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.
2025-02-02 08:00:00
Thank you Ethan and Gosha for kindly tagging me in this! ^_^v
I’ve always been posting on the internet. I started this specific blog (“anhvn.com”) because I wanted to write stuff that would be tied to my online professional self, for the Rewards (affirmation from strangers, building an online presence, potential career benefits); before that I wrote on a different, now defunct, blog about meandering things, which wasn’t private but also wasn’t known by more than like three people; even before that I was pseudonymously Posting and Oversharing in different places, but not at all about professional work things.
Mostly, though, I decided with this website that I would no longer be posting passively into the abyss but I would invite people to read it, which was a scary thing to do after many years of said abyss but was ultimately a worthwhile and fulfilling choice.
My site is built with the static site generator Eleventy, which I’ve written about before. It’s very flexible, allows me to make all sorts of custom designs, and requires minimal upkeep.
My previous abyss blog was built with Jekyll (unwieldy, frightening); I’ve written diary entries in Blogger and LiveJournal; I continue to use Tumblr, which somehow remains the platonic ideal of a blogging platform, social network, and archive.
Most of the time, I write in VS Code in markdown, since all my blog posts are markdown files. This is somewhat gruesome, but it allows me to see how the post will look on my site as I work on it. The unsightly editor doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’ve been trying to draft notes in Obsidian lately—in fact, I am writing this very post draft in it right now—and if I’m on my phone and want to record a thought, I write it in the Notes app.
There aren’t any special circumstances that make me feel inclined to write—if I have a blog post-worthy thought (wow!) I’ll try to write down a note somewhere, and those thoughts can come from any number of things. Maybe I’ll see something cool and it’ll trigger some thought and then I have to write it down.
Most of my posts, however, have been either 1) recaps, or 2) process writeups; they didn’t exactly come out of inspiration, though I may form more thoughts while writing them.
My ideal writing environment is at home, at my desk, alone. Any other setup is simply too unergonomic—writing on my laptop in a coffee shop is romantic in theory but full of far too much physical and mental discomfort to work in reality.
I usually publish immediately, which I’m sure is evident—I don’t do much editing beyond cursory proofreading, to imperfect results. But I really should edit more.
My latest Media Recap 2024 was a lot of fun to write and illustrate! I also like Weeknotes 14, aka the weeknoter post.
Haha, I always have future plans. I want to redesign my whole site this year, because it’s been more than a year with the current design and I’m craving a change, but of course that’s going to be a long and hard process because I have an impractical amount of website content. Eleventy serves me perfectly, so I have no need to migrate.
Some future things I would like to add are:
I would love to read answers from: Sage, Erica, Veronique, and Jedda. (Only if you want to!!! No worries if not!!!)
Also if you just want to do this, then I tag you as well.
2025-01-15 08:00:00
2025-01-02 08:00:00
Note for RSS readers: I designed a custom blog post layout for this, which won’t display properly in an RSS reader (in fact, it will probably be extremely screwed up), so I encourage reading it on my blog itself.
After belabouring my favourite media throughout the year on this website, I must now of course collect it all into a single incredibly overwrought blog post.
It’s like this: these are my personal media highlights, rather than a best of list. I’m including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works of—creative genius, or something, that I’ve encountered this year. I’m not a critic; I am mostly just talking about things I liked. These are tremendous to me. I hope they can be tremendous to you, too.
This year, I watched fewer things—32 movies and 12 tv shows, versus last year’s 44 movies, 15 shows. Half of those movies were rewatches, and I started and dropped a lot of shows.
In 1920s Los Angeles, a bedridden patient in a hospital captivates a young girl with a fantastic tale of heroes, myths, and villains on a desert island.
I rewatched The Fall, a cult classic film from 2006 directed by Tarsem Singh. It is, famously, a beautiful movie, known for its landscapes—shot in 28 countries!—as well as the performance of Catinca, its child actress.
In my memory, The Fall is beautiful and sad. When I first watched it maybe a decade ago, I was in a different place and I connected too well with its suicidal protagonist. The scene I remembered the most was not one of the film’s cinematic fantasy sequences but rather one of the hospital scenes.
Ten years later, I am not so affected by that hospital. I enjoy the beautiful landscapes so much more (though the fact that I watched this in a movie theatre rather than a laptop screen helped). And I finally understand what the film is saying: a story lives in both the storyteller and the listener.
In my generation, once you saw a movie, it was really hard to see it again; you had a certain kind of nostalgia. You would think that this movie you saw as a kid was so amazing, but then you sit down as a grown up with your friends and show it to them, and they go, “But this is a piece of shit,” and you go, “Yeah, I kind of agree”—you had changed it in your head. So that was always true about storytelling: you’d change it in your head. This is a phenomenon that I think the newer generation won’t be that familiar with. Now, people can keep looking at film clips on YouTube or whatever, so the film kind of keeps up with how you remember it. But back then, you saw it and as you grew, the story changed and evolved—and you have to walk away for five, ten years at least to have that happen.
Smarter people than me have written about the film and its meaning. What I didn’t expect, however, was to be so enamoured by the behind-the-scenes story of how it was made. Molly Templeton writes, “This story, like most stories, gets romanticized to varying degrees; this is a movie that almost begs to be mythologized.”
The second story here is of The Fall’s creation: a self-funded labour of love, shot in 28 countries over four years, critically panned, and never widely released or distributed, until this year.
And it happened at the right time. My Italian girlfriend dumped me. I met Catinca, and I’d been looking for the child, boy or girl, for the film for seven years. I thought, We make the movie now, or like my brother used to say, we’ll be two old guys with a lot of money that are talking about a movie that they’ll never make. I told my brother, “Sell everything. I want to have nothing.” I’ll never be in that position again, because now I have a son. You gotta give him something to carry on and carry on. But back then, it was like, “Fuck it, burn the bridges behind me. Let’s go make this.”
—Tarsem Singh in Vulture
How absolutely romantic indeed. He thought about this for years, and made so much money doing commercial work (necessary!), and then spent it all making this. And then no one wanted it, and it had a cult following but no wide streaming or physical release—until 2024. And here we are.
Further reading:
Television highlight
Arcane is incredible. You already know this! Everything to say about it has already been said (it’s beautiful, stunning, etc.), so what’s left for me is the hyperspecific, nerdy shit:
[…] eventually computer-generated 3-D animation is going to age, ‘Whereas if the image is based on handmade artistic talent, that’s going to perdure.’
— Jérôme Combe (p.173)
I am unwell about it. It’s like how I felt after seeing Spider-Verse last year. I feel like my life is changed. I feel inspired.
Dir. Kiyotaka Oshiyama — Based on the manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto — 2024
The overly confident Fujino and the shut-in Kyomoto couldn’t be more different, but a love of drawing manga brings these two small-town girls together.
I saw this in theatres not knowing anything about it. It’s delightfully relatable—it captures the energy of being a young, obnoxious artist so well—and then it grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. People were crying all over the place. I’m crying again, just writing this.
It asks, why do you draw? The protagonist, Fujino, says that drawing manga is full of awful, hard work, yet she’s done it her entire life. Why does she do it? Why do any of us submit to the mortifying ordeal of creating art?
(We do it for what it’s always about: the rewards of being loved.)
Related listening: the theme Light song by haruka nakamura
Dir. Satoshi Kon — 2006
When a machine that allows therapists to enter their patient’s dreams is stolen, all hell breaks loose. Only a young female therapist can stop it and recover it before damage is done: Paprika.
Paprika is known for its surreal visuals. Like with The Fall, I first watched Paprika on a shitty little laptop screen many years ago. Earlier this year, it played in theatres as part of a Satoshi Kon celebration, so I jumped at the chance to see it. It’s really so magical and beautiful.
Related watching:
Seasons 2–3
Season two was perfect: I love character development, and there was so much of it. My favourite episodes were the two standouts: S2E6 Fishes, with its mounting anxiety and chaos, and S2E7 Forks. Richie, that beautiful bastard, has his moment and it feels so earned. The catharsis! I love growth! I love Love Story by Taylor Swift!
Ironically, I don’t watch much YouTube. I’m a cranky millennial who hates video, and also I struggle more with processing speech than text, and I prefer the flexibility and efficiency of reading. But I know I’m missing out on a lot of great stuff, so I’m trying to broaden my horizons.
Since this is a new category, there’s some overlap with 2023.
By Hbomberguy — December 2, 2023
The four-hour video essay that was so widely talked about that even I sat down to watch it, and then I rewatched it as I was working on this post. It’s an entertaining video, engaging through its entire runtime, and Harry Brewis approaches the topic of plagiarism with a lot of humour. He goes through so many examples of YouTubers plagiarizing their videos, how they did it, why they did it, how they defended themselves…it’s very messy!
But he also takes it seriously: why does it matter that these YouTubers have stolen the work of others? Why is it important for people to be credited and known? It is more than just insular YouTube drama.
Maybe it’s a good idea to have some standards for not stealing. Maybe.
In current discourse, YouTubers simultaneously present as the forefront of a new medium, creative voices that need to be taken seriously as part of the next generation of media. And also uwu small beans little babies who shouldn’t be taken seriously when they rip someone off and make tens of thousands of dollars doing it. (3:36:12)
Related intervew: Hbomberguy Didn’t Want to Make That 4-Hour Plagiarism Video by Rebecca Alter in Vulture
By Patrick (H) Willems — August 23, 2023
About things like the devaluing of creative labour (this was released during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes) and the flattening of all types of creative work into “content.”
I too have to stop myself from calling things “content” out of convenience. If there’s a more precise word, I’ll use that.
In general, watching Patrick’s channel has also properly shamed me about doing the whole watch-movie-in-the-background thing—in this video, he talks about streaming services wanting “second-screen content” for that exact purpose, which is insulting! I’m trying to be better about it.
By Jacob Geller — September 4, 2023
This is the only Jacob Geller video essay I’ve seen (I’m sorry, I ordered his book, I can’t wait to engage with more of his work) and it’s a really gorgeous meditation on the pre-apocalypse—the before the world ends—as seen in various books, movies, and games.
In his words: “This is an essay about catastrophe and death and despair and hope and two dozen other things.” And hope. It is a hopeful video essay.
Post-apocalypse is easy. When the great defining event of the world is in the rearview mirror, characters in post-apocalyptic stories are free to grapple with smaller, more individual crises. What are they going to do? Unexplode the bombs? Unscorch the Earth?
Setting a story in the pre-apocalypse presents characters with similarly impossible challenges, but this time the stakes are so high that to NOT do anything would be…morally contemptible? Right? Clive [FFXVI] has a moral obligation to stop Zettaflare, doesn’t he? When the alternative is a burned world? (23:07)
XOXO Festival — August 2024
I was fortunate to see Cabel Sasser present this at XOXO Festival this year, and it was a whole experience to be in that room. It’s about a McDonald’s mural—“the Sistine Chapel of McDonald’s wall art”—and legacy.
“Appreciate everything endlessly,” he says, and yeah, that’s really the heart of it, isn’t it? And maybe, just maybe, we can all live forever.
I watched A Family Affair and Bridesmaids on a bachelorette trip, neither of which I enjoyed, but the communal yelling at the TV was fun; my descent into Batman-related media (more on that in the Books section) included Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, Batman: The Animated Series, and Young Justice; other beautiful animation I enjoyed were Suzume and Metropolis; the only show I continue to keep up with is Jet Lag: The Game, which remains impressively entertaining; I finally watched Fight Club, which I had somehow never been spoiled for.
I’ll confess: I don’t have any literacy in music, so this will be the most vibes-based section. I liked this song because it was good; it was good because I liked it; etc.
Artist Highlight #1
Like everyone else this year, I got really into Chappell Roan. Her music is—perfect? I love pop music and the pop girlies.
Good Luck, Babe! is my song of the year. The perfect bridge; the vicious well I told you so’s; the graphic design is my passion lyric video; the sapphism; you’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling. Chappell Roan, I am bewitched!!!
Other obsessions include: Red Wine Supernova (so fun n flirty), My Kink is Karma (deliciously destructive), and Pink Pony Club (this live performance is my Roman Empire).
Artist Highlight #2
I first listened to Vaundy late last year, and Odoriko showed up on my top 2023 songs list. I listened to a lot more of his stuff this year. Odoriko remains one of my favourites, and this year Koikaze ni nosete (恋風邪にのせて) topped my most-listened to songs list on Sp*tify. Tokyo Flash is a whole vibe. I like Omokage, which he produced and is performed by milet, Aimer, and Lilas Ikuta. Uh. Songs good. I like them.
Ma Meilleure Ennemie
Stromae & Pomme — Arcane season two soundtrack
Look At You
Rebecca Black — Let Her Burn
Fortnight (ft. Post Malone)
Taylor Swift — THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT
Playing God
Polyphia — Remember That You Will Die
Silhouette
KANA-BOON — Time
Gunjō (群青)
YOASOBI — THE BOOK
I don’t really watch music videos unless 1) they’re from my favourite kpop artists, or 2) my YouTube algorithm autoplays them, which is presently showing me a lot of Japanese music, on account of listening to a bunch of Vaundy.
Cody・Lee(李)
I’m obsessed with this song, the styling, and colours. It made me want to use a red/yellow palette for a while, and also go eat dim sum.
BUMP OF CHICKEN
This MV is so much fun. It’s the opening theme for Dungeon Meshi and it uses a bunch of video game and storybook styles to show an RPG party. Super cute!!
Sakanaction
I love 80s (I think it’s 80s?) vibes! The dancing, the camera movements, the palm tree background, the outfits…
I went to four concerts this year!
As is the case every year, Destiny 2 was the predominant object of my fixation, though it ebbed and flowed depending on how exciting the season was. I’ve officially reached 3000+ hours logged in Steam, which is a truly horrific number to behold, but it’s not like I’m surprised by it anymore. It’s more like grudging acceptance, at this point.
Note: This is very indulgent section that will be comprehensible to maybe the five Destiny sickos who read my website.
I say this every time, but: Destiny is the most beautiful game in the world. It’s terribly good at its space wizards and aliens setting. Every time I see a brand new skybox—a skybox!—it’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen and I take screenshots of it, even though my capture ability is awful and I never go back to look at them anyway. But they are beautiful, and I am compelled.
I did three weeks of Pantheon! It was a fun time, despite the anguish and suffering and so forth. The modifiers made it so challenging and interesting. Highlights:
I don’t even change my emblem—I’ve been using ‘Share a Glass’, the VOG sherpa emblem, for a couple of years now—so the proof of my Pantheon achievements go unseen. Ah well. Now you all know about it, at least.
A banger expansion!!! Highlights:
Related: The Final Shape artwork on ArtStation
I love day one raiding, and have attempted each one ever since the reprised Vault of Glass. I went into this one cautiously optimistic—haha, what if it’s like Root of Nightmares? still hard, but doable?—and then it turned out that Salvation’s Edge was obscenely, undoably hard. I spent at least twelve hours doing that first encounter! Twelve hours! In Substratum! Fucking ridiculous. After we cleared it, we stumbled our way to the second encounter arena to take photos and then disbanded. Truly a classic Destiny experience, 2/10, would do again.
Off contest mode, SE remains quite challenging—though blasting our way through Substratum on normal mode was hilarious. The Herald boss is really satisfying, mechanically. Verity is beautiful, and I would argue it’s easier to dissect than to do whatever shape-juggling inside. The shape memes were good. I don’t love the third or fifth encounters, but I got the raid exotic on my third clear so I suppose I never have to do it again?
To understand the unique brain energy of this game, what compels us to devote our lives and souls to it, this article on PC Gamer really captures it: Yesterday I ignored 10 tornado warnings to finish a Destiny 2 raid, didn’t get the exotic drop, and disappointed my fiancée. Is there some sort of lesson here?
Dual Destiny is such a fun exotic mission with its mechanics—clock notation! lol!—and CHOOSE PEACE/KILL ending. I did so many overthrows in the Pale Heart because I was bored and just wanted to shoot things. I don’t even use my pile of Ergo Sums, which now collect considerable dust in my vault. I am never not using a rocket sidearm. If it’s not a rocket sidearm, I don’t want it. Double special meta rules. I still suck at PVP but continue to chase the thrill of Ruinous Effigy dunking.
After a zillion years, I made it to the award-winning expansion Heavensward. I finished the base campaign of A Realm Reborn two entire years ago, and then slogged through all of the post-campaign stuff. But then at the end, I had to sit and watch a 40-minute cutscene, and this was so egregious to me (remember: I hate video) that I put it off for at least six months.
When I finally did get around to it, it was the most engaged I had ever been in the entirety of my FFXIV experience. What a bananas sequence of events!!
Unfortunately, my subscription ran out and I am unable to play anymore unless I decide to fork over twenty dollars again. Maybe sometime next year. Now, I just watch my friends post screenshots and do activities together in Discord, like I am sad squidward looking out window.
I’ve been playing co-op with my friends every week, and we’re almost to Year 1 Winter. I’ve played several different farms over the past few years, so it’s nice to settle into familiar game mechanics (well, as much settling as you can do when also trying to optimize every second of every day) and hang out on a regular basis.
There was a couple of weeks in the fall where I got really into Balatro and then dropped off, which is probably for the best. I’ve made it to Black Stake but I’m admittedly not very good at it. I feel like I need to start watching guides or something.
Related reading:
Good for him!
I got back into playing Good Sudoku on iOS, which I had first gotten into a few years ago. This time, I’ve progressed enough to do the highest difficulty puzzles, though most of the time I use hints to solve them.
Y-Wing might be my favourite technique? I find it both annoying to spot and very logically satisfying.
Related watching: The Miracle Sudoku by Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube — it’s super fun to watch someone solve their way through a seemingly impossible puzzle. He makes it look so easy!
This was less of a reading year for me. I read one novel (a category I will conspicuously omit here) and a number of art reference books. Most notably, I got into DC comics towards the end of the year, which is funny and embarrassing because it makes me feel like I’m twenty again and getting into Marvel comics, which I have since left behind. So I’ve been reading a bunch of comics in the past few weeks and watching Batman-related media.
I’ve said this before, but to me, comics are the perfect medium. My last three homepage redesigns have been comics; I look forward to the local comics festival every year; I most admire the technical skill of comics artists.
There is really no shortage to brilliance happening here, and my ventures into the medium are embarrassingly limited. Next year I will try to do better.
Art by Starbite and written by CRC Payne
My first foray into the world of Batman that captured my interest. It’s an official DC webtoon, but tonally it’s light-hearted. It seems the best way to my heart is slice-of-life? In my mind, the Wayne family is full of love and happiness and nothing bad ever happens to them. Certainly, no one has ever, uh, died.
Written by Frank Miller and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli
My first Batman comic! I love the art: its use of shadows, Gotham’s noir atmosphere, the way the characters are drawn.
By E.M. Carroll
A weird, surreal mystery/horror. E.M. Carroll’s art is gorgeous and sets a great eerie atmosphere.
By Sumiko Arai
THE CUTEST MANGA IN THE WORLD!!! This has me kicking my feet and giggling. It’s about two high school girls who bond over their love of Western music and then FALL IN LOVE and it’s VERY cute, very doki doki, springtime of youth. The art is so sparkly and green.
Also, this is a fun example of a series being born from social media—it was originally posted to Twitter, so each chapter is four pages long due to Twitter’s limit of four images per tweet.
Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons
This was my first time rereading Watchmen while actively being into superhero comics. Every time the characters talked about how ridiculous the concept of costumed crime-fighting was, it made me think about how ridiculous Batman is. Who watches the Watchmen?
The art is a delight, as always.
I’ve been buying more art books lately, because I’ve realized that owning physical copies of artwork is satisfying and I will actually look at them, versus novels and non-fiction books that serve as props for my cosplay of a person who reads.
I’ve linked to these in my weeknotes, but here’s a few of the most memorable.
By Celine Nguyen in personal canon — May 27, 2024
The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas.
By Elan Ullendorff in escape the algorithm — June 11, 2024
When you see a slightly generic news story design, you’re seeing the solution to the problem: how do I make this work for any headline, any image, any tone, any audience? How do I make this as adaptable as possible? The question of “what does this story want?” becomes subsumed into the larger goal of malleability and efficiency. A template, not a story. A map, not 500 maps.
By Winnie Lim — January 21, 2024
I thought about this all the time throughout the year.
What is the point of working on and completing a sketchbook? In practical terms – none. But the entire process enriched my soul deeply. Each time I completed a spread it feels like I painted another layer of my soul. It is a full circle: having an experience that becomes a memory, pulling out that memory to make art out of it, then holding that creation in my own hands and seeing that memory take a concrete form – it enhances and solidifies the original experience that would otherwise have been quickly forgotten. We could probably do something similar with photos, but somehow there is alchemy in the act of drawing, as though etching the memory deeper in a bodily manner. It is no longer merely visual, I have used my body and breath to record this.
If Look Back is about the external rewards of creating art—the validation, the connection—then this is about the internal, the enriching of the soul, the permanence given to memory.
What a year of surprising and beautiful things. I didn’t expect to be so enamoured by the story of The Fall, or for Arcane season two to be so devastatingly good, or to care so much about a McDonald’s mural, or to continue to be awed by Destiny as though I didn’t already know that it’s beautiful, or to find something appealing about Batman for the first time in my life, and so on! And there will be more next year. How exciting.
In lieu of setting goals I will not complete, I shall end this by reiterating Cabel Sasser’s words of wisdom: “appreciate everything endlessly.”
Thanks for reading!
