hvincent @hvincent@scholar.social

i should start telling people i manage developers as part of my work

like, i keep them organized and clearly labeled in a locked cabinet and wear the proper safety gear when handling them, and ensure that they are diluted at the correct temperature and then stored in containers that minimize oxidation

i've been managing developers for over a decade, hire me for your startup

(they get to have all their belongings packed and stored for free on campus, and can opt to have some things shipped back to them but shipping costs are on them)

gonna be on campus for two weeks, first time since mid march other than a brief stop to drop off equipment. helping to pack up dorm rooms for students who haven't been able to come back after spring break 💪

(i think my irritation is mostly in finding out at the last minute, because this wasn't in any of the assignment writeups; if i knew ahead of time i could have saved myself the hassle of converting and readjusting all the formatting by writing it in a compatible format to begin with)

it's not that i really want an excuse to stop using latex but i do like using latex except when i find out as i'm submitting a final paper that the professor requires a .doc/.docx and i throw my hands up in despair and decide i might as well install pandoc

like, one semester i gave up and just wrote in .odt and saved as a .docx afterwards but i really do prefer text editor+markup language and citation management like 95% of the time

no one knows if we'll be back in the fall, i'm starting leave in a couple weeks and refuse to do anything resembling work over the summer, i appreciate excuses to go biking, it's nice to see students coming up to my house because i miss them, etc.

sending out email to all the seniors i don't get to see on their way out; usually, them coming by my office after finals week to drop off gear is my last check-in with them. i'll miss it.

the circumstances of campus lockdown, people graduating or otherwise moving, and still having equipment checked out is leaving me to fun things like having students drop stuff off on my porch, biking around town and collecting stuff off other porches for people with limited travel options, going on a scavenger hunt around campus for equipment abandoned in lockers, etc.

(this is not sarcastic, i am legit having fun doing it)

we cannot run a physical darkroom or studio space safely under pandemic conditions with all our communal equipment, there's just not enough space and too much room for stressed out students to not keep to good hygiene practices. i already struggle just to keep everyone from bringing snacks into the darkroom.

the week after course registration week, the uni president announces the possibility of remote or partially remote classes for the fall. my unit is polling all our instructors (mostly adjuncts) about the viability of teaching remotely. we're all studio photography courses, many with a heavily analog component. i'm immensely proud that we managed to pivot and get anything done whatsoever this semester. we'd have to 75% scrap our entire course offerings and start over.

i've been playing a lot of minecraft this week and it seems like it doesn't matter how i build my house, eventually a creeper will sneak up behind me and explode, blowing away a chunk of my yard and sometimes fatally injuring me. i can't stop thinking about it.

sure, we forbid certain things from being inside because they are unhygienic (poop), irritating (mosquitoes), dangerous (wolves), etc. but once we start excluding things justified for practical survival, aren't we also terminating our relations with things (entities, creatures, systems) that may have once been mutually beneficial? what do we lose by paving over the land and rendering the landscape into a space we think we have sole control over?

we build shelters to live in because it is important to protect our bodies and our support infrastructure from daily and seasonal weather/climate fluctuations, but what else do these shelters do? after incidentally shutting out plants, we select some to grow in containers which are permitted indoors, but trim back trees that grow too close because they are a threat.

dogs can live with us but we tolerate them since they can understand our needs for hygiene and leave their bodily waste outside

and on the other hand, feeling so starved for a particular kind of thought work that i latched onto the notion that seeing a fox in the city park feels cool and blew it apart into how the human-nature separation that characterizes the dominant western idea of our existence has created a scarcity of relations between humans and non-humans in a way that being reminded of that scarcity triggers anxiety that we want to soothe by seeking out that missing component more

and also robin hood is hot

the more something is treated as a given, the more i want to take it apart and demand to know why

woo approved to register for courses in the fall

gonna take a history class on human-animal relationships

i still make myself take a "commute" at the top and bottom of every day, to make a physical separation between being in a working vs resting mode, but sometimes that means i'm doing stuff during the commute that i never could before, and in doing that i'm keeping more "work" stuff out of the house, which i am trying to preserve as a personal space as much as possible.

strange little quality of life adjustments that snuck up on me: i can still be in my pjs at 9 for my 9:30 class, and take my time getting my breakfast dishes cleared because i just have to dial into class instead of get all my shit together to be away from the house all day

i've been going to class while taking walks up and down my quiet neighborhood street, and it's nice to not feel trapped in a classroom, to pick a setting that makes me physically more comfortable

at least 50% @bgcarlisle's fault but i just pre-ordered a remarkable2 with the hopes that it will improve my studying life, i'm currently doing okay reading on a smaller kobo and taking notes on paper but this ereader is super clumsy at pdfs and i think it's not really gonna hold up if i actually increased my academia participation

we're also working to support students who don't have sufficient access to these tools, including converting lab fees towards adobe licensing. if i had things truly my way, i'd convert things over to krita and related software (which i started installing in our lab last month over frustration with adobe licensing hiccups) but it's not really my call to get all the faculty on board

If you anticipate having any barriers to taking our class online that haven't been covered in this survey, please let me know here.

Is there anything else you would like me to know, as I am thinking about contingency planning, in regards to this course, your situation, or whatever needs you might have to finish classwork successfully?

instructors in my department are sending this survey around to their students:

Do you have unlimited access to a computer- if so, what kind?
Do you have a dedicated internet connection/ is it reliable/unreliable/
Can you download the adobe software suite for $20/month or the initial one month free trial
Do you have access to a digital camera/phone/

Are you willing to use Zoom to meet with me over videoconferencing?