a belated day 7 writeup

Thursday, like Wednesday, started later to make up for a later finish — an artist’s talk from Aram Bartoll after an intro to the hardware class we’ll be doing with Taeyoon. While both were interesting (the former for how little I liked the work and the latter for how much cool stuff is coming), I spent most of the day wrapped in the hunger for working and doing that has been stalking me the last few days. Since we’ve begun, there has been a lot of preliminary movements but much less time to eat up and my brain has been dying for some of this kind of experience:

I’m not sure yet if I am just impatient or if I think things could have been set up better; it’s going to take longer than 10 days to shake that out. I have been wondering though what things would be like had we broken days into just classes in the morning and studio time in the afternoon, with optional evening lectures. Maybe even with multiple classes at the same time. A way to manage the firehose.

I do notice I am way more into the programming classes than the artier things so far. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been exposed to the details of art longer? Or because I am just TOO EXCITED about code.

Guilt and Criticism

The other Thursday theme on Planet Sarah was criticism. This is a thing I keep coming back to: I feel terribly guilty when I have a lot of criticism for something. I know everyone works hard to do what they do, and I hate to diminish that, but sometimes … things are just bad. So I tweeted about that and I thought the responses were interesting.

This question of useful criticism, respect, and passive aggression has been something I have struggled with since The Believer published Heidi Julavits’ snark essay in its inaugural issue and into some of my work at various design firms. Obviously I am not going to solve it here and now, but it is funny to me how often it comes around. Maybe it is the fundamental question in how I personally relate to work.

Now back to this damn Timeline of Neglect refactor.