Rebuilding a foundation as the ground crumbles away

First of all, I want to say I hope you and your loved ones are doing as well as can be expected in these times. I want to give you all an update on how I'm doing personally and on my work, but I also feel like none of that is important enough to matter at this point, and perhaps none of it has ever been important to anyone. This project that I've been trying to turn into something worthwhile for years now, just seems wholly incapable of meeting the moment we are in.

So, most importantly, if you are in any kind of financial hardship right now, if you are in an industry that has been affected, if you have a sick loved one or an out of work roommate, please put your resources toward helping yourself right now, I really only want folks to donate to me if they can afford it. I'm doing okay right now, I have a stable place to live and enough money for my immediate needs. I don't know if I have anything useful to contribute right now, I am trying to figure that out, but I really can't ask anyone else to be responsible for it or to bare any hardship while I navigate my own mess.

Tuco and I have been doing alright so far this year. My biggest challenges have been just setting up my physical environment, dealing with paperwork, and trying to nurture a little bit of mental health. And finding community. I have my studio mostly set up now, but I haven't made any friends in my new city yet.

I want to build online community, but when I try, I can't help but have powerful feels about platforms. I feel really strongly that centralization and the reliance on big tech companies to mediate all forms of communication are a serious problem that I have some responsibility to work on. It's just depressing to try and build any kind of durable community on the foundation of something like youtube or discord. The decentralized platforms have their own problems of course, and it's harder to find people in a sparsely populated space, but it feels like a healthier foundation to build on.

Diode Zone (https://diode.zone) has been going well I think. It's still quite small as far as video sites go, but it's one of the more popular PeerTube instances. It has 436 registered users, and just passed 30k video views. There are several other creative types posting videos there now, and content moderation has been okay so far. I get the occasional spammer and the occasional person who obviously never read the rules, but most people seem good!

It's been frustrating seeing Zoom get so much free press just because people are using it by default. Just about every piece of tech has tradeoffs now in convenience and privacy, but it just occupies this niche I find especially infuriating, in the intersection of "is basically malware" and "should not even need installation". So I was looking into open web conferencing, preferably something that runs in-browser and has no opportunity to be a shady app in the first place. That search turned up Jitsi, which is quite easy to use in the cloud (https://meet.jit.si) or you can install it on your own server.

The past two scanlime-in-progress livestreams were call-in shows where anyone could join with text/video/audio. I used jitsi for that, and we luckily had a friendly small group, but there are no moderation features really so I didn't expect it to stay that way forever. Then I got a tip about another open source project called BigBlueButton (https://bigbluebutton.org), which is also a web conferencing tool but this time it includes moderation and presentation features designed specifically for online classrooms. I'm pretty excited about this so far, so I set up an instance on a spare machine: https://meet.diode.zone. There's a room that I plan on using as a hangout for stream viewers and friends, https://join.scanlime.org, feel free to drop by any time.

I will try to keep folks up to date often. And now that I'm back to streaming kinda frequently, be sure to follow @ScanlimeLive on twitter or scanlime on twitch to get announcements when I'm going live.

As for the next edited projects... I have a lot of footage on the shelf right now, and several partially-edited projects. The thing I've been working on most recently though has been the time lapse of my isopod terrarium. I saved almost a year of continuous recording from the microscope in there, and over the past few months I've had an automated tool running to time-compress those videos in a way that focuses on motion and skips over still frames. I've been cleaning that footage up a bit more, with the intent of having a long-running chill sort of ambient video. I'm not sure where that's going really, it might just become b-roll or background footage for another project, or I might upload it as-is, or I may try to put audio to it again.

Thanks for reading this, and thank you for your support. Be well, wash your hands, pet your cats.