Hi people!
I hope that, if you’re in the northern hemisphere and sufficiently far from the equator to experience seasons, you are enjoying the spring weather. Here in New Haven, CT, it’s been raining a lot lately; the upside is that all of the plants are thriving. Whenever it’s not raining, I’ve been spending as much time as I can outside.
If I’m being totally honest, while the weather is helping me feel optimistic lately, there has also been a lot of other stuff that is doing the opposite. I have had to make a strong effort to avoid spending more than a few minutes on social media and news feeds per day, or else risk catching a debilitating case of gloom. But even avoiding these things doesn’t make the job market any better or the cost of basic needs any lower, and it’s hard to imagine that any of the terrible things going on right now will stop any time soon. Normally I reserve this topic for in-person conversation, but at this point it feels strange not to mention it at all. Thankfully, I also have some exciting and fun things going on as well, so I will share a few of them here. Hopefully they will brighten your day a little too, and help offset the other stuff just a tiny bit.
After my last update in March, I had a very busy spell where I played two shows, taught a workshop, and finished off my six-week batch at Recurse Center — along with the coding projects I was working on during that time. Afterwards, I managed to gather a bit of documentation about each of these things on my blog.
I also made a short 2 minute cut of some footage from my show at Union Docs:
Lastly, I wrote a bit about the projects I worked on at Recurse Center in depth on my blog, but the two main things were:
And:
I had a very fun and productive time during my retreat at RC, and have kept in touch with some folks from the community there. But it was also a bit intense! So after finishing all of these things, I tried to take a bit of a break.
In April, I resumed working on freelance projects, mainly building websites and running AV tech for events. (I still have some availability for freelance website and coding work — if you need anything, get in touch!) I am still hoping to find more long-term employment soon, and have been throwing all of my spare energy towards that, but I haven’t had much luck yet. So I’ll just keep stitching various things together for now. (It is really not a great time(/economy) to be job searching in; solidarity to anyone else who’s in that boat right now.)
I also took some time to expand and improve my own website. I added a sidebar for desktop and a hamburger menu for mobile, which enabled me to add more pages to the main navigation. I also renamed my “work” section to “art” and created a new section called “code” to house a portfolio of my coding and web projects.
If you haven’t seen my website in a while, I invite you to give it a visit and poke around a little!
Lastly, another thing I’ve been excited about lately is that I gained access to the silkscreen facilities at MakeHaven, my local makerspace. I don’t want to share photos yet, in case anyone is on here that hasn’t received theirs yet, but I did my first print run and sent them out to members of the Zine Club Mystery Object tier. I look forward to doing some more silkscreen printing and maybe making some patches or T shirts!
All right, that’s probably enough for now. Thanks for reading this, keep in touch, and I wish you well.
Best,
Paloma Kop
