paloma's journal

wow, i am so tired. it is sunday night, after a very eventful weekend. my younger sibling came to visit me, and we went to a very large thrift store in my area. we spent three hours there, and i obtained at least a year's worth of new clothes. my younger sibling is my personal fashion consultant, so it was helpful to have them with me in that process. in particular, i got a lot of light, flowy, natural-fiber clothing, to help me cope with the hot weather. they also helped me cull and organize my wardrobe in general. i have a bag of things to donate, and more space for the new things i found. i'm actually excited to wear my clothes now, which i must say i haven't felt in a pretty long time.

we also did some bleach dyeing with another friend who came over to hang out. i did my usual bleach-dyeing technique, which involves throwing splatters of bleach randomly onto my clothes and hoping they come out cool. but my sibling and friend both did very careful, intricate designs that they painted onto the clothing with a brush. even though it was both of their first time trying doing it, the results were very cool, and i think i'll try it too next time, in addition to my random splashing.

today, my sibling left, and my partner returned from a 2 week family trip to alaska. so we went on a long walk together and caught up. it was pretty hot again today, for the fourth day in a row, but i read that it's supposed to cool off tomorrow. i hope the cooler weather leaves me feeling a bit less drained...

i went to the city to work some AV gigs. i helped set up screens for a tent event at the central park zoo. i had not been there before. we were working near the sea lion enclosure, and they were watching us with curiosity.

i was traveling very light, which was nice. besides a change of clothes and toothbrush, i just brought my e-ink tablet and my phone with some locally downloaded episodes of battlestar galactica. between working, sleeping, and hanging out with friends, the only time i had to kill was the train ride itself. so i decided not to even pretend i was going to get anything done!

i got back pretty late last night, but decided to go to my other job early today anyway, to force my sleep schedule back towards "normal" (it hasn't been the same since my trip to mexico). well, i think it worked, because i am extremely tired.

i was reading an article earlier about how many people entering college today do not have the basic reading and writing skills that would have been taken for granted in decades of the recent past. i was thinking about how both AI and the whole shortform video content thing are perfect allies in destroying people's brains. i also don't want to assume the smugness of a person who says, "i'm smarter than you all because i do not do these things." it's such a strange time, and god knows the youth will figure out their own way to have intellectual lives... i hope.

anyway, i'm going to keep reading and writing, and where it makes sense, creating diagrams and other visual aids. i won't read my writing aloud to make it more accessible to people, for better or worse. the only videos i make will be long, weird, and, as a critic (like, an actual art critic) once described my work: "challenging to the attention span."

p.s. the article about people not knowing how to read had a typo.

i went to another art opening today! this time it was one that i was in. it was curated by my friend kit, who is also my neighbor, and it was at our local community art space which is called ely center.

the title of the exhibition is restructuring realities, and it's all video work, much of it analog, glitch-based, or abstract. kit put so much work into putting it all together, and scrounged up all of the equipment from friends and his own collection. for a show with 15 video works, that was no small feat.

since i haven't been very active since i got back from my trip, i decided to walk there and back. it was a little bit warm out but it was a nice walk nonetheless. i saw a lot of people in their sunday clothes, including some people standing in front of the masonic lodge wearing tuxedos, and a parade truck covered in people protesting yale's tax evasion. i walked a total of 6 or 7 miles.

i went an art opening at a museum today, which the artists i work for had some work in. my favorite art that i saw was actually in a book in the gift shop, of works by an artist named karla knight.

i am slightly jetlagged, but i stayed up later last night than could be justified by that alone. i actually was obsessively working on a new project, which i will talk more specifically about soon. so i ended up going to bed when it was getting light out.

miraculously, i wasn't tempted to keep working on it today, so i was able to do more normal human things such as clean my house. i also didn't have an energy crash, which was also lucky. i think i've gotten past the "proof of concept" phase of the project i was working on. i think the reason i spent so much time on it yesterday is because that phase is very addictive. successfully doing something you weren't sure would work can be very gratifying. now the rest of the project is just leg work and stuff i already know i can do, which is a bit less exciting. and that's actually a good thing because i have a few other things that really should have been in front of it in the queue.

i spent the past week in mexico, visiting my parents, who officially moved there this year. it was my first time visiting guanajuato, the city where they now live. it is a very interesting place; it's an old city nestled between mountains in the high desert (at 7000 feet / 2300 meters in altitude). there are many mazelike alleys that are only accessible by foot, as they are narrow, steep, and riddled with cobbled stairs. i was glad my parents came to meet me when i arrived, because it would have been very difficult for me to find the unmarked door of their building on my own.

from the roof of their apartment, and in many other high points in the city, you can see the dense arrangement of centuries-old buildings, stacked practically on top one another as they ascend the slopes of the surrounding mountains. to supplement the few streets which had been built wide enough to accomodate carriages, a dense, equally complex network of tunnes was excavated beneath the city at the beginning of the period where cars became prevalent.

i'm not sure if it's lucky (for structural integrity) or unlucky (for the tunnel builders who bored though it), but most of the ground there is solid rock. my understanding is that the town was originally built around mining, and that it once was the world's capital of silver (citation needed). there is also a long tradition of stone carving, which you can see in carved architectural details everywhere.

one of the most interesting visual things i noticed was the contrast between the grandness of the older architecture and the chaos of later modifications, often equally represented in the same structure. in accordance with mexican tradition, the solution to every building problem is: more cement. need a new bench or shelf? need to prevent ATVs from squishing a soft plastic hose that serves as the water line to an entire building? need to re-attach an errant tile or stone? more cement!

i spent a lot of time walking around, and we had a small party with my parents' friends, and saw some live music performances. i also explored the area around the reservoirs with a new friend, and went to a figure drawing club and made some other new friends (it was a club where everyone takes turns modeling), and saw the editor of a newspaper i used to write for when i was a kid (who now lives there too).

i didn't bring my laptop with me, and though i did do a little bit of internet research for an upcoming project, it was a rare time where i stepped away from almost all of my usual business. now i'm back home, and getting back into it all...

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...