• 11 years. RIP.

• Lots of reading, amidst the cracks of life as it goes, changes. Halfway through E. Biella Coleman's Coding Freedom, started David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and wanted to start, but probably have to wait until after the thesis, bell hooks' Where We Stand: Class Matters.

"I would be interested in whatever you were interested in when you came to my office. That was my job." -- James P. Danky, from an interview conducted by Sean Moxley-Kelly

• A piece in the New Yorker about Noah Baumbach, a person whose work I have a lot of sympathy for somehow, but in this piece he sounds like he wants to be a vampire sucking the energy off of his girlfriend's ideas. Is that a great way to have a relationship, or a terrible way?
• I've also been reading Living Anarchy on the train, while very tired lately.
  

I read this article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed on the train home yesterday and reflected a little about my own workload and how I feel about it lately.

I'm struggling to work on a thesis right now while working full time. I've been in school for the past three plus years while working too, but the thesis is feeling more like a very LARGE project that is all ME somehow in a way that other coursework has not. Maybe it's because I'm doing new original research (as in, I thought I had ideas I was working up to in other coursework about what my thesis would be, but I took a turn into some new landscapes that require a lot of other research that's new to me).

My new goal, which has also been an older goal, but one that I'm trying to stick to right now is to be extremely and very careful about the things that I commit to--even fun and enticing things. I wish I could go off the grid a bit more, venture out into a writing cabin or somehow just be a little more isolated physically, but I think really what I need to work on is saying "yes no yes" or putting the thesis front and center. I might even stop drinking for the summer (a prospect that frightens me knowing how great Brooklyn for backyards and booze) but a decision that feels like it will help me gain lots of productivity and morning writing sessions (I hope?!).

What techniques and tips can you recommend for getting large research and writing projects accomplished?

• Zines from the Brooklyn Zine Fest: Alex #4 and #5, Deafula #5, and Indulgence #11.

• Jeppesen, Sandra. "Becoming Anarchist: The Function of Anarchist Literature." Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2011.2
• Imhorst, Christian. "Anarchy and Source Code - What does the Free Software Movement have to do with Anarchism?"
  

• Going to try to finish In Praise of Copying today. This book has pleasantly surprised me in many ways and I'm greatly enjoying it. Highly recommended if you would like to think more deeply about copying (and its mimetic, ever-present nature) on a philosophical level.
  Many of the books about intellectual property I've looked at recently discuss the absurdities of various IP situations, or examine IP clashes via specific (often outrageous) legal cases. This book, on the other hand, talks more about the practices and traditions of copying, collaging or appropriating through many different perspectives, going back to the work of philosophers who are long dead but also looking for the mimetic in religious practices, theory, art, and even inside the human body. Totally fascinating.
• Also this article on drone, also by Boon.
  

• More Moonwalking with Einstein, enjoying the history of the book (as related to memory) section.

• Inching my way through Moonwalking with Einstein, which I've only read over BC lunches in the office.
• Insomnia had me reading Fosterhood in NYC
  

• About half of In Praise of Copying by Boon, which I am enjoying.

• Read the introduction to Common as Air by Hyde.
• Last week watched the documentary, Kind Hearted Woman. Among many powerful scenes, was struck by those where Robin took family to go walking through the U of M, and how looking at the university and thinking about what it offered was a powerful activity for them.
  

• While fighting some kind of bug finished Please Kill Me and ripping through Cometbus Omnibus and Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change

• Been reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Not sure if it will help the thesis, but it's a good pick up/put down at random book.
• Also still moving very slowly through Moonwalking with Einstein, my official over-lunch-at-work book of the moment.