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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-10)

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Checking in – June 2023

Goodness, that's another month just jumping by for no particular reason. I'll once again give you a quick recap of things I've done this month.

Creative stuff

I've started a tutorial project to learn Remotion, which I have mentioned before as being an animation engine that is "in code". Although I'm sceptical of their attitude toward software freedom, it is basically the only thing I have found that matches my mental model of how a video should be composed. It's also text-based, which is a bonus.

I built a couple more flags. They now number fifteen in the big wall of flags from above, and again half of them are vtubers and half of them are everything else. Unfortunately one of my old ones has suffered water damage from a dripping air conditioner and also it won't stand up properly for some reason – there's probably too much weight for the blue-tack. Also the blue-tack is collecting dust and it looks unsightly, but I can't think of another way to secure these flags where they are (atop the arm of a monitor stand).

Watching stuff

I have been introduced to [Serina], a work in the genre known as "speculative biology", which is all about making animals (occasionally plants) that are realistic. Serina is a seminal work because it pioneered the idea of "seed worlds", where you pick a couple of animals that you want to see evolve in its ideal state and write what happens next. That's spawned many similar works since then.

At the same time, I have been listening to some old music from Bill Wurtz, which I think provides an interesting contrast. The thing about seed world stories is that they don't work without deep time – evolution is on a different timescale from most stories, and this one in particular lasts a third of a billion years, which is well beyond the scale that most stories give. On that kind of time scale, normal stories about entertainment, music, even grander ones of country and civilisation, become mostly trivial, too short to care about. Specifically, this means that the story is deeply compressed – seeing that the average reader does not have even three million years to follow the story, many details are lost, and some of those details are things I think most of us care about, or in fact the only things we have cared about.

Meanwhile, I am also reminded of the inherent ephemeral nature of vtubers, and how for some reason the custom is that when one retires ("graduates", in the lingo), all their public records vanish. I feel this is wrong, somehow, but I don't govern this kind of thing so I can do little more than meekly accept it.

This just is rudimentary complicated feelings about the passage of time. I do not think I will develop them further, because I don't think they can be assembled into anything coherent.

Serina

Contacting others

Oh dear.

Well I have put off doing that for another month. I must actually do this at some point. This includes looking for a careers progress.

I think I have a problem here. I can seemingly only write so much in a given amount of time, and afterwards I run out of motivation to write any more. But I tend to spend those words on things that keep my interests alive, and not things that are more useful like contacting others.

I think I have gained a small fear of doing that, in a strange form of introversion – afraid to affect the world in a way that would make me do follow-up actions. Not to mention that these are time-sensitive things, which puts me off even more.

I wouldn't know how to fix this.