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.