I don't really like (the parts I saw) of Seattle

August 6th 2024
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My spicy take from having seen mostly just the city core is that, 
y'know, I think seattle is kind of the bad end for portland: like what 
would happen if we got completely eaten by the tech sector. Everything 
was even more expensive than here in pdx, the air stank with car 
exhaust, there were fewer trees and transit was even worse.

It definitely gave me more appreciation for the fact that portland, 
despite being having a population of ~1 million people, still feels more 
like a small town except with a functional transit system. Yeah, okay I 
didn't expect to come back with a new appreciation for trimet but I sure 
do. At least when a bus is late it's still going to arrive.

I wonder if the outer parts of the city are nicer and queerer although 
I'm guessing they're not going to be as walkable as here and I can't 
imagine that the transit system gets better the further you get from the 
city core

My partner tor met up with a friend from the outer parts of seattle and 
they ended up saying that they were late to work so many times that they 
ended up having to buy a car

so that's another data point

anyway, I should say the zine fest itself was great

tor has a small but dedicated actual facts fanbase for their writing and 
they sold a couple dozen zines which was pretty great

what else? oh, I suppose I'm going to have to start preparing for the 
academic year to start again in about a month and a half but the main 
thing that I've been thinking about is that I need to make sure that I'm 
not working myself half to death this year

my instinct has been "I need to make sure that I'm spending as much time 
as possible cramming in all my personal interests this summer since I 
won't have a chance to do them later" but that's a recipe for disaster

I'll end up making myself miserable in the summer and am setting myself 
up for defeat

No, instead, I really need to spend more time throughout the year doing 
things I want to do and making art

Oh, yeah, so that's one of the cool things about spending some time in 
seattle for the bremerton zine fest: the seattle art museum

Every time I look at paintings in all different styles and forms I have 
so many ideas for things I want to make but I never let myself spend 
time on it

I often think about this old tyler hobbs post [1,2] where he explains how 
he worked on how to replicate the look of watercolor in code and I feel 
like I want to do similar things but for the kind of aesthetics that *I* 
find striking

This is also a side point but I *hate* that all talk of procgen art is 
getting eaten by diffusion models so that the average person just 
doesn't even understand that there's a difference between the two when 
one is about hand-crafting code to produce artifacts and the other is 
just a toy application built on top of CLIP that you can spam

So, yeah, I just need to actually spend more time on the art projects I 
like and stop engaging in holy self-deprivation

[1] https://www.tylerxhobbs.com/words/a-guide-to-simulating-watercolor-paint-with-generative-art

[2] I actually lost a lot of respect for him when jumped on the NFT 
train but his old posts on techniques are still good