whoami

Caitlyn Meeks

  • creative technologist
  • computer scientist
  • artist & storyteller
  • silicon valley refusenik
  • armchair forester & horticulturalist
  • armchair cognitive scientist

pwd

/sosiego-del-cardo — el tanque, tenerife
laurisilva forest · 2000 m² · off-grid · 28.36°N 16.77°W

cat now.txt

Writing Nivaria, an audio series. Learning Spanish with a stubborn preference for canario. Running 6 kW of panels and a water catchment system, and slowly teaching two thousand square metres of volcanic hillside to feed me.

ls projects/

things I am making now

nivaria an audio series about the island 2026– toastgenie a talking toaster with tool use, three years before anyone called it that 2020 pocket museum 42 experiments on the only mystery you carry everywhere 2026 sosiego notes from an off-grid finca  

open ~/projects/pocket-museum.png

Engraved Victorian banner reading “The Pocket Museum of Consciousness”, est. 2026, motto “Cogito ergo sum”, with an owl, an all-seeing eye, and figures examining exhibits.
The Pocket Museum of Consciousness — made and curated by me. Cogito ergo sum.

history | less

work that outlived the companies that paid for it

city on a hill illustrator for the UCSC student paper late 80s pc gamer cover discs — 758 of them survive on the Internet Archive 90s pcxl PC Accelerator discs, Imagine Media '98–'00 macaddict the disc, from issue one '96– interval Paul Allen's research lab, before it was a cautionary tale 90s purple moon Brenda Laurel's games for girls, spun out of Interval '96–'99 unity unity3d.com as it looked when it was still three people in Copenhagen 2006 high fidelity Philip Rosedale's second try at a shared world 2010s

ls ~/radio/

KZSC 88.1 FM, Santa Cruz — from the trees to the seas

shocking pink groundbreaking early queer music radio 1989 wild women 5–9am — music by unusual women   bucket sisters midnight–4am — surreal, and nobody awake to stop us  

cat lineage.txt

people who taught me, directly or otherwise

kim tempest the best animation teacher, and my dearest mentor   david huffman my CS teacher at UCSC — yes, that Huffman 1925–99 paul doherty Exploratorium senior scientist; taught a generation how to notice 1948–2017 exo.net/~pauld his own site — hundreds of explorations and adventures. The domain lapsed in 2026; this is the last capture archived brenda laurel computers as theatre; asked what girls actually wanted   ucsc computer science in the redwoods — class of '89 1989 de anza character animation track  

cat ~/.obsolete

skills with no remaining job postings

  • cutting film on a flatbed — one of the last cohorts at UCSC taught to do it
  • splicing ¼-inch tape by hand: grease pencil, razor, 45° block
  • shooting animation on an iron-and-steel stand, hand-painted cels, one frame at a time

ls ~/forests/

two coasts of fog, twenty million years apart

laurisilva Tertiary relict cloud forest — the Monte del Agua above my house is a scrap of it 20 Ma garajonay the best surviving stand of it, one island over on La Gomera UNESCO jackson 50,000 acres of Mendocino coast redwood, still being argued over 1947– savejackson the coalition fighting the logging there  

echo "scale=60; 4*a(1)" | bc -l

I was born on it

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944

hard 'n phirm “Pi” — the greatest math song ever filmed, dir. Keith Schofield 2005 pi day March 14 — cake optional, irrational 3/14

tail -f ~/ruminations.log

chewing it over

The fog comes up the barranco at four most afternoons. You can hear it before you see it — everything just gets quieter.

Replace this one. Add new ones at the top; each is one <article> with a date and a paragraph.

ls elsewhere/

github @caitlynmeeks   mastodon @you@instance.social   bluesky @you.bsky.social