jacy

my heart goes out to the people of waialua, the town being hit hardest by this unrelenting storm. it’s the one you see in the opening shot of this vid 🥺 waialua is a small farming & plantation community on Oahu’s north shore. it’s a super local, tight-knit community and it’s where my best friend grew up. her family and several of our other friends still live there and were evacuated yesterday amidst severe thunderstorms & flooding. they have been unable to return because the only accessible road that isn’t flooded is now exposed to a massive gas leak. they don’t know if their houses are still standing, their neighbors made it out, or what awaits their return. and even more rain is expected later today 😔 the bigger looming issue though - and they reason they were evacuated - is the wahiawa dam. it’s a plantation-era relic built by Dole when they opened their world-famous pineapple operation in Hawaii. Dole is the largest landowner and the largest employer in waialua and they’ve been warned for DECADES that the dam is unsafe and the spillway is insufficient to hold back water in the event of a massive enough storm. but rather than do the prudent, community-minded thing, Dole turned a blind eye and now ~2,500 residents downstream are at major risk. and while it hopefully doesn’t happen today, the dam will burst. so fuck dole. fuck monsanto. and fuck every other big business who doesn’t do right by the communities they extract from. WE > ME WE is def > than PROFITS and more ppl & businesses need to start acting like it.

there’s a solid chance i to need to pause my Word-A-Day efforts 🥺 life is becoming too hectic and unless i can spin up an agent to keep the cycle on repeat, i see no other viable options. hoping it doesn’t come to that bc i love how engaged it’s kept me on this silly little app. but alas, such is life.

your Word-A-Day app is subtly making me more erudite, one obscure vocab drop at a time. i’ll be sounding a lot smarter than i actually am in no time 😆

i have had a camera in my hand for as far back as i can remember. the advent of DSLRs and smartphones exacerbated what was already a compulsive habit because i no longer needed to worry about running out of film or nailing the perfect shot. except i now have hundreds of thousands of files and a lifetime worth of photos & vids scattered across hard drives, cloud storage, and devices i can't even find a charger for. and every attempt to start the painstaking, meticulous work of organizing it has been a total exercise in futility. i think AI might finally be the unlock here. pretty excited to start building something that actually makes the project feel a lot more manageable. if anyone already has a system or tool you like for this, drop the rec's below 🙏

for a number of years i mentored a young boy through the Children of Incarcerated Patents program. his dad was in jail and he was the youngest of 5 living with a single mom in a new relationship. he just hit a milestone birthday and called me to thank me for the love and support i’ve shown him over the years. i didn’t realize at the time what a profound impact that relationship would have on my life. the mentorship technically ended years ago, but the relationship is honestly the gift that keeps on giving.

several years ago when we moved into the back of a valley with a sprawling trail system we joined a nonprofit community group whose mission is to reforest native hawaiian plants. invasive plants from foreign lands have become so pervasive in hawaii that they’re drowning out our native species. we’ve spent dozens of weekends weeding, planting, hiking, and learning. went back into the valley today after a few months off and with all the rain we’ve been getting the native plants are absolutely THRIVING 😍 more importantly, they are choking out the invasives and i can’t help but feel so good inside knowing we were able to make small, but meaningful contributions to our community. WE > ME