The color resulting from 50% UCI Blue and 50% UCI Gold. Hex code #809b52. "UCI Green" seems to me much more associated with the campus than blue or gold; as my girlfriend says, UCI feels like a "suburbia" whose most distinguishing feature is the front lawn of Aldrich Park.

Night's sky as seen from Aldrich Park. Beautiful and obnoxiously light-polluted, making sure that I am aware of the industrially constructed space around me.

A friendly, just-off-campus reminder that corporations rule us and hate me. Not conducive to my peace of mind as a student.

Nighttime has a remarkable separating tendency.

I discovered this a few years ago, when I started to stay up later. The night separates itself from the days it is sandwiched between, walling me off from their events, emotions, and expectations. It provides me space to think and to live. It associates itself with a safe freedom. As my fondness for night grew, so did night, from the space in between days to the space which days are between. Night became a shadowy refuge to whom I could escape. She became a friend.

The move to university has upended my autonomy. As an expansion, it has replaced my physical space with one that is much larger and much more navigable. I have rein to walk or otherwise move wherever I want.

As a contraction, it has restricted what I can do with my time. I must allocate my attendance, studying, and sleep, not only to accommodate my own life but also those of others. In particular, by making them less accessible, college has revealed Night and other times as distinct spaces which are reachable and mutable.

The places offered by UCI provide the settings for parallel narratives in our lives. Code switches between day, Night, inside, outside are transitions between the different frames in which these narratives take place.

surprisingly analogous frames

The frame narrative is a new concept to me, although its structure is familiar. Analysis of my own spaces as frames yields surprisingly robust results.

UCI, as a time, will most likely last for four years, or almost a fifth of my life by the time it ends. Since I plan to spend much of the time on campus, it will function as a partially enclosed world—most of the experiences I gain and the people I meet for four years will be at UCI. Its size slots nicely between the very small world I inhabit at home and the very large world I inhabit as an adult. UCI is a between-space like that of Boccaccio's Author, which sits on top of the wall dividing reality and fiction. The university enables investigation, both personal and professional, without as much danger as a more sudden transition.

Each campus subspace, like one of the Decameron's short stories, pushes a doctrine—how to craft, how to solve, how to act, how to think, how to live—that is meant to help me survive in a higher frame. Most efficient of these are the classroom space and the student club space. Time rears its head again, separating these two by their rigid schedules and, conveniently, by their dayness and Nightness. My classes take up the early morning and afternoon, while most clubs meet in the evening. In fact, I have found myself averse to clubs whose times intertwine with my classes. Perhaps I like the later clubs because they also act as transitions, with me entering them as the sun sets and leaving them into Night's kinder embrace.

a particularly constructive space

Where better to look for worldbuilding than a club whose members are actively trying to build a new world? With worldbuilding on the brain, while attending meetings of the Students for Socialist Revolution at UCI I've picked up an astounding number of ideas that tie very clearly to topics discussed in Humanities Core.

Of course, the most prominent example is their worldbuilding to compare political systems, from the hypothetical worlds of anarchism and anarcho-communism to the implemented ones of capitalism, Marxism, and Maoism. Besides being the bases for governments, these schools of thought themselves can influence people just as much as their modeled regimes might. The most exciting part of discussing radical worlds is the platforming of imagination. Substantively, what do we want to change and how will our values interact with a new space? Procedurally, how well and how quickly might we implement it?

The club is like a playground for real application of the tools that HumCore presents. Recently, the discussions have taken an interest in why news media tells stories. While alleged facts are revealed, they are accompanied by commentary that often carries clear bias. For example, socialist states like China are publicly villified in the US to uphold the image of capitalist states, while in reality China remains one of the biggest commercial partners of the capitalist world.

thanks