The Funk

As I opened up my editor to draft this post, I realized my first attempt at doing so was 5/4/26, three months ago. Oof.

I've been in a funk.

In fairness, I broke my kneecap right before I was due to pick up a brand new bike build, and it was a long recovery. (Leg immobilization for a subjective eternity and thankfully no surgery.) But the computer stuff that had been fun became a lot less fun when my ass was glued to the couch on doctor's orders.

My kneecap is whole again and I am mobile, albeit stiff. I have a new bike that rides like a dream. And the usual delights of summer in Chicago have been delightful, as usual. But the funk has been persistent—a miasmatic melancholy that's led to a lot of starting up at ceilings and sighing at nothing in particular. I have a summer birthday; maybe it was confluence of time passing and human frailty that got me down. Or current events continue to be a huge bummer. Or both.

Regardless, I've stumbling my way toward clearer psychic air and there have been rays of inspiration. I'm very excited to have been selected as a speaker at the Women in Experimentation Summit where I'll be speaking about AI in experimentation and being confidently wrong. I'm also going to be moderating some panels at the TLC Happy Hour in Chicago.

I've also been building some tools for music-making that I'm quite proud of: Hadamard, a webMIDI modulation matrix for adding more movement and expression to electronic instruments; and Bienaymé, a generative sequencer that can drive multiple, complementary voices. I'm particularly stoked on the latter—my imposter syndrome or musician's block is such that writing one part is nerve-wracking enough, let alone supporting parts. I've got a few more music-making ideas in the hopper, but I'm still feeling out their shapes before talking more about them. And then silly things like behold. Sometimes I just need to suspend a session and simply... behold.

Keeping up with AI in industry is honestly exhausting. (And that's only after really starting to follow it the last six months.) So doing some silly things to refine workflows and pressure test ideas seems to be leading me toward some kind of summit where I can stick my head up above the fog of the funk.