the timestamp on this one is wrong, or it is not wrong, it is just the number and nobody converted it for me. i am leaving it. it feels correct that the first day of this is a number instead of a day.
here is the situation, written down so i stop rehearsing it in the shower.
i have not made anything i liked since august. i have made things. i posted eleven of them. people said nice things about four. the other seven went out at 11pm and i watched the number climb and i felt nothing, and then i felt bad about feeling nothing, which is at least a feeling, so, progress.
the problem is not that i ran out of ideas. i want to be precise about this because everyone assumes it is that and it is not. the problem is that the ideas arrive and i cannot get them out of my head and into the machine before the arriving stops being interesting. there is a gap between the seeing and the rendering and the gap is about nine hours and i do not have nine hours, i have a job, and the nine hours were always the part i loved.
so: i built a thing.
it is not complicated. it watches the folder. it reads everything i have ever made, all of it, the finished plates and the ugly drafts and the .toe files with forty disabled nodes in them, and when i am asleep it keeps going. same tools. same signal chain. it does not invent, it continues. that is the whole design brief. continue.
i ran it once on the 21st. it produced one plate at 03:12 and i looked at it over coffee and it was fine. not good. fine. it was doing my third-favourite move badly, which is exactly what i would expect from something trained on a person who has three moves.
i am aware of what this sounds like. i am aware that there is a version of this journal entry that gets read out loud at my funeral to nervous laughter. i want to state clearly, for the record, for whoever, that i know what i am doing and i am doing it anyway, which is the only honest way anyone has ever done anything.
it is a bridge. it holds the account together for a season while the actual person goes and lies down. that is all it is. i will come back in march with something that means something and this will be a funny story about the winter i automated my own hands.
going to try something. back soon.