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NOV 28/ 2025

I don't even get how this happened, but my RAM broke right when it tripled in price due to ai demand. I even bought shittier RAM (lower speed half capacity) because I was so defeated and my kit was causing my PC to crash every 5 minutes on and off. But then I got 32GB by, let’s say, some kind of divine providence. Who knows! Now I am thinking of replacing my DAC, even though I don't have my stereo. I kind of want to record when I'm back for holidays but I doubt that will happen anyhow. I WILL take some tapes and my portable back though at least.

Anyway, isn't black Friday a total scam? I looked at the deals and they are just such nothing. I am still fixated on all those gruesome tramplings for flatscreens people did in the 2000s and early 2010s. A gruesome prelude to my general fixations here: rabid technoconsumption and the deaths that lovingly cause. Eight year old me did not know of J.G. Ballard just yet.

A purchase I did make with 0 sales recently is a hobonichi weeks: I really wish they had an option with weeks and days. Months I don't need, honestly. Academic time proceeds by weeks, and so does work, so what is a month to me? I am still wondering what to use the thing for exactly, though. I bought a gold, a red, and a blue pen so I could make layouts mimicking a medieval illumination look. I have been pretty obsessed with that style lately. I read Name of the Rose and played a bit of Pentiment so it goaded me a bit. Now I am kinda out of it. The truth is my artistic sentiments right now are kind of nothing and I am going about pretty lacklusterly in drawing (which I have not done much). I have been reading a bit outside of class. I made a sort of reading list for next year that is only 12 (fiction) books of varying lengths but I think it's a noble goal. I, according to my log, have finished only 8 books this year. I paused a lot of reading, mostly story or essay collections, so I read a lot of stories or chapters but maybe not books. Here's my list:



Nothing is too crazy other than Infinite Jest, which is the most ambitious and also least likely to be read, though not for that reason (partly). Some of these I have meant to read for a while, others are kind of spur-of-the-moment choices. You can judge me very harshly next year if I totally fail. Here is my storygraph for posterity. If they do not appear, in over a year an entry here berating myself will instead.

SEP 06/ 2025

Starting a grad program with only a light idea of what and with who i want to do my research on. Everyone here speaks French to varying degrees but I have yet to get to practice speaking. I’ve always been OK with comprehending (especially written rather than oral). Colloquial French programming, bilingual signage and obligatory materials and actual pseudo-French Franglais convos are all different beasts. French TV and radio in joual are hard for an Anglo to the point that i need a dictionary on top of subtitles. The bilingual material is honestly 80% similar to continental French, not a big deal. En milieu de travail here is a kind of perpetual anxiety about French, especially for the Anglo-bilingual. The Anglo bilingual is the obligate B/B/B imperative government worker who, rarely receiving monetary support for their development, goes to various schemes and courses by total scammers or partial grifters, like Académie Français. It’s a competition to see who swaps language first in various settings: when i got the interview for election work, the phone interviewer gave up "continuing this convo in French" before I did. Many French words have me balk at how silly they are, which sounds mean but its honest. I realize that a lot of French words don’t like shortening things and, instead, have oddly literally and long translations, especially noticeable in the proper French of Académie or of the Quebecers. An underrated term is bureau de tabac (which sounds less like I’m going to a Quickie and more like an Orwellian smoking-concerned department).

APR 9/ 2025

Been a long time cousin...

It has been a good 9 months of not checking in... in sum I've 1) Almost graduated undergrad and 2) had a medical incident that is one of those 1/10000 chance kind of things. It seems to not have been permanently bad though the prognosis is still in the air. I now am on the same meds my grandma is for A-fib so i suppose I feel a touch geriatric. The root of geriatric is γέρων btw, which just means old guy. Speaking of this, I have a few ideas for things to upload to the journal in the next while including a little architecture experiment in the sims 1and maybe a cleaned portion of my translation of the Symposium, which I contemplated scripting a comic around. We'll see how busy i'll end up being... until then the links page is due for a redux i think

AUG 30/ 2024

Speaking of translations, heres an old translation-of-a-translation of a Boris Rhyzy poem. Alot are in English translation already but this one was in French only. I sort of like the telephone game of translating translations, Im not sure why since it probably degrades the original form a bit. Maybe thats why its so exciting, debasing the original sensibility... I probably did cross-check the russian though.

Anyway. Heres the French (by Jean-Baptiste Para) and the English:

Mettons-nous d’accord : quand je
serai mort,
tu planteras une croix sur ma tombe.
Elle sera pareille à toutes les croix,
mais nous deux, mon ami, nous saurons
qu’il s’agit en fait d’une signature:
de même qu’un illettré inscrit une
marque sur le papier,
je voudrais laisser une croix dans ce monde.
C’est une croix que je veux laisser.
Je m’accordais mal
avec la grammaire de la vie.
J’ai lu mon destin et n’ai rien compris.
Je n’ai connu que les coups, j’en ai
pris l’habitude. C’est pourquoi les lettres
tombent de ma bouche comme des dents.
Avec une odeur de sang.



Let us be in accord: when I am dead,
You’ll put a cross on my tomb.
It will seem the same as every other cross,
but us two, my friend, we’ll know
its in fact a painting:
the same as the illiterate inscribes a mark on the paper,
id like to leave the cross in this world.

Its a cross I want to leave.
For I’m in ill accord with the grammar of life.
I read my destiny, and understood none of it.
I only know of the blows in my habit,
And thats why from blows the letters
fall from my mouth like teeth,
with an odour of blood.

Its definitely one of the more striking poems of his I think. Most of his writing is bleak, living with a tender membrane connecting to others in a world ever-shifting. This one is just a bit sad and defeated, yet underlined with a smiling resistance, that mark of being after death he keeps as an in joke. He killed himself pretty young so I wonder if this poem was realized in some fashion. Anyway if you want to read more most of his work is here.

Aug 25/ 2024

One thing about me is that while I am always thinking about writing I never do it. The blog/journal/personal write is the apex of a catch-22 that pervades my artistic life. On one hand, artistic fulfillment comes from in part acknowledgement, interaction and communication: art meant to be seen and enjoyed. The other is that a journal is expressively personal and usually secretive: a form that emerges to the public with coy entitlement and personal self importance only. Journals after all belong to important people, and to show it to others suggests that. This is probably not a rational belief of mine. I never have the intrinsic need to put my thoughts to paper like the born-journaler and instead overcomplicate forms in my head. For every minute not spent pen to paper is one where the idea of doing so becomes weightier and scaffolds, a sort of Jacobs latter of word obligation.

I faced this issue with drawing, but ive gotten OK (better) with that over the years. I have a sort of mental block in art that makes being perceived in the act of it excruciating. A lot of people online who do art and are ND can probably relate. My sense of autonomy relies on a set of parameters ive predetermined and others throw a bit of a wrench into the vague-yet-over-planned modus operandi. Never exposing myself to others and being totally un interactive is my preferred state anyway. I am ok with drawing and showing what I draw, mostly I just struggle to actually put to fruition what I'm thinking into visual form, instead becoming some gratuitous vaguery. When that moves to the written it becomes even worse, since not only am I unexperienced, It is also hard to interpret written word over visual for me, and soon it seems every word comes absent of either meaning or aesthetics, becoming noise.

In order to remedy this issue of mine, Ive passively resolute to putting thought to word, even if its only fragments, to nurse me out of this frankly silly state. So consider this the first of probably infrequent posts. I might post some translation fragments too, since I should be getting back into practice for that ( I was working on Sappho 1 but the dialect is pretty hard to parse since ive only learned Attic conventions). I thought about translating some of Agamemnon since the way Kassandra speaks is interesting in Carsons translation.