• [[petrichor]]
• [[ostranenie]]
• [[flancia]]!
  • [[aj]] ~ [[ag]]
    • happy, joyful!
  • [[Avalokiteshvara]]!
    • [[Tara]]
  • I paid my taxes for the remainder of the year (or scheduled all payments). This small detail made me feel freer; it was indeed on my todo list.
  • In the spirit of a Sunday I made some [[magnetic art]] and I enjoyed it. It's interesting to do things with one's fingers, thinking about space and color as we go.
  • [[social coop]]
    • read some discussion
    • wiki next steps -> testing
  • [[donated]]
  • [[sila]] -> CL
• the Agora is a bit slow -- pages are taking >7s to render when the cache is cleared.
  • It's also buggy, like [[petrichor]] above which strangely redirects to wikipedia :)
  • I love it anyway, but this says I have to allot some time to [[fixes]].
    • #push [[drishti]] fix bugs
• #push [[poemas]]
  • [[agua]] (va tomando forma? no sé)
  • [[collected poetry]]

• What does this [[product]] or [[service]] give [[people]]?
• How else can [[people]] [[learn]] to turn [[loss]] into [[growth]]?
• Lagging [[signs]] are easy enough, what are [[leading]] signs of something?
• [[Who]] is this for? What will we get by giving them a [[way]] to get what they [[want]]? How will what we're doing [[give]] them a way to get what they want?

• Sunday, 05/07/2023 ** 13:14 Most of this weekend has been spent thinking about names and interior design. I have a name for the studio that I'm happy with - finally - and the domain name is extremely affordable (No spoilers). Spent some time walking around, some time shopping, some time writing at Brod & Salt (I don't have a European keyboard yet, so it's difficult for me to hunt down the omljud on the fly). I'm excited to have the apartment finished and start working under this new umbrella to make something real. We'll start with an email sign-in box : )

Spending time online I can't help but wonder what I'm missing out on by not living in one of these innovation epicenters: San Francisco, New York, Berlin. San Francisco is the most beautiful place in the world but I've never seen a world so adulterated by tech that the fabric of the city outside of the office is ruined. Culture in San Francisco stinks - it's commodified and distilled into Blue Bottle and Allbirds, turning self-expression into a series of checkboxes, a manual, and the number on your bank account. The big players in SV, from my understanding, are brilliant and analytically stubborn to a fault, unwilling to consider 'unquantified' or 'soft' benefits to their lives - why do you think San Francisco looks like it does outside of the office? They need to learn to remove metrics from aesthetics and revert to their psychadelic dreams of the 70s. The wage gap is too broad there to ever realize this without proper housing. The only way to live in the valley is to live in a bubble and to curate the right bubble for you.

Cool - that leaves NYC and Berlin. Is Berlin monocultural? I haven't made friends with enough Berliners to know. I do know that enough people I keep in touch with online frequently commute between the three (SF included) to make them each a place where you'll be able to meet and know everyone. My work and ego aren't yet strong enough, though, to enter those spaces. I'll have to work twice as hard in Stockholm before leveraging the reputation I'm going to force my work to build. ** 13:28 Completely forgot to write about interiors. They're difficult! You don't notice the details until you really dedicate yourself to making a place home - why are the countertops like this? How are the tiles misaligned just slightly? Why is this asymmetric? Earlier I ranted against symmetry - but like all things symmetry is a balance. The four potted plants on my windowsill, all different breeds, were in radically different pots - and this looked absurd. Normalizing the pots - using four of the same pot and replacing terra-cotta with glass to better highlight the plants themselves - improved the room demonstrably. Terra-cotta feels uncomfortable to the touch. Caring for your belongings is more difficult if you don't enjoy them.

And the carpet! Generally the same rules of outside apply to inside. As you look from the ground to the sky, colors should get lighter and more vibrant. The really bright colors should be sparse and carefully curated - these are the areas that the eyes of a visitor should focus on when they enter the room. Everything else should be plain and muddy and pastel or black or white or anything that could blend into the background as a tool should. Surfaces should be distinct from the items on them without distracting from them - marble is too detailed and places the focus on the table ratether than the items on top of it, much like the wood grain of the table my laptop rests on as I type this.

Adorning the walls is just as important. Smell is more important than sound, and sound is more important than light; smell can indicate immediate or lasting danger, while sound implies near-term danger and light just controls whether something could be present or absent. It's therefore far more important to consider sound and echo than the details of furnishings in the house. (Segway: wow, these IKEA panels are brilliant: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/oddlaug-sound-absorbing-panel-gray-00427366. Design that is functional and accessible to anyone is far more important than design that is beautiful. More later.) The more detail you introduce to the home, the less noise you hear.

Finding the perfect furniture is incredibly difficult. I can picture the particular table that I want but I can't make it - I don't have access to metal fabrication facilities to cut the table to size and acquiring the raw materials would be super difficult. The process reminds me of why I love computers - digitally, anything I can imagine or picture I can make real. Experimenting with physical spaces is expensive and carries with it far more material limitation than the infinite computing power that I've become accustomed to having access to! + it's so difficult to imagine something filling in a space without having it. My walls are empty and I can hear it throughout the apartment.

Still don't understand:

• Fringes. This piece of fabric is beautiful - why leave vulnerable tassles hanging off of it?
• Triangular slants in furniture. Every design company and system uses a slightly different triangular slant. None of them match well with one another in a room or stack well. Snow peak knows this - they make glasses with vertical walls of varying sizes so they can slot into one another. Forget stacking. Just go smaller and taller.
• Uncomfortable textures. Maybe I'm more sensitive to texture than other people, but lots of interior furniture is uncomfortable! I wouldn't want to have to hold half of the objects I see in stores or sleep on half of the sheets I touch. This holds regardless of the store's prices. Why would I buy something that I wouldn't want to use every day? ** 13:53 Granit store charged me for an extra item. Employee didn't seem to be concerned by it. Do I look too much like a rich American?