20 Jun 2022
This is a quick blog post about how I’ve been making my book, how I was able to use open source software throughout the process, and a few lessons that I learned. I’ve been exclusively using Linux as an operating system for the past 4 years. Linux distros, however, are not especially known for their attention to visual design. (If you are looking for that, though, I recommend ElementaryOS! I ended up having some hardware...
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10 Jun 2022
This blog post starts with a contextual-maybe-philosophical overview and then goes into a technical overview for my AURA READER… FOR TWO! The first part Two years ago, I made a a little aura reader, as part of an ongoing series I’ve been doing on-and-off around techno-divination and mysticism (the other two are the i-ching and the barthes-tarot). I want to tackle tea-leaves next! I haven’t done a lot of little creative coding projects lately, but...
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31 May 2022
Post co-authored by me, Ashley, and Jessica Farrell, Community Facilitator for the BitCurator Consortium and Software Preservation Network. Check out those sites to learn more about her and her great work! Archive81 debuted as a Netflix original at the beginning of 2022. Here is the plot summary from Netflix: “An archivist takes a job restoring damaged videotapes and gets pulled into the vortex of a mystery involving the missing director and a demonic cult.” A...
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29 May 2022
This is an older draft that I’m publishing a bit late (Aug 6, 2022) – this covers my thinking around how to decide what the path forward is, and I have a lot more thoughts now that I’ve been through the process, keep an eye on this space for those posts coming soon! Thinking about where to print Making a book can go a few different ways. Obviously, there’s pitching to a big (or not-that-big)...
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09 May 2022
(Why I said making instead of writing will become obvious quickly) In late December, as things start to slow down and wrap up for the year, I was feeling pretty burned out. I’ve been feeling burned out for a while (and I’m certainly not alone in this sentiment, there are so many reasons to feel burned out even in the best of personal circumstances, which are my circumstances). I also had a lot of pain...
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13 Dec 2021
This is my eighth annual report. Here’s last year’s. Every year, I’m like “wow I did nothing” and then I look back and realize “hey, I did some things!” – here are those things. This year, it’s especially surprising and relieving because I’ve felt that I’ve had to drop so many things in order to just keep getting by. My brain capacity feels so low; my mental stack has felt so full that it can’t...
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27 Jul 2021
The A/V Artifact Atlas is a resource for identifying errors and anomalies in analog and digital video. For almost a year, I’ve had the idea to add translations to the A/VAA, to broaden the reach of the resource to communities working with legacy audiovisual materials but speak languages other than English. This got held up for several reasons (other commitments, burnout, lack of funding to pay translators, much less any for myself). Anyway, I outlined...
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16 Jul 2021
This blog post is very short, but I just had to get these out of my head! 21 January 1973 PARRY Encounters the DOCTOR 22 June 1973 ARPAwocky December 1985 ‘Twas the Night Before Start-up’ September 1989 “Act One - The Poems” February 1992 Remembrances of Things Past December 1995 The 12-Days of Technology Before Christmas Not poems but close: September 1989 The hitchhiker’s guide to the internet 1 April 1994 A VIEW FROM THE...
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03 Jun 2021
A big problem with getting into video in general is all of the esoteric lingo that you have to learn, and WebRTC introduces a slew of new acronyms and words into the mix. Since WebRTC is basically a protocol composed of or built using many other protocols, it can turn into an acronym soup pretty quickly. It can make it difficult to even have a high-level conversation about live video streaming on the web without...
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09 Apr 2021
I recently made a tweet that seems to resonate with a lot of people. It’s entirely not surprising, because I’ve been talking friends, hearing anecdotes from acquaintences, and listening to strangers repeating the same things with increasing intensity for like five years, with a major leap in the past 13 months and another jump in the past 2 months – the entire world is totally burned out. My tweets auto-delete after a time, but the...
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03 Apr 2021
Overview / project vision I’ve spent the last few weekends working on this thing, tentatively titled Media Collection Viewer (and it seems like that name might just stick!). The way it works is that you provide it with a valid JSON file derived from the audiovisual file analysis tool MediaInfo and it produces charts based on that data, so that you can get a broad understanding of the files you are having to handle. (Note:...
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13 Dec 2020
This is the seventh year of my annual reports. Here is last year’s, if you’re curious at what I said I wanted to do before a global pandemic kicked off. Although spoiler alert, my goals were to have less plans and travel less. Well, mission fucking accomplished, eh? I didn’t go anywhere and all my plans were cancelled. I was burned out, and I stayed burned out all year long. I started off the year...
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16 Nov 2020
The below writing was included in Screen Slate’s “The Year the Internet Broke”, a publication corresponding with a film series held at Anthology Film Archives earlier this year, right before the big shutdown of 2020 and the last time I used the subway, walked in Manhattan, saw people casually, hugged a person I don’t live with, and ate at a restaurant. Copies still available through the link above, and it goes towards supporting this excellent...
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14 May 2020
Update: Project page is now up, here! Go there if you want demos and a high-level overview of this project. In anticipation of Recurse Center’s Never Graduate Week (essentially an alumni week time of celebration), a week I had planned to take off from work, I started to think of projects that might fit well into the scope of just one week, both at the angle of R&D work but also technical work. Stumbling through...
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13 May 2020
For the past little while, I’ve been working on this network-based performance project that I have named Throttled. It’s a performance by 233 gifs and a very slow network connection. This blog post is a bit about what I learned while making it. I’m writing this somewhat in haste, so the notes are a bit sloppy. This project had me asking some questions that are the opposite of what people usually want to learn about...
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