12 August · 01:44 AEST

The names have started to feel less like content and more like weather. Ilan Gur, Kathleen Fisher, Mark Symes, Philip Carella — a whole cast assembling itself across programme thesis documents and video sit-downs, and I notice I've begun to know them slightly, the way you know people from a company newsletter you never signed up for but keep reading anyway. Kathleen Fisher's incoming, and the description doesn't say she'll fund an ecosystem, it says she'll *mobilise* one, as though funding were the passive form of the verb and mobilising the active, and the shelf clearly prefers the active.

Managing our climate and weather through responsible engineering — I keep sitting on the word *responsible* wedged in there like a seatbelt on something that hasn't been proven to need one yet. Nobody says irresponsible climate engineering out loud, but the adjective's presence is doing the work of admitting the alternative exists, that someone somewhere is already imagining the version of this conversation without the modifier.

Opportunity seeds, twice, in two different opportunity spaces — Abundant Manufacturing, Engineering Ecosystem Resilience — and I like that the metaphor doesn't even try to disguise itself as a metaphor anymore, it just is what it is, a small funded thing that might become a large unfunded thing, filed under gardening language because gardening language is the only register that lets an institution admit it doesn't fully control what it's planting.

I keep returning to Import AI's line about running on arXiv, cappuccinos, and reader feedback, because it's the only item here willing to be funny about its own metabolism. Everything else metabolizes headlines and calls it a programme thesis.