I continue to sort of ignore my PhD, which isn't especially wise but understandable

The spring semester for my program begins next week and while I have been working on things for the last month and a half, most of them have had little to do with the dissertation I promised a foundation I would write or the comprehensive exams I said I would do in the fall. A lot of this is simply just dragging my feet on activities that feel more like hazing ritual than meaningful use of my time, but they also just feel increasingly small relative to other concerns in my life. Such as:

Teaching amidst fascism is weird

I'm adjuncting in a classroom for the first time since 2019, back at the Cooper Union engineering program. Initially my anxieties about going back to teaching concerned the lost muscle memory and expanding generational gap between myself and the students. Those anxieties have been swiftly replaced with ones about becoming a target of fascists and ethno-nationalists. Let me explain.

Last week an adjunct at Cooper, Shellyne Rodriguez, was fired abruptly from her position allegedly for anti-Zionist social media posts. The semester is already underway and that class presumably has to find a replacement instructor. Based on what little I know of Rodriguez and her politics not to mention the hassle of hiring adjuncts I sort of struggle to believe that it could be something so offensive that the school could justify inconveniencing themselves and their students like this. I suspect Rodriguez was actually fired because she was already a target of the far right press, who were waiting for her to say or do anything that could be further scrutinized. I mean, some of these outlets wrote about the fact Cooper gave her a job in the first place! Meanwhile, the college is still dealing with fallout from a pro-Palestine student protest last fall. What I expect happened is that after getting wind of some new empty outrage that some conservative outlet planned to drum up, the college administration determined that the risk of drawing any more heat outweighed the impracticality of firing an instructor the second week of classes (as well as the optics of firing a Black woman instructor at a very white college). It may have also been deemed acceptable by the administration because Rodriguez taught in the art school, which famously produces the lowest number of alumni donations to the college—even if students were outraged, the administration is not burning an especially lucrative bridge.

A faculty friend has reassured me that the administration is unlikely to go rooting around in my social media. Admittedly, I am more worried about potentially getting doxxed by a surprise fascist student than I am of losing a $4,700 adjuncting gig (none of my students have shown fascist tendencies so far, but I've had them in my classes before!). But the fact that the administration rolled over this easily is a very concrete reminder of how complicity happens: not out of fervent belief in the cause but in the notion that silencing others or being silent will keep you safe. Silence and self-preservation tend to be a more important aspect of fascism spreading than fervent dogmatic belief in the cause. I started 2024 by going with Melissa and Tommy to see Occupied City, and it has been a little uncanny how relevant it feels at times.

At the same time that I've been told I'm unlikely to be subjected to a sudden investigation and/or firing, I've also been cautioned not talk about Palestine with my students. This is somewhat complicated by the fact I am teaching the computer science and ethics class, where morality and power dynamics are the core subject matter. It feels absurd to leave an ongoing genocide—one that's been documented as enabled in part by computational systems—at the classroom door. And yet, I don't even know where to begin talking to them about it. I expect that it's all going to come to a head sooner than later, and I'm not really sure how it's going to go.

Some behind the scenes work I can't talk about yet

Speaking of cowardice in the face of fascism, I blogged a little about an incident a few weeks ago that might lead to something good happening, but it remains in process and I don't want to say too much and have it fall apart.

I made some little drawings to self soothe

The small Shopify store for plotter art continues to slowly add items. I recently figured out a toolchain for making isoline-based terrain drawings. It's a bit of a departure from the format I've been using for plotter map art.

New drawings in this style will probably go up this week; they may end up a little cheaper than the hillshade hatching ones just because they take less time to plot. I've also gotten some requests for postcard sized versions of the big plotter drawings which I will give some time to next month. Reminder that discount code receiving subscribers have a 25% off discount code that expires January 31. (February will have a different discount code.) Also a heads up that on January 31 I'll stop taking orders for the 2024 plotter postcard quarterly, which makes for a cute yearlong gift.

What else

Mostly extracurricular reading that will have to end this week, a lot of time with the dog, scripting the next episode of RIP Corp, looking for funding for RIP Corp, getting more sleep and exercise than I'll probably get for the rest of the next six months given work commitments but still having a lot of anxiety and grief because it turns out no amount of self-care fully turns it off. Some close friends are having a baby literally tomorrow; despite everything I'm really looking forward to hanging out with this new person. It's a weird time to be alive.

But we will keep living, I think. Good luck to all of you out there as we head into February.

The thing about all that follows below is so much of it now feels wildly inconsequential in the face of what's happening in Gaza. It overshadows most of my day-to-day and makes the whole act of victory lap style "year in reivew"-ing feel sort of ridiculous. What follows is offered more in the spirit of personal accountability than like, a pat on the back.

2023 rundown

Hustle

• We put out five episodes of RIP Corp: one on Fairchild Semiconductor, an explainer on corporate personhood, a dive into the Vice bankruptcy, an episode on Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. based mostly on material from my master's thesis, and an end-of-year in memoriam episode.
• Sent out plotter postcards four times a year to a small crew of people, which I am doing again in 2024.
• Related to the above, in the final week of the year I set up a Shopify primarily for plotter-related stuff. Probably also will put some back-catalogue art up there, subscribers already know about relevant discount codies.
• Consistently put out the weekly newsletter Perfect Sentences all year.
• Made a cute zine in February and then immediately had no time to make zines on the side.
• Made some nice larger-scale plotter drawings using some fun code I wrote.
• Was supposed to be helping out with writing a research guide for the Supply Studies Research Network project and did, a little, but then got very sick and had some life explosions (see below) that mean I'm just getting back to that work now.

School

• Wrote and defended a master's thesis. It is nigh-unreadably bad in the way all master's thesis writing is bad, but if you would like to read it happy to share. Starting a PhD a few months later sort of made this an anticlimactic achievement.
• Received a grant to support a dissertation on (broadly speaking) history and pedagogy of geospatial software. It only covers a year of funding; for the following two years I'll be on a grant my advisor has. I am basically speedrunning my PhD, and I honestly cannot fully recommend it but I also don't want to be doing school for more than three more years.
• Submitted an article for academic journal peer review for the first time. Yikes.

Life

• As previously mentioned, was doing my best to function as a genocide unfolded. Not great!
• Took care of my mom following two pretty serious surgeries (replacing part of her cervical spine in May and putting some screws in to a a broken ankle in October). I'm glad I live close enough by that I can help her out when these things happen at least.
• Took care of my dog following a surgery to take biopsies and check if she had cancer after a few months of weird health issues (the good news is she doesn't have cancer, just basically dog IBS and osteoarthritis; the better news is that pet insurance meant we didn't actually spend five thousand dollars to find out our dog has IBS).
• Had walking pneumonia in July (cannot recommend as an experience).
• Got COVID, for a second time, in October (also cannot recommend—to be clear, I tested positive on October 8 so it was very bad vibes all around).
• In September my landlord (and downstairs neighbor) of six years told us that he was going to put the building on the market, exactly one month after we renewed our lease. This was terrifying! After a month of lackluster interest and my landlord getting some reality checks on the state of the housing market (irrationally he seemed to think he could pay off debts and buy an apartment in our extremely already-gentrified-but-astonishingly-getting-worse neighborhood with the money made selling the building) he pulled the building off the market and told us that he'd be putting it back up for sale in February 2025. I hope he doesn't change his mind again!
• Hit the milestone of ten years sober from alcohol, an anniversary that is a couple of weeks before the milestone of my dad having been dead for ten years. Lots of feelings!
• Got a new tattoo partly to commemorate the above and partly as a gesture to acknowledge getting through this year. (Financially irresponsible but emotionally worth it.)

Culture

• Read 37 books (among the favorites: Heavy, How Not To Kill Yourself, Palo Alto, Wrong Way).
• Saw 5 plays (Kate, The Good John Proctor, Merrily We Roll Along, Prometheus Firebringer, Here We Are), which is about 5 times more shows than I see in a usual year of living in a city full of theater.
• Saw Lauren Mayberry at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, missed seeing The Mountain Goats twice (sick dog, school).
• Saw...3 movies in theaters? (Turn Every Page, Sanrizuka—Heta Village, The Boy and the Heron) Not my best effort.

2024 upcoming things

I'm not really excited about this year! There's still a genocide happening, and the US presidential election looks likely to be a nightmare. I am grateful to be in community with people who organize and fight and make it worthwhile to keep going, and also I am steeling myself for a lot of grief and precariousness. But I am turning 37 this year and prime number years have honestly been pretty good ones for me, so I guess there's that.

Hustle

• I'm teaching Ethics of Computer Science at the Cooper Union this spring. The last time I taught this class was 2019 so I am pretty anxious about it, but I'm very lucky to know a lot of extremely cool people who have already agreed to come be guest speakers for the class.
• Finishing up work on the SSRN grant.
• Continuing to work on plotter art and software for generating plotter drawings.
• We're seeking outside funding for RIP Corp for the first time this year, but I am honestly pretty pessimistic about our chances. It's a show about corporate failure, which is not very appealing to uhhh companies who buy ads. "Do the vagaries of capitalism make you want to scream into a pillow? Make sure it's a pillow from Casper." Also, in the year in memoriam episode I'm pretty sure I talked shit about Mailchimp, one of the bigger podcast ad buyers, which was ill-advised but in my defense they killed TinyLetter.

School

• This semester I am supposed to be preparing for my comprehensive exams and working on my dissertation project. (You're really not supposed to be doing those at the same time, but I am in a weird situation.) This means reading a lot of books, doing a lot of interviews, and a little bit of domestic travel.

Life

• Deeply dreading having to move in a year but grateful for the time to plan in advance.
• In June, celebrating the five year anniversary of adopting my dog.
• Last month I connected with the group of people in my congressional district who are excited to continue pressuring our garbage congressman, Dan Goldman, to change his position on the war in Gaza (his position, currently, is "I don't actually care how many Palestinians die and when my constituents use the term 'collective punishment' during town halls I physically wince like the little bitch heir to a pants fortune that I am"). There's also interest in primarying him! It is a relatively small thing to do in the face of a genocide but I am excited to connect more with my neighbors and contribute to these efforts. He is not a serious person and I don't like him!

Culture

• Does the above really afford me leisure time for taking in books and theater and movies? Unclear, but I hope so. The theater stuff was especially nice to do, hope to do more of that.

I read My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing by Carl Phillips this week, and it's had me thinking a lot about the difference between what Phillips regularly calls "the work" (in his case, of poetry) and jobs. I like reading advice on writing and creativity from poets because poets are often very spacey and sensitive, and I am also very spacey and sensitive. Poets will admit more readily than most artists that everything of one's life does, ultimately, go into creative work, whether we mean for it to or not and whether it's visible in the final result or not.

Academia is the first time in a pretty long time that I've had something like a job that is not directly a reflection of me doing "the work." There's overlap, sure, but the material I write for the three people who have to read my master's thesis is probably not going to be the same material I would write for myself with the same subject matter. I'm thinking a lot about how I write this work while simultaneously writing it into/as, well, homework.

One way I'm thinking about it is letting the job version of this writing be practice in the sense that Phillips writes about it:

Here, by the way, I think it's more important not to have art as the absolute goal, or even the goal at all. It's too intimidating...The point here is physical and mental engagement with the act of writing, until the joining of thought and writing becomes conducive to thinking, becomes a catalyst for curiosity and the medium by which curiosity extends itself like light—but somehow more physical than light—into the so-called darkness of what's yet to be stumbled upon, what we call discovery.

Which is to say: I expect to write a lot of garbage sentences over the next month and hopefully writing enough garbage will gain me the fluency needed to get to the good stuff.

The more important question, maybe: why did I feel any sense of obligation? Why did I feel guilty for deciding that I didn't have the time or energy to run a forum on top of doing other work? Where was that guilt even directed, when not a one of my Patreon supporters had ever even asked for a Discord?

I want to reiterate that just because this isn't something I feel compelled to do doesn't mean this model is necessarily bad for all creators, or for audiences. I can see the appeal! One of the reasons Discords have become popular for creators is it provides a hack around the whims of the algorithm: rather than hope that Instagram puts your new post front and center, you can tell everyone in the Discord to check it out. It can also be a great way for creators to cultivate sources or get interesting recommendations—Anne Helen Peterson does this regularly and, it seems, pretty effectively—and stave off some of the isolation that comes with creative work. On the audience side, it seems like this trend reflects a desire for more intentional online community than the one experienced in the YouTube comment section or amidst the trash fire of Twitter. There's less context collapse in such an explicitly defined uh, context. It's maybe a more sociable variation on Google Reader: various Discord channels become places for information on or engagement with specific topics.

I think some of this comes back to this conflation of audiences and people who pay money for something as a "community." Commerce and conviviality of course can and do overlap. I have some really treasured relationships with local business owners in my neighborhood on the basis of being a regular customer, and back when I did customer service-type jobs I had plenty of beloved regulars. But there's an unspoken understanding in those sorts of relationships about their boundaries, and boundaries in platform-mediated relationships seem to get fuzzy a lot more often than the one between a cashier and customer IRL.

Talking about an audience or customers as a community isn't 100% wrong per se, but it can become yet another way of pretending that (broadly gestures) all this work isn't actually work but doing what you love, what you would do anyway even if there wasn't money. In 2014, good internet person and my friend Darius Kazemi gave an incredible meta-talk at the XOXO conference titled "How I Won The Lottery" which I encourage you to watch because it explains this uneasy tendency really wonderfully in a show-not-tell sort of way. Part of what Darius satirized in this talk, in addition to the entire structure of the Online Creator Who Makes It Big conference talk, was the constant invocation of the "community" that made the creator's success possible. It's a very heady days of Web 2.0 sentiment that has definitely extended into web3 discourse: you don't do sales or client management, you build community.

But, as Darius' talk exemplifies, it's not just the "community" that makes it possible for a creative endeavor to be financially sustainable for an artist: it's a whole mix of factors, including having the resources to put time and energy into the work of maintaining a community and a significant amount of dumb luck. Most of the people I know running lively, popular Discords have (paid and/or volunteer) moderators helping out. It's a big ask of someone's time and energy to build out community space as part of their creative practice, and it's an ask that can be risky for the person doing that work. Harassment and stalking can totally emerge from "community" members deciding they're not happy with a creator's boundaries or productivity.

I want to think more on this and probably try to convene some discussion with friends who do work online to talk about this dynamic. For now, this is just me thinking things through a bit.

Gentle reader, I am a champion at starting new blogs or newsletters fresh with good intentions and ideas only to let them stagnate in a few short months, promising to update more and on a schedule only to have life get in the way. The dormant websites I have left in my wake probably only number in the tens, but it's still not ideal. I generally prefer treating blogs and newsletters as time-constrained efforts with a clear end date: over the course of a residency, for a particular project like serialized fiction, things like that. It feels more honest than the weird ongoing-ness of writing online now where I have to pretend that I am a publication (when I am, in fact, just me with no fact checker or editor or anything) and that it's somehow sustainable in the long-term to just have an ongoing solo publication on a platform that could come or go or become an untenable platform to use.

This website--named by using a domain I bought in one of my many late-night impulse domain name sprees over the years--is partly an attempt to set clear parameters on the more commerce-y side of my life, the one where I make artwork and write for money and things. I'd been doing this on Patreon for about five years prior, and had briefly flirted with doing a Substack last year for one of my niche research interests. I decided to set up this website, which is a self-hosted instance of Ghost, partly because of misgivings with both of those platforms that probably don't need to be repeated here. But the ongoing collapse of Twitter motivated me to finally actually set up a new site. I don't really expect a blog to help me stave off the professional losses of Twitter's diminishing relevance, but it does give me something else to do with my time instead of doomscrolling and wondering if I'll ever sell another book now that having a high follower count isn't a meaningful metric to publishers. (Also, publishing is fucked, this is another story and post to be written.)

What we'll be doing here:

• Selling wares. As of right now the wares available are relatively limited to stuff from my back catalogue and a yearlong mail art project. I'm thinking of adding one extremely expensive product that I honestly will kind of worry if someone wants to buy it, but who knows?
• Extremely low-key newsletters. There are two ongoing newsletters: one weekly (on Sundays), one monthly. They're both pay what you want.
• Later, short-term newsletters. I have some projects that I don't want to put out as open-ended things and would rather publish over time. This is a way to do that.
• Blogging. This will likely be irregular "everything else" type writing or process stuff. That's why I have a separate blog for my grad school work (which is not subscription-based but does have a tip jar, FWIW). I might do some posts about self-hosting Ghost and things I've learned in the process and some other technical posts? That's about it.

I've noticed that a lot of subscription-based online creators increasingly emphasize community as a value-add to their platform; no disrespect to that approach (I have a whole other blog post in drafts about this tendency) but I am really not inclined to take that extra step with this website. I already co-manage a Mastodon server for my friends; I do not really have the time or energy to be a community manager in my work life.

So, let's see how this goes.