I heard that you should take your pet projects out back behind the shed and put them out of their misery, and I’ve found that there’s a lot of truth in that. Come Out was a big stepping stone for me, and I am quite fond of it for that reason. It was the kick I needed to actualize not only myself, but my skills as a creative. The more I learned the more I realized that the way I was doing things was counterproductive. A classic newbie creative’s mistake of trying to run before one can walk, throw it on the pile!

I learned so much in pursuit of finishing Come Out only to realize that I could say everything I was saying more succinctly. But of course, the pursuit of knowledge never ends. I keep learning and keep growing, and that means that I gotta get into the habit of actually finishing projects. I’m still quite bad at that, but the experiments have been paying off. The poems, the photo dumps. I’m obsessed with an app called open camera. You can find it on F-Droid on android devices. No AI upscaling, just the tools for filtering the raw data on a digital sensor. It’s really quite remarkable, and open source software has come a long way in recent years.

Those dreams have been coming back, a creative mind must be cared for. There’s this brilliant book called Liber Indigo by Justin Kirkwood. It’s about how the metaphors we live by affect the ways we think. He uses this knowledge to make an argument for a more useful way to design computers. It’s a brilliant read, very short, only 145 pages including the index, it changed my fucking life. But Kirkwood’s research goes much further than computers or UI design. It’s everything, we’re all like that, submerging ourselves in oceans of metaphor that flatten the underlying complexity of the world, while simultaneously giving us tools for change. We must actively and consciously choose metaphors that are pragmatic, that serve us, and not those who wish to oppress us. Get out there and learn something, you may be surprised how much you needed it.

That’s it for now, I love you, whoever you are, take care, and wash your fuckin’ dishes!!!

~ Lewa 💚