A list of a few things that I’ve been interested in recently.

  • Met Marco Salsiccia and found his BlindSVG generator and lots of other cool materials on his website
  • Andrew Stone showed me KnowHow Shop’s ceramics studio for the blind ceramicist Don Katz, which used 1:1 prototypes of construction details as the primary design method
  • In that vein, I enjoyed Abraham Cruz Villegas Art21 short on Autoconstrucción, a direct construction practice based on self-built architecture in Mexico City
  • One of my favorite artists, Lenka Clayton, was in the recent Human Nature episode of Art21
  • Have been designing wall sections for the hosue at Perkins, and thus revisiting Andrea Deplazes
  • Some of the work of Rael San Fratello has some tactile interest
  • Have loved picking through the reading list on Life, Nature, Time, Community & Happiness at the end of Samin Nosrat’s cookbook Good Things, and oppositely, have just started Misery Meals
  • A conversation with Lavendar Darcangelo has me revisiting plain language, and thinking about the tension in Crip Authorship between Mel Y. Chen’s “to hell with accessible writing” piece and Kelsey Acton’s plain language manifesto
  • Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant has been interesting
  • Have almost finished Paul Fry’s open course on Literary Theory. It’s almost fifteen years old, but the final four lectures have been immensely helpful in grounding some ambivalence I’ve been feeling around disability as identity

Have also divested from a few things:

  • Have replaced google search with Kagi (weird politics, horrible accessibility backslide, and nonconsensual AI is getting to be too much.) You’re next GMail!
  • Also shifting out of Adobe into free and open source programs like GIMP, Krita, and Typest.
  • Still love Rhino, and vibe-coding actually lets me bypass huge parts of the visual interface, have been talking with their developer team about making it more blind-friendly. May be pretty close to a totally nonvisual 3D modeling workflow there.
  • I’m waiting for the Microsoft divestments to feel possible. Maybe I should just jump ship and start using EMacSpeak? The surveillance technology in Gaza is sickening.
  • Have not boycotted OpenAI, like everyone else in academia seems to be doing these days, but there’s definitely a lot of ambivalence there. More in this in the future.