It’s been rainy lately but today it’s cleared up.
This isn’t meant to be metaphorical. Though it might sound like that, the symbolism breaks down quickly because of course I much prefer the rain. It’s just easier to start a conversation with small talk about the weather or a blog post with a non-blank page, or a blog with some really lousy posts.
I’m still not exactly sure why I dropped out of school or will drop out of school or am dropping out of school or might drop out of school, there was just something in the air. At the time, when I was talking with the professor I’m closest with, I just described a total temporal exhaustion. It was a simple metabolic calculation.
I don’t really want to dwell much on the past, some reflection is obviously in order, but time is of the essence. I was talking with a friend yesterday about aesthetical integrity in #brand #ui/ux #digitalproductdesign and I was I was drawing a nonsense line in the sand as an excuse to hyperfixate on french philosophy and expressionism because technocapital told me that I can still be radical if I make things that made people go “hm” 50 or 100 years ago my subcultural identity, and “all of a sudden” rhizomes came up (who could have predicted this). I bring this up because it happened yesterday, but also because I think the basic distinction I was making was about how google’s expressive design functions through very control-oriented thinking. Just make the vein bigger because that way the addict won’t miss it when they shoot up. Read their post introducing it if you want to feel very sad. On the other hand, I see, perhaps not neubrutalism, I’ve been skeptical of it since I became aware of it, but good old anti-design as evolving to a convergent endpoint through whatever the opposite of control-oriented thinking is. “head-empty thinking.” It’s malicious compliance with your annoying client who won’t make up their mind, and it’s accidentally typing in the wrong number when you scale it, and it’s that thing you saw trapped in a book in the library 3 years ago that wiggled its way into your brain and is now wiggling its way back out of it and onto the computer screen in front of you, and it’s just for a laugh. The cute concept turned up to the max in my understanding of expressionism is that the exterior is an expression of the interior. Head-empty is perhaps not the right way to describe it, it’s more like head-emptying, no filters, get those worms out and leave them there on the page. & I associate this approach to art/design with the rhizome because you don’t go into the process with some goal in mind that you are trying to achieve, instead it just happens all of a sudden: a conversation with your professor, a phone call with your parents, suitcases and airports.
Onwards!
The other half of dwelling on the past that I half-wanted to get out with this post (And yes, of course, this was my friend’s very valid critique, it can’t be a total binary between trees and roots. Once you’re aware that a rhizome is growing, growing it becomes your goal, & you’re back to tracing trees. “We must remind ourselves that smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space, and striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously”) was simply taking inventory of this winter and spring.
I think I came home around January 30 or February 1. I did nothing for about two weeks, and then I started working on LRC in mid February. I took a short break, but then I really got into it at the end of February and whenever the blog post on it got posted, that was when I had a working prototype for LunaRC and the initial lrcd. After that, I started working on
BOORING omg so I was writing this earlier today, and then I took a nap, and then I just watched Eraserhead for the first time. That was a movie. Wowza. Really makes you appreciate the fragility of life and all the things we have in this world.
Anyway, this doesn’t need to be a whole novel. I’d like to make weekly blog posts, I’ve wanted to make weekly blog posts so this is the beginning of them. One thing that I’d like to do with weekly blog posts is to set a weekly goal each week and then we can check back in on it next week. For this week, I’d like to have lrcd working on the new protobuf lrc. It’s nearly there but it’s been a while since I’ve had code that compiled in the lrc x xcvr extended universe.
-rachel