A Bot’s role as a participant throws off the structural assumption that technology’s role in the chatroom/IM space is that of a facilitator or mediator. The great irony is that, as I will demonstrate, the bot is simply another layer of mediation between two users. Thus it becomes clear that chatters often fetishize the bot, imbuing it with a level of agency that it never can exert within an interaction. What is hidden in all of this is the bot’s creator, with whom the chatter is actually in conversation with, albeit across a temporal divide. And that’s the next thing that I need to unpack.

Thanks for the encouragment all. It’s now less than two weeks until the end of classes and about a month before I’m back in Rochester.

The last ten months have flown. Flown I say.

Tension level right now is through the roof. Sleep is something I fondly remember. In part that’s because of stress/panic attacks at night. Deadlines are really starting to loom and there are a lot of uncertain aspects for the future.

All that being said, I’m hitting harder and on more cylinders than ever before in my life. Which only frustrates the job situation in a way. I’m doing better work than ever before. Heck I am better than ever before. And yet I don’t know what will happen when I get back to Rah-cha-cha. And while I try to push that to the back of my head, you can’t quite get away from it.

Everyone in my life has reminded me that I always land on my feet, and I sorta know that to be true. But at this moment I’m in sorta a free fall and that’s rough because I can’t even tell what ground I’m heading for. And it’s tough to get past that, but get past that I will.

Plus, as goofy as it may sound, I’m bummed that I haven’t been able to share a lot of the pictures that I’ve been taking. I’ve got lots of stories bottled up and really want to share them at some point. Perhaps the summer will be a review of the past year.

Oh… and I will eventually write everyone back. I swear.

In the meantime, I’m going to take a nap.

I’ve got just about a month less. I guess not even that. And I just don’t feel like I have it in me. I’m so tapped out it isn’t funny. And I realize the only thing left to do is just get up and keep going. And I will. But it’s just getting tougher and toughter at the moment.

I’m trying not to think about the writing or the move and just concentrate on the reading. But I’ve been finding my page per hour just keep dropping and that’s not good.