Midterm: This Is Where I’m At and Where I Think I Am Going
I made another presentation and kept digging into craft culture.
This week I took a slight break from reading to focus on the presentation. While I continued to make my way through Making is Connecting, I realized I needed to spend more time than I thought formulating my slide deck and distilling my thoughts.
First, the process of distilling my thoughts.
To try to get my thoughts together I made a mind map for this project that had my three main topics with a bunch of subtopics that came up in my reading over the past few weeks.
This is the mess map that was created as a result.
Then came the herculean task of distilling these connections into a 5-minute presentation that had to be recorded.
I will admit that I do not like listening to or hearing recordings of myself so this was an interesting experience.
I am however trying to distill some bigger ideas in this presentation that I don’t think are coming across well. I wanted to go into some of the shared verbiage and parallels I’d observed but I didn’t want the presentation to run too long or have too many tangents.
The threads are still percolating and I am sure they’ll come together after I get back to reading as I have been in the next week.
And then I found a book I didn’t know existed.
I have done a little more poking around in trying to distill my topic a little bit further for a research statement and in doing so I found a book that sounds perfect for the intersections I found on my mess map.
Techgnosis by Erik Davis came up on a list of occult scholars, and given my interest in technopaganism, I think this will fit well into some ideas I have surrounding mysticism and computers.
And a look at my personal knitting practice this week.
I took out an old project and started working on that to decompress. This project is a sock yarn blanket made of scraps and mitered squares. I started this project back when I was an undergrad and have two in the works: one for myself and one for my parents.
Over about a year I accumulated a lot of sock yarn minis (5 gram balls of fingering weight sock yarn) that should allow me to finish both. I want to finish this one in particular by May because it’s meant to be for my parents and I kind of don’t want to move with it.
If I keep going the way I am moving now, I will hopefully have this done this January.
