• Saturday, 03/18/2023 ** 14:56 Just attended the art book for at Multiple Formats: https://multipleformats.cargo.site/. Very jaded this time. Everyone makes zines and publications and little books on paper to express themselves, hoping that someone else will spend money to fund a personal exercise; I'm pessimistic today, but a lot of the work I saw felt somewhere between Jungian art therapy and emulation of 'modern art' off a museum, using all of the words but not truly exploring the principles and ideas that often make these gallerists' work interesting.

No inspiration is working either. Maybe I'm just stressed about work. We'll see if my photos get any better. I'm worried about plateauing everywhere.

"They called his shop the 'Macy's widow' of porn shop displays." - The conversation next to me as I'm writing from Boston University's Pavement Coffee shop

I've seen one too many studio names and I'm realizing that they aren't distinctive enough. "isnt.online" bothers me in the same way that "thick press", "workspace shop", and similar ideas bother me; they use words so generic that the business melds into anything and everything as all of these pseudo-brutalist minimal websites with cute little clickable interactions become indistinguishable from one another. Jake feels the same way; common names say nothing about the character of the people behind them.

A good name is distinctive. A good name uses words that evoke a strong association with a particular feeling or aesthetic concept. Serenity OS means nothing in isolation, but Berkeley Graphics is immediately identifiable.