End January Update
I’m flying off in 3 days and I’m antsy, so I’m posting this blogpost a little early since I’ll be out the whole day tomorrow anyway.
Sunday at SCAPE: Ground Loops, Labour Block, and Consensual Hacking workshop
When I saw in the SFPC newsletter that they were coming to Singapore I was like no wayyyy lol. I enjoyed the Ground Loops exhibition, but that might just be because I missed going to exhibitions. A particular work I liked was The Public Repository of Canned Laughter / Applause (2026 - ongoing) by bani haykal. The perspective from which you stepped into the artwork caught my eye, not angled like a TV show but like a spider in the corner of the room watching you. Being watched, reacted to, you react back, you watch. Lovely artwork. The tour guide (she was Ashley Hi I think?) described their group’s practice as academia, “research through artworks”. Maybe that’s flowery language, but it did make me think for a second “Ouyah, I guess I never questioned why academia is always papers.”
Listening to this gallery walk momentarily gave me the mild existential crisis of “It’s too late for me to be an artist, isn’t it?” and then I have to quell that thought and tell myself I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed this industry anyway. When feeling jealous I always have to remind myself of what I’m even being jealous of.
There was a bit of time before the workshop so I checked out Labour Block at the ground theatre. I think 6 months of that self imposed buy ban has just stripped me of all material desires, everything I saw I just thought “This is cool but I don’t need this stuff at all lol.” I ended up only buying a postcard for my sister.
Workers Make Possible had a booth there and I chatted with one of the employees as I looked through their zines. He was doing this alongside his architecture job and there was quiet solidarity between us workaholics. Talked more about the 12 cupcakes situation as well. Tbh I was having a mindfart moment because I had just come from work, didn’t really ask a lot during the exhibition tour either even though I love doing that usually.
He asked if I’d like to volunteer and I said I’d think about it. It looks like it could be an interesting use of my time but the thought of having to edit one of their Instagram reels makes me nauseous. I’ve had to do a bit of thinking of what kind of internship I want to do as well, because I still can’t stand the idea of doing marketing or even regular graphic design despite that literally being what I’m studying. Maybe this is also contributing to my anxiety of being an artist.
Then the Consensual Hacking workshop, led by Melanie Hoff. The “hacking” part only lasted maybe 10 minutes, but I found the earlier part of the workshop much more interesting anyway. Beautiful even, Hoff’s perspective on consent, as being more than a yes or no.
Because how do you say yes to an experience you can’t know will go well? To an experience you know won’t go well. Surely, I want new experiences despite that, I want to discover new pleasures, and I can tolerate a few trips in search of that. She mentioned an article that I don’t remember the name of, talking about consent supposedly being this bridge between me and the other.
There’s no such thing as informed consent. When I shake your hand I don’t know what you (or I) have touched that day. I don’t know the names of everyone who has built my laptop. I don’t know the boundaries of the cookies a website collects from me. I say yes, I enthusiastically consent to many things when I don’t know what I’m getting into. I have not consented to the world, the state I was born into, yet I’m here anyway.
Despite these dilemmas my takeaway was to be more tender rather than careless. I cannot assume that if I tolerate roughness onto me I will be able to bite back. I consent to bad experiences as much as I can, and I’ll hold them carefully close to me.
I appreciate the intersectional approach Hoff takes to viewing computers and code. I resonated with it right away. For a while now I’ve been of the opinion that there is so much to learn about ourselves from the computer, something tailored so specifically, always changing for us. The trope of the cold, inhuman cyborg is interesting because the computer is such a personal thing, sitting in your lap and facing you always. Of framing the world through code but also seeing code as a product of the world. The first computers, as Hoff would say, were humans after all. Part of me wishes I took notes, but the other half knows I wouldn’t be able to make sense of them anyway.
Guy next to me didn't bring a laptop so I let him hack on mine. He was wayy better at bash than me anyway
Making my Portfolio Site
Finally got around to doing this after itching to do so for half a year now. The design was very much inspired by Chia Amisola’s sites, specifically whenwe.love and chia.design. Can you tell I'm obsessed with gradients?.
The HTML and CSS was the same old stuff, more interesting was this is my first time using a custom domain name (thought sooo hard about it and I think the one I settled on is pretty cute ^^) as well as a paid web hosting service, NearlyFreeSpeech. I was attracted by their “pay only what you need” model, but then I learnt this meant there really wasn’t any handholding, much of the trouble shooting I’d had to do myself (though their FAQ is pretty well rounded anyway). Main new thing was learning how to use SFTP, which was simple enough once I figured it out though a little slow. Coincidentally, my first encounter with SSH was in the Consensual Hacking workshop, it’s what we used to “hack” into the computer of others!
I live with a pretty good level of cognitive dissonance, I can post on Instagram without a second thought. But curating a website concentrated with all my favourite works made me think “hmm, maybe I should at least have a robots.txt.”
License: https://www.stayherewith.me/license.xml
User-agent: ia_archiver
User-agent: MojeekBot
User-agent: search.marginalia.nu
Disallow:
# List of bots below taken from https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt
User-agent: AddSearchBot
User-agent: AI2Bot
User-agent: AI2Bot-DeepResearchEval
User-agent: Ai2Bot-Dolma
User-agent: aiHitBot
User-agent: amazon-kendra
User-agent: Amazonbot
User-agent: AmazonBuyForMe
User-agent: Andibot
User-agent: Anomura
User-agent: anthropic-ai
User-agent: Applebot
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
User-agent: atlassian-bot
User-agent: Awario
User-agent: bedrockbot
User-agent: bigsur.ai
User-agent: Bravebot
User-agent: Brightbot 1.0
User-agent: BuddyBot
User-agent: Bytespider
User-agent: CCBot
User-agent: Channel3Bot
User-agent: ChatGLM-Spider
User-agent: ChatGPT Agent
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
User-agent: Claude-User
User-agent: Claude-Web
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: Cloudflare-AutoRAG
User-agent: CloudVertexBot
User-agent: cohere-ai
User-agent: cohere-training-data-crawler
User-agent: Cotoyogi
User-agent: Crawl4AI
User-agent: Crawlspace
User-agent: Datenbank Crawler
User-agent: DeepSeekBot
User-agent: Devin
User-agent: Diffbot
User-agent: DuckAssistBot
User-agent: Echobot Bot
User-agent: EchoboxBot
User-agent: FacebookBot
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
User-agent: Factset_spyderbot
User-agent: FirecrawlAgent
User-agent: FriendlyCrawler
User-agent: Gemini-Deep-Research
User-agent: Google-CloudVertexBot
User-agent: Google-Extended
User-agent: Google-Firebase
User-agent: Google-NotebookLM
User-agent: GoogleAgent-Mariner
User-agent: GoogleOther
User-agent: GoogleOther-Image
User-agent: GoogleOther-Video
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: iAskBot
User-agent: iaskspider
User-agent: iaskspider/2.0
User-agent: IbouBot
User-agent: ICC-Crawler
User-agent: ImagesiftBot
User-agent: imageSpider
User-agent: img2dataset
User-agent: ISSCyberRiskCrawler
User-agent: Kangaroo Bot
User-agent: KlaviyoAIBot
User-agent: KunatoCrawler
User-agent: laion-huggingface-processor
User-agent: LAIONDownloader
User-agent: LCC
User-agent: LinerBot
User-agent: Linguee Bot
User-agent: LinkupBot
User-agent: Manus-User
User-agent: meta-externalagent
User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
User-agent: meta-externalfetcher
User-agent: Meta-ExternalFetcher
User-agent: meta-webindexer
User-agent: MistralAI-User
User-agent: MistralAI-User/1.0
User-agent: MyCentralAIScraperBot
User-agent: netEstate Imprint Crawler
User-agent: NotebookLM
User-agent: NovaAct
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: omgili
User-agent: omgilibot
User-agent: OpenAI
User-agent: Operator
User-agent: PanguBot
User-agent: Panscient
User-agent: panscient.com
User-agent: Perplexity-User
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: PetalBot
User-agent: PhindBot
User-agent: Poggio-Citations
User-agent: Poseidon Research Crawler
User-agent: QualifiedBot
User-agent: QuillBot
User-agent: quillbot.com
User-agent: SBIntuitionsBot
User-agent: Scrapy
User-agent: SemrushBot-OCOB
User-agent: SemrushBot-SWA
User-agent: ShapBot
User-agent: Sidetrade indexer bot
User-agent: Spider
User-agent: TavilyBot
User-agent: TerraCotta
User-agent: Thinkbot
User-agent: TikTokSpider
User-agent: Timpibot
User-agent: TwinAgent
User-agent: VelenPublicWebCrawler
User-agent: WARDBot
User-agent: Webzio-Extended
User-agent: webzio-extended
User-agent: wpbot
User-agent: WRTNBot
User-agent: YaK
User-agent: YandexAdditional
User-agent: YandexAdditionalBot
User-agent: YouBot
User-agent: ZanistaBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
DisallowAITraining: /
Content-Usage: ai=n
Made with some referencing from this thread on the 32-bit cafe discourse. In addition to everything here I’ve got a noarchive meta tag in the head of my html files to opt out of Bing’s AI training. I’m also well aware these measures are nothing in the face of AI scrapers making new user agents (or just simply ignoring my robots.txt), but at least I tried!
Media Wrap Up
I’ve got a longer media wrap up this time. For TV shows I’ve already written a review on Pluribus. JJBA watching has slowed to a crawl on account of my sister being really busy with school, but I did read that one spinoff, Shining Diamond’s Demonic Heartbreak. It’s really good! A nice little afterwards for all the characters involved. I liked Ryoko Kakyoin’s character a surprising amount. Like wow, I can’t believe they have a woman who’s an actually compelling character!1 I liked it enough that I bought the physical volumes for my sister.
About halfway through the month I read through Eva Baltasar’s translated books. Permafrost was my personal favourite, just because it was the most relevant to me. I finished the book before bed and spent the minutes before falling asleep staring at my ceiling just thinking about the book, thinking ohhhh my godddd.
It was good enough that I read the translator’s afterword, because the distinct style of the books made me wonder how much of it was the author’s original intention and what else were Julia Sanchez’s words? She gave her own interpretations in her notes too, it was a very interesting read.
The result is an intensity of feeling, something the protagonist both craves and balks at. Hence the permafrost, the thick layer of ice she’s thrown up to protect her inner life from the living that’s happening outside. Hence her fixation on sex, which allows her to safely bridge the two. Yet, if there is a conflict between the external and the internal, between thought and body, body and world, there is none around the objects of the body’s desire.
That separation between the internal and external is very clear in the writing of Permafrost and Boulder, you are only privy to the inner thoughts of the protagonist and feel rather disconnected from whatever situation they’re in. In that regard I do admire Mammoth for being so viscerally grounded in its presentation of the farmland and its cruelty. As the protagonist describes about her house not having a bathroom,
I like that I have to focus on the essentials. How the need for a bathtub drives away all my more trivial thoughts.
Sorry for the excessive quotes, Baltasar’s books are just Quotable like that. This is already longer than intended but idk I like her books a lot!!! I love the messiness of all 3 women, how they internalise the conditions they’ve been exposed to, just so much to chew on!!!
As of writing this I have also just finished The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. This was really good too! I was afraid of getting overwhelmed by the world building (as I tend to be with science fiction/fantasy) but it was completely fine. It was just enough for me to appreciate the attention to detail, I especially loved the deliberations on the meanings and connotations of Karhidish words. It was just really easy to get sucked into it as well, I’ve already got another book of hers in my kindle.
Links
I see other bloggers share interesting links they've found at the end of their updates and that's something I want to cultivate as well.
David Horvitz’s Mood Disorder: a series where he tracks the proliferation of a photograph of him across the internet.
Richard Johnson and his beautiful illustrations.
How Might We Inhabit the Internet in More Playful Ways? By Tee Topor. Many fun links in this one!
January was a very nothing month, but I feel that way about every January. This took a while to write, perhaps I should cut these up into weekly updates instead?
Note I am still at part 4 in the main series, and honestly I think the spinoff made all of the characters involved more fleshed out as well.↩