Still plugging away at this painting. I feel like I need to get a bit adventurous with the lighting.

We are headed to Puerto Rico for 4 nights. It will be the first family air travel in the aftertimes. Looking forward to it.

Drastically improved some regenerative medicine technology this week for Forever Labs. I need to spend the afternoon making sketches. Did some experiments in the lab on Monday, and it felt good. It had been a while since I had my hands in a bio hood.

In other news, I have been obsessed for some time with the idea that we need a new mobile OS that took full advantage of Ethereum applications. Anyway, I started tweeting about it enough until about three weeks ago a guy in Austria reached out and was like let's do it. So we made a discord, and now we have about 130 people and a number of them are building and designing, and we have a v0 Android fork that has an Ethereum client and apps on it can interact with it, and we have a v0 DappStore and a test Dapp.

Here's the site that went live today: https://ethereumphone.org

It's crazy that with github, discord, figma, notion, etc., people can quickly coordinate and build with very little knowledge of each other. When you couple that with tokens and DAOs, you basically have inverted the capitalist process. It now goes: people gather, sort by talent, build product, issue shares, elect executive leadership.

Organization of production used to be the value-capture, but now that aggregates with little more than an idea.

Been busy as all hell the past two months. We're really understaffed at my preschool, and I'm running myself pretty ragged. They just cut our hours down to 30 hours a week, which I am actually pretty grateful for at the moment. I don't have to go in until 11:30 every day now, which finally gives me some time to work on things before I am completely exhausted at the end of the day. I've made it my goal to make some new music every day, and so far I've managed to keep up with that goal for the last two weeks or so. If you want to listen, you can check it out here. Pretty much all just ambient stuff, I've been going back to recording live on tape and slowing things down. I'm considering taking about an hour's worth of the best tracks here at the end of the month and printing a limited run of like 25 tapes.

I also did some music for a friend's short movie recently, which just came out this weekend:

And last, here's something I'm really proud of that I made for the preschoolers when we were talking about robots:

It's a light/touch sensitive synthesizer thingamajig! LDRs for the eyes, and custom-made PCB touchplates on the sides. The kids had a blast exploring this.

Hope all the Hubskiers are having a good start to 2020 2.0!

Thanks for making the world a little better.

Hey man, we gotta push back the dark somehow.

An old hubski sticker on a long-since retired journal begs the question, "What can be learned?" Not to box anyone into a particular interpretation, but the question has always felt ambitious to me - it's a guiding light of the discourse we have here, a fundamental principle from which all goals can be derived. It's also a question from a frame of mind that feels incredibly foreign right now, but searching for the emotional means to express myself...The incongruity of it feels nostalgic, and I think that nostalgia bears the mark of an ambition that I've set down for the time being.

It was a guiding principle before, and I think that principle has changed meaning for me while we all search for normalcy: The goal is to return to the mindset that created this account in the first place. The ennui is dissonance between the goals that we made and the reality we're living, and "What can be learned?" is a lighthouse back to the person who made those goals.

If I can stick with that understanding, I think I'll come out of this a little stronger. Sorry for rambling, I hope the purple prose doesn't eclipse my meaning.

We had our first birth in the birth center last night. Success. And we get to bill for nitrous. That means the infernal machine needs to be used only nineteen more times to pay for itself. My daughter, on the other hand, called for attention every time I was about to fall asleep for the first two hours and then woke up from a screaming, bawling nightmare. My wife is asleep in the other room which prevents me from finishing the background pass on the not-very-good movie, unless I put on headphones, which I hate doing when I'm doing surround work.

Our burn rate is a few thousand dollars higher per month than we anticipated, due entirely to construction delays. This means it will be longer before the center is profitable. Nonetheless, confidence is high. My wife pointed out last night that it was effectively equivalent to me putting her through college all over again. This morning I'm mulling over the fact that aside from a brief, glorious nine months between relationships in 2002, and a semi-refreshing, maybe-we'll-make-it period of about a year before we had our daughter, I have given over the overwhelming majority of my earnings to the care of others for more than 20 years now.

I'm partly bitter about that and partly contemplative. A friend of mine was in Variety on Friday because he's got a show set up with Granada and Netflix. He, of course, came to LA about a year after I did. Then his wife (whose family is not just wealthy, they're royal) supported him while he did free work for two solid years, had two kids, went through treatment twice and lived i a $4k/mo apartment while we were grinding dried placentas to make ends meet. They don't tell you that: if you're trying to break in while earning a living, you're breaking in against dilettantes with zero cost-of-failure and infinite hang-time. Then Sunday I discovered that another below-the-line friend had died of a heart attack at 36.

It's all about anchoring, I guess. I've got a tree surgeon coming over to tell me what it's going to cost to make sure the three massive firs in the back don't fall on the house. I'm hoping I can afford it. At the same time I was talking to the neighbor Sunday; her roof is leaking because she got a deal from another neighbor's then-boyfriend but he's a junkie now so whatever warranty there was, yeah notsomuch anymore. Meanwhile they're building out, not up, because it's cheaper, because there's seven of them in there, six adults, and they've got one bathroom and fewer square feet than we do, and one of them is in a wheelchair. But she's on 100% disability, her daughter is on 100% disability, her son works two jobs, both of which are custodial, her one grandson got thrown out of his mom's house for fighting and her other grandson -

He was howling Sunday. Not sure why. It was dark, there was lots of shouting. We're debating calling CPS. He hangs out with me but he's rough. He's eight and enjoys the company of my 4-year-old daughter who is brighter than him by far. He's on the spectrum among other things and he breaks stuff. We let him play with our daughter out doors but he's not allowed in our house unless one of his family members are there. And we're crowded with three people and all our shit in this house but fuckin'A we can still park a car in the garage. They've got seven people in there and I don't even know who the seventh is.

They're building out. They're getting a loan. The contractor is a friend of a friend which worked out oh-so-well last time, right? There's seven of them, two fixed incomes and maybe three jobs between them, none of which make much money. I mean, they've got a blue tarp keeping the rain off half the house (not the roof leak; apparently that's just sort of happening without any remediation).

Anchoring. I don't have a blue tarp keeping the rain out of the family room, my toilet-to-person ratio is 1.5, and we have retirement savings as if we were 20 years older than we are now. And I'm not in Variety but I'm not in the ground, either. And as formidable as our burn rate is, we fuckin' made it this month.

This month, anyway.

"Remember, politics aside, no matter the outcome we're all neighbors. That's something worth holding onto."

I've been ruminating on just this thing all week. I don't give a damn who wins as long as Chloe Eudaly beats Steve Novice for city council. I've talked at least 4 people into voting for her (maybe as many as a dozen). It's a close race and Steve has spent ten times the money Chloe has. If I ever ran for office I'd shake the hand of every damn bartender and barista in the city and give them a campaign T-shirt.

I liked that Chloe used comic as a campaign device.

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