As the drum of days beats a slower rhythm

A—— has been working really hard on his goals and it's making me feel renewed and more sustainable excitement to work on mine, too. I met up with a couple friends this weekend, and I always come away from that with a reminder that we're all just striving towards our own little goals, and we just want to see each other happy and fulfilled and thriving.

Writings

My piece on poetic programming, A World Encoded, is out in Pleiades! The piece was included in Issue 44.2 for Fall 2024, and was additionally published as an online exclusive. I was really proud of this piece.

I'm acutely aware of how I feel when I write. I want to take shortcuts; I want to fall back on the saggy armchair of clichés. I'm not sure how to get to the mountain on the horizon, so I'll stick to mumbling overtures and a crude outline. I write like the pen is afraid of the paper. I'm intimately familiar with the ellipsis; I don't want to reveal how little I know. If I leave it mostly to your imagination, dear accomplished reader, my steadfast suspicion is that you would take my thesis and run, and, reader, distances scare me.

But I love an unexpected turn of phrase, and I'll offer myself this one: it seems like a trick can become a skill through practice. So I'm learning to exercise the muscle and to befriend the first draft. It was a really good workout to be able to work through this whole piece without chickening out, and I'm always grateful for the opportunity and the space to do this. I have a better sense of what I was trying to say now, and I'll try to say it better still, next time I get a chance.

Aside from Pleiades: I wrote about accessibility for Fathom's blog. I wrote and rewrote this a few times, each time feeling bogged down about scope and framing. At times, the process of learning about accessibility and trying to fight inertia gets overwhelming and frustrating — doubly so, when I feel like I don't even know the right answers to tell people, anyway. I wanted to open up conversations about accessibility without making it too ideological and accusatory, or, alternatively, too utilitarian and short-sighted. Where I landed on was a more personal account of how I've come to accessibility, how I generally try to improve accessibility, and how I balance it with the understanding of everything else towards which we are pulled.

With the Pleiades piece and the accessibility piece, I keep finding it helpful to remind myself that I can't and shouldn't try to tackle everything. I can offer just a little slice of something, and that makes me happier and more confident, too.

Projects

Sometimes when I revisit long-running WIPs, I try to figure out what's stopping me from finishing them.

• Does it feel like it can never be finished? Should it then be a little smaller in scope?

• Does it feel increasingly impersonal and uninspiring? What was inspiring to me originally — should it then be more specifically about that?

• Do I want to make a tool that stems from a personal example and I'm struggling to make both axes work? Still figuring out the balance on that one.

Tree project (the arboreal one). I have collected all the photos! And I took a big step on this recently, which was to take all the photos and process them all in Photoshop with the super handy "automatically align images" feature. All the images now play smoothly without jumping around, and you can see the seasonal changes on the actual tree much more easily now. I put together a page for it, which is almost there — I think I want to think through some text to go along with the visual experience.

Tree project (the syntactic one). I started to refactor the code on this a while ago — you know, classic lateral move. I think I'll try to rethink the angle for this — maybe make a smaller prototype with the example I have in mind first, before trying to build a full-fledged tool.

Bookshelf project. Made a lot of progress on this over the weekend! I tend to take very frequent screenshots of projects as they progress — school has trained me well — so it's always exciting to find the right feeling as I wade through the exploration, then look back to where I started. The layout and hierarchy of the page has been one of the harder problems in this project, so I still have to work out those kinks. Otherwise, I'm excited to hopefully wrap this up soon.