#which is weird because there's tons of interesting tech stuff you could take inspo of robots from but most robots seem to be more of a

[ex-vespidae]

i was gonna talk about how i don't really understand why people like robobot so much but i honestly think i just don't like sci-fi robot themes all that much? I realized this because i just remembered that the main reason i picked pkmn scarlet instead of violet is because i thought the robot stuff looked boring

[horsebitesfence]

One year Sober – Sophie Helf interview

How is New York ? We know from Twitter and your guest spot on the Death Panel Podcast that you spent a year working toward moving back there, and you made it!   How has it been going so far?   

– It’s been wonderful. The past year was incredibly difficult – going through surgeries, relearning to walk – but I knew I wanted to move here so did whatever I could to heal up quickly. So far I’m quite happy here! It’s nice to be able to see all my friends, go where I want, explore different opportunities. Simple things feel so good – having my own room, living with nice people, ‘hustling’ for work (ha!). Not a fan of the weather though.

We really love your piece for the Outline, where you talk about inspo porn, being a little worm  and how you love your legs.  We I hear you’re getting new prosthetics –  how do they compare, and might they lower the chance of another infection? That must have made the move that much harder (and more inspirational).

–– Thank you! My new prosthetics will actually be vacuum-powered – every time I take a step the ends of my legs sort of get ‘sucked’ into the prosthetic, so to speak. Everything is custom made, from the liners to the sockets, so it’ll be a lot harder for my legs to chafe. The infection was miserable but has healed up pretty well so far. Sometimes the leg still hurts but not nearly as badly as it did before.

They sound cool and we hope it goes on healing really well.  

You’ve been tweeting about using the subway since you’ve been back there.  From here it seems like New York’s public transport infrastructure is pretty run down –  kind of hostile for users in general and especially for disabled users.   Has that been your experience?  

–– The infrastructure can be pretty shit, depending on which station you’re at. The one near my place is just a set of stairs leading underground that I have to carefully waddle down (though I’m getting better at that). Most people here stick to the ‘keep right’ rule, which is nice, but there have been occasions when I’ve had to dodge someone and almost fallen down. At the larger stations with various train lines there are elevators and escalators, but if you’re at a smaller one it’s probably just stairs. Good exercise, I suppose, but for people with mobility issues it’s incredibly unfriendly.

Sort it out NYC. You’ve lived in London, SF and New York;  how do the three cities compare in terms of transport, access, attitudes? 

–– The Bay Area actually has a fantastic subway system for disabled people. Every MUNI and BART station has an elevator and the trains can easily accommodate someone in a wheelchair. London stations were squeaky clean and most stations had elevators, even at the farther-out ones; I took it for granted at the time, but looking back it was very well put together. New York definitely has the most unfriendly transport system, but from what I’ve heard there have been rallies to make it more accessible, which I’m hoping leads to something better.

Yeah, London’s public transport infrastructure’s pretty good, but there are just so many people, and not everyone is good at keeping left or moving carefully.  It doesn’t help that the UK is one of the few countries where you’re supposed to pass on the left side, whereas London is such a global city that many people naturally tend toward the right.   

It’s better not to travel at rush hour if you can help it, but that’s not always possible, and it’s also pretty restrictive. London Transport now do a ‘please offer me a seat’ badge, but we also need ones that say ‘don’t push’, ‘give me space’, ‘keep your distance’ . Or maybe just ‘keep the fuck away from me.’ And more ‘keep left’ signs – it makes such a big difference. 

–– London transport gets so incredibly crowded, more than in New York or San Francisco, I think – I definitely understand why you’d avoid rush hour! I generally try not to go places during rush hour; seeing as I’ve mostly been working from home, it’s been easy to avoid it. I’m hoping to get a 9-to-5 job, though, and am not sure how I’ll deal with the crush. Stay posted for developments!

Yes!  Best of luck!  And best of health insurance. 

One of the many things to love about your Twitter is the way you tweet on MH stuff, and meds, and coffee, and coffee on meds. You also tweet about sobriety. What’s it like being at NY parties sober? 

–– I’ve definitely had my mental health issues in the past, which led me to getting sober. It’s the best thing I’ve done for myself, I think; my mental health, though not perfect, is doing better without the guilt I used to get when I’d wake up after a messy night out. I don’t really mind people drinking around me (or doing coke in some cases – oof) and people have been really respectful of my decision not to participate. I feel really lucky that hardly anyone’s pressed me on why I got sober; if someone does, I just say ‘I felt like it’ and don’t go into anything deeper because I don’t really owe anyone an explanation.

Yes to respectfulness, and to not owing.  And congratulations on a year sober. 

[One Horse Bite discloses: I spent years feeling shame about MH stuff, being in denial and trying to ‘act normal’, which in hindsight has had distorting life-effects.  I held out against doing psych meds for a really long time, even though they’re almost free, thanks to the NHS, what’s left of it – maybe that’s why they don’t get pushed on people here so hard.  After my accident, I finally gave myself permission to try meds, maybe because I felt like it gave me a concrete reason to need them, one that carries less stigma than mental illness.  And then I still wasn’t ok!  Both due to the accident and because I was already not-ok, pre-accident. The accident was the last straw really; like I had no spare capacity to handle it. Invisible Strings / @M_Kelter, who tweets on autism and depression, suggests that in place of ‘comorbidity’, we might use the term ‘meanwhile’. Meanwhile, I had to begin to address the MH stuff I’d already been carrying, and admit to myself I’d been carrying it all that time, as well as with the accident. Meds were helpful with that, even tho it took a bit trial and error to find the right ones;  for most of last year I was on what seemed to help at first, and then made me increasingly and dangerously disinhibited. There were – incidents, including but not limited to shouting ‘walk left’ at people on the underground. Still no ragrets – sort of; once I found the right meds, or the more-right ones, anyway, I kind of wished I’d started on them years ago, though it’s important to stress that nothing has helped so much as finally having stable housing for the first time in my adult life, post-accident. Also to note that my being in a state of ‘invisible homelessness’ at the time of the accident was a key causal factor in the accident itself. Meanwhile –. ]

Sophie, you went to art school, but studied design rather than fine art, and are now a coder; so while you’re art-world networked, hopefully you’re a bit less subject to the horrid vicissitudes of all that. How did you get into coding?  

–– I was at Central St Martins from 2012 to 2015, a couple of years after they moved into that awful Granary Building.  Very strange being there; they insisted that the great corridor in the centre was a space for collaborating, but you had to get express permission from tutors or higher-ups to put things there, and – I hated this – your tap-card could only get you into your studio.  So if you were a design student and wanted to go into the fine art studios, you’d have to borrow a fine art student’s card to get in. It really kept all the different programmes separate from each other and discouraged collaboration in the end.

–– I got into coding after coming back to California from CSM without a Bay Area design/art network, without any idea how to get a job. I needed a portfolio site to present my work on but hated all the templated ones (Cargo Collective etc.), so decided to learn a bit of HTML and CSS to build one myself. To my surprise, I really enjoyed it, so started learning JavaScript as well. Choosing whether to professionally pursue coding instead of design was a huge decision to make, but eventually I decided ‘fuck it’, successfully applied to and attended a coding bootcamp. 

Now I do front-end development, which focuses on the look and feel of a website and how a user interacts with it. It’s been interesting navigating the different splits and rivulets of ‘the coding world’, so to speak; there’s ‘the tech community’, which I do feel separate from as I tend to view coding just as something I do and not an entire lifestyle. Code can intersect with art and design in tons of different ways and I do like Twitter as a tool to keep up with some of the people I admire. 

Can we be really prurient and ask what you meant when you tweeted about missing mid-2000s SF ?  

–– I like this question! I guess it was a tweet that was sort of mourning what San Francisco used to be like back before it was stuffed and crawling with tech people. I was in high school in the mid-2000’s and specifically remember San Francisco as – scuzzier, I guess; still kind of eerie and loose and a little more dangerous. I was a little shit back then and spent a lot of time at a park called Dolores Park, which used to be crusty as hell and filled with naked hula-hooping people and boozy high schoolers passing around bad weed (including me and my friends). Now it’s squeaky clean and gets stuffed with frat kids on the weekends. I’ll admit that I do love to complain about current SF a little too much. Cities do change, of course, but it makes me sad that SF is so incredibly unaffordable and losing much of the weird, wonky character it used to be known for. It does still constantly smell like weed and piss though, which is oddly comforting.

Is that what made you so keen to get out of there, aside from the glut of other coders, and the fact that it’s your home town – or was it more about getting to NY  ?

–– Honestly I think you really hit the nail on the head re: tech people and hometown. It’s a tiny city and I felt like I’d explored every corner, done everything I wanted to there, and got a little tired of bumping into parents of kids I went to high school with while I was buying a Diet Coke at the grocery store. And yes, I really wanted to go to New York – a lot of my friends live here, and it’s a whole new city to get to know and explore. I’ve been here for a couple of months and feel like I’ve seen a tiny droplet of what’s out there, which I like. And, truthfully, it’s cheaper both transport-wise and rent-wise, which is important while I’m freelancing while looking for a job, and will continue to be nice once I’m salaried – more to save for retirement, health insurance and occasional fun things. I’ve wanted to live here since middle school so it’s nice to, you know, be here. I like it a lot.

Sophie, thank you!  Enjoy New York.  

Thank you for interviewing, this was very fun!

S

X