It now occurs to me that I should probably just end the week on Sunday, or Monday morning, seeing as that appears to be when I consistently write weeknotes. And the writing of them? That’s just more intrepid pushing-through more than anything else.
It was one of those weeks where time at home was evenly divided with time in the studio, it being a four day holiday weekend and a four day week. Over the holiday weekend I had the good fortune of meeting a completely baller skate photographer who basically took me to *school on the history and practicalities of photographing in the skate park. It was positively brilliant, and I may be overstating it but from my eyeball, I basically wasn’t taking photos until Jay showed me what to look for. Of course, in hindsight I was interpreting this accidental couple of hours through the filter of The Craftsman, which I am re-reading.
I kept wondering where a bunch of audio parts I had ordered are — I’m curious to try out some different ways of mixing audio to make in-ear audio appear to be more ambient rather than closed off and cocoon-y. I’m not sure this is even interesting, except that I’m interested in what it might sound like — as if you were listening to a stereo in a room rather than stereo in your earballs. ((Turns out the place I ordered from is about as clueless as it gets with their order handling — I called the number on the PayPal receipt and I got someone’s home in Florida who evidently gets lots of these calls from the merchants customers.))
I found a way to participate in the upcoming 01SJ (ZeroOne San Jose) festival in the fall. I had helped Steve formulate the statement for the festival’s “Build Your Own World” theme, but sort of lacked the wherewithal to get the studio to participate in a way that made sense and what with life and all — people starting families and all that — it just seemed impractical to organize a kind of studio-embedding-in-San-Jose sort of thing. Which was frustrating and made me a little prickly and anxious for practicing designing inside-out rather than inside-in. Originally I was corralling the studio to go up there and do a collective project and instead, after being sort of frustrated with myself and taking that frustration out on the drywall in the man-lodge with a new reciprocating saw, Steve and I talked and I offered to contribute to the catalog, which is better-than-good-enough as I should be writing for this Swiss Design Network conference anyway. It’ll be an evolution of the Design Fiction thinking, but written in a more quotidian way.
Things I didn’t do — again — that I meant to do: Capture the breeching sequence in COD4 on video to point out the peculiarities of superpowers and as a linkage to these academic papers by Jessica K. Witt that describe the baseball-the-size-of-a-grapefruit and hole-the-size-of-a-bucket phenomena that baseballer’s and golfer’s experience when they’re on top of the game. I’m interested in this superpowers phenomenon and these moments in COD4 when everything slows to a crawl and its like the world has slowed down giving you the chance to have these super human powers — this is intriguing. ((I’m not intrigued by the violence, but it is part of the game play.)) I also didn’t capture the final faked-steady-cam title sequence of COD4, which I think is a curious exemplar of making something fake appear real, viz. the Design Fiction principles.
There’s more I’m sure, but that’ll do.