Merry(?) Christmas, I guess...

At some point in my life I transitioned from “Christmas is Awesome” to “Christmas is vaguely annoying and I don’t know why”.  I know part of it is the commercialization - but that’s the easy answer, and fairly incomplete. I love/hate snow, depending on whether I’m driving and whether the roads have been salted, and how warm my feet are in a given moment. I actually enjoy finding gifts for loved ones in most cases - though receiving gifts is barely awkward and uncomfortable, especially when the gift is something I largely do not care for and must now feign gratitude in recipe of. I love a good fire, in a fireplace or otherwise. Christmas music is largely hit or miss, and there are so few truly good holiday songs that I think the repetition gets to me before anything else. And largely I do life Christmas decorations - what’s not to love about twinkle lights and glitter?

• Commercialization - hate

• Snow - yay?

• Gifts - neutral

• Fire - yay!

• Music - no

• Decorations - yay

So what gives? Why am I so largely irritated by a holiday that should come out a a net neutral?

I think about this every year, and this year it finally crystalized for me - we’ve taken all of the teeth out of winter.

Krampus in Quebec, December 2024

Last year, in Quebec - where the cold was real and the scary monsters still lurked in the dark - Christmas was amazing.  Even though the Cramps in the parade was largely a cute huggable beasty, the beast was still present. In the US our beast has been defanged, like the abominable snow monster in that Rudolf movie we’ve all grown up on. 

What is an Abominable Snow Monster without any teeth?

I can’t help but feeling that when you take all the teeth out of the holiday, the joy becomes too saccharine with nothing to temper it. Kids get told Santa only brings presents to good kids, but no kids actually get coal - though lots of kids go without anything at all.  Family gatherings feel more obligatory than for protection and security, and with the need to live where jobs exist and only travel within the schedule your job does or does not allow - that gathering becomes more of an upper class privilege year by year, at the mercy of capitalism rather than the scary monsters in the dark.

The scary monsters in the dark are slowly but steadily replaced by people, and the god of commerce. All of the folklore has been removed and replaced with paper receipts and empty bank accounts. And while winter itself seems to be dying - it’s a balmy 62 degrees in Kansas City today - and a look at the Christmas temperatures since 1895 does show an upward trend in temperature, how much of this disconnect between weather and holiday has to do with the homogenization of culture? Most of the North American Christmas tradition developed in Northern Europe hundreds of years ago. 

Kansas City Christmas temperature highs from 1895 to 2024, trendline in pink.

In the end my distaste of Christmas as currently practiced seems to be a result of several things - distaste for capitalism and the God of Money, displacement from a climate where any of the Christmas traditions even make sense, and the lack of scary monsters to balance the flavor of too many sugar plums. Even the Nutcracker has an army of mice creeping in from every shadow, these days all we have to fear is corporate greed.

House Cleaning

In terms of getting my “house” in order, I have a lot to do, digitally and physically. I’ve not been the best digital archiver of my own work, partially through lack of follow through, but also through technological catastrophes - the external hard drive I was using at one point for a back up of my entire computer just… died, and a lot was lost. I also have too many mediums, and finding the tools and supplies I need for each one would be more efficient if those items were stored together instead of haphazardly here and there.

One of the roles I’ve taken on in the last two years at my job at the Yearbook Place has been Digital Asset Manager for our department, and I’ve learned a lot about the importance of a good archive, how to keep it, and how to reference it, which has also got me in a mind to put together a proper archive for my won work - not only so I can find files when i need to , say, upload hi-res versions to print sites so I can have a shop; but also in the eventually that I want to dive back into the gallery world - it’s important to have an easy to reference database with images to the work, the size, the medium, descriptions, etc. for faster response time should someone have questions about something, or if i want to submit a piece to a show. Do I think any of my current pieces qualify for such - not necessarily, but the point it to get into a good practice of file management and data archiving.

Today while running errands I made sure to pick up two extra storage containers - one for silversmithing, and another for leather working, because apparently these are both things I’m dabbling in now. And another to host my piles of gel pens, assuming I can manage to put them back when I’m done with them, but at least they have a box. And plastic totes are easier to store in closets than what’s going on in my studio closet right now.

I used to get so frustrated with “Art Totes” because they never fit the things that I was being told to store in them, and they inevitably ended up empty or filled with junk. Now, finally in middle age, I’ve figured out what does go in them, and what would be better to store elsewhere. My markers are in a bin. My ink pens are in a lunch box. My pencils are in an old Star Wars tin. The Art Totes are full of my watercolor tubes. The beautiful old water color wood box will be used for something else, possibly all of my exactos and whetstones. My acrylics are in a milk crate. We don’t have to accept the containers things come in, sometimes they fit better elsewhere. How a thing is organized is less important than the system working for the individual using it.

And now I need to start working on my reading list…

Intentionality

I’m old enough to remember the infancy of social media, when it was all supplemental to everyone having their own websites - myspace and opendiary were supplemental to your geocities or blogspot or custom domain. You’d spend time. week to week checking in various sites to see if that lady who bought the 6ft tall metal rooster had written a new post, or if the geeky lady had a new review of some etsy shop. It was all a little more time intensive, but also very intentional. And it feels like the internet may soon be making an about face back in that direction.

Meta and IG are scraping all of your images for their datasets - apparently in using the platform you’ve given permission for them to do whatever they want with your images unless you can prove it’s directly harming you. I remember seeing this in the IG terms of use back when I first created an account, but it also seemed very choiceless at the time. Scrolling through a feed is so much easier for an audience than going through your list of links to see who is going to entertain you for 5 seconds - and at the time I was a lot more concerned with being seen than I am now a decade+ later. I’m curious to see if we all go back to individual web preseences, or if artists will attempt to use tech like Nightshade to protect themselves from what is essentially theft. I’m not 100% sure it matters - I don’t know if Meta is able to remove the millions of ai images from the dataset effectively and I have been watching for that moment when that snake starts eating it own tail.

I remember my moment last year(or was it two years ago?) when I had a glint of optimism about what ai was going to do and what people were going to do with it. I’d forgotten that people are human and humans do what humans do - and it’s frequently the least amount of work for the most amount of gain regardless of who it hurts in the process.

In short, I’m going to be purging and deleting my IGs, which is going to take forever to delete each individual image - not that it matters for past content, what’s been scraped had been scraped already. But this venue give me infinitely more control of what is mine, and more reason to use a blog space.

I’d like more intentionality in my life - which includes who views what I make. I’d rather you were here on purpose than a glance in a sea of content.

What are we doing? Where are we going? Why are we here?

I love the concept of self improvement. I love the process of learning, acquiring new skills, and challenging myself. I love following my whims hither and yon, exploring the subjects tickling my brain today and finding unexpected connections between outwardly unconnected things.

One of the creators I follow on tiktok (Trejayne) has been talking about skill trees for a while now, and the concept of utilizing a skill tree for real life is brilliant. And to be clear - none of this is about saving money. There are projects I want to make, not because it’s cheaper to make them than to commission someone else to, but because I want to make them, and understand how they were made.

I have so many projects I’m working on, waiting to start: hacking a furby, a quilt, a temperature quilt, the dollhouse, an entry for the Federal Duck Stamp competition, and someday far in the future - a replica of the Baseball Diamond from the Great Muppet Caper - it’s well past time to drag myself out of the RimWorld hole I dug for myself and spend more time working on all of this.

And then it was December... also I got married.

It’s been over six months since I last posted anything here (so much for goals). A lot has happened, and also very little has happened - as is the way things feel sometimes.

To start, a chain of events:

• Last year I completed a Data Analytics Bootcamp hosted through KU. It was great, it was overwhelming. I learned a lot, and “graduated” with 103%, despite coming out of it without a final project I could show anyone. But it was so much in so short a time, I felt like I needed to do more to flesh out and reinforce what I learned.

• I started 100 Days of Python, while I considered what to do next. This was also great, and was reinforcing a lot of key fundamentals in my programming knowledge that had been glossed over a bit during the bootcamp.

• A quarter of the way into my pythoning, EdX - the company that runs the bootcamps - contacted me about being a TA for the program. This sounded like an excellent way to do some of that reinforcement I’d been wanting to get around to. I applied, I was hired.

• It was not the reinforcement I’d been looking for. Mostly I spent my time helping students install things on their computers.

• Talking with my partner about my experiences with the bootcamps, he brought up his own trepidation about working with anyone who’d learned in one for the same reason I hadn’t applied to any jobs yet - too much too fast with no reinforcement. I took a beat, and started looking at local college programs with Analytics degree programs. I found one at a community college that looked good, applied, registered, and I’m just completing my first semester this week.

• A month ago I finally declared my “major” - Computer Science and chasing another Data Analytics Certificate. I will quite likely not finish the former, but I really only declared a major so I could sign up for classes three days earlier than I would be able to do otherwise.

• Also I got married two weeks ago. 

TLDR: Did school. Did more school. Did more more school. Got married. 

School has got me to finally update this site though, as it’s a requirement of the Data Analytics program to have an online portfolio (how convenient for me that one already existed). I still need to finish my Bigfoot project, which might get a complete overhaul for very important reasons. I also find myself wanting to do an exploration of Kansas City crime over the last 10 years because True Crime, and also convincing my mom that Seattle would actually be a safe place to live.

Art has been more of a private affair. AI and advancements and AI internet drama is provoking thoughts about the commodification of our attention that I can’t quite put into words yet. The next (insert number here) months/years are going to be interesting to say the least. I have mostly been working on my dollhouse, learning basic electrical to light it up, and lots of faux-everything techniques. Wanting to share it, that will probably be here in this blog. It doesn’t fit in with anything else and it’s not something I want to market, just share. Though truthfully I’m feeling very over marketing myself. I don’t want to be a commodity, and to keep people’s attention everything about you has to be a commodity.

I much prefer the quiet.