Changes

In an effort to be truthful, I am an inconsistent person. I struggle with consistency in every aspect of life. For every routine I set, and every list I make, things will fall by the wayside. I struggle in day to day basics, everything from the necessary to live to the things I am forced to do to survive in the state we live in.

Dead Signals, a namesake I’ve adopted over the last year is rooted in connection to my work in radio and analogue tech, and the long running social and cultural connections I have to death. I don’t really think of it as a grim thing, because the signals still exist, as long as people can recieve them.

I hope you’ll recieve my signals.

As for my other alieses online, I think I’ll be lovingly retiring the 15 year old namesake I’ve gone by since I started being somewhat social online. Ackasi was truly, just leters put together I like, and some shuffling of a namesake we hold, I made it when I was nine, I love it, but expect some effort of retirement. Tumblr is the only piece of social media I go by a different name (along with Discord) they are both blaseball references, I haven’t decided what I’ll do with those yet, if anything I’ll just intergrate my tumblr feed to my site as a permaqueue.

Over the next few months I inted to make this the place for my online presence.

What it means/Creativity

A part of my ongoing undergradute (and potentially graduate) research projects has been the inspection and understanding of online presence, communial accessibility and technological intergration with the arts. This is a formal way of saying I like being online, using tech, and creating things, and I want to help people learn to love these things.

I have experimented with a lot of options and intergrations with different apps, systems and formats, those familar with my work understand that I started actually quite young with the coding of HTML and theme intergration across blogging sites, Tumblr being the one I was most present on in social circles, with that.

I got really passionate about the aspect of retaining ownership and control over the data you create and presence you have at a young age, largely due to engagement online simply not being congruent with my ethical standards, and fearing retaliation both online and in real life, due to things like bullying, sexual harassment and invasions of privacy.

Later in social “fandom” spaces, where the engagement changed to being more about passing interests, creating interest works, staying long enough to see social complexities in tight knit groups, and witnessing a lot of uncomfortable things, I’ve been known to go “ghost” or wipe the slate clean in a sense, while I still hold friends from old friend groups, fandom spaces, creative projects, and connections, I use the word friend in a uh, probably unfair sense of the word, I don’t talk to a lot of people day after day, i have a tight knit group of friends and my partner, I think of people I care about in the online presence as people I do care for, or people who did effect me sincerely, and I want to understand how to connect to them.

People who know me more recently, since the Pandemic began and continues on, you know me because I was in Blaseball spaces, the enthralling pull of sports and horror, chance and creativity did not escape me and it most certainly spawned a greater interest in both archival, social curration, moderation, and again, online presence. This is not a place to dictate the experiences I went through, nor the ones I witnessed or heard second hand, though it certainly influenced my degree, ironically enough.

Since the Blaseball times, I also took on the depth of my facination of web design, notably intrigued by the Web Revival and Indie Web scene, I’ve coded my own Neocities site since Apr 22, 2022, and It’s time I announce I’m putting it to bed. The site, as it stands, will likely go offline sometime within the next month or so, though I will retain a hard copy on my harddrive I will save. The creative work on the site will survive, it will be ported over to this site in segmented subpages dedicated to hosting my writing, art, and various creative projects.

I am glad I took the leap into web design, I’m glad I was inspired by the Indie Web scene, though I cannot go without highlighting things from the insustainability communities like the Yesterweb faced, nor the considerable accessibility concerns Web-1.0 and early 2.0 revival culture brings to the internet. I undoubtedly contributed to that with early renditions (which no longer exist except for still screenshots, I’d have to search for) of my site, and my goal towards the end of life of my Neocities site, and the establishment of this one, has been accessibility. A part of the shift away from Neocities, is frankly, I’m not skilled enough yet at raw HTML, CSS, and Javascript to implement best practicies behind the scenes. There are things I am skilled at, like captioning and providing alternate text according to standards, and keeping my essentric taste in color to WCAG standards, but using WordPress, and having access to a greater bank of resources to facilitate making sure my work is accessible helps me. The interface I’m working in now allows me not only to port the work I do have easier than before, but it will make creating new work, both for personal and academic purposes, that much easier.

I will note, I did try utalizing a direct publishing tool in Obsidian Publish, and while that served a nice inbetween purpose for things I was writing between the mid point of last year and now, I simply want a consistent system for everything in one place. The Obsidian Publish site will also depreciate (though I will note that is the first place I’ve used the phrase Dead Signals) sometime in the next month or so, and the blog posts will be added to this site.

This experimentation, passioned by the creative in me, inspired by things like streamers, video makers, essayiests, tutorial makers, artists, musicians, programmers, game developers, poets, authors-far to many people to count, brings me to the point of wanting to document that inspiration and experimentation, my life and my art, first hand. I’ve been doing this for some time now, I want to make it mine.

With making a place for consistency, and presence, there is also the relevence of the academic and professional existence which is asked of us. I have complex feelings on art and labour, and the systems in which creatives are tasked with essentially marketing themselves, utalizing language principles, social, cultural, and contextual clues in different enviornments to appeal to whatever entity they are interfacing with. We do this, not so we can engage in the things we aspire for, we do this so we can follow a scheme set for us, fufilling labour requirements to contribute to a greater entity’s earnings. We recieve a fraction of those earnings as a result of our labour, though these greater entities could not survive without us.

In creating this site, I am committing myself to the terrifying act of unmasking myself. I imagine, through exploring this site, my ethics and principles, though they may be varied, inconsistent, and ever changing, are clear. A world without capitalism would see to it that the lives of people who struggle and suffer under the weight of these forces masks would be able to survive. I believe in striving for that world, I have the ability to demonstrate how that can be done.

What it means/Professionally

My first job was a florists assistant.

It’s true.

I would join my grandmother, age 12-13-14, and I’d slip in the back door of the corner store tourist shop that also served as the town and surrounding reservations’ premier flower and gift shop.

In the back of the building was where she worked, the helium station for the latex balloon station she hated, the rows of Halmark cards on the wall, the lounge area that sat the house plants reserved for the more conservative botanical gifts, the books of predesigned arrangements she rarely followed. Solid in the middle of the space was the walk in freezer, you could see the premade, slightly cheaper options, like prepped roses, nice vased tulips, and whatever was the relevant holiday pick. This time of year, summer rolling into fall, I remember the flowers being pink and warm. Inside the solid steel door, that’s where the work began, rows of different cooled flowers, prepped or wating to be prepped, sitting on standby, and on the rare occasion, an arrangement that hadn’t made it’s way to it’s destination.

After standing in the freezer for far to long according to her, I’d bring the bulk of our workload, white carnations and babies breath, for the sake of my favorite tedious project. She’d teach me how to make corrsages and butiners for one of the high school’s homecoming festivites; but not before informing me of the color scheme, blue and silver.

We would come home those nights with our fingers; I picked up bad habits from her withered hands, covered in blue dye, fine silver glitter, and fragments of tuul stuck to our clothes.

At the end of those few days, I’d get slipped 150, maybe $200 at most as an “under the table affair.” Ironically the first time I was likely underpaid for a creative job.

I tell this story first because I fall into a lot of my work by knowledge of others and happenstance, or an often annoying refusal to not ask the adults questions.

I started using the computer around the age of seven or eight, my mother was a web developer working in the music industry, my grandmother was writing a book using the desktop and got familar with publishing among many of her other creative persuits. I had a strong foundation of technical knowledge because when I was young, I wanted to learn what they were doing. I soon learned the word processor and paint tool when a few years before that I was writing and drawing comic books with my mom’s stolen art supplies. I consider my early time on the internet a little understated compared to my time offline. I loved writing things, and not saving them, playing with the computer interface and learning how each of the buttons worked. I was taught how to use a file system because the computer software we were running was one era behind what was in the school computer lab, and my god, did I use the school computer lab.

Along with personal access to technology, I was a student placed in classes that encouraged more hands on, technical based learning, and I had a fantastic teacher early on who introduced me to the world of robotics, which I participated in through high school. I mentioned I was a stubborn and often annoying child, I wanted to learn how things worked. If things could not function how they needed to, and in the expected way, I would get, to put it lightly, irate. I learned how to use the equipment my teachers were, to be honest, not trained to use. Arizona, where I live, is not exactly a leader in education across the United States, however I find that a largely ignored facet of this is how the education system here fails to provide technical based education that continues to build on a learners understanding. From the teachers, to the students, both through economic and instructional means, we are not given the tools to succeed.

I formed my path through this system in ways I was privleged to have, and ways that I had to fight for. In recognition of my own disiblities and struggles, there are things, within the current academic and professional systems I contribute to, which I struggle with greatly, I do not, at this time, feel like I have the tools to succeed.

In documenting my job history, I often took on shorter roles, spots of work as an editor for both video and audio, serving as the house sound and light controller for several local performances and events, a tutor here, a writer there. In school early on, you figure out that your skills are less something value as a service, but it’s something they view as an asset you owe them. For as many things I’ve been paid to do, I did a lot of unpaid labour from the ages of 12 to 18 that left varying effects on my mental, and in one case, physical health.

The most consistent, enjoyable, and well paying job I’ve held, which I will likely continue to contribute to on and off for a long time, is the job I held at my local radio station. I continue to go back and support the station either as a guest host, writer, editor, or educator, but I count my time there six years. I picked up my passion for journalism and my hate for local fiscal government action. I wrote and read daily live news reports for many mornings, afternoons, and evenings, and at one time I held the position of Communications Director. Since I started working at the station, every person who has worked there since has been trained by me. It’s a job I had a lot of love in with the routine, though it had it’s difficult moments. I’ve read obituries for family, loved ones, friends, and classmates. I, more often than not, was one of the first to know of a death besides the local hospital, mortitian, and family. I covered instances of mass death at the start of the pandemic, and the way the government failed my communities. I saw first a lot of local corruption and racism that I documented. Covering the news, that being the cycle of events relevant, important, timley, and interesting to your intended audience; is a nonstop job.

I fell out of love with journalism largely due to the moralizing of the industry within the United States despite interests of the industry going against the needs of the public, the consistent presence of ethical abandonment for monitary and disinformative gains along with a lack of care, and instances of disregard for my mental state and disibilites within my college’s Journalism school.

To capture the panorama of my work experience, I’ll be archiving segments of written work, such as articles, blog posts, news articles, production credits, and media. This work will be archives as original as dictated on the documentation date. This archival process will take place under fair use standards, with the archival materials including commentary along with context on what I provided to the given project.

Currently, I work in a job unrelated to any of the prior areas of interest I just demonstrated. I am fine with this. Though I continue to be interested in sustainable, supportive, long term creative work, the conditions of employment will continue to be complex, I again, intend to use this site to bridge the connections between my presense, form, creativity, and survival. If you want to employ me for a project, email me. If you want to support me as an individual, you can tip me. I am currently investigating and applying for grants and programs to continue my research and artistic endeavors.

A version of my resume in more tradional terms, along with a PDF copy of my condensed portfolio is avaliable upon email request.

For commission and self employment work, I continue to develop these offerings as they come, reach out to me at avery@deadsignals.love for more information.

A note on upkeep costs: As covered earlier, the depreciation of both Neocities and Obsidian Publish will save me some money, however everyting I create with DeadSignals is paid for my job earnings, academic funds, and generous support from peers, friends, loved ones, and family.

To close, as the year continues to march forward, so to will the way I engage online, and the way I commit to labour, the way I create and the way I intend to survive. I hope you will join me on this march.

If you recieved this signal, thank you.