Recently

Wednesday September 21, 2022 — Brooklyn, New York

Hello. It’s been a while. Six months, give or take.

A lot’s happened. I put my stuff in Taipei in storage, and went a lot of places:

• To a regional burn in Oregon
• To Electromagnetic Field
• To Lisbon, with Laurel, Elliott, and Michelle
• To Norway, where I backpacked through something like 350km of beautiful nature
• To May Contain Hackers, where I helped set up and had a really excellent time overall
• To Brooklyn, where I spent about a month being quite depressed, and have been more recently digging myself out of that little pit of depression

I don’t really know how to write an update after this long. I fear I may have forgotten how to write in general, or perhaps how to communicate entirely. I suppose bulleted lists are a non-threatening place to start — here are some things I’ve been doing recently:

• Trying to visit every bookstore in the world
• Participating in the Metafilter Steering Committee
• Working on a lot of zines, but they keep on ending up being enormous rabbit holes
• Thinking about DaoismUrsula K Le Guin’s translation is what got me into it, and I highly recommend it, although I do recommend doing your own translation if you end up really getting into it — she has a particular lens on it, which I appreciate, but is definitely a interpretation
• Growing shiitake mushrooms in my backyard. They are delicious.
• Thinking about performance art
• Bouldering

Notable books I read (all recommended): The Dispossessed, Nevada, The Secret Life of Groceries, Figuring, On Immunity, Solitude, Exhalation

Notable TV that I watched (all recommended): How To with John Wilson, The Rehearsal

I will close off with a list of memorable moments:

• Hanging out in the teahouse until late at night, talking about sci-fi and life, sharing conversation and laughter and cuddles with strangers
• Walking until 1am in Norway, still twilight outside, and simply collapsing to sleep on a bed of moss when I was too weary to keep going
• Walking through the rain to get to a cabin with a sign reading “WALKERS ON THE PILGRIM ROAD ARE WELCOME TO USE THIS HOUSE”, making a fire inside, waking up the next morning to the bells of a flock of sheep passing by
• Visiting the anarchist squat in Hamburg
• Operating a scanning electron microscope while tripping
• Walking into a 42 meter long ship, and being transported into a near-magical makerspace and art gallery full of possibility
• Going to a party in DUMBO, and by happenstance running into two people I knew only from the internet, one of whom I’d been unrelatedly trying to meet up with earlier that day
• Collecting and processing black walnuts and acorns with Avery and her friends

I’m not really sure what I’m doing now, or where I’m going next. I’ve just been sort of floating along, for the moment. I’m sorry that I’ve been so absent, here and elsewhere. Here’s to figuring it out.

☙