2025-05-23 08:00:00
I went to see Avatar: The Last Airbender In Concert which was nostalgic and wonderful.
I haven’t been gaming much! (What have I been doing?? god I don’t even know)
I haven’t played Blue Prince in a couple of weeks now, partly because each session often ends up quite long and you can’t save and quit partway through a run.
I played a bit of Destiny last week—I farmed the Insight Terminus GM (a classic) in pursuit of a super cool void rocket sidearm; the Rite of the Nine is pretty cool in my extremely limited experience with it—Spire is infinitely more doable when there are little indicators telling you where the next node is.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the upcoming expansion.
I’m not watching much!
Well. Last weekend I watched the third period of game 7 of the Toronto Maple Leafs vs Florida Panthers, which was just a concentrated dose of depression. (Leafs lost 1-6).
I subscribed to DC Universe Infinite, DC Comics’ online comic subscription service. It’s kind of bizarre—you can only read via their iOS or Android app, because for some reason the web version is only available to US subscribers (what?), because we live in the medieval times, or something. I read on my iPad, which is a wonderful screen, but I wish I had the option to also read on desktop.
But! It’s better than me trying to borrow five million different issues or trade paperbacks or whatever from the library. Trying to read mainstream superhero comics is like the least user-friendly thing in the world.
Anyway, some highlights:
I bought a new desk!
I’d been using the same cheap IKEA desk since literally high school, and despite spending the vast majority of my time sitting there, I never upgraded it until now. That desk is old enough to vote!!
Anyway, I now am the owner of a nice standing desk, which will surely fix all of my problems. I also upgraded my vertical monitor to a 4K monitor, so I can beam even more pixels into my eyes.
Product list, for the nerds:
Behind my laptop, I’ve hidden my USB switcher, which I use to toggle my peripheral inputs between PC and Mac. I’m still missing my PC speakers (cheap, crappy) and webcam (seldom used).
So, something fun I realized is that I can now lower my desk down enough to sit at a height where my feet touch the floor, which I couldn’t do with my old IKEA desk. The less fun part is that I won’t be able to put an IKEA Alex drawer underneath as a result, lol.
2025-05-22 08:00:00
antilibrary; intentions; my ideal self; aspirations. stuff on my mind; stuff i want to think about but just not quite yet. i am the ashamed owner of a dozen browser windows, many containing a dozen+ tabs—what is in there??
2025-05-04 08:00:00
itsgonnabemay.jpg
I did 19/30 days of PleinAirpril! Most days, I spent about 30–90 minutes. A couple of them were actually done en plein air, rather than from a photo reference, and a few I gave up on because they were going badly.
19 days is the most I’ve ever done for a monthly art challenge. I missed eight days from travelling, and three days from other life priorities. All in all, I’m proud of myself for this level of consistency.
All paintings are compiled over in my sketchbook, along with any stray notes about them and timelapses.
I visited New York for the first time, which was very cool and exciting. Highlights:
Here are a bunch of photos and sketches.
2025-03-30 08:00:00
Almost April—wtf.
Fragmented thoughts: been thinking about how to go about ‘knowledge management,’ but it’s not really knowledge management—I feel like there’s an element of synthesizing that I’d need for it to be knowledge—but more sort of ‘collecting’ things to be findable later.
I pin stuff on Pinterest because it’s easy, and my interests are properly organized in the right place. It’s nice for surface-level exploration, but quite bad when it comes to things like sourcing, quality, and generative AI images. I save ‘things to look at later’ or ‘interesting links’ or ‘useful tools’ with the web clipping extension for Raindrop, but that rarely ever gets sorted and often does not get looked at ‘later’ at all.
My most successful collection habit is on Tumblr, where I have an art reblog blog and have tagged most posts I reblog on it with the type of art, artist name, and any other useful info. It’s the most organized collection of digital links I have, something I’ve been maintaining for over a decade. And it’s something I do come back to look at. If I ever want to see all of the #marvel fanart or cool #comics I’ve ever reblogged, I can.
I never apply this level of organization to any of my private bookmarks. I’ve been thinking about why that’s the case, and I think it comes down to:
So, anyway, all that to say, I’m trying to use are.na more publicly, to encourage better habits.
April is looming and I feel distressed about not creating enough. The time is passing and what do I have to show for it! Nothing!!!
I want to do Plein Airpril again this year, and having done it last year I feel more confident about it.
I’m slowly embarking on my ambitions of creating a font based on my handwriting!
I’ve tried the Fontself iPad app, which is easy to use. Sadly, the iPad version doesn’t have features that would be essential to making a handwritten font—namely, alternates and ligatures—so I may pick up their desktop version.
Related reading: Behind the Scenes: What goes into creating a messy handwriting font? by Laura Eddy of TYPEHEIST, my favourite foundry for handwritten fonts.
I took out some of my woefully-underused pens recently. I’ve been using my Muji 0.38 gel pen for so long, I’ve forgotten how different and satisfying it is to use a pen that can produce varied line weights.
Every single person in the world continues to tell me to watch Severance, to which I tell them, no. Until I do, eventually. One day. But for now, no.
I spent a Sunday doing Salvation’s Edge—six hours of raiding during prime time afternoon sunlight! But it was fun and we succeeded in a red border chest run, which demands doing the raid in one sitting.
I rarely raid anymore (getting six people together is…not easy; also I’m so over the grind of chasing specific weapons now) but this kind of makes me want to get back into it. My ideal setup is raiding in two hour blocks, and it would take at most two sessions.
(Tangent—I looked at my raid report and I haven’t done Vow in like, 2.5 years?? What? I guess it doesn’t feel so long since Caretaker and Rhulk were both part of Pantheon, but I kind of want to go through Exhibition again to see how it is now.)
I started replaying Control, which I first played back in 2022. I’d been wanting to replay it for a while, and after seeing the new trailer for FBC: Firebreak, which is based in the Control universe, I’ve decided now is a good time to revisit the Oldest House ahead of Firebreak’s release.
I booted up Stardew on a whim the other week and have fallen headfirst into 1.6 game updates—there’s so much to do! I hadn’t done Ginger Island yet! There are so many QOL improvements! I’m going for perfection now! This is now my second job.
Sadly, I’m playing this pretty slowly because it’s one of those games that make me dizzy. It’s cool so far though! I’m pretty excited to get to the third game in this series, Arkham Knight, which I keep hearing good things about.
Here are some photos I’ve taken recently:
the reason art with ai at the creative helm will never get traction in any long term or meaningful trot is because art is more than what is in the text of the book, or notes of the song, or runtime of the movie. art is whats OUTSIDE of the medium, a performance piece between creator and experiencer
If you’ve followed me long enough, you’ll remember—in a previous life, I was into mechanical keyboards. I never fully shut the door on that until now though, in which I’ve officially chucked my keycaps project into the garbage—we all knew it was dead for years now, but there were remnants of it floating around. No more! I’ve deleted the email list, the instagram, and the website is long gone.
With that said, I’m intrigued enough by Yuzu Keycaps that I have it bookmarked for if I ever get the urge again to do a graphic design.
2025-02-27 08:00:00
I had grand plans for this post, involving intricate artwork, interesting layouts, and bold colours, but—I lack the willpower to execute on them, this time around. Instead, here we shall have: several straight-forward lists, covering the events of the last month or so, which is a period of time universally acknowledged to be basically the same as “a week,” hence this qualifies as “a weeknote.” Thank you.
Apparently, we can use CSS counter-style and symbols to style unordered lists—wow technology!! I’ve been styling my <ul> list markers with pseudo elements for years, but no longer!!
For example, instead of:
ul {
list-style-type: none;
}
li::before {
content: '→';
}I can now do:
@counter-style ul-primary {
system: cyclic;
symbols: '→';
suffix: '';
}
ul {
list-style-type: ul-primary;
}Very cool!!!
I realized that having decimal places in some of my font sizes can render weirdly on Windows:
But I can use round() (which is baseline 2024!) to round it to the nearest whole pixel:
p {
--font-size-sm: 0.85em;
font-size: round(var(--font-size-sm), 1px);
}I always feel like such a fucking idiot who doesn’t know how to web development—do I look like I know what a java script is?—and I feel especially embarrassed about being late to cobbling together some GSAP basics. It’s cool! I enjoy it! One of these days, surely, I will use it to make something interesting.
I feel hesitant to share early WIPs because there’s a good chance I’ll never finish them and it’s kind of embarrassing (hey, remember that things I’m working on post from last summer? lol?), but I was excited about this so I posted it on Mastodon anyway—
The idea is: weeknotes, but it’s fashion. Recapping stuff within the framing of outfits and style: what was I wearing at this time? What was my character wearing? What was the fashion of [insert media here]?
I’ve been looking at a lot of fashion illustration lately and I’ve been wanting to do some kind of fashion/OOTD thing for a long time. Hopefully this will go somewhere! I had planned it to be the basis of this weeknotes post (this is the aforementioned “grand plans”), but alas, it’ll be a future thing.
I’m starting to listen to podcasts, which means of course I have to build a new page for it.
I’m still chugging along with my site’s version 7 redesign. It’s very slow going, because I have so many dang pages and also aspirations for writing better CSS, which is kind of an obstacle when I’m not particularly good at CSS. But we’ll get there! Lol!
I visited the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time! It was a mostly spontaneous trip and I met up with a bunch of internet friends.
I got to eat good food, visit some pretty museums, and sit in highway traffic. I saw a cybertruck for the first time. (Cringe, gross, fuck that.) I saw all sorts of other cringe AI ads. I went to In-n-Out! I took a bunch of pictures, which I would like to compile into a future blog post, but as we all know, I said that last year about Portland and here I am, sans blog post.
Here are a few photos:
In government, that infrastructure is built by laws, policies, and regulations. But regulations alone do not infrastructure make. Regulations require workers to become infrastructure: those workers who labor to understand new policies, how best to enact them, and then work to make them legible and understandable to the American public — and, yes, to enforce them. Without those federal workers, and their labor, these systems fall apart. And the architects of this assault on the federal workforce are keenly aware of that fact.
What is the mathematics of self and how does observing, hypothesizing, and experimenting change you?
I’m not watching Severance (never seen any of it) but every single person in the world has told me to, so. Eventually. Though I feel irrationally resistant to it now that I’ve been recommended it so much. I have tried to mute the hell out of it though so I don’t get spoiled for whatever is going on for when I do get around to it.
I regret to inform you that, once again, Destiny is good, which is great news for sickos (like me) but also terrible news for people who need to touch grass (like me).
But actually—Nether, the current seasonal activity, is fantastic, and the Sundered Doctrine dungeon is cool! The Barrow-Dyad exotic mission is interesting but also the most horrible environment I’ve ever seen in the game (it is…hole…) and I never want to do it again. I got jumpscared by a giant stabby knife! Fuck that!!!
Another year, another Hourly Comic Day on February 1! I think this is the first year I’ve broken out of a uniform, boxy panel structure—not that this new paneling is particularly interesting, but I’ve been doing hourlies for some ten-odd years (!) and I haven’t tried to deviate until now.
(Read: 2024)
Say happy birthday to the first Tumblr theme I ever published, ten years ago on February 13, 2015. She’s part of what kickstarted me into my current career, as one of the first times I took web design seriously as more than just a hobby for myself.
2025-02-06 08:00:00
The big picture goal this year is to take my creative work more seriously.
I feel like most of my work is very casual—I publish blog posts without editing, leave my artwork in the ‘sketch’ stage, and go fuck it, good enough more often than not. This year, I want to take things more seriously and push myself to really improve my craft, which involves actually doing the hard work and expecting more out of myself. This is the non-fuck-it year.
