daiyi

Californian alpinist writing code and making drawings in Berlin ✨

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my sweet mountain boie

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kabocha stickers!! Possibly the best things I've ever made.

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Mount Banner, backpacking in the high Sierra ✨

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Watercolours from Sierra backpacking (:

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I journal a lot, in plaintext files, sometimes braindumps of recent thoughts and feelings, other times basically lists of events that happened (so I can remember situation details for later and comic journal about them never). 

I will occasionally open up journals from a year or two ago, skim them, and close them in cringing disgust, mostly an exercise in PAINFUL SELF-AWARENESS. I was telling marco about this phenomenon on the phone today, and happened to have my computer in front of me with the text editor open so I picked a text file from last year and started reading from the top, to demonstrate how comically terrible self-reflection is in hindsight. 

UNEXPECTEDLY I ended up reading a couple days worth of pretty cool things that happened to me! and some pretty ok feelings too, which is weird because I distinctly remember going through some rough emotional times in february 2017 (I was in new york, it was winter, I didn’t have a bicycle). I remembered that I was commuting way too many hours up the hudson to hang out with kat, and I was still getting on the G in the wrong direction, and I was helping my friend take the lead test at the gym which he failed and started yelling at the climbing instructor for, which made me uncomfortable, but later I ran into some of the cool routesetters I’d met at a routesetting clinic I took the week before. and then lillyan came over and we streamed a political debate on the tv.  the week after, lexande was in town and came by to see me. (’:

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This colour informs the nutrient content *_*

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When someone asks me how I am, I usually pause a bit because I don’t have that information cached and gotta evaluate. People like to comment on the pause, like you only hesitate if you got something bad on your mind, but sometimes it takes time for the brain to remember the good things too.

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the bones of life infrastructure prototyping sprint cycles

even before I decided to make cutting loose from space & time a full-time job, I’ve been spending my entire life hopping from one timebox to the next. In times of high agency, purposefully running myself against a clock to squeeze the best out of an experience. In times of desperation, force-feeding a circumstance with the promise that the end is a known destination and the externality will be excisable in a clean temporal cut. I was thinking about how I’d been living the last two years in 3-to-12 week sprints: 3 months in new york, 3 weeks in california, a month hitchhiking through eastern europe, three months in berlin, 2 weeks in the uk, three more months in berlin, a couple more weeks in california, 6 weeks in new zealand–on and on, endless prototypes of possible lives, each booted up with the expiry date prestamped.

my projects are similarly hack/draft-based: WIP screenshots, algorithmic experiments, midnight pushes to master, comic strips, zines, and doodles, never murals or books or prints or a foundation anyone depends on. I never ship anything, it’s almost charming (comics and zines and doodles and games with a rough edge are cute). I have never tried to build and curate and finish something, not a project, or my personal life infrastructure (the biggest project). And I think this is the very crux of why I am struggling so fucking hard to adjust right now. yes, I have been an adult before, at least two other times minimum. but this is the very first iteration that I didn’t go into with a cutoff date. this is not a drill. this one is the real deal. I have worked v hard to assemble the components of something nice, and now I have to construct the pipeline and the infrastructure to run it long and good.

The permanent game takes a different kind of muscle, which I have never tried to develop. I’m straining my prototyping tendons doing old patterns with this new life which means I keep breaking myself over and over. I need to build a new skeleton, some bones to keep me up on the order of years, maybe even my personal forever. I’m so impatient though, I want it to be 3 years from now, when I can finally rest in peace in the novelty-free zone and take comfort (and pride!) in a smooth-running machine that I will have built.

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Clone babies from the mothership.

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I'm still trying to unpack why, but every feeling feels so permanent while they are changing so quickly. When I'm worn and overcommitted I feel as if I've been running on empty my entire life. The moment I slip from my healthy routine of exercise and eating it feels like I have been a trash fire since I was born. When I'm happy it is an incredible lightness stretching into the horizon in all dimensions. I'm experiencing each moment for a thousand years, I have somehow lost my grip on relative time and it is thrilling and exhausting.

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THEY'RE COMING IN

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I found these photos from Switzerland, it feels like two lifetimes ago already.

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look how normal and happy we are

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winning the body game

you know how sometimes you suddenly get super into something very impractical (like pulling an all-nighter on a workday reskinning your linux desktop theme, why would anyone ever do that)–last summer I somehow became oddly obsessed with consuming the bare minimum nutrients to like not be catalysing my own vital organs. it had a similar appeal to ultralight throughhiking except you can keep at it for months at a time without becoming profoundly lonely, and you’re not in danger of being ingested by bears (just yourself).

I have this hypothesis about how nerds get suckered into eating disorders and it’s because your body is actually a huge iterative strategy game that you CAN win by meticulous planning and execution. and you don’t even need to get a committed group of friends to meet n times a week for m weeks to make progress! Sometimes the compulsion to win the game of my body manifests v positively (like having a really solid climbing/running/swimming training schedule) but other times it goes horribly wrong (recreational starvation).

I’m thinking about this right now because through a series of miscalculations I’ve gotten into the terrible habit of putting everything I see into my mouth without regard to how horrible it makes me feel and I can SEE MY THOUGHTS steering into the direction of applying my skills and knowledge of recreational starvation to this problem. these are bad thoughts. I’m hoping talking about it publically will force me to think of a better idea, but actually what will probably happen is I’ll secretly be starving myself while cosplaying a normal person, because I am very clever and full of just the right amount of self-hatred.

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how about a bowl of ramen o/

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When I think of fall I think

drinking tea from old glass pickle jars, precariously gripping the threads to carry them out to the rooftops because we couldn’t help but fill them to the brim with steaming water. Berkeley and bicycles and bouldering—crisp nights, crisp mornings. The kind of chill you can be comfortable in with a hoodie and flip flops, mornings that look like late afternoon, days that come with tired sunlight. Cooking the most delicious ramen with every possible ingredient we could imagine. Putting off uncertain future trajectories with nice music and adventures into the hills and small gifts, climbing up trees and putting up our hammocks, staying up really late and getting up really early, walking on the windy coast and tracking sand back into the car. 

(It’s so silly that I don’t feel alive unless I’m pushing myself to the brink of death, like the threat of falling apart lets my brain loosen to experience a wider range of emotions.)

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yesterday, I saw an old friend.

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Packed for 4+ sports and ready for NZ!(?)