Recently

I have a bunch that I want to write about this month, but that'll all be in different posts. Just got back from Atmosphere Conf in Vancouver and settling into a false Brooklyn summer.

Reading

I read so much this month but have little to share here. Despite trying to keep a rich, diverse information diet, a lot of the articles blur into the same thing, and I've been reading too much on Instapaper. Saving articles for later is a powerful way to manage my time, but it produces a huge pile of content that I then feel obligated to work my way through.

No single data point better illustrates the cultural movement of youth than this: 42 percent of Gen Z watches anime weekly (compared to 25 percent of Millennials), but only 25 percent of Gen Z follows NFL football (compared to 44 percent of Millennials). Anime has transformed from niche subculture to mainstream entertainment.

From American Diner Gothic. There were parts of this article that resonated with my experiences with Gen Z, others that made the author seem like kind of a jerk, and when they discuss statistics around transgender people they either misuse or abuse the statistics. They compare the number of respondents who identified as transgender in 2017 (1.8 percent) to the number of identified as gender-diverse (trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, two-spirit) in 2022. The latter number was higher, obviously, because it counted more groups, but the article treats them as apples-to-apples and uses this as evidence that Appalachian youth are more likely to be transgender. It's stuff like this that makes me always click the link back to the study when someone tries to justify something with statistics.

With a reasonably broad definition of simulation, most simulations we can see are not on computers: they’re in consciousnesses. What we find it natural to call a computer sophisticated enough to run our universe would likely be, on our terms, alive, or of undefined animacy.

I've been revisiting old Charlie Loyd articles and this is a great one, on Simulism. They're all great, really.

Watching

Editor's note: I've become aware that YouTube embeds aren't rendering for the blog in RSS readers. This is because I switched to lite-yt-embed some months back because YouTube was the main thing slowing down pageloads on macwright.com. I will find a way to do split rendering so that YouTube embeds are iframes in the RSS feed and lite-youtube elements on the website.

Anyway, enjoy this beautiful video of riding a bike through the beautiful woods accompanied by a trail dog, if you're looking at my website.

I am still loving Ben Levin's wildly creative and weird 3D-rendered videos. They're unabashedly creative and individual.

I didn't understand ISO either! This video really changed my mind about how it worked, pretty fun watch if you have a camera with any kind of manual control.

Drawing

This month I participated in an 'art challenge' again, and made some art every day. I tweaked my workflow a bit because I was producing so many images: I created an Automator Script to add EXIF times to scanned images so that they'd sort correctly in Capture One, and started fresh with a new Capture One library with much more organization.

I learned some new habits with watercolor - I bought some artists tape to secure the paper to a flat surface and stop it from curling so much, learned to pre-wet the paper if I wanted to do large areas of consistent color, and used the tilt of the paper to direct the flow of ink.

Brian cox