quandary to have when your art practice partly consists of making tools. i'm always in constant conversation with myself about it. but i do want to do some more video recording and experiment with color more, and those involve more tool use than tool creation. probably????

other things that are going on:

• i helped my younger sibling start making a website for their photography portfolio.
• i got this thing called "snapcast" working to send audio between different rooms in my house. (i tried to do this before and failed, so i was using a much more cumbersome setup. the trick that made it work this time was using sox instead of ffmpeg to write the stream to a pipe!)
• i tried to go to the gym on friday, but they closed mad early. i almost forgot that it's a jewish organization, and they observe the sabbath.
• it was like 60 degrees fahrenheit today. spring is finally happening!

well, we got another 18 inches or something of snow. it's hard to measure exactly how much, because it was so windy on the day of the blizzard that the coating is very uneven; in some places, it barely covers the ground, while in others, it's piled up a few feet. i normally would be at work today (and yesterday too), but everything has been kind of shut down while people were huddled indoors during the blizzard, and then dealt with the aftermath.

thankfully, the show last weekend was unaffected, since the snow didn't begin until the next day. however, our friends who were on tour did have to cancel their nyc show that was scheduled for sunday. meanwhile, we spent sunday afternoon at our friend kit's house, who lives close enough to walk to. kit was hosting a "soup party," which is a party where he makes soup, and people come and eat it. by the time we walked home, the blizzard had begun in earnest, and we got fully coated in snow. there was a surreal moment where we walked past a man who was standing very still in the snow next to a telephone pole, who said "we got that blizzard ahh?" as we passed. it's hard to explain why, but it was totally unreal. also, the snow muted all sound reflections so there was no ambient reverb whatsoever, which was also super weird to experience.

in between shoveling snow today, i worked on the aforementioned blog post. what else have i been up to? the usual noodling around with coding, website, and self-hosting stuff. i installed nextcloud, which i resisted for a long time but i actually really like it. i didn't install any of the "document editing" features, i am just using it for files and it's really great for that. i also worked on setting up various data to get backed up automatically, which seems like it should be easier than it was, but i think it's working now. *fingers crossed*

oh, and i made a custom script that grabs all of the drawings in my e-ink tablet as images via usb. and i used my website-tools suite and found it saved me a lot of time when updating my website recently. and i made some spreadsheets that do cool stuff. these things brought me joy.

we watched john waters' crybaby and brian de palma's femme fatale, both of which i enjoyed. we also tried to watch another movie that was so bad we had to turn it off. that doesn't happen very often; we usually watch a lot of bad movies ... although we seem to have a higher tolerance for them if they involve martial arts.

that's all i have to report for now. till next time...

for some reason, i was unable to get a good night of sleep for the past 2 nights. so after waking up this morning feeling like someone had hit me over the head with a brick, i decided to call out of work and take a day off to rest up.

i think some of it was related to normal hormone cycles that just hit me a little extra hard this time (a known reason for occasional sleep issues), but i was also a little bit frazzled from a lot of things happening at once. specifically, yesterday, we had a new internet connection installed at our apartment, and a change in network details ended up necessitating a lot of work from me to track down new IP addresses and reconnect things. while i know what i would do differently next time, and this was partly self-inflicted due to having too many networked devices in my home, i was unable to stop myself from just trying to fix everything right away. perhaps my impulse control was weakened by my first night of poor sleep, or perhaps it was just normal neurosis, but i "had" to work on it then and there, despite a part of me knowing i needed more rest than i was allowing myself.

i did actually get everything working, and now this journal should stay publicly accessible despite no longer having a static IP address (yay!), plus all my little networked home automation toys are back online. but the lesson to myself is clear. it's sometimes a helpful habit to feel a need to clean/fix/organize things that don't seem right (my tools stay organized, my email inbox stays clear). but sometimes it's not helpful!

if i had just taken it easy and given myself a proper wind-down in the evening, would i have made it to work today? not sure, but i know that it would have helped me feel a bit better regardless.

anyway, i didn't get the chance to write in this journal again this past sunday evening, due to the aforementioned "a lot of things happening!" thankfully, some of the things that were happening were fun.

• my partner played a show on saturday, so i helped out with that. it was a hoot.
• i made a diagram of my art practice for an open call, and that ended up being an interesting project. i wrote about it on my blog.
• i completely revamped how the RSS feed on my website works, and made some far-sweeping changes to my website code in the process. very happy with how it came out — now i can share all kinds of things on my RSS feed, not just my blog posts. (i use RSS myself, so even though there are probably only like, 4 people following me on there, i feel much better knowing it's supported. plus, i am grabbing the same feed and showing recent items on my website's landing pages, so i don't have to write those manually anymore either.)
• side note: i was planning on focusing on other things besides my website's code this weekend (since i've spent a lot of time on it recently), but i finally realized how i wanted to set it up, so i just went for it. i'm excited to actually share more art things on my website now, instead of just working on its code.
• i bought an e-ink tablet from one of the people i work for, because she stopped using it a while ago. it's suuuper fun to write/draw on, even if it mostly serves the exact same purpose as the blank pad of paper sitting next to it on my desk.
• i started practicing my spanish. now that my parents are living in mexico full-time, i want to be prepared for when i visit them, though i'm not sure yet when that will be. i've been listening to intermediate spanish podcasts, and practicing my speaking over video chat with my mom. no hablo muy bien, pero con unas semanas, seguro que yo voy a recordar más y mejorar mucho.

ok, now, it's time to embrace my tiredness and chill out a bit this evening. bye for now.

it's sunday night again, so i'll continue the pattern of documenting my weekend before going back to work tomorrow.

it has been very cold lately, in the low teens fahrenheit during the day, and windy. this has significantly lowered my motivation to go outside. however, i actually went out and about a decent amount, just slightly reluctantly at times. besides errands and visiting some specialty grocery stores on friday and saturday, we also went to an art opening today at ely center, for a group show that we had a piece in. it was the first public event in their new interim location, and andrei helped them a bit with the renovation project, so everyone was excited to see how the space came out. we saw some friends and gave out some flyers for two shows we have coming up, one andrei is organizing and one i am organizing.

in between things at home, i worked on some more computery projects. i installed this app called "grist" on my server which is like a self hosted, open source version of airtable. airtable is like either a spreadsheet on steroid, or a database with a decent gui, and i used to use it when i worked in tech, but i never wanted to use it for personal projects because it feels very corporate and not cozy. grist is a pretty great medium, and i was able to implement 2 things in it already that seem like they will be very useful. one of them is a database of all the videos i've uploaded to vimeo, youtube, and peertube, and their metadata (title, description, etc.) which i used to keep in a normal spreadsheet. but now that they are in grist, i can query the data directly through the api, so i expanded my video embed shortcode generator to have a little browser that lets me see all my videos with thumbnail images and stuff and then easily grab embed codes for them.

that was kind of the highlight of my weekend, which is pretty nerdy. here are some other things i did recently:

• finally sent out my first email newsletter in over half a year. the impetus was to share some events i had coming up, but i took the opportunity to look back and share some other stuff i did since my newsletter radio silence
• set up a tracker sheet and input form for shared household expenses (also in grist)
• set up automatic external backups of my yunohost server (because i wanted to keep my grist data backed up, but was probably overdue anyway)
• at work, started writing some detailed technical documentation that brought me a lot of satisfaction
• also at work, finished what i started with last week with optimizing the parametric design (grasshopper) patches; the ending optimization was more like 99%!!!
• watched 3 more ridiculous martial arts movies with andrei
• had my art shown at an exhibition opening in michigan

also, lots of people sent interesting images to txxt.club. i think the weekly digest i set up is helping serve as a gentle reminder that it exists, and to look at what others have shared.

oh, and i got a paper planner. i am still figuring out how i want to use it, since i have my to do lists and calendar digitally, but writing things out on paper at the beginning of the week seems to help me think, and i was tired of manually drawing a grid of days on blank paper.

feedback for myself in the near future: instead of working a little bit on lots of different things, i should focus more on fewer things. it's fun to follow shiny objects, but not a good strategy for all the time.

well, that's enough for now. i need to go to sleep!

normally i have 3 days off work each week, but due to the snow my days got pushed forward last week so i only had two days off in a row.

we spent one of those days out & about, meeting some family for lunch, visiting a friend, going to some thrift stores. the rest of my time was pretty much spent working on my website (again!)

i made a new template so i can quickly create nice looking pages for events, and the event data will also show up on my homepage and /now page. i made pages for two events that i have coming up, and added the template to my frontmatter editing tool so i can actually remember what fields to input (unlike most of my website pages, they have a lot of variables in the frontmatter and very little "body" content. the editing tool serves as documentation when i'm making new pages, because it has form inputs for all those variables.)

once i finished that up, i also did a couple of speed/bandwidth optimizations. i noticed that the new version of mobile safari broke mobile menu design (shakes fist at cloud) so i fixed that. instead of having a crazy javascript/svg filter animation, i made the same motion graphic as an animated gif. i also remade something i was using css blend modes for as an image with alpha. normally those would be a .gif and a .png respectively, but i also finally caved and made all of the images on my site output as .webp, which supports transparency and animation but has much better file sizes. i mostly did that to fix some of my tarot card images (some of those images were 2-7 megabytes each, oops). it definitely improved overall speed, at the expense of some backwards compatibility. perhaps someday i will think about further optimizations (variable resolution images with <figure>? fallback formats?) but i think it is already a bit of an improvement.

now i'm back at work. today, i was doing some tutorials to learn grasshopper, the procedural design plugin for rhino. at the end of the day, i was able to vastly improve one of our existing patches that was created like, a decade ago, so it computes 90% faster. that made me excited. optimizations all around, at home and work! hopefully i can figure out more cool stuff in the next few days while we have more in-between-things time.

photo kind of unrelated; it's the interior of a washing machine.

the blizzard that passed across the entire eastern half of the united states on sunday deposited about 18 inches of snow on us here in new haven, connecticut. this caused some logistical issues when shoveling our driveway, which is basically a car-width gap between our building and our neighbor's fence. the snow was piled so high everywhere around it that we literally ran out of places to put it. shoveling is one thing; scooping up snow, carrying it 15+ feet, and then hoisting it up on top of a pile that's approaching your own height is quite another. at least my employers didn't mind that i had to start my week two days later than usual; they were still waiting for their plow to show up on tuesday morning.

besides the whole snow debacle, here are some other things that happened since my last entry:

• i spent an evening dog sitting thor, which mostly consisted of sitting in a rocking chair next to the wood stove.
• i made a flyer for a show i'm helping organize next month. it has ascii art!
• jammed out with andrei and learned how to do latency-free live input monitoring, as well as measuring and compensating for latency when recording, via ableton and my motu interface.
• drank hot chocolate.
• made and shared a document about txxt.club with people on the fediverse. also (hopefully) fixed some bugs and improved error handling in the code of the serverless function that runs it.
• discovered that, due to the cold weather, there was a ton of condensation forming in our pantry, so had to empty everything out of there to get it dried out. the fun of living in a building from the 1800s...

i have some music and art events coming up next month, so i decided that i want to make an "events" section for my website. i want to have links i can use to share info about events i'm organizing and participating in without needing to rely on other people to put them on an actual webpage. (i'm putting my foot down: no more shall i link to instagram posts as the sole source of info about an event!) but, while sketching out the page design, i realized that i also really wanted people to be able to zoom in on images in my lightbox image viewer. (event flyers often have a lot of small text on them, so the lack of zoom was more of an issue.)

this resulted in me going down a rabbit hole of changing the lightbox of my site from a very basic 15 kilobyte one (simple-lightbox), which i had heavily customized the code of, to one just under 100kb in total (PhotoSwipe — although the full library doesn't load until the lightbox is opened). i try to be stingy about how much javascript is on my site, but in this case it felt like the trade off was worth it: the new library has support for gesture controls, zoom, and panning around in the zoomed-in image, and works equally well with mouse and touch screens. it also has a lot of customizability that i was shockingly able to do without modifying the main library code at all. in addition to creating custom icons and other UI tweaks, i also extended their video plugin to work with iframe video players. (so i can have video players that only load when opened, good for pages with a lot of videos on them, so you don't have to load like 20 iframes when you open the page.) it also still has the same "progressive enhancement" pattern of linking to the source file when javascript is disabled, so i didn't have to change that much about my HTML or shortcodes.

anyway, that took me like, most of a day, and then i spent another half a day fixing various little things on my website that no one else probably would have ever noticed. so even though i still haven't actually started making the new events section, i feel better about adding new things now that the site is more ship-shape.

now it's tuesday evening, the driveway is finally clear, and i'll be back to work tomorrow. so, i guess my extra-long, extra snowy, website-editing-filled weekend is drawing to a close. i did enjoy it, but i hope it doesn't snow this much again for a long time.

i am very physically tired and sore right now because the last 2 days at my job, i helped split a bunch of firewood from a huge old sugar maple tree that had to be chopped down recently. normally, they split most of their wood manually with an axe, but the maple wood was very stubborn and also some of the logs were so large in diameter that even at just 18 inches long, they required two people's full strength to roll. (so wide that they seemed more like discs than cylinders.) with a rented hydraulic wood splitter, we were able to process the whole pile, but it was quite a marathon getting it all done in time to return the machine. as david said today when i left, "it was epic."

thor, the dog, was very annoyed at being left inside for his own safety during that whole process.

now it's friday evening, and i've got a few days to rest up and work on my own projects, which thankfully currently do not involve much physical exertion. we are also expecting a blizzard here on sunday, but i don't have to be anywhere until tuesday morning, so i hope that if we get snowed in, we can just hunker down and be cozy in our abode.

p.s. andrei made a cake that tastes delicious, but looks like some kind of halloween prank because it has drippy lemon curd frosting that looks like cartoonish slime. they are also blasting power metal while cooking beet soup as i write this.