week1 reflexion

and a fine ‘howdy’ to you, friends and freaks!

 

a blog is such a strange medium in 2018, no? who actually reads this stuff, besides those physically getting paid to (hi Juan!)? it’s okay tho, I kind of like it. like some sort of permanent archaeological diary. the internet is a very strange thing, in that regard, and only getting stranger. everything on this machine is permanent, in a way. permanent but also so incredibly miniscule. it’s freeing.

my first week of bootcamp has been one of exhilaration and joy. I hope it doesn’t sound too silly to say so. I have spent a great many (several) years in kind of a rut, producing a medium-amount of fairly good work but have no framework nor coherent strategy for what i’m trying to do and why. I’ve been out of undergrad and in the workforce for six years, but many of those have been as a freelancer, a frightening and rightly-reviled situation. nevertheless, I’ve saved some scratch and got me a nice scholarship for this here learnin-party and I intend to make the most of it.

every day here has made me more and more sure that not only is this program exactly, precisely, absolutely on the planet where I need to be at this point in my life, but that accordingly the things I and others will be able to accomplish coming out of it will be truly spectacular. we all go ahead and figure parsons is a great school, but schools are made out of programs and programs are made out of people and effort. i’m happy to be one of them.

 

on that note, one central realization I’ve had this past week is that I personally seem to be quite well-positioned to become….if not a leader (not quite my steez), at least a fixture of this community during my time here. a lot of the other students are straight out of undergrad or nearly, and some of us older follks (i’m 28, before you bust out the pocket calculator) seem to be coming from significantly more serious careers than what I’ve had, which is more of a random series of relatively fortunate gigs in somewhat interesting areas. I think I have a sweet spot in terms of years of experience with creative practice and years of design-level and coding-ish-type thinking, often in conjunction. one irony is that i’m actually here to do some rather serious physical research with my skills, but i’m quite sure I can have some fun with it along the way.

bootcamp has already taught me a great deal (FINALLY FIGURED OUT MY STICKY PROBLEM THIS AFTERNOON HOLLA), but I think the most epitomizing moment was Thursday in code, where we briefly went over how functions work in processing (aka JS Lite), and I had this incredible feeling of “god yes, this is what I’ve been waiting for these whole last few days please tell me now.” it’s been quite a while since I’ve had such a visceral reaction to straight learning, because the concepts involved in JS are so fundamental and powerful. I’ve had similar experiences teaching myself grasshopper, but not to the same magnitude of feeling like I was on the verge of uncovering some incredible central truth.

 

my goals for my first year at MFADT include:

-build a hydroponic system in major studio….or outside of it

-put together an application for the tischman environment & design center and hopefully get some grant money

-get to the goddamn finals at least once in my weekly pinball league

-somehow get out onto the useless terrace on UC (just for laughs, har har)

-commute via bike at least several times a week until the weather gets bad (if it even does this year, probably doubtful at this point I think we’re looking at another 70degF xmas)

-raise money (and contribute a fair amount) to get an old pinball table for D12! come the fuck on, yall had ping pong last year!!

 

I think these are modest goals well within my reach.

good night and good luck,

 

jeffrey