Meandering update
It's been some time since I have kept a blog/process journal. Other social media sites I engage with feel impersonal and rigid, and I miss the days of the human internet. A lot of people are saying this now. Of course, there is so much amazing, creative, inspiring art to see on IG, but the flood of information and of image after image is in many ways repulsive.
Last year, I wrote my website from scratch and, for the whole year, had a flip phone. Having a phone that doesn't do a whole lot means that people ask you a lot of questions about it: How do you do it? Why do you have that? What is life like without a huge finger-smeared glass screen in your pocket all the time? I spend enough time at my computer. I don't need one with me wherever I go.
I read a lot of articles about how fed up some people are with the tech industry, for reasons outside of the obvious political. Among those who want to get off social media or off their phones, there's a lot of talk about how necessary, how insidious, these things are for and in our lives. Google maps, Instagram, etc. The CharmPass app and the phasing out of a Charm card for the Baltimore bus system. Multi-factor authentication. One strong barrier that I've seen has been Verizon, which supports few simple phones. And group messaging which only sometimes works, and the speed with which I am able to respond to text messages in general. T9 and predictive texting is fun, though, even if I'm probably just responding to a strong sense of nostalgia. You could lose your phone back then on the MetroNorth and that was mostly fine. The word Luddite is getting thrown around a lot.
Coding a website was an interesting exercise, and so much of the HTML/CSS knowledge I had as a teenager just came bubbling back up to the surface. It's rudimentary stuff, the website itself looks dated (in a way I'm proud of), but it feels like real learning. I'm working on a better way to display the portfolio gallery so that it doesn't load so slowly, and it will just take a little time and practice. It seems to me, and I think many anti-AI folks, that generative AI is all about cutting joy out of our lives--the joy of drawing, the joy of creating something by hand, from a blank slate in the interest of capital-p Productivity, whatever that actually means. Making isn't always joyful. I've made a lot of art where the struggle feels like a kind of hell. I would rather be in hell than making something ugly in a distinctly flattened way, something entirely soulless. Generative AI writing is especially harrowing.
I have recently been applying to the limited number of available studio spaces in Baltimore. I was awarded a grant by the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) to pay for a studio space but, so far, I have not been able to find one. Something will eventually come through, but I have to spend the money by August.
Other things I have been working on... I am pitching articles to video game publications. I want to write about the revamped, pseudo-feminist Tomb Raider of the 2000s. If I don't hear back from anywhere, I'll just finish it up and publish it here. For a long time, I have wanted to break back into freelance video game writing, especially since I was laid off by MSFT, along with at least 9,000 other workers, which effectively put a stop to my career in the games industry.
In the Fall, I start at the University of Maryland School of Information in pursuit of my MLIS.
I'll write more about the work I'm making next time.