Today, I posted a bit more publicly about something I’ve been working on for a bit: launching a music blog and DIY label! (I also talked a bit about this in my 2021 blog.) Planning to run this at Yale for now (as my university has been devoid of a music blog, and I feel that there’s no ‘central’ space on-campus to get involved with the broader New Haven music scene in general––at most we have a semi-active radio station) with plans to branch in Manila once I figure out how distribution can work. New Haven is flourishing and I’m eager to spend time shifting around here and the Greater New York area before I move to San Francisco in August this year just making things and meeting people.
Essentially, I want to spend some time in the next months doing small-scale releases of art in sound & print for friends, myself, and other interesting folks. (Also doing this long after, hopefully.) The silly, jokey framing of this is “I spent years of 5AM–1AM days suffering in Manila to work my ass off and somehow end up in America, speak on the biggest tech conference stage in freshman year –– to cap off my time in college making tape loops and printing zines in my apartment”––but things can be playful and necessary, and bringing beauty into this world in times like these are the bits of hope I cling onto.
Bad Internetis a music blog and tape label (?) run from New Haven. We publish essays on music, mixes, shoot shows, and release things. Running it with a few friends.
In practice, it’s a space to explore listening as memory, listening in analog–digital forms and the under-explored potentiality of its intersections, and perhaps selfishly––a way for me to listen to the world (its past, and what seemingly mundane things are worth preserving) and take part in uplifting what I think others might like to hear as well.
Attempts at musical ekphrasis, or something like that. Something that isn’t very critically interesting but is meaningful to me are the YouTube comments under songs: tripping on acid for the first time to Explosions in the Sky, elegaic paragraphs under classical music to someone who had passed and loved a song, teenagers earnestly letting out how this song saved their life. Last year, I realized that I remember best through audio. (I have aphantasia.) A song attached to a moment, a field recording of coffee shop chatter and windy walks. Technical descriptions of sound are interesting, yes, but you can hear that and it’s consistent––yet human experience, memory, and relationships are unique and venerable. Preserving these relationships, telling stories, a friend telling you they love a song because this was the one that was playing when I––tiny, perhaps silly things that mean everything to me.
I think college is an important time to make ourselves feel grand. People don’t really have the most interesting music tastes, but they do have important ones. (Alternatively, this importance could be why they’re ‘interesting’.)(The privilege it takes to develop that taste is another thing to be written about in itself, but the magic is in relating to people and the bits between plays. The human voice can persist in a more definitive, interesting manner that words can attempt to cover. That’s the underlying goal behind this, really. Telling stories about ourselves through the medium of audio.
Digital and analog forms augmenting one another. This one I’m still really thinking about, and feel will be experimental and powerful. Audio (how we digest, consume) has maintained static for a long time, and the digital/streaming world’s instantaneity has lost the wonder of distribution and form. (Taking a moment to plug this edition of Snoqualmie Falls’ Dream Sequence, a record pressed with petals, Green-House’s cassette with wildflower seeds, or all the wonderful editions by Room40 that pair CDs with artist books.) I’ve long appreciated artist identities, live visuals, then the materiality of audio again when collecting.
What sucks is that there’s so many ways to make audio experiences on the internet more interesting. A simple example is old media players having visualizers, now dead (unless you reskin Windows Media Player which I learned is still a doable and fun thing!) My rudimentary understanding of Web3 is that it offers interesting new modes of ownership & distribution––which is one example. Thinking further, ARGs (if only transmedia was more native so I wouldn’t have to use this mildly awkward term!) and web experiences have the potential to make more interesting, intentional listening experiences online. Similar to how the form of a gatefold encourages you to digest a record differently.
This is to say that I’m focusing on releases that also make use of the affordances of the web in more interesting ways. As I practice with more physical forms, there’s also more that we can do with technology. Tired of playlist dumps as the only form of curation left; how music videos are so much rarer but can also evolve.
Just a desire to be hands-on and in full control of creative process again! Maybe a more selfish desire, but I feel most myself when I can take on every piece of a project and see it from beginning-to-end. Working in communities, this is challenging to scale. (Admittedly, I’m terrible at delegation and turnover; which is why I’m so interested now in the production of systems & processes to cover this.) Working with my hands and exploring DIY now that I have the means & resources to access materials that I never did at home (i.e. in Manila, the only guarantee I had was a computer––and it was the right tool for me then, everything could live in it and the only things lost would be of my choice) and have begun operating at this scale once more––something I’ve found that I’ve dearly missed.
I thrived at work with small startups that needed help with everything because constant context-switching and agility comes naturally to me. Working with my hands then telling stories through design and words and manipulating platforms is what I will always feel like I’ve been born to do. This is me exploring that and helping do it for other people.
Sound art, archival, ethnomusicology, etc. I’m heavily invested in labels that work on archival, re-releases, pairing things with interesting physical forms. You get the idea. I spent a long while listening to the Field Recordings section off NTS and fell in love with Death Is Not The End, a label and regular NTS radio show. This Crack Magazine article on their work is a lovely read: raw recordings with emotional, historical, and cultural significance as memorymaking, as pieces that demand true ‘listening’. I don’t think other people (at least on-campus) will come to me with this sort of work yet, but there’s a bunch of personal audio and field recording projects that I’d like to release through this. (So this is another case of someone wanting to release their own things and calling their process of publishing & distribution a ‘label’, since that’s what it essentially is, anyway.)
Two years ago, I took a Sound Art class that might be my favorite class at Yale. (For my first project, I did a ‘performance art’ piece where I blasted open Coke bottles over a gaming setup with Minecraft death rage compilations projected on me.) At the start of the pandemic, I was alone in New Haven and obsessed with taking in field recordings since I couldn’t think, then started becoming more intentional with my relationship to audio in different forms. Then I thought about how my whole life has been accompanied by music, one of those thoughts that is nothing new but still incredible at keeping you from feeling lonely. Living through television dramas on love and justice on long Manila commutes, Saturday market activities of buying CDs for cents in Ruins (a flea market in BF Paranaque now closed down), how mass in the Philippines lasts for hours because of the song. And how without fail, everyone sings. Sound in its ability to capture the indescribable as pursuit so noble in its futility.
Similarly, youarelistening.to that “mixes ambient music with police scanner radio, air-traffic control, numbers stations, spoken word & a bunch of other random things”, another NTS show. Wowowow. And from ‘Music Beyond Airports’, “The idea that public physical space can be subject to personalisation, comment, viewpoint and subjective association is not new. However, this concept of the spatial self, made malleable through digital media, can shed light on the types of relationship exhibited between ambient music and the environment.” and “Space in the ambience today is personal.”
All of this is really an act of reclamation: of memory, of making, of feeling my body again.
And in process, hoping that others can feel it, too.
Here’s a playlist I compiled to share on our page! Not reflective of what we’ll release through the ‘label’, more of just a random mix of what I’ve been listening to. Many more playlists and mixes from friends to come.
Those are all my thoughts for now. Thanks for hearing me and this phase out. If you work on anything similar or if anything resonates, talk to me about it!
Again, I have no idea what I’m doing and am playing it by ear… fun!
• whenever i prioritize myself i always fuck things up / and up deeply dissatisfied. continue working in service for others directly – if suffering is always embedded in either process then at least one has some positive outcome
• nothing i make for myself will ever be as good as the things i make for others
• nothing i make for myself will ever be as meaningful as the things i make for others
• i don’t think self-expression or my personal interests is the go-to thing for me at this time? feels like a joke to work on it honestly. the world is dying and it’s worth nothing. what story can be worth telling of this
• every vision other than mine, the stories worth telling if truly had something worth saying someone else would like to hear it directly from me (?)
• it’s so funny how quickly i turn back on myself before anything else
• like i don’t even believe in myself so why would anyone believe in qnything i’m working on rn
• why do i like to form things and then want to detach myself from them. that’s not the right mindset if i want things to originate / seed from *me*, maybe more worth focusing on realizing someone else’s dreams
• to do this until their dream becomes mine etc
• not having a dream that starts from yourself shouldn’t be sad. selfless, martyr-like, qt least a dream is realized instead of many other attempts. originality doesnt even matter in dreaming, really
• the idea of following in someone’s dream touted as strong in men, submissive in women. as if she never got to live a life. the divorce/home improvement story in the atlantic: why a man can talk about himself leaving to chase something larger because it *is* a larger thing, whereas the biggest thing a woman can chase is the family and the creation of human beings who will chase their own things
• i need to tell stories that aren’t mine
• the relegation of some humans’ purpose to produce humans with more worthwhile purpose
• the idea of someone following your dream deeply; how does this relate to love
• to love: not in blind faith, but in believing enough to question; to share a dream; to pursue something even when its outcome is undefined; to believe that process will overrule the journey, because faith in process / human existence is all about diminishing variables in an indeterminate world; this is why love is attributable to certainty, choice, to believing in “this” where “this” is ever-shifting (the person, circumstance, ways)
• but is the sad thing that i have a very specific path/desire and have never before distrusted myself so much
• talking about my own desires/dreams/wants/needs feels so futile, ignorant — feels like a joke externally + to myself; like i know nothing about this is logical (but how often have i been letting myself feel illogical things, wallowing in some suffering). feels like a joke / i am probably a joke right now / i am giving up everything for nothing
• started wearing a scapular, for some reason it’s only ever given to the men in my family so i bought my own. it feels stupid to have to buy something to save yourself. at least in one religion/belief system there is proof that i tried to be saved, or something like that.
• • why does everything i believe in sound so ludicrous and inane, when can i feel that someone believes in me, etcetc.etcetc. it’s a lonely life, to always have to make things for yourself and to live in a void, and if i do this then i have every right to dictate when i want it to be over
• • • to make and feel nothing + try making other things and feel nothing over and over again. not even what i produce can substitute for feeling anymore
• what is the point of self-expression if my ‘self’ is unimportant. i am trying so hard to make myself ‘important’, to make myself ‘matter’, to make myself ‘known’ that i have not even questioned if i am worth knowing. do i even have stories worth telling. do i even have a purpose other than to give others purpose.
• is the magic thing about me the way i suffer and can ignore it; and how i can turn all of these thoughts on and off if i try really really hard
• but it’s been hard to do so lately–no, it’s been hard for a long time
• this list as another way of saying: suddenly (but expectedly), i resent everything i love
TW: Discussions of past self-harm, graphic descriptions of (religious!) violence
Over the past months, I’ve been grappling with a few simple questions:
1. What role do I take on as an author vs as a toolsmaker? 2. Who decides what stories are worth telling? 3. How do you talk about your day? or How do you tell a story? 4. Do I need grief to function?
dont know why ive been so hesitant to cite "for fun!" or "bc i want to make cool things w my friends!" as reason & motive––as if it's less valid than some corporate goal or feeble attempt at higher purpose––when there are few things as binding, true, & self-driven as joy
(Apologies for the abundance of tweet embeds as of late; I’ve been dumping random thoughts there and returning to see how people respond / how I develop it afterwards. Hopefully I don’t have another identity crisis/massive revert back to using my real name in-username that triggers some massive link rot.)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CYFJzM8OSOo/
This was sort of inspired by something I made late last year, a yes/no question simulator. Try it out: chia.design/everyday-i-believe
4. Do I need grief to function?
I have a weird relationship to pleasure. This is my way of lightly saying that it was rather unhealthy and fucked up.
Somewhere in between Catholicism and having to adhere to strict routines, I had adopted the mindset that every time I experience joy there must be suffering attached to it that I must be deeply aware of––or even inflict upon myself. It started with simple things: finish the food on your plate because there are kids out there who are starving. (This is made more tangible because of where I grow up, where ribs stick out on the streets and privilege, like in older days, is marked by how much fat is on your body.) Later on, I would barter time for play with time for work; time to go outside for homework; ability to go out for a birthday if I stayed silent for an entire holiday; until I had no more desire to step outside of my house but stare at a screen and absolve myself of this unerasable debt that I had somehow accrued from merely living.
Joy was taught to always come at someone’s expense. It started out as intangible others, and then the people around me who will soon die and then give me a million regrets to carry (for years I was incredibly afraid of death, and then embraced it myself), and then myself. Somewhere between teenhood and the future, I had come to believe that anytime something good happens to me, there must be something incredibly horrifying on the way. If I had accomplished something, it would be routine for me to hurt myself. Yes, the reason sometimes was that I thought I could do better and that the physical sensation could propel me to it, in the way that electric shock and interrogation supposedly worked from how I gleamed it on the television. Sometimes it was just that there was this spiritual, universal balance that required my pain for every accomplishment. Simply that it was routine. I cried when I graduated as high school valedictorian, out of grief and anger and a feeling that there was nothing to come, and I remember no words that I spoke on stage. I remember doing something terrible to myself that night.
Then there is also the actor Jesus. We never concretely studied the Bible past the second grade aside from memorizing facts about saints that I could still recite to you today––but I remember off days where they would play to us The Passion of Christ––its agonizingly long, torturous scenes of whipping and bleeding that had then imbued me as a sign of perfect pleasure and beauty. My grandmother used to share those posts on Facebook that would depict the ‘physical suffering of Jesus‘ in the form of illustrated diagrams or Now This-like video explainers. The story of the saints that were recounted to me, after psychological abuse, would be physical. I heard about the first Filipino protomartyr Lorenzo Ruiz when I was breathing in & out so deeply that I couldn’t see straight. Lorenzo was running from Japanese soldiers that were persecuting Filipino Christians. Lorenzo was tortured and was told to renounce his Christianity but never did. Lorenzo was hung upside-down over a pit, and with the aid of medical knowledge, the extremes of what happens when the human body is suspended and bound over two days until its passing were also told to me when I was just in middle school. His narrative meant to say “this suffering is nothing compared to the suffering he felt”, and what I realized years later was also by extension, “this suffering I’m giving you is nothing compared to the suffering I felt.” I know so many people venerated because of how they died, and so little of the actual lives they lived. Children enter the chorus of heaven. Sacrifice, innocence, youth. Later, this makes me pray and wish that my life is short and fleeting.
All this to say that I don’t remember a time in my youth where I did things that weren’t providing an explicit ‘gathering space’ or ‘service’ for others; few things that were my own without utility expected. I never knew how to do nothing with people. So when I share moments of silence, quiet, and non-expectation with others where my mere presence is all necessary––it is the most precious and intimate thing to me.
3. How do you talk about your day? or How do you tell a story?
As a joke, and perhaps to hide the power that comes with it, I attribute my typing speed (which can sprint to ~180WPM and averages around ~150WPM) to fights on League of Legends chat and ancient forums. Realistically, it also comes from a need to be the first to say something –– otherwise I will never be heard.
This doesn’t translate very well to real life, as you might imagine. I’ve been waxing about how the loss of seemingly mundane, routine conversations like this in my youth has brought up a me that never know what to say. Does someone want a surface level “good, and you?” or do I actually spill about whatever thing is interesting to me? How much do I withhold out of fear of being ‘too much’?
Maybe that’s why I prefer writing out abstract recaps of my life, turning them into little vignettes. Taking piano lessons at age sixteen and writing as if it’s the most grand act of all time, facing weird relationships to housing and the descents and spirals that come with the uncertainty of a roof for the first time, a portrait of love I feel today that will transform itself tomorrow. Why I adore slow movies where nothing really happens: the pretentious kind of Frances Ha flicks that romanticize the lives of confused feminines in their 20s who still have nothing to say at the very end. I want these little things to be glorified. I want the mundanity of my everyday to be heard somehow, since I have no one else to witness it but me––because mundanity is tenderly temporal and sacred in its own sense. Nothing in this world is uninteresting.
Right now, I ‘talk about my day’ in this semi-public internet diary. I wonder if people today would call it ‘performance’ when it’s all I’ve ever known. It stays as a blog because I like how unprescribed it is and hate taking up space in people’s inboxes; knowing who follows me and the visibility of it. I would love to be completely transparent but also rarely digested––maybe this is what pulls me in as a creator, almost. Things for no one but myself or targeted messages to friends. I used to not understand why someone who makes something beautiful could be scared of the attention and fame, deleting things and pulling away the moment they receive the hit of virality that others spend their entire careers searching for. Now I get that.
The issue is that I still rely on myself sitting down and writing to process anything. Whenever I have space to just ‘think’ blankly, like on walks when my phone runs out of battery and there’s nothing else to fall back on (I can’t even just shower, I need to hear something), I default to what I should make out of this experience, or what I have to do next. I don’t think I default to how I actively feel or think about regular life events that happened. I must sit down and write to begin unraveling myself. If you asked me a question in-person about my intentions or latest experiences, I wouldn’t be able to answer very well or I would come up with some bullshit that I think sounds more normal than whatever I’d actually been doing. I think everything is interesting but everything I experience is the most dreadful thing ever. I fawn over the newfound love for ‘when someone gets so excited and passionate when talking about something they love’ but then can’t see myself really doing that well because I think I’m about to go on a very dreadful, painful ramble. Have I ever been comfortable enough with anyone but myself to be real about what I like and how I’ve been? Maybe I need to figure that need for security out before I start rehearsing how to say the same thing over and over to entertain. Though, I don’t know if I want to entertain either––I just want to literally be able to think about what I’ve been doing and what I like without jotting it all out on a piece of paper beforehand. I’m 21 and it’s embarrassing that this feels like the most impossible thing.
I lie compulsively when explaining my day. I am authentic with everything else.
2. Who decides what stories are worth telling?
Maybe part of why I make is because it’s the only way I know how to transform narratives that I believe deserve attention. Alone, especially if spoken through my mouth, they stand frail and untempting against everything else that competes to be noticed.
Been thinking a lot about biographies and the optimistic belief that everyone deserves one. I get most upset about my unhealthy/unstable relationships with family back home for many reasons––one of them being because they’re the best carriers of life back then in Manila: the EDSA Revolution, shifting relationships on class and materiality, hospitality and desire, growing and rotting in urbanization. No matter how many books I read or interviews I cry through, it doesn’t feel the same as what I might imagine hearing the stories told personally would be like. This is contradictory even, because having personal stake with someone would give them more reasons to lie than some random actor recounting their experiences. But it also gives me more context, without the numbers and metrics and the atrocities of the Marcos regime with hundreds of my people left to be known by a 10-point rating of how much they suffered, because I know their life outside the context of this terrible thing that may be a part of them and how they lived but never will be all of them. I know the rest of them, as distant and estranged; I have a better picture of it. And then I know how these pieces and places and happenings make a person, a life. It would be a dream to sift through dozens of essays and messy retellings about what ‘ordinariness’ looked like then. And then I want to see how they lived.
Gauging ‘Notability‘ was a weird thing for me when I started to edit Wikipedia. (There was also a time in my teenage years where I said that it was my goal to have a Wikipedia page by the time I hit age 20, a goal I did not obviously accomplish––a goal that I set for myself because of a weird desire to be seen and in the same sphere as ‘social activist influencers’ who sell period products and general anti-war truisms to get famous.) Not saying that I think this online resource needs to be inundated with repetitive histories that have led to predictable results (my being)––obviously that should exist in some separate form. It’s one of those necessary, uncomfortable concepts. I suppose this is the point of Everipedia, which I also now conveniently learn is somehow blockchain-powered.
Anyway, example: It’s my worst fear to be one of those people who are only noteworthy in relation to an event. If I were killed in some freak accident today, I definitely wouldn’t be notable enough to have my own Wikipedia page. I will get a fine paragraph about where I was born and raised (which matters a lot to me), perhaps it will mention the professions of my parents, the schools I went to (which do not matter to me at all), and all the potential I had. And then they will talk about how the body was found. I think about all the children who have even yet to live a life, get a nice college name in the article about their killing. Perhaps the absence of one is enough to say they were loved but not enough, and the world was greater deprived of the love they had yet to give.
I like Wikipedia’s advice about writing biographies for people, though. It’s an interesting read. I think archiving both objective and non-objective (presenting how many people retell their relationships with X instesad of extrapolating some objective timeline, which would forever miss some of the most important bits of how they loved and were loved––and thusly how they lived) histories is an exciting and worthwhile thing, and I’m thinking about the best way to mend the two. The presentation of yourself as you’ve lived, the way other people have known about you, the objective facts and numbers. Everything.
Pulled apart from performance and So many acquaintances and friends have died over the past few years. Death has come so early and consistently that I don’t even fear it anymore. It feels weak and cheap when I still can’t stomach looking through their profiles, seeing how quickly the language has shifted around them, even if it’s one of the best representations of how they felt and thought (assuming it’s like, a personal account and they’re authentic there and whatever). I think those memories of them need to be untouched.
Preservation
Another means of storytelling is curation and archival, preservation as memorymaking. Thinking about how we tell stories not only as the we want to share them first, but in how they they’re passed for the centuries to come.
On the last thought–its something that I’ve never really thought about until I saw firsthand whom of my friends were going to be remembered. They have lived through too much to only be recalled as a prayer. As something yet to be realized. They were.
I’ve been writing a lot about how I am driven to create and how it becomes my own act of self-preservation. It’s far from my primary motive in making, but as my days began blurring together I came to be grateful for it. One of the most wonderful byproducts of the act. Putting things into this world––the more tangible and reaching (in depth more than audience) in its lifespan the more certain––I come to place myself in history.
And then I like to make tools that make it easier for other people to do this for themselves, and the spaces that drive people to do so. Amplification. Curation is also amplification: I send my friends links that scream ‘you’ and someone’s work suddenly exists between a new shared language that the creator is mostly unaware of. We become each other’s influences’ influences and then become better selves. I curate the stories and parts of myself that I tell to my friends, oftentimes badly, thinking there are select parts of myself that they might enjoy digesting the most. Then the retaliation from the people who truly love me: they want to know it––especially the things that I fear might drive them away from me or even resent me. They find it and if it is truly love, still find it wonderful.
Everything comes back to me. Much of my enjoyment, no––much of my ability to live within this world is because someone intentionally made a decision to plant something that would persist. When I was in middle school, I used to find it unbelievable that trees took thirty years to grow. Why do it when you have to wait so long? Why do so many people do it when they’d no longer be in that place, let alone be on this world? I didn’t fully understand the concept of how something can live on in another thing until someone close to me died. Then I started planting trees too.
Even outside of personal attachments, I think about the lists and articles and publications I comb through daily and the desks and stories and jaded writers that make one of my ways of learning of the world possible. But I fear for memorymaking in anything incentivized by profit, especially if it’s necessary to its survival. These things, I often feel, live unfaithfully to itself. At least admit that the truth you believe should be told comes from no place human.
Maybe this is why I like the early web. Small circles of curated exchange that weren’t hard to break into, people putting anything around, the typicality of RSS feeds. I wonder if it’s silly to Archive.org your own site. I don’t think anyone else is going to do it for me, so I might as well…
1. What role do I take on as an author vs as a toolsmaker?
In this one I wonder how many times I can write for myself, or whether I should just stick to providing a service for others.
Michael Rock essays changed me at the beginning of my undergraduate education, but I also don’t know how much I consciously thought about what designing and art meant to me aside from the fact that I wanted to do so much of it and did. (I still think about how prolific I was when I was a teenager. Strangely, it was my least visible work but I was so, so focused. I have 100+ blog posts that I’ve never publicized from then, each one 3000–15000 incoherent words.)
Designer as Author of course, correctly spoke to the ancient dilemma that I was experiencing: insecurity in design compared to art or writing because of no ‘origination’ and ‘agency’ in process. It became abundantly clear as I started making more and more things that the vessel in which something presents itself is perhaps the most urgent thing about it, even if it’s not necessarily the substance in truest form. But as much as I hate it, this is still a way of passing truth. So I started thinking harder about form and design as this vehicle for communication and expression, more challenging than art. But only imaginary constraints really ever stave off the desire to integrate art and words into design anyway, so I use them all.
I don’t think I have too much of a problem with creation as I thought. I create the world I want to live in and am living in it. I put out things as I wish (cool), never paying attention to my ‘audience’ and what more they want (questionable?). I learn to hate the reduction of ‘whim’ into ‘performance’. In my adulthood I go more days without speaking to anyone than otherwise, I’m pretty sure. From this, I gathered that I need little certainty from people other than myself. Some days creating becomes unfathomably difficult. Some days I treat it like a quota, but at the end of the day it resolves itself as just one of the millions of ways I measure myself and plant numbers in my head. One thing against the millions of other things I have produced, bodies of work established to myself yet ever-evolving that reflect evergreen beliefs and hopes. Sometimes I translate. Sometimes I gather. Sometimes I perform. Sometimes I make. Many times it is all of this at once.
Making tools is creation. I’m having a ridiculous time (positive) with my thesis and enjoying it more than I had thought I could. Tonight I called with my advisor for an hour and thought about the most absurd and arbitrary ways a tool can be anti-user friendly and draw heavily from my artistic arsenal while still ultimately being software that people create their own things from. This is a fancy way of saying: I’m making a game maker that is terrible on purpose. All my bad decisions are decisions. I am breaking every rule (and many rules around tools I’m aware of) but also, not really. What we’re doing is thinking about features, language, and tiny interaction details made with seemingly nonsensical decisions for the sake of chaos––but also, it really works. Things I want to do ‘for fun’ still come from desire; play and joy are hugely undervalued. Warioware and Resetti screaming at you suddenly make so much sense now. Bitching and nicheposting as my sense of humor is affirmed, albeit a bit toxically. I frustrate myself and someone else joins it with me. Design discourse has already evolved to ‘no defaults exist; neutrality is a fraud’ since forever, so I don’t know why it’s difficult to think that the process of embedding ‘delight’ into things isn’t a form of authorship itself. Translation. Direction. Even if it’s a shitty splash of confetti after submitting a Canvas assignment.
Making spaces is creation. I don’t know how many times I have to elaborate on this. All my life I want to gather people and see what comes of it. Lately, I’ve been wondering why I’m most comfortable generally detached from the spaces and things I put out-–an observer. Moreso if I’m forgotten. Moreso how I have never wanted to attach my name to ‘larger’ things. I don’t have a perfect answer yet (or one that I can try to windingly articulate, which is what I do a lot on this blog), but perhaps it has something to do with even distance being a part of the process.
I have no doubt that I can live the rest of my life doing both. I don’t know how significant the ‘role’ I take on is, or what exactly it looks like, but I know I must play it.
