.horizontal { display: flex; gap:10px; } .horizontal img { max-width: 50%; min-width: 0; height: auto; } I keep forgetting to write a post. Instead what happens is I leave myself little bread-crumb trails of notes (“chitaru shiota exhibit; can’t relate”, “birdhouse craft”), like a woman fleeing a crime scene that she will later have to investigate. They just sit there. A little graveyard of intentions. This is the inconvenient curse of my flavour of ADHD: I cash in the entire dopamine hit on the idea, and then there’s nothing left in the tank for the part where you sit down and, you know, do…
An article from 2015 is making the rounds again because the internet has no new ideas and neither do we, that says Shakespeare (yes that Shakespeare) was quite possibly absolutely baked out of his mind the entire time. Pipes found in his garden. Cannabis residue. And honestly this explains so much. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep; that is not a sober sentence. You write that at 2am after hotboxing a Tudor outhouse with the total stoned clarity that nothing has meaning and everything is beautiful. --- There’s a small installation by Leah…
A Ritz-Carlton hotel in California closed an entrance after a hummingbird made a nest on a door handle and, amidst all the daily ambient horror of simply being a person with a phone in 2026, it is nice to be reminded of the kinds of small lives we still agree to make room for. --- Have you noticed that we don’t get any art isms anymore? The 20th century minted them like currency: Expressionism. Impressionism. Cubism. Brutalism. All the big lads, all the heavy hitters of the ism game, all in a Parisian cafe in the 1900s going “what if a face but wrong” and changing the world forever. And now?…
There’s something good going on with music these days. Romance by Fontaines D.C. is a perfect album. I have listened to it almost every single day for weeks and have not gotten sick of it once, which is – and I mean this clinically – a medical miracle. Jack White is on SNL. The Strokes are touring. There is a band called Angine de poitrine who are the most aggressively anti-AI band I can imagine existing, out here doing absolutely Weird Shit™, and I don’t even normally listen to math rock like this but I am so glad someone is making it. My current theory (slash hopeful prayer) is that the…
Thinking about resuscitating regular written updates. Reasons, in order of honesty: vanity it might pressure me into actually doing something worth reporting on writing is a part of my brain that has been gathering dust and I am becoming increasingly concerned this is turning me into a bore. --- Found an interesting framework for evaluating art via Instagram Reels, which I realize is not the most dignified source for deep aesthetic theory but here we are. Three Ns: Novelty, Nuance (alternatively “craftsmanship,” but that starts with C), Narrative. Big find for me because I have long harbored…
I have 4 (rounded up) beefs with language-y AI bots that have resulted in me sort of avoiding them altogether: They have the personality of a middle manager who writes Google Docs all day that nobody wants to read They’re reallllly good at guessing but not actually that smart, which leads to very convincing lies (see: the “how many Rs in strawberry?” saga). If I had the inclination to double check all the bot’s work, I would’ve just done it myself Absolutely no thank you to the scam that is “prompt engineering”. I’m not wasting 17 demon invocations to convince Chat GPT to do a thing. That’s…
.floatie-bit img { object-fit:cover; transition: transform 0.3s ease-in-out; cursor: zoom-in} .floatie-bit img:hover{ transform: scale(1.5); z-index: 1000; } @media (max-width: 700px) { .floatie-bit > img { margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 24px; width: 100%; } } Wow, long time, no posts! Anyway, about them text-to-art generative models going about, eh? Surprising nobody: I am extremely into them. I’ve been using DALL-E and MidJourney since they came out, and even though tons has been written about them, I wanted to give a slightly different overview: the perspective of someone who isn’t…
(This is a post mostly about art but I swear there’s a moral in here for all you tech readers, or at least a discounted therapy lesson.) As you may have noticed from these latest posts, at the beginning of this year I decided to “do more art”. This went really well for a couple of months: I was making new shit; I was pumped; I felt competent. Around September I stopped feeling competent and got hit with a smol existential crisis which, in retrospect, I’ve seen a million times in my engineering career. I was looking at all the artists I follow and respect and where they were in their art…
It’s been one week since you looked at me 8 months since I’ve been writing these weekly notes, and I think I’m going to take a small break from it. It’s been a good experiment, but I’ve been getting sloppy with remembering they’re due, and it’s starting to feel a bit self-indulgent. Because I don’t actually advertise that they exist, I don’t think anyone reads them, so I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing them if nobody on either side of the fence is particularly amused by the experience. I do have a blog post in the barrel which is a rare and momentuous occasion y’all can look forward to.…
On Monday Frances took me to the teamLab exhibition at the Asian Art museum. It was really wonderful! I hadn’t seen the one in Japan so I was new to it, but the interactive art nerd in me was all over the concept and trying to figure out what was static and what was interactive, and where the sensors were. Tons of fun! On the weekend we went to the Gold Cup ⚽️ final in Vegas. This is important only because: the powers that be let me bring my own drum and I drummed for the whole 120 minutes. As I might have mentioned this has been a dream of mine, and I’m 100% that dream-believe-achieve bitch.…
First off: I think I’ve done a bad numbering in some of these recent weeks, because I wanted to write about what I actually did on July 13/14, but apparently I’ve already counted that week? Counting, man, a hell of a thing. My good friend Maeghan who aside from being a top drawer human being and tswift fan is an amazing professional contact (and I don’t deserve her one bit), connected me with the European Innovation Academy (EIA) to do some technical mentoring for them. They run a pretty neat incubator-like program, where they teach university students how to get from startup idea to feature…
So here’s what happened: I went on vacation and because I’m leaning so hard into this funemployment life I didn’t open my laptop once. Every year Zach and I go to his parents’ (now my in-laws! hah!) lake in Minnesota for the 4th of July. Normally we fly there, but last year we drove (because of the panderoni) and this year we also drove because you can’t fly with a big dog anymore. It’s kind of a bummer, and I hope airlines revisit this decision and find a middle ground that works both for the rest of the plane and people with nice but big dogs that don’t fit under seats (like …buying your…
The last time I changed something big on my site was 3+ years ago. I was really into gradient rainbow text and IBM Plex Mono. It was a mild increment over whatever I had before, which was just a cleaned up and colourful version of Left from like 6 years prior. Anyway, what I’m saying is: this website had hella split ends. Here’s the before and after: .arrow { font-size: 40px; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; } ↓ But also, why? I used to write a lot of blog posts, so my website was very blog focused. Originally the home page was just a listing of posts with some copy sprinkled in. As the…
It’s true, I did. I also wrote a blog post about it because tbh I did a good job on it, and it’s a good read. As two ladies of leisure, Frances and I went to the MOMA on a weekday to see the new Nam June Paik exhibition. I didn’t love all of it, but the bits I really enjoyed were all about putting TVs in unexpected situations. Which makes sense, since I really enjoy when surrealism is executed well. I loved the TV garden which was a dark room of real life plants with a bunch of old school CRTs showing … weird ass videos; the TV cello and TV bra which are exactly what they say they are, and a…
Weird flex: been making cheese fondue for lunch because I make the rules here. One of the (many) amazing things about being a Canadian living in California is that this state (unlike, say, no-rules-nevada) doesn’t recognize non-US driving licenses. This means that after almost 20 years of getting my first driver’s license I had to do the whole circus show (written test, road test, being treated like a teenager, etc) to be able to drive here. This week I finally bit the bullet and a) drove daily which is wild and b) did my road test (passed with flying colours, I know you’re wondering). Side…
Trying out titles because I have enough weeks that even I can’t tell them apart and I lived through them. Sports!!! We went to the Nations League ⚽️ semis and finals in Denver. If you don’t know this about me, I am a bit of a football (soccer) hooligan. Zach and I go to games, we sit in suporter sections, we chant. We went to France for the Women’s World Cup, because sports is a great excuse to travel, and the US women’s team is rad af. On top of that, a weird goal of mine is to be one of the drummers doing the chant drum beats, so I was super happy I got to drum a couple of chants at both…
Chopped off 10 inches of my hair and I feel unstoppable. I always think I can deal with mermaid hair when the reality is I cba to brush it and it keeps getting longer and drier until I’m ready to take the kitchen scissors to it. I resisted that impulse and got a professional to cut it. Am I finally an adult? I am writing this update FROM A PLANE. Yes, a real plane. My brother-in-law’s family is moving into a new house and we’re going to celebrate. Also I haven’t seen their kids in a year and a half, which is 50% of one of them’s lives. She talks now! What! Update: the inner life of 3 year…
normalcy resumes chez nous. I know this isn’t true everywhere, so if you’re in a place of lockdown: I am sorry for how annoying these updates will be. I was a good girl and bunkered down for over a year, and now I’ve got antibodies in spades and taking advantage of it. first trip of the after times: Monterey! I’d never been, because prior to last year we didn’t have a car, and renting a car for a 2 hour trip always felt daunting. However, now we have a car, and San Francisco is full of lovely things just a drive away. aquarium is still on pandemic rules so I didn’t get to see any 🦦🦦🦦. Next…
Ya look at that? It’s May already. My dog’s is turning 2 on the 14th, does anyone have any good dog cake recipes or should I just give her an almost-empty jar of peanut butter with the same success rate? I got my second fouchie outchie! (#teampfizer). I wouldn’t say it bodied me the next day, but I felt uncomfortable enough to sit in bed and read not one but TWO Bridgerton novels. I’ve now read 1-4 and I think I’m done for a while. Speaking of books, I’m finishing up On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Ocean Vuong; reads like poetry but isn’t. Review next time), and I’m about to start up The…
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