In Horoma's Head 22

Hi everyone,

It's that time of the month already I guess. October flew by quite quickly, and unfortunately by the end of this email we'll basically be in Christmas already, more or less.

This month has been quite a rollercoaster since I alternated between high productivity periods, interspersed with complete rest periods either doing nothing (or trying to, but HOTD helped) or being on vacation. Quite a weird rhythm that I wouldn't recommend to be honest, but I won't complain being able to take some time off for once.

Now what about this month's newsletter? I want to write a bit about the course, its future, and the future of Horoma basically.

The course

From The Ground Up is finally online, and while it didn't sell like hotcakes (why would it?) I still was pleasantly surprised with the first sales and at least I won't be alone for the workshop that should happen end of November.

I already got some feedback from past students that browsed through the new content and were pretty amazed at the bump in quality and depth that the course has compared with its two first iterations. This definitely makes me happy and sort of makes me more confident regarding the quality of all the work I've been putting into this project for the past year or so.

Now, would be nice if the course was online and I was done. Thing is, that type of project is never really over, especially when it's still in its infancy and you have big aspirations for that boy. So while I still have plenty of work to go through with checklists, cheatsheets, resource pages, the wiki and the workshop, now the rhythm is quite different and I don't have very specific imminent deadline anymore. So the stress is much lower, and I can go through those tasks more peacefully in my day to day schedule.

The future

One thing that is fun, or annoying (depends on how you look at it), is that my mind tend to drift on the big next steps even though I'm not even done yet with the current ones. I think this is how I keep myself motivated - by seeing all the ways I can push further something - even though by experience I know that what I think will take one year will actually take two or more (after all I still have unchecked items in to do lists of more than 3 or 4 years ago).

So even though I'm not even done with my current to do for the course, I literally spent a whole day last week writing down ideas for the future of From The Ground Up. Trying to clarify the real end goal of that course, foresee the different methods of education that will emerge in a near future, and also trying to pinpoint the shortcomings of competitors in terms of innovation.

And I think I came up with a pretty sensible idea that is only now becoming technologically possible, or say simplified and streamlined. I won't share it extensively now, but the funny thing is that I got the idea from the merging of concepts I read 15 years ago in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, as well as much more contemporary ideas like the ones you can find in Stable Diffusion or MJ. I think I've also always been focused on helping artists build creative autonomy, which helps in zeroing on what matters to me, deeply.

So as I put it already now in From The Ground Up subtitle : _your companion course to understanding composition, crafting better visuals, and running a successful archviz studio_. The idea will be to focus on this companion idea, and keep on working on ways to integrate this course more and more seamlessly into the workflow of my students.

Needless to say the technical challenge is noteworthy, and it will take time, but I'm confident there's something valuable to do there, and it's a convincing place to take the course to.

So while I will keep my eyes on that mid-term goal, I still need to refine the current course and build the necessary intermediary steps to get there.

The future's future

And as my mind kept drifting, I also started to think about things I'd like to do with Horoma in a much further future. Of course all this is pure speculation, dreams and personal aspirations. I doubt I'll change my mind about what I'd like to do, but I know there's only a slight chance this will ever happen.

The current trend is to build more and more for the digital with the latest example being the metaverse. I don't have a strict take on that metaverse thing, I don't think it's crazy to think that it will be part of our lives in the future. It also isn't crazy to say that right now it looks empty, boring, and ugly.

I don't know if this is a direct reaction to this, or a deeper aspiration that I've always had (maybe because I'm trained as an architect and love product design), but I'm finding myself more and more attracted to physical projects, in many forms and scales. A friend of mine reminded me of a word that we don't see much anymore : analog. This idea of continuous physical stream. The word itself is already super cool and has a vintage and otherworldly feel to it.

Just to give you a very rough idea of what ideas or projects I have in mind : I've started prototyping a raincoat with a fun irridescent fabric (I always liked fashion), I've started conceptualizing a card game for kids and designing some maps (always loved boardgame and education), I've started thinking about a small bookstore concept (while this lead me to think that potentially the metaverse could recreate the feel of visiting a bookshop, for now the analog version is way above surfing Amazon), I've also started looking for plots where to build my house and how villages dynamics work in order to potentially turn that into a self-sufficient off-the-grid community.

As I said, it goes from S to XL, just like that big book people use as door stoppers.

Another aspect that struck me when I was working on those ideas and trying to clarify their nature and potential of happening, was that the economic dimension was always absent. While everything I do with _Horoma digital_ (be it images, animations, or the course) is often business-focused and I carefully check that what I do bring in more money than it costs in order for the studio to grow peacefully, _Horoma analog_ is more about the experience, and a more abstract endgoal.

While I of course won't poor hundreds of thousands of euros into a project that will economically fail for sure, I think I'll be more comfortable with endeavours that are less profitable because the value for me will not come from the generated profit, but from other more intangible aspects.

Now, I know myself, and I know these projects will most probably stay on paper for a while. But I think the fact that they are so diverse in scale and upfront-capital needed, that it should enable me to push forward some of them. I also feel that this urge to make things analog and digital, rather than purely digital will not wane.

Time will tell, but in the meantime I'm filling in physical and digital notebooks with ideas and it feels great and motivating, and I think that's what matters.

I hope you too have this type of moment where your mind just drift away and you just enjoy the experience, whether or not it will realize one day.

And on this hopeful note, I will end this little newsletter for the month.

As usual if you find this utterly boring and useless, please let me know before unsubscribing 🎀. If on the other hand you do like it, then I'm glad, and feel free to share it with your archviz pals that would maybe like it too by sending them here : https://www.horoma.net/newsletter-subscription

Cheers

Simon