I was part of the Trail Art performance put on by the Inner Fish Theatre Society, and not to dump on the project, but the performance itself meant absolutely nothing to me.

That’s part of what was interesting about the experience, because the experience had a lot of value, and I wonder how many people felt the same way. It might be a perspective that I’m very late to the party on.

Of course audiences, and in fact us actors ourselves really want to to derive meaning from a performance, and it’s not uncommon for auteurs and those adjacent to circumvent textual meaning, but the actual performance of this event seemed to be irrelevant compared to its construction and delivery.

We were letters on a hillside, we had a direct message to convey in literal text, and the director had an artistic vision on how to express that text, but it was very flexible and constantly evolved right up until the formal delivery. Each of us amateaur, volunteer performers brought a unique aspect to the development and deployment of the scene, and I’m sure every audience member took away an interpretation just as unique and derivitive.

Regardless of what the formal intentions were for anyone there, I can’t imagine the grand message of it all being anything other than “community”. I’m very grateful, and derived a lot of meaning from having met and worked with all these different people, even if I personally thought the project was in structure rather meaningless. That’s not a critique, I just wonder how intentional that take away is from a director standpoint, and how many other experiences in my life have been missing this insight.

I’ve replaced fuses in my stereo system with magnets where ever I can find them. Now I’ve learned that they still function as fuses! Sort of. They’re not tuned to a specific voltage, but once they got hot they demagnetized and fell apart. That saved my amplifier this time. Good to know.

Canadians and American’s are often vocal of how they love to support freedom, yet many of these most vocal proponents are very directly pro-slavery. Our society has a movement corruptly labled as “quiet quitting” and is considered “anti work”, but the definition of that action is to do no more than what your job contracts. That is the very basis of employment. We’ve normalized the basis of work to be a form of “quitting”.

In fact, it is the moral obligation of anyone who supports freedom to oppose working more than what a job contractually entails, and of course for employers to ask no more. Admitedly, in many mundane ways this can be bothersome, but these obligations are amongst the only ways to keep power on the side of labour. To do otherwise normalizes uncompensated labour; that is slavery.

Employment enables freedom by trading labour for needed material resources like food and shelter, but at a point once freedom is enabled and stable, one begins trading their own freedom for resources that no longer support it. You can’t trade freedom for more freedom. Anyone who considers themselves on the side of freedom against slavery should be striving to strike that balance before employment becomes slavery; and spread freedom enabling resources as wide as possible.

By lodhart, then brimstone326. So, not my design, but it is probably the most complicated thing I’ve printed so far… complicated as in lots of small bits. I’m very happy that the process came together as smoothly as it did. Even happier that Snapmaker finally fixed their pause print feature so it doesn’t spit out the filament when I try to change colors. So liberating when I can make gradients and add transparencies.

A relationship begs, and loathes, the meeting of expectations.