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.