Some things lately

Where

I am always somewhere on the internet. I’m off Twitter for a bit and it’s actually kind of worse without it — I wasn’t taking it too seriously, liked a space to share thoughts and build upon it. I am still on Instagram where I also don’t really care and am sharing stuff every now and then.

I shared my kind of chaotic blog that essentials acts as the substitute for random thoughts, but am not sure if I should have made it that public.

Offline, I’m moving to San Francisco soon and am dealing with all the delusions I put on myself over the past year: that I would spend this summer working a million jobs (I didn’t and intentionally didn’t go for my work authorization until the last possible moment) or that rest would teach me new things (it really didn’t, which I distinguish from the practice of ‘conscious listening’ that I’ve been doing ever since leaning more into sound—I suppose I am someone who finds solace in making something for myself). Now I feel kind of unsettled with the lack of time I have here and guilty.

I spent the past two weekends at a cabin, then in New York, then here in my apartment alone. I will miss it so much. And I need to get rid of everything that I’ve touched. And I have a hard time parting with material things, especially when this is the first time I’ve learned to imbue so much of myself into physical space — which was important for me to feel like I can be connected with the world and what becomes of it.

I move to San Francisco on the 17th. I leave behind most of the people I know here, and all the people I have yet to meet. Most of my major life events are uneventful if not sad. I should be saying goodbye to the people I’ve encountered by proximity and wish to keep for longer, but I feel weird and no longer welcome and unnecessary. It’s the constant self-fulfilling prophecy of not reaching out and never being seen. It doesn’t hurt as much anymore though, kind of just living with it. It’s hard to reach for my phone or engage with people. I’m mostly keeping to myself these next weeks.

chia.design

I took care of https://chia.design/ and have been starting to make a massive archive of my work. There’s a weird gap between 2013–2016 so far. Hmm. I don’t really know what I was doing then.

I like prolific portfolios and seeing quantity. We often talk about the adage of the ceramics class where the students who produce a hundred pots ended up with better work than those students required to produce one ‘perfect’ pot. I never liked portfolios that showed only polished highlights, in the same way that we never only like the polished highlights of a person. On paper, this will probably suck at me getting jobs — which is the intention of the website (though it kind of conflicts with http://ifyouknewmewouldyoulove.me/ rn, which I’ll fix to be more experimental and a collection of only ‘artsy’ pieces later). But most of my scrappy, smaller jobs and opportunities mentioned that they liked how much I’ve done. I even forego a lot of the impressive metrics in this, such as the gathering projects with Developh that took months of planning and congregated many. There’s still a lot more work to document and archive. Funnily enough, I learned that I was better at keeping record of my work in high school when I was designing for student councils and organizations than at Yale — where I’ve lost half of the work I’ve done and constantly spoke of how my high school had better extracurricular systems.

‘Gathering’ is a new word I settled on that I feel describes the work I do well. It was one of my wishes to take graduate-level ‘On Gathering‘ class in my last Spring 2022 semester, but I was taking seven classes in order to graduate (where the normal is 4–5, and I had to petition vigorously) and knew I wouldn’t really be able to be fully present and wouldn’t make much of it. All I want to do, I write, is to gather the people I love in one place.

Patreon

I started a Patreon now that I’m legally allowed to do it. I had it set up for a long time and figured why not just publish it now. I think my output is consistent enough where it might be interesting to share, though I’m not expecting much from it. I’m planning to be most consistent with updates on research interests, talks, and projects there; as well as to solicit feedback and advice on what to prioritize since I have so much I want to build—and do tend to build it all.

♡ Check out my Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/hotemogf ♡

If you do choose to support, the hobbies I’ve engaged in over the past year have made me accrue a lot of trinkets from prints, keychains, cassette tapes (mostly mixes, field recordings… very 1/1 stuff), and stickers that I’ve handmade that I’d love to spread around the world.

Projects

I’m going to do more comprehensive writeups on these soon that I’ll try to publish on Patreon, but here are some things I’ve done lately:

• https://philippinecassettearchive.com/
• I am making a gardening idle.
• https://maybe.press/
• I’ve been using up all my cassettes. The hiss from my shoebox recorder is unbearable.
• There was a piece about love that I was writing and then suddenly stopped because I felt weird and alone and then wrote all those sad things. I will get back to it soon.
• Developh is restarting programming, and I’ve been idly re-connecting, fixing institutional things, etc.
• I’m writing a series of talks for Developh with these topics that will come soon:
  

More people than usual have reached out in the past weeks… I’ve always been bad at getting back, mostly because I feel unworthy of anything. I’ve been feeling especially gloomy but I will try to get back soon amidst selling and moving. Thank you for remembering me.