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: