paloma's journal

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.

i have this weird thing where, if there is something i want to post publicly about, and i haven't done it yet, i can't seem to sit down and write in my journal. i can — and have — done lots of other things in the meantime, but it feels strangely like i am sneaking around in secret. it's one of those weird procrastination brain things. who am i hiding from??

anyway, i finally finished my year in review blog post, which means i am free to do other things that result in public artifacts now! i started wanting to write it about a month ago, but the self-pressure really ramped up when new year's came and went and i still hadn't done it. then i went back to work for two weeks, and i also still hadn't done it. i wrote a little bit in the post itself about why it was a bit difficult to write, but i did it anyway, and i think it came out good enough to be proud of.

in the meantime, while procrastinating the blog post, i started making a suite of tools to make it easier to edit my website. in some sense, this was an extremely ironic way to procrastinate writing a blog post. "once i am finished making this tool, editing my website will be so much easier!" *proceeds to put 30 hours of work into the tool instead of 2 hours actually editing my website*

despite the irony, i am actually super excited and happy with how the tools came out. i really do think they will be a game changer, especially for making image galleries, and making custom gradient styles for my page backgrounds, two especially visual things that i had previously been doing laboriously in a code editor. i ended up building the tools as a static folder of html, css, and javascript files, rather than using a static site generator, because i wanted to keep them extremely minimal and free of external dependencies. along the way, i came up with a way to generate a list of all of the colors used on my website, that updates every time the site gets built, and gets served as a public json file. and then the website tool suite can ingest it and display it as a grid of swatches. i spent a while thinking and trying to figure out how to create swatches and save the data somewhere, only to realize that my website itself is the best point of reference for what colors are used on my website. kind of like self-documenting code or something.

prior to the website-tools project, i did another productive procrastination project in which i spent a bunch of time last week installing some elaborate automations on my smartphone to make it become essentially useless and uninteresting for approximately 12 hours a day. i already don't usually spend a lot of time on phone apps, but i have been wanting to get more sleep, and also have a more focused morning routine that doesn't involve "checking" a bunch of things right after i wake up.

now, i have a custom set of automations where if i log a certain amount of time on my meditation app in the morning, i can use an NFC tag attached to a 3D printed statue of the venus de milo to unlock the more compulsive apps on my phone. otherwise, i have to wait until 10am, when things unlock automatically. then, in the evening, the phone becomes "dumb" again at 10pm. i could theoretically disable these things, but i have set up deterrents that would make it very annoying to do so (and guilt trip me in the process). these are the kinds of things that bring me a weird amount of satisfaction to set up.

i also did another round of printing out my are.na idea cards. i had added 12 new things to are.na over the past couple weeks, so now i have a total of 176 cards. i'm still working through the 4 idea cards i pulled around new year's, but i'm almost ready to pull some more.

a week ago, we hosted a small birthday gathering for my 34th birthday that took place over the holidays (my birthday is the day after christmas). we had to push it forward from december because andrei was sick, but i think that more people were able to make it for the new date anyway, since it wasn't so much in the middle of the holidays. later in the week, we visited andrei's sister's family, and yesterday, i went to a gathering that some other friends were hosting. it's been a pretty social time!

going back to work after my two week break for the holidays was a bit tough because, despite my efforts, my sleep schedule got completely shifted around. so i was very tired for a lot of the first week, and a little bit of the second week. also at work, i helped my boss cut down a pretty huge tree, so that was kind of exciting, and a bit scary.

oh, and one more thing that happened since my last journal entry, is that i helped a client, who is also a family friend, triage and migrate a broken wordpress website. she has had her website running for over 25 years, but she's not a technical person at all so when her website disappeared, she was very distraught. thankfully, i was able to get it working again, but it took a good chunk of time last weekend that i did not expect to dedicate to that.

now, it's sunday evening, and i have tomorrow off because it's martin luther king day. i've still got some stuff i want to get done before my extra long weekend is over, but now that the blog post is done, i feel rather relieved.

ok, this journal entry has enough photos to make up for the last few having none. i took my camera with me today on a trip to the mystic aquarium.

since my last entry, i ended up obsessively going through everything in my password manager since the jurrasic era (2010s). i was planning to spread out the project more, but a part of me just wanted to get it over with, and i guess it scratched a certain itch. a few observations:

• a LOT of the websites i signed up for in the 2010s no longer exist. a reminder of the ephemerality of the web. i'm sure things are popping up and disappearing at a similar rate now, but the things had a different flavor back then.
• privacy policies are great and the GDPR is pretty cool for making it a more widespread (though not universal) practice to allow people to delete their personal data. though some websites say they will but their privacy contact listed in the policy doesn't work or they ignore you.
• when you change your email address for a website login, some companies will take it as permission to re-subscribe you to marketing materials that you had already unsubscribed from on the previous address. insidious!

anyway, i probably should have maintained things better over time instead of creating that trail of abandoned accounts and passwords for defunct websites, but i do feel better having cleaned up what i could.

i was going to do some website updates this week, but they still haven't happened yet. i took some photos of my are.na idea cards for the write-up though!

today, we met up with andrei's sister and her kids at a sri lankan restaurant, which ended up being really delicious. the kids were too cranky to come to the aquarium as planned, so we parted ways after lunch and andrei and i went to the aquarium on our own.

it turned out to be pretty crowded, but we were able to see a lot of really cute and cool animals. they have kind of a lot! dozens of tanks indoors with mostly ocean fish and creatures, and then outside there are penguins, sea lions, and a whole family of beluga whales. i have mixed feelings about humans keeping other species of animals in jail, but it's still neat to get to see them in person. the small percentage of photos that i found interesting enough to share are below...

i think we are officially not sick anymore, but got a bit drained from being out and about in the cold today. i'm glad i don't have to leave the house tomorrow, and can spend my last day of vacation in cozy goblin mode.

it's a new year! i stayed up late.

we didn't really do anything for new year's eve because we are both still a little bit sick. earlier today, i finished up a first draft of a website design i am working on for an artist friend. after banging my head on it for a while, it finally felt like it actually came together, and i wielded some neat css tricks. then, i did one more thing on my bucket list before the year ended: i made a new email address (or rather, got a domain to use for email) to replace the google mail account i have been using for online account logins for the past 10 years.

recently, i've been thinking about data hygiene. well, i think about it pretty often because it's a hot topic in the circles i run in. but the recent trigger was switching my default search engines last week. i already stopped using google search a while ago, but it made me more aware of how google is still lurking too heavily in my online life.

i already have 2 email addresses, one that i use for interpersonal correspondence (which was already a custom domain), and one that i use for online account signups (that was the one that was still on gmail). i wanted to transition the latter to a custom domain so that i could use a catch-all (*) alias and put in different email addresses for each website that i registered an account on. this would allow me to individually track how any given spammer got my address. not that i even get a ton of spam, but having this kind of digital hygiene brings me joy.

anyway, i finally went ahead and got a new, domain name, and hooked it up to a non-google email provider. i won't say the domain name here because i don't want it to be publicly connected to me. (weird to remember that this is a public space even though it's just bits on a raspberry pi behind my desk!)

i changed my login on a few accounts already, but it will take me a while to transition because of the sheer number of logins i've created since i started using my password manager. but the first step is done, and i feel great about it! oh, and using a custom domain name that i own means that i can switch providers in the future without having to repeat this process of going through and changing all of my old logins. (well, as much as anyone can really "own" a domain.)

then, we finished watching the godfather. i wanted to watch it as part of my project to understand more popular culture references. but it's actually kind of a good movie in some ways. sort of a funny choice for a movie to ring in the new year with though.

i want to put more photos in this journal. it's nice for things to feel a bit more visual. when i'm just spending time at home, i tend not to take as many photos. so this is a reminder to myself to play with my camera more.

ok, i have to go to bed now. happy new year, web friends!

over the holidays, i was given a break from work of over two weeks. i'm a bit more than halfway through it now. last week, i had family visiting for a few days, and i caught up on some deep cleaning around the house. then, i was supposed to have a birthday party and then go to brooklyn to visit some friends, but andrei got sick so we just canceled everything and stayed home. i was looking forward to seeing friends, but if i'm truly honest, having a lot of unstructured time at home is very much my idea of a good way to spend time off. plus, i have some things i wanted to work on that would have been more difficult to squeeze in around a trip.

one thing i worked on a bunch recently was making printed cards of all of my are.na blocks. are.na is a platform for gathering and organizing images, links, text, and files. a lot of people use it for research or moodboarding, or as a replacement for what we used to use tumblr for back when i was in college. anyway, it's one of the few online platforms that doesn't feel horrible to use these days, and i have used it sporadically for many years.

anyway, with the new year coming up, i was thinking a lot about what i should work on next and prioritize over the next year. but i had a lot of little notes about ideas of things to do scattered across different text notes and to-do lists. i started thinking about making a little app that i could use to gather and organize and catalog all of my ideas in one central place, so i could look at all of them in a more zoomed-out way and pick a path forward. i sketched out an overview of the kind of application i would like to have -- a collection of networked blocks organized by channels and tags -- and realized that are.na already offered 90% of what i needed. so instead of spending my time building something new, i focused on gathering my ideas all into are.na.

the really awesome thing about are.na is that they have a full API so you can export or do whatever you want with your data on there. i thought for a while about what i could do to close the gap of the remaining 10% of what i wanted to do with my pile of ideas that are.na couldn't already do. instead of building some kind of alternative front-end for are.na, i decided to bring the interaction into the physical world so i could engage with my ideas away from a computer screen. so i made some code that would generate a printable PDF with all of my are.na blocks as cards that i could cut down and have as a deck. i still want to do a write-up of the process on my website, but i shared the code on github. also, my are.na page with all my ideas is fully public. yay, transparency. (i want to write up some of my thoughts about working in public on my website too eventually.)

so between making the code for that, and cutting down 164 cards, i spent a decent chunk of time on that. but i'm very pleased with the result. now pretty much all of the things i want to do are available to me in physical form. i can shuffle through and review them, or to a tarot-style pull to decide what i should do today. sometimes, the pressure of making a decision can be stressful when there are too many options and you know you probably can never do them all. so randomness can be really helpful as a means for removing creative blocks. see also: brian eno's oblique strategies cards.

anyway, i'll save more of my thoughts on that front for my website. other stuff i did: i made another track for my friend brenna and my mutual accountability project. it didn't exactly come out amazing, but that wasn't really the point; i spent a few hours on it, i explored some new techniques and learned a bit, and i made more of a "song" than i have since i stopped making music regularly a few years ago. so far, after two rounds of our accountability music making project, i am feeling very good about it. speaking of randomness as a way to get past blockages, deadlines (even "artificial" ones like shaking a friend's hand and saying "i will send you a track on this day") can also help a lot. actually, that is something i like about zine club as well!

i have some more stuff i need to do this week. most of it is not under the same category of open-ended creative work, but i'm feeling good about the direction things are going, once i have some more time to return to it.

i also have been playing cyberpunk 2077. i am only about halfway through the main plot, and it's kind of occupying the part of my brain i normally use for a book i'm reading, so i've been resisting starting a new book until i'm finished. but i'm also playing it really slowly. oh well, books can wait for now.

wow! i woke up this morning and everything was covered in snow. exciting!

we walked to a cafe and had some brunch. then i played with the modular synth for a while. a friend and i are doing an accountability partnership where we both make a new song (can be rough) every other week and send it to each other. mine had a sound in it that sounded like a sad robot singing.

i've been thinking a lot about creativity, art, and what my goals are. i just found out i have over two weeks off for the holidays and i'm starting to think about what i want to do with my time. of course, much of it will also be spent relaxing and hanging out with friends and family. but i have been wanting to try new things, and it's hard to decide what to focus on when there are so many things that interest me. so i feel like i should also take the time to zoom out a bit and choose some directions to go next.

hmm, it's been over a week since i wrote in here. a lot has happened, but i haven't felt too much like typing things out. in this time of year, with dark, cold weather, i seem to have a natural urge to rest and not do too much beyond what feels necessary. so i haven't been sharing much online or in general. i normally do those things a bit more frequently (making blog posts and newsletters and the like), but i'm trying to give myself a break and not feel pressured.

this journal isn't a place where i really feel pressure to write, but writing in here is like, an artifact of me mentally processing things. and weirdly right now i haven't felt like taking a ton of time to process. but it doesn't feel like things are pent up or building up. things just happen and they seem to leave less of a trace afterwards sometimes. i actually stopped journaling for a long time at one point because of this. anyway, i'm not abandoning this journal; i know it will still be here when i feel the need to write more again.

anyway, here are some updates on current events in my life. soon after my last entry, i picked up andrei from the airport and we went to a szechuan restaurant and then went to two different specialty grocery stores. one of them was a chinese grocery store and one was eastern european. we got a bunch of stuff for the house, including bulk goods and seasonings. i found a really good relaxing tea blend that claims to be "hypnotic." (i assume that they meant it makes you sleepy.)

last week, i got back into the swing of work post-thanksgiving-break, and managed to start getting to bed earlier again, and also went back to the gym for the first time since then. i've stopped doing the work trade at the yoga studio and started doing the free yoga class at the community center where my gym is. the quality of teaching isn't the same as it was at a dedicated studio, which is to be expected, but it is a much better option for right now when i'm not able to commit to the volunteer work each week. anyway, the sleep and exercise together resulted in me feeling good for most of the week. aside from a random episode of stomach cramps on thursday night, which i couldn't pinpoint the cause of.

on friday, andrei and i did some errands together. we went to my eye doctor and i picked up my glasses, which had been re-lensed with a stronger prescription. i'm still getting used to them; my vision is sharper, but the amount of difference between each eye is a bit disorienting. it's been less than a week, and i'm adapting more over time, so hopefully i'll be able to adjust to them, and start using my right eye slightly more.

over the weekend, i did a bunch of house chores, played video games, and worked on a new piece of furniture for the living room (a baltic birch plywood cabinet with a dual purpose of redirecting the hot air from the vent so it doesn't blow directly at the heads of people sitting on the couch). i glued and assembled it with screws over the weekend, and then applied water-based polyurethane on monday morning so it could dry while i was at work.

yesterday was tuesday, and we did a visiting artist workshop for our friend anna's video performance class at hamilton college in upstate new york. we had to leave at 7am to get there to set things up, since it was over 4 hours away, so it was a long day. she also asked me to talk to the students about the fediverse, personal websites, and decentralized platforms in general. some of the students were very tired from studying for their finals, but they still seemed to enjoy exploring the analog video equipment we set up. in the evening, we went out to dinner with anna and jason, another friend who teaches russian at hamilton.

so this morning, we set out on the long drive home, which was delayed and slowed by a veritable blizzard. after taking refuge for a while in crazy otto's diner in herkimer, ny, we slowly made our way east, towards the coast and away from the weather systems of the great lakes, until the roads cleared up enough that we could drive at a normal speed again. now we are about an hour away from home, and i'm looking forward to that.

so, that's it for now. more... later? i'm not sure when, but as i alluded to at the beginning of this post, i might take a bit of a break from more regular updates.

it's been a quiet week with the house to myself. i didn't really celebrate thanksgiving, beyond catching up with family over the phone. i spent most of the actual holiday at the makerspace, working on stuff for zine club, which, if i'm honest, is kind of an ideal way to spend a holiday. as much as i like my family, longer periods of time off work are precious, and i often prefer to spend them at home, working on my own stuff and chilling out.

i have been feeling a bit anxious lately, and i've noticed that positive things in my life can sometimes feel like they fade into the background, while points of friction and difficult things continue to come to the foreground and be more noticed. i'm usually a fairly optimistic person, but recently i've been observing more of that "negativity bias" thing, which i've read about and know is fairly common. frankly, i think thanksgiving is kind of a bullshit holiday, and i'm wary of the potential for gratitude practices to become exercises in toxic positivity. but with those caveats, i decided to make a list of things that i am grateful for, so that i can look at it when i feel like my mind is fixating too much on the negative. but since i also don't want to avoid my problems, i included a list of things that frustrate me as well. i guess i'm hoping that acknowledging both the things i'm happy about and the things that frustrate me about my life right now will help give me a more balanced perspective. and having lists of things that i update over time can sometimes make me more aware of things, because i'm subconsciously looking for stuff to add to my list.

i'm not gonna share my lists here, as they are a bit personal, but i thought i'd share the idea of the practice. reading about how other people process and organize their thoughts is interesting to me, so i'm doing the same.

tomorrow i'm picking andrei up from the airport, and the next day i'll be back at work, so my mini-vacation (which i've somewhat ironically spent working just as hard as usual) is coming to an end soon. today, i'm planning to pack and prepare this new batch of mystery objects for shipping. (they came out really nice, i'm excited to send them out.) i might watch some battlestar galactica while doing some of the more rote tasks. and maybe i'll have some time to play video games if i finish the whole thing up before too late in the day.

my boss gave me an old pair of insulated carhartt overalls that had been sitting in his basement for a while. they were very dirty, the shoulder straps were worn out, and the legs were far too long for me. so that was my excuse to spend several hours watching battlestar galactica while hemming and repairing them.

i sew by hand, which for this task was difficult due to the thick layers of tough canvas, but i eventually managed to take in the legs, hem them, and replace the straps with fresh elastic. i also dyed them dark gray, which helped a lot with making them not look super stained. now they just look a little bit stained which is actually a huge improvement; i didn't take a before picture, but they were beige, so you can probably imagine. also they match the rest of my clothing better now.

i should probably do the badge process to get access to some of the sewing machines at the local makerspace. they have a sailrite machine there, which would have made quick work of these bibs. but then i would have had to leave my house and not watch battlestar galactica...

i've mostly been hibernating because of the cold weather and spending 4 days last week doing construction work. andrei is traveling to visit family, so i've spent the past couple days enjoying the quiet and warmth of my apartment, playing video games, and doing some prep work for some art/object-making projects i have coming up soon.

i have to leave my house again to work again tomorrow, so i'm mentally preparing to go back out into the cold. at least now i have more insulated pants options...