User:Thijshijsijsjss/Notes from Up There
So I'm lеaving this body
And I'm never coming home again, yеah
I'll bury the 'atchet
Between the window and the kingdom of men
Oh, I'm becoming a worm now
And I'm looking for a place to live, yeah
Here I come now
Week 1
Monday: grad show meeting, collective publication meeting, discussing pen plotted 3d movie with Joseph
Tuesday: skipped collective publication meeting
Thursday: grad show meeting online, grad supervision meeting
Saturday: oh my, I didn't realize there's only a week's time between my thesis deadline and the grad show
Week 2
wait no, there is a month extra after all!
Pen Plotting Party interviewed
GRS: deadline extension and plans?
Kamo exhibition opening, xpub1 SI26 launch event
Week 3
Currently, my focus continues to be demanded on live outside of xpub. While unfortunate in some ways -- for example having to miss the legendary grad show mock-up meeting -- I do believe it is for the best in the long run. Luckily, I feel a little more mental bandwidth for reaquinting myself with the thesis (which, naturally, has taken over the project a bit at the moment).
Thesis Mapping
For a while now, the bottleneck for my thesis has been the format. Not the physical presentation, but rather the matter in which the (nonlinear) contents are presented to the reader. While the wiki is dear to me, and this format has been encouraged by Michael and Marloes, I haven't been able to accept this as final form. There are 2 main reasons: (1) to justify the wiki, I would want to make full use of it. As this text is a documentation of my project's development, I think that many of the wiki's artifacts, while intersting, do not contribute meaningfully to the story I want to present. Not in it's current state at least, and rewriting to allow for a deep and inspired use would be a lot of work. Also, (2) I persist on wanting a physical version of the thesis. This is a ambition I've had since the start of the year, one I'm apparantly not willing to let go of, and one that puts constraints on the way a user would navigate the text. In particular: exuberent use of hyperlinking tends to not work as well on paper. Instead, I've been thinking about a 'wrapper' to address the reader with, which would be a sort of CYOA / TA game on top of the thesis's main text, through and with which the reader would navigate.
Grad Supervision
In this week's grad supervision meeting, Michael seemed receptive to this idea. In my final map sketch, I included a little drawing of what a physical version could look like, with the faint subtitle 'A counter manual'. This was mainly there as filler, but when Michael asked about it, I said something along the lines of 'this text does not try to instruct or dictate. Quite the opposite: it hopes to invite something personal, and trusts that you can navigate that by yourself'. This led us to talk about how we can lean into that manual format. In particular, Michael suggested the above mapping as a manual-style flowchart. The edges could be abstract ways of navigating, like 'feeling perplexed? Go here.': something the reader parses (themselves). I think this has potential. I will have to see if and how to combine this with the wrapper: a flowchart can work without 'narrative game'. Some things to play with: in physical form, page order need not be grouped by contents, but another order can be instilled here (like chronology of writing). Also, flowchart can allow for different node shapes for another layer of information. Finally, LaTeX might be used for (for a million reasons).
The LaTeX Resurgence (Another Map)
I translated the most recent map to LaTeX, with the hopes that this would allow me to play around with some in-pdf linking. This has brought about a curious shift in my thesis workflow: I find myself drifting away from the wiki, and notice myself considering this heap of LaTeX the main text.
LaTeX has always been the default fallback option for this thesis. This makes it sound negative, but actually I think it's quite appropriate: not only does LaTeX allow for all customization and interactivity I might want to push this thesis to a game-like experience, it also carries an archaic 'manualism' with it naturally. And to my surprise, it allows for a way more meandering, non-linear writing process.
In many ways, LaTeX was my wiki-predecessor: both have been ways not just to capture thoughts, but actually spark thoughts by working with them. By deeply familiarizing myself with them, they have been introspective processing tools as much as tools for typesetting and sharing.
I am curious to see how this will develop. Will another processing tool find its way to me?
Week 4 -- MAY BREAK
Doing a lot of thesis work!
Snackbar Frieda Ice Cream Assembly
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Week 5
Still on the train headed to thesistown.
More mapping
Week 6
Feeling like the thesis was in a place where I would be able to submit it any time if I needed to, I felt inclined to take a little time off from it (and the looming grad project) and focus on some side quests. This felt good. Now returning to the thesis, I find myself in a mindset of 'just wrapping it up'. Not in a way that is nonchalant per se, but definitely also not as obsessively panicky as before. Good things.