2/13/2026 – Taking care of both the negative space and the positive space

Create more than you consume. That's the goal right? The gold standard? Yet every day I wake up and I consume. The first thing I do when my alarm sounds early in the morning is look at my phone. At first just to check the time, then to see what messages I've missed while I was asleep from friends in other time zones. Then I check emails, delete the newsletters that don't interest me that day, turn off the fan; by then, I'm hooked, and it only takes a few mindless taps to be catching up with stories and messages on Instagram, falling into a desensitizing wormhole of thoughtless pacification. There are so many traps that are set for us to consume. Our society is structured around this fact, it relies on it, that we will wake up everyday and commodify ourselves without the corporate overlords needing to lift a finger. Creating, on the other hand, is not so intuitive. It requires time, motivation, inspiration, and intentionality. The best things in life are often this way. They say nothing good ever comes easy. It's the friction that makes them feel valuable. In the wintertime, however, motivation and inspiration can be incredibility difficult to find. I stand by output as a virtue, and I think it'd be in everyone's best interest to reduce their input from outside voices. But perhaps there is also virtue in the in-between space, in doing nothing at all.

Last weekend Steph and I visited the MoMA to view the Ruth Asawa exhibit on its last day. It was a wonderful retrospective of her life and career; she was a master of innovating within her craft. She discovered early on the themes, forms, and materials that spoke to her, and lived an incredibly active life integrating creativity into her every day. "Doing is living." she said. "That is all that matters." Something else from the exhibit, however, stuck with me. In the gallery themed "Taking Care of Space", the placard read: Asawa tended to negative space in both two and three dimensions. As the child of Zen Buddhists, she trained from a young age in calligraphy. In this meditative practice, "you're not watching what your brush is doing, but you're watching the spaces around it," she reflected. "You're watching what it isn't doing, so that you're taking care of both the negative space and the positive space." There is profound wisdom in this. In nature, winter is both a time of reduced consumption and restrained output. In other words, it's a time of rest. It's a negative space. The flowers and the trees wither and become dormant, the animals store up their food reserves and go into hibernation. The natural world goes to sleep to come back with vibrance in the Spring. Why do we think ourselves so different as humans?

I'm proud of the efforts I've made to save my soul from the oppressive systems that control our lives. We don't own a TV, we instead spend our days listening to music, reading books, and conducting research falling down endless rabbit holes. It's much more fulfilling and grounded in reality. Now I want to allow myself to take care of both the negative and positive space in my life. To reconsider the time I spend doing nothing as an important part of maintaining balance in my life as a creative person. To allow myself to reflect as I look out the window in the morning and quietly watch the world flow by like a river, without any worry as to what I should contribute, or record, to experience what is happening in its passive state and allow it to pass over me like I'm a grain of sand in the sea.

12/3/2025 – Is this real? Who made what I see?

Ever since AI reared its head just a few years ago, people have been saying the same things over and over. “That’s crazy how real it looks! But notice the hands, the amount of fingers are wrong. You can still tell it’s AI” and I’ve continuously replied with “Yes! But think of where it was just a year ago. Soon we won’t be able to tell the difference.” AI companies have half-heartedly put up guardrails to show “accountability”, Sora by OpenAI for example placing moving watermarks, or markers in the metadata. But even these are easily removed by anyone who’s patient and barely technically inclined enough to try. RecentlyI saw a video of an evangelist pastor placing his hands on the foreheads of goth girls performatively casting out the devils inside them in an energetic church service. The content was undoubtedly hilarious and bizarre, but it looked almost perfectly real and not unlike real TV evangelist services we’ve seen before. Here and there throughout the video, glitchy pixels jumped around the screen, which at closer inspection matched the patterns and movement of a now-removed Sora AI watermark. I showed this video to someone and they replied, “wait, this is AI?” I’ve had several moments like this myself. Videos depicting third world carelessness on construction sites, a bizarre conversation in the middle of a hurricane, kids nailing an impossible bottle flip trick. Shame fills my heart when I read the comments and realize the general consensus is that the video is obviously AI. I fell for it. Am I becoming easily gullible like the older generations born off the internet, falling for obviously fake images on Facebook? And then there’s the opposite cases; recently I saw a video that I was almost sure was AI. Nobody in the comments seemed to make this connection. But their movements were off, and I could notice a face shift when it left and re-entered the frame. But it was real enough to pass the test, and the lack of AI accusations left me questioning whether I had judged incorrectly. This process is maddening. We can no longer trust our eyes. What made real videos like these exciting was that, while they were outrageous, they actually happened. Now that they didn’t, what’s the point? I found myself asking, “what if we tried to trace this back, find the people in this video?” perhaps then we could really get to the bottom of it, expose the video for what it is. But is this a losing battle?

My hope is that these changes in how content is made leads to a shift in how we consume. Capitalism in its greed has removed desirability from products. The things we spend money on and the reasons we buy them resemble drugs more than viable goods. We’re not being sold products to make our lives better, we’re being sold products so that we become dependent on them. There was a peak in internet use a decade ago when everyone I knew was on social media because it was a viable means to stay connected with each other. But now more and more of my friends and family have left the internet entirely and are completely disconnecting. In many ways, I think this is great, but I also think it’s throwing away something that made the internet so great to begin with. The internet is a truly free space where anyone can carve out a space and make something valuable for people to enjoy. It’s a means for connecting with human beings across the globe and for freely for sharing ideas, for forming real world relationships. My hope is for the average person to not only feel like big media companies have gone too far, that AI does more harm than good and needs to be rejected, but that instead of questioning whether everything they see is real, they start to question where it came from. If all the content we view online is made by people we know, we won’t need to live our digital lives in a state of constant mistrust. Maybe this hope is utopian, but I think the solution to many of our problems is in going local, in our real lives, and in our digital ones. I only want to look at content made by the people I know. I want to know who’s behind everything I consume. I want to know about the writers, the artists, the designers, the craftsmen, who they are and why they are driven to create. I want to believe in what I see and in the people who made it.

This was largely inspired by this great article. by Elan Ullendorff.

…I’ve come to realize that when we obsess over whether something was made by AI, we’re often asking the wrong question. Sure, there is newsworthy content for which veracity is paramount. But for everything else, asking how much AI is in something may be less important that a simpler question: how much humanity is in it?

11/21/2025 – Perspectives gained through reading

For the past week, I've been reading Sunset Park by Paul Auster. This is the second book I've read by him, the first being Leviathan, and it's been fun to not only read a quintessential New York author, but to read an author who lived and wrote all of his stories in the neighborhoods I live in. Leviathan took place largely in the neighborhoods of and around Cobble Hill, which I pass through now and again when going out with friends or when running errands, but Sunset Park, as the name implies, takes place in Sunset Park, as well as Park Slope and Greenwood Cemetery; one of the main characters even has a store on 5th avenue which I frequent often. I love when visiting and experiencing a new place provides additional insight into a novel. I felt this way when I was reading Proust in Paris. What was unfamiliar suddenly became clear in my mind as I could now easily picture the streets they were racing down in their carriages, the parks they were playing in, the cafés they were meeting in. This is especially true of Sunset Park. Miles Heller spends hours wandering the cemetery, reflecting on its scale and its fascinating monuments to consequential historical figures. Inventors, authors, politicians; he photographs them and finds sanctuary from his chaotic life in the city. This is what I do in the exact same places, I can see it, it's describing my own reality.

Something I appreciate about Auster's novels is his attention to the characters. I can see that this is his speciality as a writer, that he writes portraits of people. It makes me wonder how he would write me as a character, or how I might write about myself in the style of Auster. To attempt to do so feels vulnerable. He describes his characters honestly, all of their strengths and all of their weaknesses. He doesn't paint anyone out to be a hero or a villain, but gives us reasons to really like and be repulsed by every character. I think that's why they all feel so real, because just like real people, we have to take in all of their virtues and shortcomings and form our own opinions of them as we watch them make decisions and respond to situations. To attempt to write about myself in such a way would be deeply uncomfortable. It would be difficult to leave out any bias and avoid lifting myself up too much, or to making excuses for my failures. It would be opening myself up for analysis, allowing myself to be perceived.

Since I began seriously reading on a daily basis just a couple of years ago, I've felt my mind change entirely. I see the world differently now; I have more perspective. My mindset is completely enveloped for the duration of each novel I read, and I start to experience my life in the style of the author. Reading Proust helped me notice the beauty around me. Knausgaard encouraged me to notice and internally narrate the subtle details of my everyday life. Auster is making me take note of the intricacies of people. I'm grateful for these perspectives because they influence me to be more present, more self-aware, grounded in reality. I want to be a better writer; I know I'm not particularly skilled yet, but that's why I write here; it's a training exercise.I hope to someday devleope my own style so that others can experience when they read my own work.

11/17/2025 – Ancient humans

Yesterday on the r/Archeology subreddit, I saw a post where a user shared a recent find of an artifact near their home, a beautiful carved river stone with a motif depicting what appears to be a bird, and which they believe to be, and were asking for confirmation on, from the Mississippian culture. For me, seeing that beautiful object was a pertinent reminder of the rich ancient histories that surround us of the people who lived here hundreds and even thousands of years ago, and how they expressed their ideas in ways not unlike we do now. Having grown up in Utah, the vast majority of my knowledge of indigenous Americans is on the tribes and cultures that were local to me; Navajo, Ute, Timpanogos, Paiute, Hopi, Fremont; my childhood is filled with memories of staring up at petroglyphs scrawled into high up rock faces in Ninemile Canyon or stumbling unexpectedly on pictographs depicting hunting scenes, bighorn sheep, mysterious spirals, triangles; easily and frequently finding arrowheads, beads, manos and matates, drills, scrapers, all lost in the sand long ago, while wandering out in the deserts of Central Utah. In Sego Canyon near Moab, there are wall paintings that are estimated to be 8,000 years old. Evidence of the people who lived there for thousands of years before Europeans even stepped foot on the continent was all around us and filled my childhood imagination with curiosity as to what their stories were. I should mention that my very presence on that land is not uncomplicated as it was my direct ancestors who wiped out their descendants. My connection to these traces felt distant, maybe intentionally, as if I should be careful not to trespass further where there still exist very real tensions surrounding the still sensitive, open wounds. Still, we share a common ancestor, we are all Homo Sapiens, and our stories are all part of the human story.

Seeing this post about the Mississippian artifact sent me into a rabbit hole reading about other ancient discoveries of human art. Löwenmensch, the prehistoric ivory carving of a human with a lion's head, the oldest known sculpture and oldest evidence of human artistic expression at 35-41 thousand years old, which was discovered in a cave in Germany in 1939. The Divje Babe flute, in Slovenia, which is believed to be 50-60 thousand years old and possibly made by Neanderthals and is the oldest known musical instrument. Then there is Chauvet Cave, discovered only in 1994, home to some of the oldest and best preserved cave paintings in the world, made by the Aurignacian people. Looking at these beautiful, surprisingly well-made paintings of lions, oxen, rhinoceroses, mammoths, horses, bears, hand prints; I could feel their energy. Unlike the rock art I was raised near in Utah, these are most certainly my own ancestors. 35 thousand year old drawings in red paint and charcoal, the imaginations of my ancestors captured on walls deep inside a cave. Some of the drawings utilize natural contours in the cave provide emphasize to the figures. In places the soft clay-like walls were used to scrape images rather than draw. The caves which (thankfully) are only open 2 weeks out of the year for view by experts studying it out of precaution for preservation, have been completely scanned and can be explored virtually. Wandering the chambers, even through my computer, I could that this place was sacred to me. Tens of thousands of years of mystery separate me from these people, and yet I am connected to them through the stories they left behind in their art.

I'm struck by the ephemerality of it all. When even one or two thousand years feels like ancient history to us now, when the oldest traces of our own familiar civilizations are only a few thousand years old and lie in deserted ruins across archeological sites, it's hard to imagine how far back 35 thousand years is. Nothing exists of these people beyond their art and tools. Homo Sapiens have been around 200 thousand years, and we have worked tools from earlier human ancestors going back 3.3 million years. Everything we have and know is brand new. We are so small, and yet, I look at our ancient art and think, we are important.

11/15/2025 – Indigo

The hexcode #004169 is close to my favorite color, which is a natural dyed indigo, specifically after a few rounds when the fabric begins to take on a rich, saturated hue.

I first fell in love with this color sometime in 2019-2020 when I was learning about traditional aizome indigo dying in Japan. The process of growing the leaves, drying them, fermenting them in vats; natural dyes already have intrinsic beauty because of the labor involved in making them; but true indigo is special in that its color becomes better with time, and because blue is so difficult to make naturally.

Indigo as a color for me is deeply symbolic. It makes me feel calm, and it invokes feelings of patience. It represents time, and the effort required to develope a craft or a skill. It's imbued with history and tradition. All of these are important values to me, and when I see that color, they're brought to the forefront of my mind.

A couple of years ago in Salt Lake City, Steph and I went to an estate sale at the home of a man who taught biology at the University of Utah. He was obviously well traveled, and in the 1960's lived for a few years in Japan. His home was full of artifacts, pottery, interesting plants, artwork, books. We went back two days in a row, leaving both times with armfuls of treasure. On the second day as I was scanning a computer room for anything I previously might have missed, I spotted blue fabric hanging over the door. I looked closer and discovered that it was an indigo dyed shibori noren, or door curtain. Shibori is the practice of tying the fabric before dying to create drawings with the undyed white parts of the fabric, which in this case were beautiful butterflies. The curtain was about 50-60 years old and I was estatic with my discovery. We took it home and it hung on our livingroom wall for the rest of our time living there, my favorite item in the home. Unfortunately, when we finally packed our life into a pod and left for New York, it was the only casualty of our move. I remember rolling it up with rubberbands and tucking it inside, but we never saw it again.

Now indigo has an additional meaning to me, one of ephemerality and letting go. We can dedicate our lives to working towards something, and then one day we might look for it only to discover that it's gone away. When we've found so much joy and purpose in the journey, is that really such a bad thing? Emptiness leaves room for something new to fill its space.

10/17/2025 – On recording memories

This morning I started My Struggle, Book 3 by Knausgaard (I can't stop reading his work!) and the first few pages have been on his reflections of memories captured in old photographs when he was a baby. How strange everything in them seemed now that they're gone. This got me thinking of how a month ago, my mom sent me some recently digitized videos of my older sister's 1st birthday party. As a family, there exist almost no videos before I was about 14 or 15 years old. It was such a visceral experience to not only see my parents as young kids in their mid 20's, and to now myself be older than they were in those videos, but also to see familiar faces move around my childhood yard in an era before cellphones when you'd just set up a camcorder on a tripod for 2 hours to capture the entire event. The 90's clothes, the way everyone spoke, the hair. I was struck seeing someone I know playing as a child, knowing they'd go on to struggle with addiction and be in and out of jail. Or another familiar face having conversations with aunts and uncles now knowing the last years of their life were spent completely degraded in a care center from years of alcoholism. Another face down on one knee so engaged in conversation and laughter, knowing they'd die when I was just a kid from cancer. None of those people had any idea what would happen to them in 10, 20, 30 years, nor were they concerned. They showed up to my baby-older sister's birthday, and were only concerned about what everyone was thinking about them in the present moment, catching up on the mundane goings on of everyday life.

I've been thinking about our obsession with recording the past, and how sometimes I wonder if it can be harmful to dwell on what was, when it only continues on in videos and photographs. Those moments are unable to be captured or relived, no matter how much we yearn for it. Sometimes we might look back and feel upset at how we used to be, even years ago, when all that's left are the impressions made on us, on the pixels of a screen. Are humans meant to remember the past so vividly? Of course the benefit of remembering is understanding. Knowing how things became the way they now are so we know what to continue, what to leave behind, what to repeat, and what to never do again. It's strange to think that the past doesn't exist, nor does the future. The only thing that exists is now, our impressions, our understanding, and our actions. Everything is so derivative, layers and layers of impressions. It's always a welcome reminder that we only exist in the now, and can only ever be who we are because of what we've experienced, for better or for worse, and that we always have the opportunity to understand and to act accordingly.

9/9/2025 – Reframing how we see time and progress for a better life

This morning I watched a fabulous video from a woman talking about the philosopher John Mbiti's ideas on the difference of how African people view time, and how for many African societies, the distant future as a concept is not in their language, and does not exist. Time is something that you wait for or create through the occurrence of events, and time only exists as a "long past, vibrant present, and virtually no future". Mbiti contrasted these ideas with the Western idea of 'time as a commodity', something to be spent, gained, and even lost or wasted. When a Westerner sees someone sitting against a tree, they may think to themselves, "that person's wasting their time", but in African thought, that person might actually be waiting for time to happen. The woman in the video ended her thoughts by suggesting that this Western idea of 'time as a commodity' is what drives our incessant need for progress through work and growth, and that for Africans, the 'golden age' is in the past as it develops through events, ceremonies, and experiences, and joins the cycle of time.

I love learning new ideas from non-Western cultures that challenge what I think of as reality. To clearly frame 'time as a commodity' as a Western idea helps me to see how our lives are experienced in capitalist societies where our days are rigidly divided up with the goal of maximizing our position in the great machine of society. The output of that machine, while it has built large global societies, benefits few over the rest. I read once that hunter gatherers in their simplified lifestyle had more leisure than we do today. It's one of the great paradoxes of innovation–by attempting to improve our lives and make menial tasks easier, we upset the balance elsewhere and leave gaps that need to be filled through further innovation–the cycle just continues. We build gyms to offset our inactivity caused by the automation transportation and work. We produce vitamins and health products to offset our bad diets caused by the automation of food production and farming. We create apps and social networks to offset our isolation caused through the internet and the disintegration of third spaces and physical interactions. With every innovation, we think life will get easier, but instead we create more demand for productivity, and our quotas for work increase, diminishing our leisure and life experiences.

What if, instead, we saw time as something to be produced through experience? What if we sought ways to improve our lives by maximizing our health and increasing time for leisure, to create time through more experiences with friends and family? Time to experienced doing what we love, time as an archive, as a legacy, as something to be proud of and remember. What if progress was measured by these things rather than by greed and constant growth, the idea of which is in itself a fallacy and cannot be sustained? Prosperity is not found in money–you can have all the money in the world, but if your time is not experienced being with who you love and in doing what you love, then it means nothing. These ideas encourage me to readjust and shift my priorities. To protect my dreams and fight for my time feeling peaceful and being with loved ones. Real wealth and progress is found in memories and knowledge, things that only exist in the lived present and in the past.

But the wise only want to be last,
To live on solid ground,
To think deeply,
To be gentle and kind,
To speak with honesty,
To govern with peace and order,
To work with skill,
To act at only the best time.

– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

8/31/2025 – Opt out, refocus

Recently, I've been noticing an increase in discussion about the state of our consumerist society and how the quality of every product and experience has declined while prices have increased. How options have dissolved, and what's left is empty and hollow. Everything requires a subscription. There are several streaming platforms that everyone subscribes to, but none have the movies we want to watch. Social media bombards us with more ads than actual content from our friends; it algorithmically prioritizes certain content based on how long we interact with it, regardless of how positive or negative it is. Nobody can afford to own a home, jobs are requiring more and paying less. Rent is high, but the quality of our spaces is low. Everything, it seems, is minimum in, maximum out.

This phenomenon is honestly depressing and has left many of us wondering what happened to the seemingly idealistic world our parents were raised in. To put it in the words of a post I saw: "everyone is paying more for fewer products with less disposable income". I feel this, and it makes me feel angry towards the reality we've allowed to develop, and that we continue to put people in power who not only allow this to happen, but profit off of it because they are in the tiny minority of people with the money and connections to benefit from it. But what I've found is that in order not to get beaten, I need to stop playing. This doesn't work for everything, of course. I can't "not play" healthcare, and I need to work for my food and shelter. But in a day-to-day existence, I can opt out of my main sources of entertainment being centered around a television. I can opt out of paying exorbitant amounts of money for books and clothes and find my things second-hand from small shops. I can opt out of the raised prices of Uber rides by riding my bike or taking the bus. I can opt out of services that prey on us to subscribe to their services and choose to spend my time in ways that require little to no money to leave me feeling fulfilled.

I speak only for myself on this, but life can be peaceful and fulfilling with very few commodities. Take away something and see how you adapt your routine without it. When Steph and I moved to NYC, our apartment had no (and still doesn't have) dishwasher, microwave, washer, or dryer–and now we have no TV. Contrary to what I expected, I haven't missed any of these things, and we've completely adapted to living without them. I'm not going to say I wouldn't be glad to have some of these things, but I've noticed many improvements in my life without them. My food tastes better because I'm cooking fresher meals. I feel more present in my space because I'm doing more housework by hand. I spend more time deep in thought and have more time for reading and writing because watching TV isn't as convenient anymore. I think as a society we have optimized ourselves into a higher quality of life–it's one of life's great paradoxes. By optimizing work, we're expected to produce more. By making entertainment so easy and mindless, and by making socializing so impersonal online, we've forgotten how to talk to and keep up with real people, how to enjoy living a regular daily life in the real world. Opt out, refocus. Find a way to live that's cheap and accessible and detach you from the oligarchical corporate systems that want nothing but to enslave us.

8/21/2025 – Traveling

Travel is a curious thing. In many ways, travel as we know it is an extremely new experience. Before the invention of airplanes, travel was significantly more difficult and not accessible to the average person. It was reserved for those with time, money, or for those whose careers required it of them, i.e., sailors and merchants. But with the inventions of airplanes and cars, suddenly, in the mid-20th century, anyone could travel almost anywhere in the world. Tourism became a massive industry, and places once sleepy became destinations, entire economies sprouting out of the new phenomenon. There are so many ways to travel, but this corporatized view of it lives on just as strongly as it always has, with travel guides, must-see photo op destinations, and a finite list of sites to check out your list as quickly as possible. Steph and I just returned from 10 days in Paris, the French countryside, and Amsterdam. The latter half was spent with friends, and we didn't encounter this travel cadence very often there, but in France, it could be argued that we were visiting during the peak of this high-season tourism. One caveat that I'll make here is that Paris is, in many ways–I say this full acknowledging that I'm making a broad generalization of a very large, complex, and diversely complicated city–a city of monuments built for tourism. The Seine, the palaces, the statues, the fountains, the museums, and the cathedrals have been built or retrofitted for the world to view when they visit Paris. It's astonishing how many things there are that are so incredibly famous and well-known. In August especially, this means waiting in 1-2 hour lines, never-ending ticket reservations, tight spaces, over-crowded, phones swinging in your face at every turn, of people trying to capture the moment that they were there. It's hard because Steph and I as designers and artists have a genuine desire to visit many of these places for their beauty and the inspiration they give us, but it seems the vast majority of folks who travel to these places care only for how it will make themselves be perceived by their peers, and this quest to take the photo and move on to the next thing was frustrating and distracting to be around.

Regardless, we were still able to gain experiences and create the types of memories one hopes to gain through travel. We saw the stained glass in Saint-Chappelle and stayed until closing time, where we were the only ones there and had a conversation with a worker who was developing his own personal AR tool to study the hundreds of stories recorded in the designs of the windows. We mused on the role of royal religious buildings, such as those that were both a gift to god, but more so a symbol to the world of their wealth and prestige, on their value and their importance to art, but also on their vanity. We attended mass at Notre Dame and smelled the incense from the thuribles and heard the singing and organ music echo throughout the ancient walls. We thought of how different cathedrals feel when they see continuous use over time compared to those that became museums long ago, and how they have more energy and spirit inside of them. I stood in front of some of my favorite Monet paintings that I've dreamed about seeing for years, and was moved nearly to tears by his painting of his dying wife. We learned about the intricacies of the French Revolution and what they stood for as we analyzed the paintings of Jacques-Louis David, who painted for the emperors before and after the revolution, but was also a strong Jacobin who voted to have the king beheaded and painted propaganda for the cause. In all these places where tourists challenged our peace, we remained strong and were able to still draw inspiration, because we knew why we were there and why it was important.

Some of our best experiences in our travels were because of the people we met off the beaten path. In our bed and breakfast in Béhen, our French host came to say hello as we were sharing a bottle of wine on the front lawn, and he was carrying a plate with his dinner. We invited him to sit with us and had a wonderful conversation where he told us about the property and neighboring towns and their use by the occupying Germans in WW2. We learned about their methods and what gave them away, of how they caused the nearby town of Abbeville to be burned, and of how the French people still bear scars from that time almost 100 years ago. Of how his father, who purchased the property in the 50's, planted trees in every crater created from the falling mortars. To hear these stories from someone who lives where it happened and still grapples with its effects was priceless. Another man we met was Mr. Rosenkrans, a Dutchman staying in our Paris hotel who was visiting his daughter nearby. He offered to show us around his town, Leiden, if we ever came. As luck would have it, we did go there not even a week later, so we took him up on his offer. Peter, an 80-year-old retired professor of internal medicine, invited us into his beautiful home from the 1600s for tea and then walked us around the town to show us its most important landmarks. I had never heard of this town, but it was unbelievably beautiful and historic, with a reputation for being a city of scientists, artists, and scholars. In this town, Rembrandt was born, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower set off for America, 16 Nobel prize winners made advancements in science, and the tulip was cultivated before being introduced to Western Europe. We learned so much from Peter, and he was sure to show us his first home and the home of his now passed wife when they first met half a century ago.

I feel it is our duty to travel in a way that expands our understanding of the world. To experience a new language, culture, and history, and to talk with the people who live there is a sacred experience, one that not many throughout time have had the luxury of experiencing. To go and treat a city like a theme park is not only disrespectful to the residents who live there, but it is a missed opportunity to change your mind, mold it into a new, more refined shape. Speaking with people and forming relationships in the regions you visit reminds us all that we are humans with dreams and desires, experiences and histories; we can see ourselves in each other, and in these bonds we can find peace. Everywhere we've been in the world, I've held on tightest to the smallest and quietest places.

8/4/2025 – On the shortness and longness of life

Yesterday my mom sent me an email with twenty video links on Google Drive. The videos had names like "1st Birthday Party.mp4", "Relaxing.mp4", "Nap Time.mp4", "Jake and Friends.mp4", "Jake Messing Around.mp4", "Jake Lip Syncing.mp4". For decades we've had video tapes recorded on a handheld camcorder sitting on a designated shelf in my sister's old bedroom closet. Recently, finally, my mom sent them to be digitized. I knew some of them were from when my sister was a baby, or from my parent's wedding, but I haven't had many opportunities to sit down and watch them. So last night when Steph was out at a party and I was home alone, I sat down and watched them. I don't have a lot of videos from when I was a kid, there are some YouTube videos still up of me and my friend Kyle in 2007 solving Rubik's cubes set to double-speed so they look super fast, but that was about it for a long time. Only recently I thought to download them off the internet and slow them back down in a video editor to hear our voices as they were for the first time in almost 20 years.

Watching these new videos of me and my friends playing together in 2006, silly dumb 10 year-old boys staging overly violent puppet shows with our stuffed animals, imagining that we're going crazy, playing with my childhood dog, hearing my friend's laugh again, I was predictably washed away with memories and nostalgia. It's scary how dim memories become without reminders. 19 years isn't a very long time, and yet it's a lifetime in a lot of ways. The world is so different now, but these videos took me back to my parent's unfinished basement, my childhood bedroom, and re-surfaced a million other memories of us playing Jet Set Radio on my friends Xbox in his basement while listening to Queen, light saber duels in the front yard, walking home from school and sitting on the planks covering the irrigation ditch that led out to the farm fields which have long since become cul-de-sacs and homes.

The older videos titled "1st birthday party", "relaxing", and "nap time" were all of my sister when she was a year old in 1993 and my mom was only 26. The parties especially entranced me. 36 minutes of the camcorder set up on a tripod in the front yard trained on my whole family only 30 years younger, my parents younger than I am now, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, some teenagers, some babies, I was struck with just how much everyone had lived entire lives before I was even born. Some of those children would go on to face unimaginable hardship. Some would become great people. My parents were so young and sweet and excited by my then-baby older sister. I watched the body language and dynamics I was blind to as a child but now seemed so obvious. Tensions, discomfort, love, care, companionship. It was like looking into a crystal ball or a portal to another dimension of a world that feels familiar but has been long forgotten.

Life passes frighteningly fast, but so much life can be lived in such a short amount of time. Some days I feel like I'm getting old too fast, and some days like today I feel like I'm just barely starting to live. I've meditated on this before, I still believe in my theory that life passes too quickly when you become too comfortable. Things slow down for the better and life is richest when you become uncomfortable, take risks, and push yourself outside of your comfort zone. I'm grateful for these videos and for their insight. They gave me fresh eyes to see my parents more than any of my other family. I could see their love for my sister, and by proxy for me, though I wasn't born yet. I wonder what it will be like for the children of our younger generations who will have every day of their entire lives recorded somewhere. How much more will they remember, how much more will they see? Will it be too much? Will they appreciate it or take it for granted?

7/30/2025 – Alive internet theory

I've been thinking about the internet today and how there still exist communities keeping it alive the way it used to be. Over the past few years "Dead Internet Theory" has entered the public conversation more and more, especially with the Ą̸̻͎͕̰̲̯̝̲͉̬̳̎͗̃͜ͅI̸̹̲͉̼̳̘̙̬͖͍͖̅̿̀̅̄͗͌̎͌̇̔͝ revolution. It's the idea that because of the sheer amount of bots creating websites, profiles, accounts, and content, that it's become so bloated that the internet is essentially "dead". Honestly, this might be the case for the big social media platforms. F*ceb**k is filled with posts made by bots, and the comment sections are filled with... you guessed it. Bots. On Inst*gr*m you constantly receive follow and message requests from spam bots, you find accounts with thousands of followers but only a few dozen interactions on their posts. Bots. P*nter*st is all AI content. These corners of the internet could be considered dead, or at the very least, dying. But we forget that the internet existed for decades before Big Tech swooped in with their big box social media platforms. For decades people learned HTML, harnassed platforms like GeoCities (or con contemporaneity, Neocities), and carved out their own corners of the web for themselves and their friends. Maybe because of this the web wasn't for everyone, but it was open to everyone, and it was beautiful. With the migration to more accessible social media platforms like the aforementioned FB, IG, Twitter, etc. a lot of these spaces were abandoned, their hosting subscriptions left to expire and to fade away into the past. But there exist communities still who keep this part of the internet, the true internet, with soul personality and connection, alive. I'm not naive enough to think someone like my mom will create her own website from scratch, those who created the first web blogs were the "nerds" of the day. To reintegrate into this part of the web, you have to be a certain type of person and personality. Most folks will likely leave the internet altogether (I've already seen this happening). We will still have to deal with the consequences of a dead internet, i.e. useless Google search SEO, lack of availability (or extremely high prices) of domain names, etc. But I think the more people learn about the communities that still exist who are creating their own websites and connecting with each other through them, we might be able to bring more into the fold and resurrect that which made the internet so amazing in the first place.

7/28/2025 – On friendship

This morning I'm looking back on past friendships and trying to understand their nature. Friendships are, by their nature, conditional and liquid, and yet they are imbued with nostalgia and often a level of guilt. One of the primordial conditions of friendship is loyalty. A relationship between two beings is formed when the other can be relied upon, when a level of trust is formed and when the two can work together in understanding of each other. This is why the first friendships formed when a child learns to play with another, both relying on one another for entertainment–and these friendships end just as quickly when their underdeveloped ability to share produces conflict and the play date ends in tears. As a teenager, friendships form in school as the brain develops and adolescents learn to depend on each other for belonging. Social circles form and watch each other full of trepidation, analyzing their differences and similarities. It is in adulthood where friendships become perhaps the most complicated. For 8-9 hours a day, your friends are your coworkers. The similarities and loyalty you have for one another is built on necessity of your work situation. You may have nothing in common, but you rely on your interactions with one another to establish a base of trust to overcome work challenges. Inside of coworkers, there may form tighter bonds–you may share similar interests, feelings, concerns, and a friendship might extend beyond work hours. As an adult, you learn to have different friends for different purposes. There are those who you see at parties, those who you spend one on one evenings lost in conversations. Those who you go to concerts with, those who you meet occasionally for drinks, those who you message online but never make plans with. The ranks are always shifting and people often shift from one position to another. In all friendships, there may come a time when a change in circumstances means a friendship ends, or becomes dim. When you no longer need to, or can depend on each other, the friendship drifts to the final rank–one of occasional check-ins, the "how have you been"s, the "what's new in your life?"s, the "congratulations!" and "happy birthday!"s, and eventually the "what have they been up to?" when your connection fades to where your only link is another mutual, now closer friend. It is in this fading that we find guilt, maybe because the distance was one-sided, and one of the two feels like it was their fault. But it is important to never force a friendship and to accept their seasonality. The most important friends are current, they're the ones you can depend on right here right now for support, and we should cherish them while they're here knowing that while it may not last forever, their impact on your life inevitably will.

7/19/2025 – On earnestness

In my opinion, earnestness is a virtue, and one that does not come easily as it requires a level of self-sacrifice and innocence. Sincerity and conviction for a particular thing or idea is synonymous with care, a quality that is not celebrated–especially in our contemporary hyper-online culture. The opposite quality, irony, is a hallmark of the younger generation. On the internet, everything is forced under a microscope to be analyzed and scrutinized. To hold onto a particular idea or action to firmly is to put yourself in the line of fire–and those who fear earnestness quickly find acceptance among their invisible tribe by laughing at this display and branding it as "corny" and "cringe worthy". I myself felt (and still often feel) the heat of irony as I spent nearly half my life in spaces like Twitter. I've had to consciously analyze my responses to certain displays of earnestness and ask myself why I felt the way I did. In every occasion, the answer had nothing to do with what I was criticizing, but everything to do with myself. At our core, I think we are a deeply earnest species. We cling to meaning and exist on the pretext of belonging in order to survive. We are social creatures and demand acceptance. To show sincere, deep conviction for something is vulnerable. It's exalting your ideas and interests above the rest, taking a risk and trying something new, making known something that likely incubated in privacy, but has become important to you. I love earnestness, and I love those who take this risk and risk the spotlight illuminating them. It is courageous, and it makes me want to be passionate like them.

7/18/2025 – On symbols

This morning I was reading "If On A Winters Night A Traveler* by Italo Calvino, and in the chapter the narrator speaks of the symbology of an anchor as a message to "attach, cling, delve, and end a fluctuating condition and remain on the surface–but also to cast off, set forth towards open sea. I love the idea of interpreting objects, or even animals and patterns, as symbols of virtues one wishes to keep close and top of mind. It seems to me that the use of symbols as such was once a prevalent part of the human condition, and you see symbols like these woven in the fabric of everyday life for those in the past. Even up until the late 19th and early 20th century symbols were everywhere. I think of the Victorian Green Man that is carved throughout architecture from that time as a "symbol of rebirth, representing the cycle of new growth that occurs every spring."

Before reflecting on what things are symbolic to me and how we might reintroduce them in modernity, one has to ask why they have gone? It's perhaps a narrow point of view, but I see a lot of things like this stemming from the industrial revolution and the slow commodification of all aspects of life. With the slow dissolving of craftsmanship and the mass production of all things in life, our basic surroundings have become duller, flatter, simpler and cheaper to manufacture and maintain. Along with this came the commodification of culture and ideas which have also, in many ways, become duller, flatter, simpler, and cheaper manufacture and maintain. Virtue and profound inner contemplation are all but lost unless these things are placed upon you by a higher authority such as a political or religious leader. But these too run their organizations more like businesses to be optimized. To bring back wisdom once understood over 100, 200 years ago, these things must be acknowledged and rejected. One must shift their focus towards things which are long form, well thought out, made with skill, effort, contemplation, research. One must spend time lost in thought without the influence of others barraging them at every moment.

So, how to reintroduce symbols into my life? I think I would like to spend some time writing about the things around me and admiring their virtues. It would serve both as a form of meditation and prayer, as well as an exercise to understand what I value in life and want to incubate in myself. I would also like to spend time reading of existing symbols from the past–perhaps this would serve as a good starting point in this practice. The end goal would be to work these symbols into my daily life. To choose objects I acquire based on their meaning, to inject them into my art. Even find ways to include them in my clothing and everyday objects. This is something i love when I visit museums–when something as simple as a belt clasp or a hand mirror are decorated with symbols which tell a story to remind its owner of something important in every moment of every day.

7/17/2025 – 80 year anniversary of the Trinity Test

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, aka the detonation of the first atomic bomb, a day that has changed and will forever change the history of our planet. It fore-shadowed the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the cold-war, and the looming fear that persists to today. It symbolized, perhaps, a great conglomeration of human nature. Those who developed it in the name of science too blinded by their curiosity to question its consequences. Those who paid for it and dropped it on human beings in the name of power and preservation, even harmony and balance. To me the air weighed heavy yesterday thinking of the untold suffering something seemingly so small could bring to the human race. And to think we saw what they could do and still continued to develop them 1000 times past their original power.

I think of the people who were there at the Trinity Test, the scientists and military personnel who watched the first light of the blast, who saw the mushroom cloud rise into the sky. I think of the people in Japan who were there when the bombs were dropped, who saw their cities burn and their families die. I think of the people in Ukraine and Russia today, who are living through a war that is tearing their countries apart. I think I see today stories and images from Gaza, children crying and starving, bloody and orphaned, entire cities leveled without nuclear weapons. I see Jews in New York City, regular people who go to work every day, clinging to their Zionism saying its justified, that they were promised that land and that the conflict was instigated by the Palestinians. Humans have this incomprehensible capability to destroy each other, to destroy themselves, in conquest of individuality, dominance of their own tribe over another.

I look at the energy used in war, the nuclear fission reached to detonate an atomic bomb and its similarities to the nuclear fusion which lights our sun and provides us with life. It's such a strange juxtaposition. The first light of the blast of the Trinity Test, the first light of the morning. Life and death. I think back on the Thom York lyric from I Am A Very Rude Person: "I have to destroy to create".

When we destroy ourselves, when every human on Earth is gone, when all life has been wiped away, the Earth will regrow and new life will take its place. The system is in balance and when we tilt the scale too far in our own favor, it will re-balance itself. And we will be forgotten.

7/10/2025 – Transitions in life

There's something strange in life about what ones focus shifts towards based on the environment you're in. As a teenager and when you're single, it's about being outwardly interesting and posturing yourself to be desirable for making friends and attracting lovers. Since being married, I've noticed that when we have single friends, they're significantly more busy with social gatherings, and they share far more selfies on social media. It's like in that stage, you're almost marketing yourself. I haven't been in this stage for a very long time–I suppose I was in limbo for several years having been newly married, but still getting my footing. I went several years between 2016 and 2020 where I was in a liminal space with no real focus besides survival and escape. But once I started MDD, I transitioned into a new stage of life, and my focus became more of discipline in my field and in always striving to do something that was cool and interesting to my peers so they would remember me and think of me when we graduated. Now I'm graduated, and I still feel like I'm in that stage as I look for work and meet new people, but I feel myself outside of my career slipping towards a new stage, one of seeking peace and clarity. I had a brief moment in 2019-2020 where I was here, but as a coping stage to deal with my faith crisis. Now, perhaps, I am doing it for similar reasons to survive unemployment and the anxieties surrounding it. But I feel like I want to constantly be grounding myself, strengthening my mind, seeking inspiration through reading and writing, being outside fully present and unplugged from the internet. I feel excited for one day when I am comfortable in my career and I can fully dedicate myself to these things as I find a lot of fulfillment in them. I do think someday I'd like to become more of a researcher, write a book, dig for understanding.

06/24/2025 – why/should vs how/can of AI

As a designer and as a creative coder, the AI revolution has been full of complicated feelings. I have felt both the excitement and wonder of software engineers when new almost magic-seeming capabilities have being developed in insanely short time frames, and the horror of artists and graphic designers who are seeing their jobs be automated and replaced in real time. So where do I stand? Over the past couple years after spending time in these cross-boundary spaces of creatives and programmers, I have noticed certain patterns emerge when it comes to thinking about technological innovation. Very often I see software developers spending a lot of time on "how" and whether they "can". But in the process, I have seen an absence of asking "why" and whether they "should". So in favor of challenging this mindset, why AI? Why should it be developed? In the case of many historical innovations, the answer is often the automation of laborious tasks. For some this might be summarizing emails, filling in repetitive data in spreadsheets, or auto-populating text. LLM's have been a game changer in automation and I myself use it for this very purpose very often. However, among the most advertised uses of AI has been image generation and now video generation with audio. Why should this be used? What is this automating? The most common argument is accessibility. In most cases its just because its impressive. But aside from the horrifying consequences of being able to create any video with audio that you can imagine that's imperceptible from reality (and increasingly so), to automate creativity is to automate the jobs which are most pleasurable, and replace the expression of human imagination with nonsensical regurgitation of human imagination which has been stolen, blended up, and spewed out by an algorithm. It hearkens back to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century where artists and designers began to emphasize the skill and craftsmanship of the decorative arts in protest to the soullessness of the industrial revolution. They understood something that we have now seemingly forgotten. That the whole reason art exists is because its human. By creating art, human imagination and emotion is made communicable and understood. Art has a soul when its made by a human. I circle back to my complicated place in this debate as a creative developer. Why is it so different for someone like me to create art with code? The answer is idea and intent. For me, programming is my medium, but the idea and execution is totally my own. I had to learn a skill, research the idea, and execute it with the tools available to me. AI, on the other hand, allows the user only the idea, but automates the approach and execution. Great ideas cannot be simplified to a sentence prompt. They are built on technique and skill.

6/15/2025 – Natural pull to the philosophies of Daoism

Over the past few years I have spent a lot of time sorting through the beliefs and values I've acquired throughout my life now that my faith in a god has been replaced with an open curiosity of the mysteries of the universe. I once thought I knew exactly how everything worked and had conviction in the religion of my family and community. But since that was completely lost and I was left like a child, I allowed myself to be for a while without trying too hard to understand anything. Ideas are powerful and can be dangerous. I've been weary of allowing myself to reach any conclusions when suggested to me by someone else. Of course most ideas and thoughts I have are derivative, but as time has passed, I have followed my heart and the facts of science in determining how I feel about existence and in deciding what I think the purpose of everything is.

In 2022 I took psilocybe cubensis for the first time. It was unlike anything I've ever felt and was not what I expected. In my blank slate state, I was forced to confront the feelings of my soul and my place on the planet as a creature on it. I felt strongly as I looked at the trees around me and watched the dead leaves on the grass that I was part of a huge system, one that depends on itself, every organism working in unison to live and die and cycle through itself, totally in balance. I felt that to live and die and become part of the soil, for grass to grow from my flesh, to be part of this system, was the purpose of life and is inherently meaningful. I've taken psilocybe cubensis a few more times, and on the most recent occasion in 2023 in the Netherlands, I felt the closest to full understanding this meaning in feeling. I could feel the energy vibrations of the trees as I neared myself to them.

Since then, I've thought about energy and the nature of it. How energy from the creation of the universe is the source of all life and existence, that this energy originated from somewhere. I suppose one could say its sacred, although it just is. I've formed my beliefs around these experiences and concepts, and recently I decided to investigate whether I'm the first to draw these conclusions. What surprised me was that these ideas and feelings appear to be the root of some of the oldest philosophies in the East, namely in Daoism. Recently learning about Yin and Yang, Wu Wei, I learned that I on my own came to believe my own form of Daoism, or something very similar. There's something validating to find that people for thousands of years have been living with a similar view on life. I resonate with the ancient Eastern philosophies. I feel like these people had it figured out and understood harmony and discipline and how to make their own existences in balance with the energies of the universe. So I will keep learning and studying, and hopefully I too can become like the plants and the animals and the trees and the water to be in balance with this wonderful and complex system.

6/12/2025 – Thoughts on curating life and the souls of objects

I'm not sure I believe people are simply individuals. It's like the parental warning for choosing good friends: "You are who you surround yourself with". I'd like to extend that saying further–"you are _what_ you surround yourself with". Like everything in life, this phenomenon is both a cycle and a balance. An individual's mindset can quickly deteriorate their environment and attract negative influences, which will in turn perpetuate the deterioration and negativity in their life. Unless interrupted, the cycle becomes a corkscrew, spiraling down into ruin. In today's modern age, for many, simply having the humility and self-awareness to interrupt this at all is an arduous step. By no means am I perfect, but I feel that I have mastered this aspect of life and would like to consider what life looks like when you reverse the direction of the cycle in an upward-moving screw, one that ascends and uplifts into a happy and fulfilling life. Once a balance has been reached and the cycle has stabilized, refinement comes through curation. One should never settle or grow too comfortable; life is best lived when constant evaluation is done to assess all things that penetrate the senses and enter the mind, and to determine whether they are the best thing. The objects in the home, the things that you touch day-to-day, the people you speak with, the music you listen to, the content you see, the things you feel, the sites you see; everything should be analyzed closely and should be adjusted, thrown out, removed, and replaced to better align with what's important to you.

For me, this is why I care so much about antiques and using old things in my home. First and foremost, things used to be made with higher quality. Pre-industrial revolution, the objects of the home were crafted by hand by someone with skill. Time went into the creation of that object, from acquiring the materials and processing them to shaping them and crafting them into a usable item. Objects were made to last lifetimes. Even into the early 20th century, when machines began replacing many of these processes, durability and longevity were still important to people, and these objects still exist en masse today, just as useful as they were when they were made 100 years ago, or easily repaired to be useful again for another lifetime. Second, antiques contain stories; they've often been used by hundreds of people. They were created by people whose children and even grandchildren have been born, lived, and died. These objects contain souls, and that to me is extremely important. Third, contemporary objects are often made with a limited life-span in mind. In many cases, they're designed to fail so as to be replaced, over and over. Capital gains are the priority of manufacturers, so corners are cut, materials are weakened, processes rushed, all to create as many objects as possible for the lowest possible cost so the consumer purchases their product, uses it, breaks it, and buys the same thing again. This is exactly the problem with the industrial revolution and late-state capitalism. It is thoughtless, harmful, and soulless. It is a downward spiral of waste and greed. To give old items a new life detaches me from this system, and is more aligned with my convictions of living in harmony with the planet and in maintaining a balance in all things.

I'm not the first person who considers the souls of objects. The Arts and Crafts Movement was centered around this concept. The Victoria and Albert Museum says of the Arts and Crafts Movement, "The birth of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain in the late 19th century marked the beginning of a change in the value society placed on how things were made. This was a reaction to not only the damaging effects of industrialization but also the relatively low status of the decorative arts. " I was first introduced to this ideology when visiting William Morris's summer home Kelmscott Manor in England in 2022. I was moved as I marveled at the artifacts in the home, at their beauty and quality, their simple forms, and the echoing of medieval craftsmanship in 19th/20th century decor. Then, as I read the plaques throughout the home and learned of Morris's work in forming the Socialist League, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Building, and in protecting historical sites, advocating for the revival of handcrafted objects, and in making these things commonplace in everyone's homes, I felt a fire lit in my heart. This visit changed my life and shaped my political and even spiritual views. I've written much on energy and the transfer of energy in ways that inspire and are in harmony with other energies, and to me, Morris understood this and fought to preserve it.

5/29/2025 – On AI

I've ranted extensively on this, but it feels like every time I've gotten all of my thoughts and feelings out into writing, a new advancement comes in the world of AI to make me feel like I need to write again. It has become clear to me now that AI will soon, in the not-to-distant future, be capable of creating any media a human can create in a way that's indecipherable to human work. It might even look better. Today I saw a LinkedIn post (which is perhaps the most delusional of all AI echo-chambers) celebrating the AI video creation platform "Flow" developed by people from Google. It's really good. It is turning out videos that are both surreal and insane while maintaining their realism. The comments on the post are all software engineers or other professionals in the tech sector responding with flame and clapping emojis, the wow factor has them totally bewitched. And yet, as a designer and an artist, I'm watching from the outside in horror knowing that not only my livelihood and passions will be at risk, but that companies will soon replace all human creativity with AI because it's faster, easier, and cheaper, completely ignoring what makes these creations special in the first place. What will happen when the wonder at technical innovations wears off and we're suddenly living in a world where we can no longer trust we we see? Where the process and the skill is replaced with algorithms? What will anything mean anymore? I feel so angry with these developers who only care about thinking if that can without any thought of whether they should.

5/28/2025 – On energy

After parting from Christian theology six years ago, the world around transformed into a formless vestige of empty meaning, it was like being born again. Suddenly I had to listen for the first time in my entire life. I was brought up being told that we were the center, that as a child, I was smarter than the most learned of academics because I knew the truth of the gospel of Christ. The world and its mechanics, even the very idea of existence was all explained, it all made sense. So as a twenty four year old infant, I grappled with good and evil, cause and consequence, yin and yang, from a completely zoomed-out perspective. Over the years as I've listened closer than ever before, and as I've scrutinized everything I read and hear, I've started to mold an idea of what I feel like is the core of how I see and understand the world. Energy is at the core of everything. The big bang 13.8 billion years ago expanded and its energy went into stars and planets. Those stars subsequently allowed for life to flourish on earth. Energy from the sun makes plants grow and those plants become food. Animals and humans grow from that food, and begin to influence each other. It's the butterfly effect. I am typing this on my computer right now because of the energy of millions, maybe billions of other people before me at this very moment. Their energy to live and die, to procreate and create me, to create those around me, the people who make my clothes, who grow my food, who build the microchips in my computer and in my phone. The people who write the books I read, who impress upon me with their ideas on the internet. Every idea, in a way, is derivative from the ideas of others. We aren't brought up in a vacuum, we are impressionable creatures–its our ability to influence that allows for the development of communities. Communities of two, three, ten, two hundred, ten thousand, eight million, eight billion. This idea that we are part of an infinite system of interconnected energy is full of purpose and meaning. We are simultaneously so small and insignificant and yet, how we use the energy we've been given can have tremendous consequences. A simple idea can grow and spread to the minds of thousands, a kind gesture or a beautiful work of art can inspire kindness and culture.

Energy is infinite, but it's also a scale and a spectrum. A balanced system supports itself, we hear perhaps the most about this in ecology. In a balanced ecosystem, predators thin the herds which prevents overgrazing which protects the geological landscape which influences the weather as well as the well-being of other species. We hear a lot about how our influence as humans is endangering species, how pesticides are endangering bees, which are vital to pollination, which is vital to our food supply. The system needs to be balanced, and will do so itself if necessary. As humans, we need acknowledge and embrace this balance if we are to survive. So often we think we are the center of the universe and that everything was given for us to use and consume. This ideology is at the center of many religions and at the center of capitalism. It's harmony versus dominance. Good and evil energies are always at odds keeping each other at bay and keeping things in balance. When the scale tips, it all slides off and re-balances itself. I don't think humans will ever go away, but empires will crumble as soon as a threshold is reached and the earth reacts to what we have done to her.

Returning to individual energy, I want to get at why this understanding of the world has become core to my personal beliefs. I don't know what to call this ideology, surely I'm not the first to think through this, but for me this belief is why kindness, peace, harmony, and creation are so important to me. There is no personal reward beyond my own peace, harmony, and fulfillment, but the best way to bring balance to this system is by creating things that inspire and connect, which influence people to self sacrifice and to be selfless. If I can reach the hearts of others through sharing my own ideas and through kindness and self sacrifice, hopefully they too will do the same and the butterfly effect will spread its wings and change communities, even the world.

The last thing I want to touch on is the energy of objects and why I feel its imperative that humans be at the center of creating art and ideas, not machines. Machines should only be used in the creation of art as a tool to emphasize the human, to ask questions, and to generate new ideas. For a machine to create the final product, as is the case in AI imagery, is wrong. When a human puts energy into learning new skills and developing their craft, what they create has a soul, or an aura as Walter Benjamin once said. All the energy surrounding that work of art gives it something that is immediately felt. AI art is an empty gimmick, trained to only hold the visual similarities of real art, and unfortunately, it removes opportunity for real humans to create which in itself is a fulfilling process. By automating pleasurable labor, we are going against the system of harmony, exploiting that which is joyful and putting stress and soulless labor onto the lower-class.

5/19/2025 – On ancient things

I am drawn so strongly to the ancient. I find myself filled with wonder pouring over archives and books of medieval art, fascinated by the craft. I listen to old music, religious chants, piano melodies, compositions and symphonies that are hundreds of years old. Something draws me to lands, buildings, things built in a time completely different from our own. Everything is derivative of these places, these sounds. I can't help but feel an energy emanating from the past, as if there are secrets lost to time waiting to be uncovered and understood. I know I'm not alone in this, I keep finding others on the internet who, like me, are fascinating to hear the "oldest written song" played out loud, or to taste the "oldest written recipe". It's as if making manifest these old records, we are being transported back in time. I always wonder that if by connecting with those from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, we might understand something that they understood that we have lost sight of among the distractions of modern life.

I have been studying and researching visions as of late. I consider myself agnostic, pessimistically perhaps; my experiences with religion have been that of complete dedication and disappointment. It's hard to imagine a relationship with religion and spirituality that is separate from that of what I learned in the Mormon church. Yet I feel a draw to the feelings I have in connection to ancient religion. The wonder, the mystical awe of feeling like something supernatural just happened, that perhaps an outside hand played a part. That said, though I crave spiritual experiences, I am resistant to looking for excused to claim a god had anything to do with the small medial occurrences of every day. I don't know if these things exist, hence my pessimistic agnosticism. Regardless, I am fascinated by those who have had visions, especially in antiquity. If anything, I think these occurrences reveal the human psyche of the time and how people strove to make sense of their surroundings. These were the people who were bleeding out sick patients to get the "sick blood" out of their bodies as a treatment for illness. We just understand the mechanics of the world so much more differently now. Visions are a thing of the past. But there is something that still entrancing me about a person seeing vivid hallucinations revealing the workings of the universe.

9/20/2024 – The city

Growing up in Utah, Salt Lake City was “the city”. To everyone around me, Salt Lake was the most dangerous place you could live. Large amounts of homelessness, crime, poverty along state street, the Rio Grande. When we decided to finally leave Pleasant Grove to move to Salt Lake in 2022, family looked at us with worry in their eyes and warned us to be careful. People like my brother in-law would talk about how he could never live in Salt Lake City, that it was “over-crowded”. Now that I live in New York City, these thoughts are laughable. Salt Lake City is about as small and suburban as you can get while still living in an urban metropolitan area. It’s funny, I never felt like I identified with these sentiments, even though I grew up in a small rural developing farming community along the Wasatch Front just like all these other people. I knew there was inherent risk and danger that comes with density, but that even so it is uncommon, especially if you’re smart. Now that I’m here in Brooklyn, I feel an energy that’s completely different, towards people in particular. I feel so much more patience and tender care for the stranger walking down the street. I love speaking with an Italian man who immigrated here to start the laundry mat where I wash my clothes. I love interacting with the cashiers at the market and bartering with the Turkish man at the antique store. People walk down the street in front of my apartment and I hear the father talking to his ten year old son like a grown man, asking him how he feels about a relationship. The mother at the train station asking her daughter if she remembers their family friend who’s on a trip in Italy. Cheering a few blocks away at the park, maybe it’s a protest, maybe it’s a parade. Who are all those people crowded by the Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Cathedral? Turns out there’s a grand annual Irish fair. There’s always something happening in the city, and everything that happens is supremely human. People don’t like cities because of the density, because its too crowded, but that density has never made me feel more human in my life. We have more friends, we leave the house more, even without trying to.

I’m reading My Struggle, Book 2 by Knausgaard, and he talks of leaving Stockholm to stay with his mother in-law in the forests of Sweden and how peaceful it makes him feel. I grew up with that peace being something you take for granted. People spend time in nature everyday, in 30 minutes you can be in the mountains climbing a cliff-face, casting a fishing line into a glacier run-off stream. I am so grateful I was raised around that, but now spending time around humans and feeling human, I can’t help but think I will appreciate those moments so much more when they’re infrequent. I think the human mind needs people. It makes you a decent person to learn how to be around others, and when you get a break from them, it feels like a load taken off.

7/17/2024 – Knowledge and resistance

I'm thinking about this passage from My Struggle: Book 1 by Karl Knausgaard.

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge.

Reading this I was moved by my own experience with this phenomena. Unlike what Knausgård is describing with this being a phenomena which is inflicted with age and time, I felt this when I restructured my beliefs post-religion. As a Mormon, the world and every experience is imbued with meaning. I used to take every breath, every action, as a message from God. If I was doing something that I was taught to be wrong and something interfered, it was God stepping in. When grandma died, God was taking her home. I thanked God for the rain, for the sun, for wind. When I left Mormonism and my understanding of the world crumbled, I was forced in my early twenties to build the world back up again from books, research and science. While I am infinitely more grateful for things now that I truly understand how they work (not to say i understand everything or even most things, it's just that I have confidence that most things can be understood), there is a certain distance I feel from the world now that it's no longer shrouded in the supernatural veil of God's will.

Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.

I feel pressure now that I feel my life has been adequately demystified to add resistance. I'm only twenty-eight years old, but just the other day I was twenty. I'm only now starting my career, but yesterday I was graduating high school. I feel like if I settle down now into a routine that I will uphold for the next twenty years that I won't know where that time has gone until it's gone. And then what does life mean? Whatever magic exists now that I'm agnostic will fade away. Steph and I move to New York in a month, and the process is deeply uncomfortable and anxiety inducing. But for a brief period of discomfort, we will uproot our lives and shift ourselves into a new world where we're forced to adapt. There will be so much knowledge to obtain and I think that resistance is necessary for our lives to progress and to give us meaning.

4/10/2024 – Memory and its fragility

I feel imbued with memory. Not memory in a sense of remembering something that’s been, but memory as a feeling, as a premonition, a hierophany. A consternation envelopes my thoughts that I have forgotten much of my life. I think this is normal for those who have tried in some ways to forget. Memory isn’t selective, it’s specular, it manifests itself in relation to where you are and where you want to be. I fear that in my pain and abnegation of my past that my memory too has been renounced in collateral. Swaths of my childhood, of my time in Colombia, of the first few years of my life with Steph — it’s already faded into a semblance of a memory. Minute instances spread so thin that they have no substance, as if to remember this is to have it told to me by someone other than myself. Something about memory makes me feel so sad, so afraid. It’s so tragic, so fragile. Steph documents obsessively and nostalgically collects every detail of her life, and I understand why. To archive is to remember, to remind. So little exists of who I’ve descended from. A few knives from my dad, a fishing reel from my great uncle, a belt buckle from my grandpa, a security badge from my great grandpa. The rest are scans of photos, simulacra of the originals, lost to time. Their homes are crumbling in the desert, abandoned and lost. The oldest writings I have in my lineage is a single line from my 3x great grandpa Joshua Sherwood, a pathetic and desperate request for a raise in VA pension for fighting in the western frontier Indian Wars. He writes, "Could you give me a little raise of pension on account of old age? I am now 76 years old and my wife is 68. We are not able to work much and it would help us to live… If you can help us out in this matter it will oblige." The oldest memory in my tree of his own words, not barely 100 years old, and it’s of one of his lowest moments, stricken with poverty, asking for help. His request was denied. I am filled with fear that my own memories will be lost to time. That nobody will remind any one of what I remember. That my great grandpa told me about being a prisoner of war to the Germans in Austria when his plane was shot down. That my grandma told me about her memories of her father insisting on driving his team of mules and wagon until he died. That my great uncle remembers my great grandpa showing him the wolf spring trickling up out of the rocks in the mountains and a rattlesnake that guarded it. My memories live in me, memories of my family live in me. My dreams, my thoughts, my worries, my passions live in me.

7/9/2024 – Thoughts on memory

I just got back from UMOCA where I've been working for the past several weeks with Milad Mozari to develop his exhibit as part of the "In Memory" show. As I was leaving at 3pm in the afternoon, I spent some time looking around at the exhibits. There is a large amount of work from Do Ho Suh of his fabric sculptures of various objects from places where he's lived in Berlin, Seoul, and NYC. This placard explained how he would sculpt these objections with obsessive detail as if the over information might contain memory. For me, something about seeing the meticulously hand embroidered warning text hidden in the back of the fabric sculpted light fixture, and the names on the doorbell directory, made me feel emotional. Such a beautiful amount of attention given to recreating the most mundane details of a moment in time really encapsulated memories for me. The feeling of nostalgia towards the smallest building blocks that construct a moment in time.

Another piece I loved was of a sculpture made of an FBI report about Martin Luther King Jr's "communist" activities, and the entirety of the report was redacted. The artist made the redacted portion a mirror, raising the question of whose memories persist, and whose memory becomes history. It's such a poignant question that feels strongly relevant. Seeing myself in the reflection delivered the artists message and left me questioning how my memory might persist and how my words might be received and controlled.

The last piece that resonated with me that i want to write about was this artist who takes found photographs and writes fake obituaries for the people in the photographs, often satirical, in a way to address their own fears and obsessions with memory lost. This unexpectedly made quite the impact on me. I have many photos from my childhood but almost no video. There's nothing left behind of my great-grandpa and beyond. I come from generations of farmers and ranchers. The land settled by my great x1 x2 and x3 grandparents is a ghost town. Only a handful of photos exist. As I scour antique stores and find discarded photographs, faces of those who nobody remembers, I fear of my own memory being lost.

I'm left with so many thoughts and feelings surrounding memory, mostly fears around my own memory, both how I remember things and how I will be remembered. I left the gallery looking up at the buildings taking a mental snapshot of my surroundings. I left thinking how I will always remember the first gallery exhibition I worked on being about memory. I'm left thinking about how I have so much on my mind and how I need to write it down to remember it all. How I want to write a book so I will always have my memory preserved, so people remember me and what I remembered. I'm left thinking about the videos of civil war veterans talking about their grandparents memories of their grandparents. How memory is preserved through storytelling. When I read Faulkner, I am absorbing his memories of the post-civil war American South. It reminds me of my own grandparents, the way they talk as rural Utahns. There is so much to remember, to remind, to record. I want to explore these thoughts more, maybe with my own art on memory.

6/14/2024 – Balancing my love for generative design and impressionist art and music

I hardly know how to title this let alone write about it, but I have this contradiction inside me creatively where I make art and designs using code and have an innate interest in the technical, and yet I find that the art I am more consistently drawn back to and more uplifted by are works that are as far from coded algorithms as one could get. Piano from romantics and impressionists like Chopin, Debussy, Schubert, etc. and paintings from impressionists and post-impressionists like Monet, Van Gogh, etc. Maybe this is a normal thing for artists, to settle into a balance with their creative interests. Recently I performed concert visuals at the Salt Lake City Masonic Temple and the opening act was an intense, brutal post-metal band called Black Shape, and one of the band members I immediately recognized as Scott Shepard from the sweet long-time Provo folk guitar and cello duo, Book on Tapeworm. His music from that project has always been a symbol of storybook fantastical whimsy – so seeing him blast us away with post-metal distorted guitars was surprising to me. Maybe that's what we need as creatives, the courage and flexibility to express ourselves however we feel drawn to. I love opportunities to mix my interests when they arise. Today a friend of mine shared work and thoughts on the internet as a "garden" and how he explored arranging snippets from his browsing as "flower arrangements". I've discovered similar concepts from old-web enthusiasts called "digital gardens", and sometimes "screenshot gardens". This resonates with me and my interests in generative art and web design, and the natural world, of gardens flowers, and the beauty of the Earth. I think a lot of what humans find beautiful is that which is natural and reminds us instinctively, maybe even programmatically in our DNA, of what is safe and a sanctuary. The romantics felt this when they painted scenes of serenity. So for me, treating a webpage and the framework of hypertext it was built on as a garden and allowing its forms and limitations grow and dictate the flow of its navigation is inspiring to me. Bringing together these seemingly conflicting ideas into a connection unexpectedly leads to new avenues of thinking, allowing new things to grow.

3/11/2024 – Thoughts on the web – where it's been, where it is, where it's going, and where I could be

I have been deep in thought about the internet lately. Undoubtedly, it is the most important development of our time, and has completely changed the fabric of our world. Some might say that it has made life easier, and in some ways I believe that to be true. But as we have streamlined our lives, we have also made them busier, more demanding, less quiet, more rapid. In the early days of the web, it was an esoteric realm for those that had the will and the desire to decode it. Websites like GeoCities allowed users to carve out their own spaces and form their own communities around them. Chat rooms and forums were town halls, plazas, community centers. The world wide web seemed limitless, anyone could do or learn anything.

Today, the web is a different place. Because of big tech companies cornering interaction through social media sites, it has mutated into a tool for essentially brainwashing the general public to engage, click, scroll, scroll, scroll, until inevitably they a. get irritated enough by the ads to PAY the company to hide them, b. see the same ads frequently enough that they BUY the product, or c. never heed the ads but, no matter, their data down to the most minute lingering on a web element gets analyzed and archived next to that users name and is used to construct a data-clone of that person which is then sold off to data brokers and used to get them to buy their products elsewhere. On top of this every-thing-is-for-sale capitalistic hellscape, algorithms perfectly curate feeds for interaction and outrage. If it gets the user to engage, the algorithm hones in and intensifies. The effects on us are severe – death of subcultures as we know them, a young population incapable of face-to-face interaction, an older population incapable of distinguishing truth from reality.

Now with AI progressing faster than any other technology in our lifetimes, all of these challenges will be exaggerated to the nth degree. The internet was the most important development of our time, and in only a few decades it is being challenged and threatened to destruction. "[Dead internet theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory) that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity." Every day this conspiracy is proven to be reality. Google images is dying with search results turning up AI generated images. Bots on social media platforms bait users into clicking their links sporting pornographic profile pictures generated by AI. Foolish silicon valley developers are building so-called "growth tools" to generate comments on LinkedIn using AI to farm engagement. With so little human touch left in the internet, how will we survive? What will happen to our beloved world wide web?

I dream of the ways of the old web. Recently I discovered a website built in 2023 by a biologist through NeoCities, a GeoCities offshoot designed to bring the old web back from the dead. As I filtered through their pages – one dedicated to bugs, one a scientific chart of every plant they've ever eaten, one a gallery of sticky note drawings made for their boyfriend, one a contact page with a guestbook where any visitor could leave a note – I became strangely emotional and hopeful of what we could reclaim. I dream that as more people become disgusted with the dead internet that a movement might take place where we carve out our own spaces and make the web ours again. I dream of a web revolution (a webolution? lol).

8/20/2023 – Thoughts while reading News from Nowhere by William Morris

We as a species advanced how we did because of our abilities to form communities, collaborate, work together, & maintain large scale communal relationships. This communal nature has been dulled in modern society through capitalism & individualism & has been the impetus for a lot of the inequality in our society. If we were to change our culture & ideologies to be more communal like our ancestors, perhaps we could eliminate it.Imagine a world where the hard work is automated as much as possible & the remaining work is divided up equitably among the able so that it only needs to be done for a few hours a day. The remaining more pleasurable work could be done by all. We need a balance of work for the body & work for the mind.

We have machines that manufacture thousands of articles of clothing. We are then meant to buy these & wear them to express our personal feelings. Thousands of people wear the same clothing & we try to afford more expensive clothing than others to create a sense of luxury & glamour which we can then leverage to make ourselves enviable. However, if we decided to focus our machines to benefit society instead of benefiting the manufacturers, things might be different. Items such as furniture, art, clothing, etc. should not be mass produced -- at least not on a global scale. These things should be kept local & should retain a hand-crafted element to them. That's part of my issue with AI, that it is being used to automate art & culture, an aspect of our lives that should remain untouched by automation.

8/17/2023 – Thoughts while reading Design as Art by Bruno Munari

Bruno writes this book to argue that today's designer is yesterdays artists — that artists have been in large part replaced & made irrelevant, & that designers are artists using their skills & creativity to be planners.

I struggle with this sentiment because to me, the difference is more in that design is art which is marketed. It feels like, while a chunk of what makes good design *good* lies in how well it solves the problem at hand, that design relies more on marketing — whether or not it makes money. The capitalistic marketing side of being a designer is increasingly hard for me to reckon with. If a design does well, it can be mass produced & populate the world until it becomes “out of style” in a few years & ends up in a landfill. Designers love to think of themselves as artists, but at the end of the day, we’re often sacrificing our vision to appease the client, who often doesn’t care or have the same aesthetic eye as you, & we’re ultimately forced to create work that feels disembodied & without a soul.

The reality for me is that at heart I’m an artist, but our world no longer values artists as much as designers. If I am to survive in this day & age, design is the closest way I can make a career while still holding onto the artist in me. But it will always be under the umbrella of capitalism. How can I read about publicity preying on people’s sense of powerlessness & dissatisfaction with life to offer them empty “solutions” that can help provide a false sense of glamour in their monotonous lives, then work for those very predatory companies helping create those very publications being used to trick them?

Perhaps the answer lies in the type of design I settle into as my career. What I do & who I work for. Will I make educational exhibits & art installations for a museum? Or will I make ads & branding for a a financial firm?

8/14/2023 – From John Berger's "Ways of Seeing"

It is important here not to confuse publicity with the pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the things it advertises. Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it.

Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of other. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.

Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority. It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. The look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

This excerpt is talking about the role of envy in advertising, but it is making me think about the role of envy in myself, & how I make decisions for want of being envied. I think the art & produce, the way I dress, & even the way I decorate my home are partially affected by wanting to be envied. To be envied is to be desired, which of course is something I want.

I think envy is, in a certain sense, a necessary feeling to possess -- to be envied is to be in demand, & especially when operating in a career where reputation leads to work & especially work that is desirable, envy is a mechanism for success; for obtaining & fulfilling my goals.

How then can we avoid envy that, like John Berger writes about, is "impersonal", "absent", & "unfocused"? Is there a balance between being envied & respected but also being humble & grounded? Perhaps envy is the wrong approach? Is it rooted too much in narcissism & egocentricity? Is there a way to be desired & respected while also not caring about what others think?