What I am Working On Today
My favorite thing on Youtube is David Lynch’s series What Is David Working On Today?, which he ran for a while during the pandemic.
In one episode, he is fixing his wooden sink &. urinal combo; in another, building a mic stand; in the third, unraveling the Incredible Checking Stick:
This was very inspiring for me.
Knowing that Lynch was working on something — something as lofty as the Checking Stick one week, and something as mundane as a urinal the week after — made me want to work on my own projects, whatever they were on that given week.
In this same spirit, here are some things I’ve been working on lately.
Some of my notes:
Testing out a new multi-camera setup:
(If you want more of these, please let me know!)
Some excerpts from drafts I am working on:
Navalny’s Psychopolitical Legacy
…I hadn’t noticed how I outsourced my optimism and passion for changing things to him.
He was killed, came back from the dead, got imprisoned, put into solitary, moved to beyond the Arctic Circle — and remained a happy, joking warrior through it all. He was still poking fun at the judge in his last recorded appearance, just a day before his death in the prison.
It seemed he was the only one left with that kind of inspiring attitude. Now that he was taken away, this last spark died, and it got very, very dark.
A sentiment I’ve heard from many Russians is “I didn’t think I had had any hope left; now I know there was a glimmer, because I felt it die with Navalny.”
My own reaction was somewhat paradoxical: knowing that he can’t carry this spark further, I felt a resolve to rekindle it in myself. I had been the rare hopeful Russian, always looking for a constructive angle, before the war — and I largely lost that quality in February 2022. Now I felt an urgent need to retrieve it and nurture it further. A lyric from an old Russian song goes, “We forgot for a moment: for there to be light, electricity has to go through us…”
Tech & Submission
The image above started out as these two sketches I made last summer, after playing with then-current versions of popular LLMs and the Meta Quest 3 VR set:
I’m not quite sure what I was trying to communicate here.
Perhaps:
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