7/15/2020

I had a very long but actually useful meeting about building out makerspaces. The only odd thing, like usual, is that I always expect other people have some secret knowledge about things that I don't, some gnosis of competency and, well, they don't. It's not like I was sitting in the meeting thinking I was above it it's just that I wasn't expecting it would be a situation where we were equals discussing tips and hard-won lessons not the master training the dumb little baby.

Then I managed to get tic-80 running on my desktop and then proceeded to lost about six hours total to some serious hyperfocus. I made progress on my gamejam gam and learned a lot more about the Fennel language since, of course, I'm making things extra challenging on myself by trying a new programming language for the first time I'm making a video game in almost a year.

Unfortunately staying up late last night coding means that I'm brainfogged to hell today and I can't seem to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. Even just writing this short post has been taking far more effort than it normally would because I keep getting distracted by random thoughts and having trouble remembering what I was in the middle of.

So many good posts around geminispace

I read a post earlier today from Foobaz that got me to put a book of essays by E.B. White on hold

New York

Shufei had an excellent piece on solarpunk and sustainable technology that I just sat there nodding along to furiously as I read it. Yes. Yes. Yes. This kind of thing---small scale, sustainable, detangled manufacturing---is exactly the kind of vision of the future that got me working in makerspaces after I left grad school.

Solarpunk Economies and Fabrication

There was also this good post from Maleza that I one hundred percent agree with. To me the freedom they're talking about is basically the same as Illich's notion of conviviality of tools: freedom, building tools that meet our actual needs.

Gemini for what it means

I'm sure there's even more good posts people have been writing that I just can't remember right now because, as above, I'm having trouble keeping thoughts in my brain for very long at a time.

Further reading

I need to get on finishing The Affect Theory Reader and my re-read of Husserl's Ideas 1. I don't know how I'm going to work in the time for everything, especially my neglected project on the phenomenology of computation.

The future

I keep thinking about what the future should be, must be. I think a lot of us are. It's probably the introspection of The Pandemic Times and having all our routines disrupted. It's like everything around us has become painfully conspicuous, a world of broken hammers (excuse the Heideggarian metaphor) that we can suddenly turn over, look at, and wonder why they were built that way.

I want to make the best of this time. I don't want disaster capitalism to go unchecked.