2023 is around the corner. I have my goals set before me and one of them involves regular updates here, so here we go:
Daily Goals - drawing, coding practice, reading, exercise. It’s a lot with a full time job and possibly a part time job in the future. There will be good days and less successful days.
Weekly updates here - what I’m reading, listening to, working on. Just a weekly writing practice in a public space.
To read more books than I purchase - which could involve purchasing fewer books, or reading more.
What I’m Reading - The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz. This is an excellent book. I’m half way into it and I have thoughts. Forthcoming.
What I’m Listening To: Mostly my music space has been occupied with a lot of instrumental covers - Vitamin String Quartet and Duomo, plus a little Ratatat and OceanLab.
What I’m Watching: I just finished His Dark Materials on HBO, and I loved it - it’s a beautiful adaptation of the books and I’ll be rewatching it soon. My partner and I are/were also watching Willow on Disney and we both hate it. There are two unreleased episodes and I don’t know if I can bother with it. I love the original movie, and part of me hopes that there’s something that will turn this series around and make the whole thing make sense - but as of now Graydon is the only character I care for at all. It feels like a parody of a D&D campaign run and played by a hoard of teenagers with short attention spans and someone’s parents iPod shuffle playing for background music. Pointing out every item that makes my head hurt would require rewatching the series and beyond not wanting to put myself through that again, I don’t want to give Disney the viewing data to suggest that I’m enjoying it enough to watch it a second time. Character flaws make for good story telling, but every character it so flawed, and the flaws collide with each other so violently that I’ve spent the entire series waiting to care that these characters are clearly going to fail.
Something I’ve Been Thinking About: We’re getting into a weird point in the evolution of culture that going to be really interesting to live through and probably more interested to study in retrospect. Whole culture wars are playing out online over AI and ethics, and it plays into the democratization of the Arts in really interesting ways. A lot of us take for granted the accessibility of art, not just it availability online but in museums and galleries. Digital tools have reformed the landscape more and made the creation of art easier and cheaper in many ways - a digital piece can be reworked infinite times without having to worry about the effect of layers on the substrate or the cost of paint or the ruination of the piece in general. AI image creation takes that all a step further, where talent and skill are also removed from the equation in the initial “creation” of imagery. What rifts will this create in the art world when it comes to medium and class and the already indeterminate definition of what art is or is not?
Something That Made Me Laugh: Like a lot of people following TikTok trends - I bought a tamagotchi to attach to my water bottle to encourage myself to hydrate better. It makes me smile, and I never had one in the 90’s so it’s also soothing a part of me that missed out on something stupid in my youth.
This would be a good time to create a 2022 in review as well, but this past year was rough. I’ll save my retrospective for a more private medium and focus on moving forward.