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Covid in the body, horse on the mind

2022-07-01

3 minute read

What it's all about

I want to keep a journal while I'm on break, and hopefully beyond.

This journal will be mainly for art/work journalling; A place for documenting process, for collecting thoughts, for reflection, and for practice.

This journal is mainly for me, but it benefits me and others if I write it in a way that expects other people to read it. Future Louis is a stranger, yet I imagine he might appreciate the effort.

I've been wanting to write more for a while now, the most recent inspiration was this interview with Jack Self. I like Real Review, and Self talks about the importance of writing in developing his own ideas and design practice.

I'm at the beginning of a 3 month slowdown and break for full time, employed work. I think writing this journal will help keep me accountable to myself, and help give me continued reflection and analysis of the goals I've set and how I'm tracking to reach them. I haven't yet condensed the goals into sentences; They currently existing as lists and brain-storms on paper. Rest assured, when they are neat little sentences they will find their way into this journal.

Truth is I didn't even intend to start this journal until much later, as I am still working part time and giving myself a little time for decompression. Unfortunately my body let it's guard down a little too far and now I've been in bed for the last 2 days with 6 and a half more days of isolation ahead of me. Small mercy is it's given me time on my hands like never I've had before - time in fact even to start early on this journal.

horse on the mind

I've spent the last two days in bed and in my room working on a new iteration of /forge, the editing tool I use to create the comics for return.horse.

Inspired by this article about folk interfaces, I've redesigned it to accomodate the drafting and idea generation methods I'm currently doing on paper. Not sure if it will work out being all I dreamed, but it's been fun to spin up after getting over the initial tooling overthink barrier.

I was very preoccuppied with how to make it

Of course, as always, the answer is in the making. Once I started building it with what I knew (js and html) the answers began to unravel. On top of that, I tried using drawbot to render them and didn't like the slight variation in the font compared to the js canvas ones. It might have just been a scaling issue, but it was enough to remind me that I'd already done a lot of work in js and html, especially regarding return.horse.

I read a little bit about design patterns and browsed the source for Ronin while building out scrappy tests for draggable note creation and storage.

the plan

A browser based interface for conceptualising, creating, and previewing comics.

An express server for saving the files from the interface and building the main site.

This way I can easily run it on my computer, and should the need arise I should be able to deploy it to a server online easily enough (authentication can wait until then).

I got stuck and frustrated for a while trying to add structure hints to the sparse text input. I eventually took a break and realised this wasn't necessary for the tool and was taking up much too much time.

Here's a video of my progress so far, made to show my friend Benjamin

takeaways

listening to

something else

This new tool makes strong use of the computer mouse to move and organise my ideas.

"we move the mouse through our world, and the mouse moves us through its world"
Emma Rae Bruml - Complication of the Computer Mouse, the mouse holds us