Scattered Sarcasm

I finished an arts today. There are videos below, which you should watch now for context.

I tried to do a pretty thing, which is new for me, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s full of my usual reactive style too.
In the Blue mode you can “charge” it by pointing it at another light source, or it’s own reflection, to make it slowly get brighter. If you leave it in the dark it slowly fades down to a twinkling ember. And if you touch the back of it you can charge it with your finger. In the Starburst mode you can touch it to expand the burst across the whole surface. In the Chaos mode the brightness is matched to the environment, to keep it visible in the sun but keep it from being overwhelming in the dark. Unless you touch it, to force it to full power.

There’s also Flashlight mode which has no features or controls but does light 45 tiny LED on the front and back at full power until the battery dies. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out. Or maybe a flashlight on a string for when you need to see under the couch.
I wrote other modes for it, but I could only make 3.5 fit into memory on the chip. I sacrificed a lot of space to make it programmable in python. On bigger chips it’s a great plan, but on this one it’s a stretch. 48kB total fixed storage and not much more in RAM. It made the code ugly and introduced a one-frame rendering error in Starbust. But I suppose it’s artful in a memory allocation tricks sort of way, and l code deserves to live in an online repository.

I finally got to filming today because I had plans to see the recipient of this arts. Those plans were canceled about 40 minutes into my commute, by someone who felt bad for being a dick, but will do the same thing again many times. I’m sad to not see L today, or to show off the pendant in person. I’m annoyed to be coupled to someone who will dick me over all the time, even when I protect myself. But I’m still glad to be motivated to finish and film the project, and the rest we can try again, until it goes.

We made great progress at robots with the remote-manipulator-style arm controller – while our setup is high on jank and full of twitch it more or less worked the first time around. I’m not sure it was recognized as a great success by the team but we’ll get there as we iterate. I’ve got ideas to make it less jank, and to get rolling on SPI sensors at the same time, which I think I can get built this week ¹On a partly related note, I’m in the market for teensy servos, ideally that are designed for less than 5V, if you have any recommendations.. T is still coming from a place of anxiety about managing the other coders, but I feel like things have been going well on most fronts.

I escaped from the work week with a tolerable number of SRs, and no deadline work due before Wednesday. I had to escalate to get my HR drone to act on my ADA request. They got back to me after I told on them, and then sent an email saying they didn’t think I needed an official accommodation because one of my current managers said he would accommodate me without HR involvement. So more resistance than is necessary, as the week of non-response predicted. But they also inadvertently admitted that the accommodation I want was reasonable, so it’s a clear win if I have to argue about it. I’m doing well stating in my arguing-with-school-administrators heist framework, which makes it much more fun and less dreadful than it would be otherwise.

Tried again to bring my therapist into the heist. They’re not resistant to the concept anymore but they also aren’t keeping up with the parts where I could use help. It would be great to have a therapist that didn’t find my challenge fearful. It’s hard to work with someone who is afraid of things you want, or things that you are. It went okay though, even if I had to be I charge of my own hour.

Shanda had a date last night and managed to not entirely disappear into it for 2 days. There was still a lot of avoidance in the last week, but not nearly as intense as it has been. And on Saturday we actually did things all together and you didn’t die even a little.

I got a call this week, for the first time in a long time. I got an art interlude recently but it was nice to upgrade to real-time comms. Things sounded sort of down and hard in general, which is rough. I hope you have the time to cope with it. There were lots of good talks though, about some of your arts and about the ways you were finding to protect yourself and to prioritize things you care about. We worked on plans for an escape to a trap. You told me about smiling success and about insights into finding the kind of help that works for you. I’m proud of you for deciding not to give up your Sundays, or your August, to people who are liable to hurt you. And for everything else you do.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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