All of these days look the same, the same muggy grey texture.

I’ve sort of struggled to get into 2021 a bit. Can’t seem to get my sleep regular and I’ve certainly been sleeping on the blog here. I know others suggest that you should write when you feel it but that’s not always convenient. I prefer to just know there’s a weekly looming target and it has to be met. Over the last year, that’s what life has been really, a series of repeating weekly targets; blog, render, duolingo, cycling training, Monday morning meetings, weekly tutorials etc. etc. I really don’t mind it that much but it’s been out of joint since the beginning of the year.

In the ongoing saga of finding a PDF library, Zotero just released a beta version that can accommodate annotation and even make annotations more searchable. So I spent my Sunday moving stuff out of Keep It and into Zotero. Which is generally quite easy since Zotero can automatically populated and index a lot of things. There’s still years of Evernote backlog to get through til I can cut that one off at the knees. Still, I feel like this is the one.

This week I need to get focussed on PhD stuff again. I’ve been on an unintended hiatus since Christmas just because of the amount of stuff piled up but I’m slipping behind my schedule so hopefully there’ll be more thoughts and reflections on what I’m reading.

Level of Detail

I’m working on a new project for the summer which I’ve tentatively titled ‘Level of Detail’ – the project will be about computer graphics (obviously) and the sort of material, physical impact of them. One of the sketches I’ve done already was a bit of a preview. There’s still some stuff to figure out but I feel really good about it.

I’ll keep documenting the development of it here because that’s sort of what this thing is for. But I really need to find a search and sort plugin that works for this site.

Short Stuff

• Nu Rave is apparently coming back. I was there first time round – best years of my life. I guess this means we’re at that stage in the 15/20 year zeitgeist cycle. It’s interesting reading the thoughts of some of the folks I used to know back then. I’d forgotten things like that we didn’t really have smart phones so you just went to the same few places and ran into people.
• How ‘Typographic Attacks’ fool image recognition – basically putting sticky notes on things. I’m not sure ‘typographic attacks’ is accurate but it certainly reminds me of speculation from the beginning of autonomous cars about protestors putting up, for instance, stop or no entry signage to prevent autonomous vehicles moving through the city.
• Job opportunity over at Birkbeck with Joel McKim for a lecturer in Digital Media Design.

I owe a lot of people emails and I need to pick up the tab on a lot of half-done projects including a lecture to put together for this afternoon. Fell into my own trap of over-promising and under-delivering a little. Love you and speak to you with some more interesting stuff very soon.