anhvn

Weeknotes 37

2026-02-23T00:00:00Z

if the layout is messed up in your rss reader, apologies, I did some gruesome CSS stuff—I recommend reading it in your browser.

What is this? you ask. Well, it’s a tale as old as time. I had a vision, and then it was Sunday night and I hadn’t achieved it. As I result, I present you this: something that might be interesting, if I spent a few more days on it. As it is, I feel my interest flagging enough that I am yeeting it out the door prematurely. Let’s pretend it’s experimental.

Fascinating life updates

I switched code editors to Sublime Text, from VS Code.
I also changed my editor font to Maple Mono, which is very pleasing.
I had a nice long weekend the other week in good company eating, watching movies, and sleeping.

Works in progress

Also filed under: stuff I posted about and then never finished, much like this post design.

Blog post

Tentatively for: my San Francisco trip, though began as a weeknotes mockup. I just wanted to do something stationery-inspired.

what if i styled my captions in really elaborate, individual ways that absolutely do not scale

Font

I will finish this this year or die trying

Works completed

I did finish one thing I’m proud of: this year’s Hourly Comic Day features every hour I was awake. Usually I get tired by the evening and stop, but I managed to get through it all this year!

Read the whole thing here.

Works (minor)

I’ve been making smaller tweaks on my site, like, which include adding a reading tile to my homepage, now that I’m actually reading more, and adding a list view to my watchlist and games list.

Recent media

Movies

I’ve been rewatching a lot of movies lately, instead of watching new things, which is just another item in my long list of suboptimal life decisions. Why am I not maximizing every precious day I have by experiencing new things to become a more worldly, enlightened person?

Anyway, notably, I rewatched Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet, both in theatres, which is a great way to experience them. The music! The fast cutting!

Reading

Against all odds (the odds being that I usually like to waste away instead of reading), I am also reading more.

The Count of Monte Cristo continues. It’s very amusing.
I’ve started House of Leaves, which is unnerving and weird (complimentary). Normally I would be zooming through a book like this to Find Out What Happens, but I’m reading it as part of a book club (population: 2), which invites me to slow down and examine the structure more closely than I otherwise would have. This is a very good book for examining structure.
I also started listening to the Pride and Prejudice audiobook. I’ve seen the movie but have never read the book.

Games

I’m still not gaming these days, but this week I’ll be trying Marathon during its free play period (server slam) before official launch (and welcome to the jam).

Okay, that’s it

Thanks for reading~ ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

I want to go on vacation

2026-02-09T00:00:00Z

Don’t tell my boss, but I am thinking about vacation. I am thinking about spending creative energy making something that will not convert or have any business value whatsoever. I am thinking about running off into the metaphorical field of flowers and playing with toys.

The standard disclaimer: the job is fine. I think labouring for a company just becomes intolerable, no matter the company, after a period of time. Sometimes that time is very short, when the job is bad; in this case, it is probably a normal amount of time. This is perhaps the kind of thing a good reset can fix—like going on vacation, or doing something that doesn’t have to do with computers, or hitting my head against the wall—but we just had December. Isn’t it too soon to abscond.

I shan’t get into the worldly horrors that kind of make everything seem meaningless. I keep thinking that what will fix me is a cat, which I can pick up or even just look at every day, which will reaffirm that not everything sucks and is terrible and actually, I am being melodramatic. What’s job fatigue to a cat.

Some things I enjoyed recently:

Rewatched Moulin Rouge!, in theatres this time. I think my type of movie is maximalist. There is absolutely nothing chill about it. I’m rewatching Romeo + Juliet in theatres soon too.
Started reading House of Leaves, and I’m excited for it to get really fucking weird.
I really like the opening title for No Time to Die.

You know, I really thought this list was going to be longer.

Things I fantasize about doing on vacation, by which I mean staycation:

Sleeping for 7+ hours
Reading a lot of comics
Drawing badly, hopefully in pursuit of drawing better
Writing all the blog posts I want to write

Due to these traitorous vacation thoughts that would get me executed by firing squad (just kidding), I have built a very advanced (it is a boolean) new feature, just for this post, that I’m calling “stealth mode”; i.e. this post is suppressed on my website’s blog archive, though the permalink exists, and is mostly going to be read by you RSS sickos (affectionate) who actually subscribe to the blog feed. I hope this list includes absolutely zero of my professional colleagues. If so—sorry. Slack me.

To offset this post’s intense melodrama, may I offer you this: yesterday’s hourly comic day, where I try to be funny instead.

Projects Recap 2025

2026-01-10T00:00:00Z

Everyone wrote one of these and I wanted to too. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my incomplete projects, and then recently about my unproductive but joyful holiday break. And currently, I’m busy procrastinating on my media recap, which feels bad, and has felt bad for the past few weeks while it’s loomed over me.

I was scrolling through my sketchbook gallery and thinking—hm! I did draw quite a bit last year! So maybe I should record all the things I did accomplish, creatively speaking. (I already wrote about this briefly on Mastodon; here is the non-abridged version.)

Site redesign (Version 7)

I redesigned my website, and restructured it under the hood. I still need to write an updated Eleventy setup post about it, but I’m most pleased with how I fixed up my templates so that it’s easier for me to maintain all my custom pages now.

anhvn.com, version 7

I’m still happy with how Version 7 is looking—love some pink, pointy letters, and Tiempos Text, especially how it renders nicely on MacOS. There is of course the usual laundry list of improvements I would like to make—dark mode! better mobile styling! sensible collections filtering!—but that can come later.

Homepage redesign: “tiles”

I updated my homepage to what I call “tiles.” It’s simple in concept and execution and I like it!

anhvn.com, tiles

I had been tired of my previous homepage (“halloween”) for a while, but didn’t know how to update it. I’ve had comic homepages for the last couple of years now, and I wanted to continue that and was half-heartedly writing some scripts, but it was all very fuzzy.

At some point I started doodling little icons in my sketchbook, and then realized putting it into a bunch of orderly tiles would be easy to do.

the initial ideas from my sketchbook. now that i look at these in retrospect, these are more interesting than what i ended up with…oh well! that's how it goes, sometimes.

I think I threw it all together on a weekend. Simple drawings, simple CSS grid layout. The most complex bits may have been the little animated details, which weren’t really complicated at all.

I’m ultimately happy with it, and think it feels very me. I’m especially pleased that I finally was able to incorporate the dynamic media—the “last watched” VHS tape shows the newest entry in my watchlist; the “on repeat” vinyl shows my latest favourite song. And I’ve been wanting to do this kind of dynamic media on physical object kind of art for a long time. It sort of exists on my listening room page, but I think there’s a lot more room to take it further, artistically speaking. Contorting an image is easy with modern CSS; I need to draw an amazing frame for it. All of my latest watched movies should be VHS tapes, actually.

Bespoke blog posts

I designed two bespoke weeknotes posts this year, which is fewer than 2024, but I had also stopped writing weeknotes halfway through the year, so it’s not too surprising.

Weeknotes 29

Weeknotes 30

The colour palette of Weeknotes 30 formed the foundation for my redesign. I found that I liked the soft pink background and blurple text, and ended up redesigning my whole site to use it. That’s the nice thing about experimenting with smaller pages. If you try something and really like it, you can reapply it on a larger scale.

Interviews

I was interviewed on Foofaraw and People & Blogs. This was exciting because I’ve never been interviewed before!

Plein Airpril

I did 19/30 paintings for Plein Airpril. I missed a chunk of days because I was on vacation (New Yawk Citayyyy babyyy) and then important life stuff; otherwise I committed time every day to painting. I’m proud of myself for the consistency! Some days were worse than others, and there are a couple I’m embarrassed about, but I shared them all anyway.

the collection. view them, along with 2024's paintings, in my sketchbook.

Museum

Speaking of New York City, I visited twice this year (exciting!) and sat in a few museums to draw. Reviewing them all now, I can see how my observational skills have improved since 2023, which is really cool.

The Met

I’ve compiled them in my sketchbook. I don’t have plans to visit NYC again anytime soon, but I hope to find more opportunities to draw my surroundings this year.

Cringetober

For my second art challenge of the year, I did Cringetober, and succeeded in drawing for 29/31 days! I have tried October drawing challenges before; my previous record may have been four or five days of Inktober, years ago. This year, while many days were still minimal effort days, I was consistent.

view the whole collection here

Hourly Comic Day

I’ve been doing Hourly Comic Day on February 1 every year for at least ten years, and 2025 may have been my most polished year yet. I’m proud of myself! This year’s is coming up in a few weeks and I’m looking forward to it. It falls on a Sunday, which means I can be leisurely about it.

9am to 11am. Read the whole thing here.

Sketchbook

I finished a sketchbook! I started it in February 2025 and it reached its last legs in December. I drew a few nice things, all inked and shaded properly; I drew a bunch of fanart; there’s a lot of cringetober stuff; I did my museum drawings in here. There is, of course, still less good stuff, but I think it’s proportionally less.

nyx from hades

Something different this year that I had a lot more drawing than design work. My previous sketchbook was filled with website sketches and the like. I think one of the reasons is that this sketchbook had thicker paper meant to be used for artwork, while my previous sketchbook had thin paper that saw lots of ink ghosting and was thus much less suited for drawing. The presence of suitable paper probably spurred me to draw more.

abigail, the last dinner party

Another cool thing is that I think my general baseline quality of drawing is improving. I know beautiful, polished sketchbooks are popular to show off online, but that is absolutely not the case for me. Polished works are the exception. But with that said, I realized that I’m mostly happy with it, rough edges and all. A friend asked if they could flip through it, and I think I would have been too embarrassed to share previous sketchbooks, but this one could withstand a flipthrough.

(I am actually toying with the idea of recording a flipthrough—me! a notorious video hater! making a video!? blasphemy—because I like seeing people’s sketchbooks, especially if they’re imperfect. But first I would need some kind of phone mount, lmao. The logistical hurdles are too high, so I have not yet done it.)

Media Recap 2024

My 2024 media recap was published on January 2, 2025, so I supposed it would still fit here. This remains my highest-effort blog post to date.

One of my main goals was integrating text + art, and I had fun with the foreground/background effect here.

A year later, I can see all the flaws in it, but it’s still something I’m proud of. I worked hard on the art and design. I tried to be sincere in my reviews. I remember finishing it overnight in a strange, intense nine-hour sprint, went to bed around 8am, and woke up a couple of hours later for my first day back at work after the holidays. Not a great day, physically, but I felt quite fulfilled.

And then the day after, I started working on my site redesign. I think the creative energy from that project kept me moving forward.

I have mentioned repeatedly how I’m working on my 2025 recap, which I had hoped would be beautiful and amazing and completed by now. But it’s not! Not even close. Last year I had a much clearer vision, probably because I didn’t have big expectations for myself. This year I’m like, I need it to be EVEN BETTER!!! which is kind of unhelpful to think at this point in time. I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s a struggle, but I’m chipping away at it slowly.

I hope to continue to create things in 2026, try new things, experiment, make something weird, make something good, make something bad, make something no one but me likes, try really hard at something, and so on and so forth.

Weeknotes 36

2026-01-08T00:00:00Z

Cool links

delphitools is an amazing collection of small, useful tools. Like this paper sizes reference, something I have had to search for before and wade through annoying websites to find information for.
I like the daily game enclose.horse, where you enclose a horse with fences. I’ve played three days so far and have yet to reach 100%.
A Website To End All Websites by Henry From Online. Everything Henry writes is thoughtful and heartfelt. Also, the fonts on this page are annoyingly beautiful.

Reading

I’m trying to read more this year. Have I said that before? Let’s pretend this isn’t a goal I’ve had every year for the past ten years, mostly to sad results.

My friends invited me to join a year-long book club for The Count of Monte Cristo, aptly titled r/AReadingOfMonteCristo. The book is a chonker. I hope I can keep up. I tried to do Dracula Daily a couple of years ago, but fell off halfway through.
I’ve started listening to audiobooks! This is a first. I hope it will improve my Reading Productivity™.
I’ve started to look at more recipe books, instead of fighting against recipe websites and shortform cooking videos.

Working on

I’ve started publicly cataloguing my planner spreads. My ideal form of this is a grid of photos, filterable by layout and subject.
I haven’t been drawing lately, which bums me out, but I’m thinking of updating my homepage grid. I excluded a tile for my books page when I made it, because I was barely updating it, but maybe I should add it now that I’m definitely going to read so much this year. And the art on my homepage is deliberately simple, so it’s theoretically (ha!) not demanding to update.
- it would just mess up the nice 3×3 grid I have going on, so maybe I need to add three new tiles, actually
then that pile of blog post stuff I’ve been working on for weeks and weeks and am too embarrassed to keep mentioning here.

Some good things:

Sunsets are nice, especially the ones where everyone around you also notices that it’s nice and stops to take photos of it
Cat videos
When the sun comes out after a dreary, rainy morning
Soup, noodle soup, hot pot, etc.
My cutting board is r/perfectfit in my new dish drying rack
I have exciting, chill weekend plans
Days are slowly getting longer

I’m not one for reading poetry (maybe one day in the future), but here is one:

Good Bones
By Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

I have had an unproductive and happy holiday

2026-01-03T00:00:00Z

“Unproductive” in this context refers to my many creative projects I wanted to tackle over the holidays. Instead of working on them, I spent a lot of time hanging out with people. As someone who is unpleasantly introverted, I usually do not like hanging out with people that often. I would rather be at home! But it was good, and I was happy, and there is time in January to do what I wanted to do.

I went to a very fancy and expensive dinner with my partner, which was delicious, and then afterward I was like okay I need to stop eating out now, that was exorbitant. One of my goals for 2026 is to eat out less and to cook more at home.
I watched Tokyo Godfathers in theatres with friends, which is a perfect Christmas movie.
I painted my nails a pale, slightly shimmery pink. I always want to do my nails but rarely have the willpower for it. But having painted nails makes me feel unironically very beautiful and happy. I like fashion far more than I care for beauty (hair and makeup, two skills I do not have), but nails are an exception (in how much I care, not in my skill at nail art, which I also lack); I should really take the time to do them more often because it makes me happy.
There was a day when I went to three grocery stores (exciting!) and then tried a new recipe (miso ramen, which unfortunately turned out mid).
I run in the late afternoon before/as the sun goes down, which often gives me spectacular views of the sunset. I can’t post pictures without doxxing myself, but imagine: pink and purple skies; sometimes clouds reflecting the light; people all around stopping on their walks to also take pictures.
I watched Marty Supreme, which was good, and I’m still listening to the score now.
I visited a local garden—the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden—which I had never gone to before. It was really pretty!
I ate a whole lot of skewers and dessert with friends.
I played two new tabletop games: Skyjo, a luck-based card game (I was very lucky), and Wavelength, a party game in the same vein as Codenames.
- On a scale of Unsexy Emoji (0) to Sexy Emoji (100), where would you put the luggage emoji? My answer: 40.
I had a very chill New Year’s Eve.
I’ve been writing a lot in and enjoying my Hobonichi Weeks planner. I’m really trying to be more organized and focused this year! I’ve got cute stickers, washi tape, and colourful pens, which means I’m all set to be so smart and organized and on top of things.
I started a physical commonplace book. So far, I’m using it to take movie and book notes.

I’m thinking maybe I should lower/shift my ambitions for my planned blog posts. At some point it becomes more of a hindrance, expecting myself to do something high-effort in a certain way while I can feel my interests shifting. There are many paths to creative fulfillment!

Anyway, I return to work in a couple of days, which is dreadful, but that’s how it goes. I hope I can finish up my blog post drafts this month :-)

Outtakes, etc.

2025-12-27T00:00:00Z

I start so many things and then talk about them and then don’t finish them. I thought it might be fun to compile them all here so that they’re not lost to the sands of time.

Incomplete projects that I posted about that are more or less abandoned in their current state

Weeknotes but fashion

In February (February! geez) I had the idea to write a recap framed by the fashion of xyz, which I excitedly posted about and then never touched again. I still like the idea and hope to return to it some day!

recently listening / my earrings. originally posted in weeknotes 29

Weeknotes but calendar

In August, I thought about doing a low-effort (writing-wise) weeknotes layout structured like a calendar. Retro.app is structured like this and I think it’s really effective for showing a weekly overview.

originally posted on mastodon

I did something similar in October 2024 for Weird Web October’s day #4 prompt “Lists.” (Wow, it took me a moment to find this page because it’s utterly unfindable, lol. Also my WWO archive somehow still uses my old site version 6 layout. Perhaps I’ll leave it like that as a little snapshot, haha.)

Incomplete projects that I didn’t post about and have suffered secretly in shame over, or whatever

Cityscapes

Back in February I started Yuhki Demers’ visdev cityscapes class and made barely any progress. Embarrassing! I want to finish it this year (preferably, in the next couple of months).

Weeknotes zine

This is from 2024, but I actually wrote what would have been “Weeknotes 20” as a tiny zine, photographed it, put it into a blog post, and decided it wasn’t good enough to post.

Well, I’m dropping it here now. A fun detail I can pick out is that this must have been shortly after I acquired my f/1.4 camera lens, haha.

(here is what weeknotes 20 actually turned out to be)

Other drafts that I intend to complete, for real

Stardew Valley farm tour

I got back into Stardew Valley in the summer/fall, and was motivated enough to start writing a farm tour post. Then I went on vacation, and then Hades II came out, and I forgot about it. Perhaps I can still pull something together though, even if it’s more screenshots than writing as I initially planned.

Some screenshots, originally posted to Mastodon in September:

Chili crisp page

This is published, but pretty much a work-in-progress still. I hope to fill it out more this year.

Site redesign + restructuring

Since my 2024 post about my Eleventy setup, I’ve redesigned my site and restructured my templates. I’ve started working on an updated post, but this languished and was forgotten. I want to finish it sometime in the next couple of months!

Handwriting font

I briefly tried creating a font out of my own handwriting, which was fun! I want to spend more time on that next year, which will take some work since I think I’ll need to learn how to use more complex software to do the ligatures and things that I want.

originally posted in weeknotes 30

The software complaining containment zone

I try not to complain too much on social media because I know that it’s mostly just unproductive. There are more worthwhile things to spend my energy doing. But of course, sometimes the compulsion to write something mean is too strong to resist—especially when I’ve repeatedly encountered something frustrating. Perhaps I’ll compile these every year and it will form some kind of interesting anthropological look for future readers (me) at the modern issues that plague us (me).

Anyway, here are my drafts, which is complaining and a bit of shitposting.

(micro)blog posts

I wrote these in a big text file.

february — using instagram is such a miserable experience. the home feed is like: 3 posts from people you follow, and then an ad, and then a ‘suggested’ post from someone you don’t follow. you have to snooze suggested posts every 30 days. what are we doing here.
- december update: unbelievably, it somehow got worse. it’s like every 1–3 posts now that you get an ad. every single inch of instagram is infuriating. (yes, i know, the solution here is to stop using it, this is why this is the petty complaining zone)
june — WHY!! ARE WE GETTING AI TO DO THINGS LIKE SUMMARIZE EMAILS WE RECEIVE INTO POINT FORM AND THEN ASKING AI TO SUMMARIZE THE EMAILS WE SEND FROM POINT FORM INTO PROFESSIONAL LANGUAGE. WHY!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA BIRDSCREAM.GIF
september: insert doomer blog post about how bad websites are. why are they so bad? bizarre.

Mastodon drafts

kind of a wild experience now how instagram is like one ad per post in the feed now and ~~also ads aren’t labeled~~. and when it’s not ads it’s suggested reels or contacts or expiring stories.
- correction: ads are labeled, but the little sponsored text has moved from the top of the post to the bottom right corner, on top of the image, making it 1) harder to read, and 2) identifiable as an ad only after you’ve seen it. congrats on the innovation.
i should be at the club (on vacation)
sorry for joking about safari. the real go fuck yourself platform is outlook
the workday really just is think
typing and deleting toots about how much i hate slop. there r better things to do with my time!! just frustrated at how much easier it is now to fill the web with junk. like we needed more junk mail and spam, but now it’s dressed up in proper grammar and em dashes and lists of 3. etc. old man yells at cloud. everyone has said this already. i will keep saying this. you are tired of reading it. i am also tired of reading it. old man yells at cloud!!!
the problem with winter is that daylight is so limited so taking an afternoon nap feels like an enormous waste of sun
it’s always garamond
getting back into stardew is so dangerous
Every Commercial Website Sucks And Every Personal Website Is Beautiful: Why Business Incentives Ruin Everything From Ads To User-Unfriendly Interfaces To

▃▄▄[ █ 😼 █
..▂▄▅█████▅▄▃▂
[████ UWU █████]
◥⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙◤

Very realistic aspirations for next year

Personal recipe catalogue website
Dressup toy
Hobonichi layout catalogue
hourly comic day including the evening hours, which is when i usually lose steam
30/30 pleinairpril
31/31 october art challenge, whatever it may be
site redesign version 8 maybe

Weeknotes 35

2025-12-13T00:00:00Z

How I’m spending my time these days

and other things I’m thinking about

I’ve been excitedly using my 2026 planner (a Hobonichi Weeks, which technically starts in December 2025). My desire to use a physical planner ebbs and flows throughout the year. I’m currently really into it, on account of the whole shiny new planner thing. Surely this is the year I will fix myself.
Related to analogue notetaking: I started a commonplace book, which I’ve been curious about trying for many years now. It just felt—inefficient, to do it on paper instead of in a tool like Obsidian or Notion or whatever. But I’ve never been able to maintain any kind of useful knowledge management system even with such tools, so I should try something else.
Home organizing/decluttering is ever-ongoing. I’m not very good at housekeeping, but I’d like to adopt a cat in the near future and thus have tangible motivation to get my house in order.
I’ve been watching a lot of home vlogs lately, which makes me want to lifestyle vlog (/blog) as well, like if I too emulate this beautiful kind of life, then I too will be beautiful and happy and fulfilled. I think a little bit of this aspiration is good for me (due to my aforementioned Being Bad At Housekeeping), but the consumerist nature of it can be offputting and overwhelming.
I’m counting down the days til the holidays—I don’t celebrate anything, so this time of year is mostly just a reprieve from the work schedule for me, which is exciting. I’m trying not to daydream too much about it, because I know I’ll inevitably spend a lot of time lazing about instead of Being Productive. Rest is good, but I also want to get stuff done.
Playing games sometimes—cautiously venturing back into the new Destiny 2 expansion (quite fun), and some more Hades II here and there (trying to romance Icarus…)

Creative projects I’m working on

The year’s media recap, which is probably the big grand thing I’ll be working on for the rest of this month. So far it’s in the vapourware stage of barely existing in my head, but I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time and focus on it over the holidays.
Drawing, sometimes. I started a new sketchbook!
Adding stickers and washi tape to my planner is fun.
Adding to my December Adventure log, where I’m documenting whatever creative bits I accomplish every day. Sometimes that involves not doing anything. I’m enjoying the lowkey nature.

It’s nice to return to this format after a while. I don’t feel the need to adhere to my previous structure. I sat down and wrote this in less than an hour, which is very freeing.

Shortbox Comics

2025-11-02T00:00:00Z

i finally got around to buying and reading comics from this year’s ShortBox Comics Fair and wanted to briefly (very briefly!) record them here
note: as of writing, these are no longer available to purchase on SBCF; i’ve linked to the artist websites/socials instead

Dream Loop by Vakueva Nina (@inkpangur)

this is such a fun comic about dreams
in the first one, she dreams that she’s missing her exam despite having graduated
which is. same. the only recurring dream i have is about uni stuff
the art is beautifully cross-hatched
the expressions are so good!! so funny and really capture the chaotic nature of dreams

INJEST by Mapurl

love the atmosphere in this…a little bit eerie and mysterious
the use of lighting is so good
and then the sudden drama/surprise of certain panels…chef kiss

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I WATCHED A MAN DISMEMBER A DOVE by Alex Siple

this one is a Berserk fancomic
i’ve never read berserk but i picked this one up because the style is so intriguing
while i don’t follow the ‘what does it mean’ of it all, i love the vibe
it mixes prose styles (drop caps!!) with imagery in such a cool way…

War and the Maiden by riotbones

i love the art…textures and colours/atmosphere
this one is more conceptual/philosophical and everything is very moody
i enjoy watching (reading) these two duke it out…

Song of the Seabirds by Narsid

THIS SHIT MADE ME CRY! !!!
incredibly beautiful art. every page is beautifully composed and detailed. the colours are gorgeous. the lines are so clean
OBSESSED with it. i could look at it forever
some pages and compositions are like a whammy to the chest
also: a love story for the ages

Blog post

2025-09-30T00:00:00Z

currently

got back into stardew valley
paused that tho so i could play freak levels of hades 2 (rolled credits today) (lol)
listening to hadestown cast recording – saw it in nyc earlier this month and i have thought of nothing else since
mourning the end of sunny weather

making stuff

not at all! not working on anything. not doing anything for spooky website season. tons of drafts in general for this website. perhaps that’s fine actually
i do want to attempt a drawing challenge though for october
and/or weird web october
feeling very uncreative and listless lately, which is boring and not new but
i guess it be like that sometimes
gradually adding to a yearly media highlights list, which i’m kind of excited to write
no idea what i’ll do for it yet, if it’ll be like last year’s, but it’s fun to think about. tons of amazing art, entertainment, and creative work out there every single day

generic i need to redesign my website to solve all my problems sentiment here

Goal: make one comic this year

2025-08-01T00:00:00Z

that’s it that’s the post

Weeknotes 34

2025-07-20T00:00:00Z

This website

I redesigned my website!!!

here's what it looks like. if you're reading this via rss, you should go look at it.

In some ways it’s not that different—the overall layout is the same, with centered content and all. The fonts and colours are new. I’m excited to look at something new though, because I was getting quite tired of the old design.

the redesign view

Movies

Watched some good movies lately!

Amélie: just saw this last night at a local theatre—so beautiful!! I’m listening to the soundtrack as I write this! I am also a very shy person with an overactive imagination, so many things about it were Too Real.
Superman: wonderful, might see it again
The Godfather: so late to the party here. ok I get it now!! I get the memes!!!
KPop Demon Hunters: BANGER AFTER BANGER SONGS, GREAT MOVIE FOR MY FELLOW KPOP SICKOS (CURRENT OR FORMER)

Games

I’m playing Destiny again because the new expansion just came out. As of writing, I’m not done the campaign yet! While I’m enjoying myself (except for the orbin’ time mechanics), my enthusiasm is much more muted than it was compared to the previous expansions.

I also didn’t participate in this weekend’s contest mode raid, which I feel glad about because it’s looking like it was an absolutely miserable (and…buggy? who’s to say) experience for everyone involved, including the top streamers, even by normal contest mode standards.

me when scientists

Photos

ootd on a nice day out

at the theatre

Some comic/zine purchases recently:

Hot Rot by puppyteeth / The Gift by Zoe Maeve

Slow Mornings by Paige Jung

I also bought Watchmen and Hawkeye (2012), two comics I’ve been wanting to buy for years.

Weeknotes 33

2025-06-22T00:00:00Z

Everything is fine!

Comics

I went to the local comics event: Raincity ComicCon.

No Thing Beside Remains by Magnus vdM
Object Head Zine
Lotus Land
RED
Cassandra Cain + Jason Todd charms by alexvndra

Latest DC comics:

Absolute Batman — chonky batman is interesting, though it’s a tad dark for my tastes.
Batman and Robin: Year One — I looooove the art for this series, the lines and shadows and colours are so beautiful. I think I’ll buy the hardcover when it comes out.

Batman and Robin: Year One #7. Art by Chris Samnee, colours by Mat Lopes.

Interview

I was interviewed on foofaraw, where I talked about my media diary and consumption. It was a lot of fun to answer 😊

Cinema

After not really watching any movies for a couple of months, I have watched a bunch in the past few weeks:

The Phoenician Scheme — I liked it! Michael Cera—whom I have, actually, only ever seen in Barbie so I don’t have a firsthand understanding of his vibe—is great; the comedy is great; the cinnamon topography is great. Solid 4 stars, I’d see it again.
Thunderbolts* — as good as everyone says! Florence Pugh is wonderful as Yelena.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League — lol, I wrote more about it here but I did not enjoy this.
Batman: Under the Red Hood — I am such a fake Jason Todd fan for not having watched this sooner but ayyy.
Batman Ninja — fun as hell. I thought it’d be about ninjas but it’s actually about mechas.
The Lego Batman Movie — I heard this was good and they were RIGHT. Silly and sweet. Contains the best Dick joke as well as my favourite Joker since BTAS.
Asteroid City (rewatch) — I haven’t seen this since it was in theatres!
The French Dispatch (rewatch) — and I’ve seen this a bunch already. This time I rewatched it because I just read the companion book for it.

I’m really excited for Superman next month!

Sports aside

I watched Money in the Bank, the WWE event where they climb up a ladder to grab a briefcase. My partner is really into pro wrestling so I’m sometimes roped into watching it. My favourite was the women’s match.

Gaming

My friend lent me their VR headset, so I’ve been playing Beat Saber, which is really fun. Caramelldansen might be my favourite beatmap.

I also played a bit of FBC: Firebreak. It’s fun! I have it on Xbox gamepass for the next couple of weeks.

I haven’t opened Destiny in like a month.

Retro gaming

I went to Vancouver Retro Gaming Expo and looked at a lot of old school gaming consoles, computers, games, and the like.

never speak to me or my son ever again

Books

I’m slowly making my way through How a Game Lives by Jacob Geller, which is a beautiful book.
I found House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski at a used bookstore!!! I’ve been wanting to read it for ages.
I bought the 10th anniversary edition of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, which has a cool holographic cover. I enjoy this one the most out of the series.

How a Game Lives. Cover artwork by Kilian Eng

Weeknotes 32

2025-05-23T00:00:00Z

Media Diary

Listening to: nostalgia

I went to see Avatar: The Last Airbender In Concert which was nostalgic and wonderful.

Playing: A bit

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.

Watching: Nothing new

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).

Reading: DC

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:

Nightwing by Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo (#78–118) — the art for this run is FANTASTIC. Bruno Redondo does such cool stuff with showing how Nightwing moves around.

The famous Nightwing #87 — Bruno Redondo does this thing where he draws Nightwing multiple times in a single panel, which I just think is so cool. Comics, baby!!!

Robin by Joshua Williamson and Gleb Melnikov (#1–12) — featuring Damian Wayne in the League of Lazarus tournament, where he (fake) kills people and makes friends and reads shoujo manga. It’s cute!
Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta — I only read the first couple of issues because that’s all that was available on my subscription, but I liked it. The art is really nice and it’s an interesting take on Batman, albeit quite violent.
Tim Drake: Robin by Meghan Fitzmartin and Riley Rossmo — I’m kind of whatever about the plot here but am totally charmed by the art, which is very opinionated and stylized. Funnily enough, it seems that a lot of people hate the art, as well as the characterizations; I can’t really comment on the latter since I haven’t read Tim’s other runs yet—namely, Red Robin—mostly because I’m not fond of that artwork, lol.

From Tim Drake: Robin. I looove how Riley Rossmo draws such dynamic movement.

Desk

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:

Desk: Progressive Desk Solo Ryzer (tabletop: 60"×30" / 152.4cm × 76.2cm).
- I picked this because 1) it’s local; 2) people said good things about its customer service; and 3) it didn’t have horrific reviews on Reddit. So many standing desk brands would look beautiful and cool on Instagram and then I would go on Reddit and all the comments were like ‘do NOT buy from this company, it arrived damaged and their CS is a trashfire.’
- Deskmat: Two-Sided Vegan Leather Desk Mat, which I got along with my desk order as part of a promotion
PC: I’ve written about the whole build and specs here; the case is a cute lil NR200P!
Laptop: MacBook Air M2
- Laptop stand: Twelve South BookArc
Monitors: two LG 27" 4K monitors (27UP650-W)
- Wallpaper: it’s a Destiny 2 wallpaper that Bungie shared; I’ve sadly lost the link to it.
Keyboard: Ergodox EZ with KAT Drifter keycaps. Here’s the layout.
Mouse: Logitech Lift; for gaming I use a wired Logitech G203, which I’ve shoved behind the vertical monitor.
Headphones: Massdrop × Sennheiser HD 6XX Headphones. I’ve also stuck this behind my vertical monitor.
Mic: Blue Yeti; it’s mounted to the left side of my desk.

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.

Etc.

RIP Pocket and Glitch.

My open tabs

2025-05-22T00:00:00Z

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??

the wikipedia page for Contrapposto: ‘a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs in the axial plane.’ — because I think I should study this, so I can draw figures that are less stiff. Related: at the Met, I drew a sculpture that was contrapposto; a tour guide came by and talked about it.
The Verge series about the American War, their special series for the 50th anniversary of, well, the American War, or as you may know it, the Vietnam War.
links to buy cable management doodads, because I recently updated my desk setup and would like to actually wrangle the million cables around me
six windows, each with a zillion tabs, related to work-related internet spelunking. they are all very interesting! maybe in six months i will talk about some of it, if i ever feel like talking about my worksona here.
my actual active work browser window, which contains: my email (i am a freak who does not use an email client on desktop), a lot of dropbox (aka the world’s worst website), some notion (aka the world’s worst website), some wordpress (aka the world’s worst website)
another window about a work-related thing that, upon review, can now be closed.
troubleshooting my wi-fi issue that has plagued me for probably a year now
tabs related to How To Make A Font, a venture I began a couple of months ago and then abruptly dropped off of and forgot, until I am looking at it again now to write here. links include: pangrams; various foundries; written guides; font-making software; reddit posts.

Weeknotes 31

2025-05-04T00:00:00Z

itsgonnabemay.jpg

Current media

Reading The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen; next up will be (hopefully, lol) Mỹ Documents by Kevin Nguyen.
Playing Blue Prince obsessively (currently: 26 hours in, recently reached Room 46, having a lot of fun); Control more sporadically; pausing Destiny 2 until it does something wild like announce a new expansion and campaign and blow all our minds (May 6th stream, I am waiting for u)
Falling behind on watching things—behind on Daredevil; watching one Black Mirror season 7 episode a week (seen the first two now); apparently Thunderbolts is good but I have Marvel fatigue?; I finished The White Lotus season 3 and am mentally jamming to the full moon party theme at any given moment.
Listening to The Last Dinner Party—their cover of Blondie’s Call Me lives rent-free in my head.

abigail, performing sinner

PleinAirpril

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.

this one is perhaps my favourite—it's different from my usual landscapes and buildings. I felt really uncertain about how it was coming along the entire time I worked on it, but in the end I'm happy with how it came out.

All paintings are compiled over in my sketchbook, along with any stray notes about them and timelapses.

New York City

I visited New York for the first time, which was very cool and exciting. Highlights:

Loved the Met so much!!!
Also went to: Cooper Hewitt, Guggenheim, MoMA, and Whitney (which, apparently, does not use the Whitney font anymore).
Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge was fun.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden was soooo nice. Sadly it was too early in the month for the cherry blossom trees to be blooming, but it was still lovely. I really liked the various greenhouses with different climates.
I went out for dinner with people from work! After working remotely for so long, it was nice to finally meet people in person.
Shout out to trains

Here are a bunch of photos and sketches.

it was nice to spend such a rainy day indoors

a bird (a house sparrow? h/t Noah) outside the guggenheim

photo by jillian ^_^

had time to kill, so I sat around in Koré Coffee in Chinatown

tiramisu latte. was so obsessed with this that I ended up making tiramisu when I got home

Weeknotes 30

2025-03-30T00:00:00Z

Almost April—wtf.

Collecting, curating, archiving

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:

Tumblr is public, so I feel more obligated to be organized.
Tumblr has social norms around tagging, as it’s used both for blog organization and also for muting on people’s feeds.
Tumblr gets pretty close to curation as a hobby, in the same vein as Celine Nguyen’s research as leisure activity—it is enjoyable to spend time caring for your blog.

So, anyway, all that to say, I’m trying to use are.na more publicly, to encourage better habits.

Art

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.

Font-making

I’m slowly embarking on my ambitions of creating a font based on my handwriting!

My First Font :)

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.

playing around and just writing in procreate

Related reading: Behind the Scenes: What goes into creating a messy handwriting font? by Laura Eddy of TYPEHEIST, my favourite foundry for handwritten fonts.

Ink-drawing

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.

Sketching with my Muji pen, for contrast

Currently watching

Daredevil: Born Again — enjoying this so far! But I heard it’s supposed to get pretty violent/gory, to the level of (or beyond?) the original Netflix series, which I feel nervous about because I’m squeamish so I really don’t like it! I know we like the dark and gritty tone but I don’t wanna see it!!! (╥_╥)
The White Lotus, season 3 — omggg. I watch this with my friend and the whole experience is just yelling at characters WHAT ARE YOU DOING, or sitting with surprise pikachu face. This show does the sense of dread and doom so well.
Jet Lag: The Game, season 13 — omg lol some of the wildest things are happening this season. The classical music! The timekeeping! The wild coincidental happenstance of Ben’s lost phone!
Abolish Everything! — a fun show that now makes me think ‘abolish ___’ whenever I get annoyed. Abolish getting periodically logged out of your accounts for ‘security’ reasons! Abolish WASD as the default movement keys in games!! Abolish the concept of 9am!!!

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.

Games

Destiny 2

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.

this is my favourite emote for when you’re just standing around and waiting (which is about 80% of raid time)

(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.)

Control

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.

the lighting is one of my favourite things about the game

Stardew Valley

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.

year 6 spring

Batman: Arkham Asylum

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.

Photos

Here are some photos I’ve taken recently:

cool logo alert at linh café (also great food)

rare photo of me not in black

cà phê sữa đá (iced coffee)

Links

Broider by Max Bittker
Chuck Tingle wrote a thread on Bluesky a while back about AI-generated art. An excerpt:

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
Crosscountry BC by Misty De Méo in CD-ROM Journal — I didn’t play this but this was fun to read about!
From Cover to Cover by Jenny Volvovski — cool project of redesigning book covers!
Let’s Hold Hands by Rafał Pastuszak — such a fun and cute concept.

Project graveyard

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.

hey, remember this? lmao

throwback to the world’s worst javascript

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.

Miscellaneous

I got new glasses. who is she
I’m going on vacation soon and the idea of travelling to the US is, uh, making me nervous. To put it lightly. Lol. Lmao.

Weeknotes 29

2025-02-27T00:00:00Z

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.

Today (recently) I learned

CSS counter-style

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!!!

CSS round()

I realized that having decimal places in some of my font sizes can render weirdly on Windows:

see: the height of the 7 and 5 in the centre screenshot

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); 
}

GSAP

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.

Works in progress (forever until I die)

Weeknotes concept

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]?

recently listening / my earrings. originally tooted feb 12

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.

Podcasts page

I’m starting to listen to podcasts, which means of course I have to build a new page for it.

WIP, using an old colour palette. originally tooted feb 14

Site redesign

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!

planned QOL improvement: linking to my corresponding Mastodon toot about a post, as well as related posts. originally tooted feb 9

Visiting the Bay

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:

Legion of Honour museum

View from the MOMA

Links for u

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font by Braille Institute
Elizabeth Goodspeed on what happens when we treat the past like a stock library in It’s Nice That
Moving on from 18F. by Ethan Marcotte — there are innumerable sad and angering things going on in the US government right now. Ethan writes about his experience with it here:

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.
The Natural System of Colours recreation by Nicholas Rougeux
Oh No Type fonts are now on Adobe Fonts!! I’m using some here: Swear Text and Display (the serif body font), and Covik Sans and Mono (the sans serif and monospace fonts).
On Making a Book #2: How to make anything ever by Madeleine Jubilee Saito — I adore this. It’s a short comic about how constraints can help free you to do the work (whatever it may be), because the horror of the infinite abyss can be paralyzing. I relate to it a lot.
Pokémon Type Calculator updates by Sage (wavebeem) — Sage makes such cool things and they’re always writing about those cool things!!
Using Figma to design perfect gallery walls by Henry From Online
StreamOf.me by Fractal Kitty

What is the mathematics of self and how does observing, hypothesizing, and experimenting change you?
365 Projects, compiled by Florian Ziegler — nice to see them all compiled here! I need some kind of regularly scheduled creative habit…

Media for me

I listened to my first audio dramas: Batman Unburied, and its spin-off series The Riddler: Secrets in the Dark. I also rewatched The Batman.
- Both feature the Riddler, and while I wasn’t terribly interested in his character in The Batman, I found him really compelling in Batman Unburied.
- Batman Unburied starts off quite spooky and I couldn’t listen to it at night, so I also started Batman: The Audio Adventures, which is much more comedic. I’m slowly getting through it.
- I enjoyed The Batman a lot more this time around, now that I’m invested in the character and world. I adore this version of weird, awkward Bruce.
I’ve been listening to a bunch of Japanese music lately—some recent favourites are Elf (エルフ) by Ado, Otonoke by Creepy Nuts (DAN DA DAN opening), and Pathfinder (先駆者) by Hoshimachi Suisei.
I also like the new Lady Gaga music video, and drew one of the frames:

abracadabra

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.

Destiny 2

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).

typical beautiful Destiny skybox

nya

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!!!

Hourly Comic Day

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)

A birthday

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.

My First Theme :)

the big picture creative goal

2025-02-06T00:00:00Z

The big picture goal this year is to take my creative work more seriously.

In execution — do it with more polish.
In ambition — aim higher; go bigger.

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.

Questions about The Blog™

2025-02-02T00:00:00Z

Thank you Ethan and Gosha for kindly tagging me in this! ^_^v

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

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.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

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.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

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.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

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.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

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.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

My latest Media Recap 2024 was a lot of fun to write and illustrate! I also like Weeknotes 14, aka the weeknoter post.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

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:

‘Related posts’ type thing
Using blog tags so my posts aren’t a disorganized, unreadable mess. better metadata in general
Sidenotes I don’t hate (help me, CSS anchor positioning, you’re my only hope…)

Who’s next?

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.

Weeknotes 28

2025-01-15T00:00:00Z

not every thought needs to be immortalized on my website
been stamping down on my impulse to blather on my website about something stupid in a stupid way, as i already do on social media
where it’s FINE because it’s ephemeral there
but here it’s like. written into stone
after publishing my media recap i thought i would take a nice long break from writing anything because i was tired
but instead i am just filled with the vague desire to write and publish something
it seems the routine of weeknotes has primed me to feel strange to not be writing them
i suppose that’s good?
i’ve built a habit
anyway this post is kind of blathering on but i don’t feel like examining that too deeply at the moment
future me will do that

i am thinking about

rewatching 1) the social network; 2) the batman (2022)
buying an illustration course based on one (1) testimonial i saw in the wild
redesigning my website
how to use are.na vs curating on my own website
my current blog post drafts: this year’s creative goals; last year’s outtakes; a recap of my recap; xoxo & portland photos
how good my brain feels after sleeping a normal amount of time during a normal time of day
my upcoming bay area trip
this coffee
dim sum
how to draw cities and buildings
when to activate my four-day ffxiv free play period

assorted links

the own-work woodshed and what the fuck are we doing anymore by kate wagner
max read’s review of filterworld by kyle chayka
henry’s website redesign
this is about 3d modeling but i liked the stuff about composition
an oral history of batman: the animated series and also the artbook full of character sheets and also the series writer’s bible (pdf)
the website of vasilis marmatakis, which 1) wow amazing posters, and 2) wowie incredible site where each project is literally just an iframe of a google images search of that project
god imagine being that powerful

recent media

i rewatched the iron man movies last weekend, they’re fun!
the stack of library books on my table continue to taunt me
the new destiny exotic mission is cooooool

idk if i should keep calling these weeknotes
but i’m kind of attached to the term now i’ve been using it long enough (incorrectly)
whatever who cares i suppose

Media Recap 2024

2025-01-02T00:00:00Z

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.

moomins. I think about this every day.

Film & Television

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.

The Fall

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.

—Magical Mystery Tour: Tarsem on “The Fall”

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.

Arcane

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:

The painterly art style is probably my favourite thing about its visuals. In The Art and Making of Arcane, Fortiche talks about how they wanted it to look like concept art for animation:

[…] 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 love messy textures, visible brushstrokes, and all that jazz. Every frame in Arcane really is—haha—like a painting. I love how they do faces! The highlight on the inner corners!!! Probably my favourite detail, it’s just so satisfying.
The metallics always look so good, especially golds—just look at Mel, who is the most beautiful character in a series full of beautiful characters. The gold accents on her bottom lids!! And there are the gold accents on Cait’s outfit. The gold on those robots (hello, kintsugi).

mel

Whenever Fortiche plays with style—what they call music videos, “a musical scene over a song with a distinctive graphic treatment” (p.208)—is so much fun. Like the charcoal drawings in S2E1, the comic book montage of the enforcers (S2E3), the watercolour flashback of Powder & Vi (S2E8). And, of course. That dance scene. I love this kind of style experimentation.
- “What if the fight was a music video?” they asked about S1E7.
- What if we borrowed from a different medium? This is really where the magic happens, and it makes my tiny little brain want to explode, knowing that there are infinite creative directions to take something, beyond what’s conventional.

comic book-style montage

The music. Ma Meilleure Ennemie is, of course, tragic; The Line for Viktor; Wasteland for Jinx; Remember Me for, well, a lot of people…; Fantastic for Cait and Vi. I haven’t listened to much else than the soundtrack for the past month.
Other memorable bits: Sevika’s slot machine arm is so fun (they mention in the artbook how the challenge was making it not anatomically accurate!!); that bullet ricochet (oh my god); “[redacted], I don’t fucking care” (oh my god); “only you can show me this” (I am deceased); the entire cosmic plane or whatever it’s called, you know; I’ve already mentioned this, but, the dance. Her eye makeup, in that scene. Pretend like it’s the first time.

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.

Other Film & TV

Look Back

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

Paprika

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:

The opening credits sequence, to give you an idea of the surrealism of this film, set to the hypnotically sublime track The Girl in Byakkoya by Susumu Hirasawa.
Satoshi Kon - Editing Space & Time by Every Frame a Painting

The Bear

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!

Video essays

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.

Plagiarism and You(Tube)

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

Everything Is Content Now

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.

Art in the Pre-Apocalypse

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)

Cabel Sasser’s XOXO talk

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.

And everything else

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.

Music

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.

Chappell Roan

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).

Vaundy

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.

Favourite songs

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

Music Videos

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.

我愛你 (Wo ai ni)

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.

Sleep Walking Orchestra

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!!

wasurerarenaino

Sakanaction

I love 80s (I think it’s 80s?) vibes! The dancing, the camera movements, the palm tree background, the outfits…

Concerts

I went to four concerts this year!

Glass Beams: I discovered them this year and was excited they were performing here. Fav song: Kong.
St. Vincent: yay Los Ageless <3<3
Michael Kiwanuka + Brittany Howard: was so excited about You Ain’t The Problem!!
Across the Spider-Verse Live in Concert: obviously I am still obsessed with this movie and it was so exciting to watch it with the soundtrack performed live. People cheered at all the exciting parts (which were many) and it was so much fun!! They performed the ending title sequence which I didn’t expect!! Perfect movie and score!!!

Games

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.

Destiny 2

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.

is this the sky or the floor?

iconoclast

vesper's host. you spend like two seconds here—this is where you load in before immediately scampering into a spaceship. yet the sky just fucking looks Like That

The Pantheon

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:

Sunshot was the MVP, particularly on solar surge.
There was this Nezarec Sublime LFG I joined that went on for way too long and all we did was get thrashed around in Explicator and then destroyed in Atraks and then it was like 2am and we all had to work the next day, and I gave up on week four and Godslayer.
The Explicator fire tornadoes, lol, lmao
Rhulk cheese strats were extremely funny (bait him into zooming off the map) — I actually did Rhulk twice, once legit (quadruple Thundercrash + Thunderlord) and once cheesed. I finally got Collective Obligation out of it!

typical atraks experience

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.

The Final Shape

A banger expansion!!! Highlights:

I’m a sucker for pyramid architecture as well as weird Witness-terraformed environments. I loved all the fucked up body horror sculptures (the hands! screaming faces! sliced up geometry!) and spooky vibes.
I can’t say much about the story, because I’m one of those horrible gamers who don’t pay attention to lore. It seemed good though, from what I could follow! The relationship between Ghost + Guardian was really sweet.
Everything was fun and challenging. The new Dread were scary. Every time one of the bats screamed at me, I was like, wtf tinnitus?? The Subjugators were terrifying and also, you know, very pretty.
Excision was a great mission to cap it all off. I love chaos! Grandmaster Excision was even funnier. Love to load into it and immediately get killed, along with half the team, before anyone could even plant a rally flag.

Related: The Final Shape artwork on ArtStation

Salvation’s Edge

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?

it goes in the square hole

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?

Other things

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.

charlemagne stats from episode: echoes. verglas curve and dragon's breath are from doing their catalysts; 1KV is from that one unlimited sword ammo week where 1K was a sword, lmao, i used it in a gm and it was extremely funny

Other games

Final Fantasy XIV

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.

Stardew Valley

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.

Balatro

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.

Sudoku

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!

Books

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.

Comics

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.

Wayne Family Adventures

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.

Batman: Year One

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.

A Guest in the House

By E.M. Carroll

A weird, surreal mystery/horror. E.M. Carroll’s art is gorgeous and sets a great eerie atmosphere.

The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy At All

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.

Watchmen

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.

Art & Reference

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.

Framed Ink by Marcos Mateu-Mestre
Jared Muralt’s Sketch Book 2015
New Fashion Illustration: Outfit Ideas for All, published by PIE International
Unknown Pleasures by Tomer Hanuka — this sits next to me on my desk and I periodically flip through it.

Internet writing

I’ve linked to these in my weeknotes, but here’s a few of the most memorable.

research as leisure activity

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.

Should this be a map or 500 maps?

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.

the experience of completing a sketchbook for my japan trip

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.

In conclusion

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!

Weeknotes 27

2024-12-28T00:00:00Z

last weeknotes of the year!
i will probably change up this format moving forward
less frequent, or not on a schedule
or something
haven’t thought it through much

idk

tbh i don’t really have anything to include in this week’s edition
haven’t been reading/watching anything
i’m slowly chipping away at my media recap, but that’s been going on all month
i really want to finish it this year (three days left! lol) which is feeling more and more unrealistic at this point
despair! anguish!

lol

this post sucks
but the next one is gonna bang
!!! totally
[crying inside] i can do it

WIP

i redrew her face sooooo many times
being truly humbled by the digital art process

art vs artist

next year goals…more environments n colours lol
(prev years here)

other bits and bobs

photoshop crashed twice today
i bought a vanilla latte
got killed by spicy food (szechuan mazesoba)
i feel like a youtuber padding their video to reach the 10 minute mark

bye

Weeknotes 26

2024-12-22T00:00:00Z

can i be real with you?

URL

you may notice a pattern here, called ‘a lot of newsletters.’

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox by Henrik Karlsson in Escaping Flatland

You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
- so tru lol!
- I often forget that this is part of my site’s ethos, which I actually put into words way back when—things should be meaningful to myself and the small subset of people who might care. I’m not trying to connect with as many people as possible.
Casual Viewing: Why Netflix looks like that by Will Tavlin in n+1

One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.
Don’t Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth

Honestly, the idea of finding WiFi routers based on the signal strength seemed pretty intimidating at the time. The idea impressed me.

But don’t get distracted by all this; the software was intended to kill people.
- via Maya, who was musing about this post’s own meta rhetoric of distracting you, the reader, with technical detail.
in praise of writing on the internet by Celine Nguyen in personal canon

if you care deeply about something, you can compel other people to care through your work. You may find, too, that it may seem as if no one cares as intensely and passionately as you—but once you start writing, all these people come out of the woodwork who are just as invested as you.
Kyle Chayka’s substack One Thing — I read a bunch of posts here, such as:
The machine in the garden by Emily Sundberg in Feed Me

I’m noticing this platform has become a really good way for women to monetize their diary entries — lists, random thoughts, and (easy to write) roundups of “what I’ve been doing” do really well on this site.
- lol—fucking—just, eviscerate me I guess!
- okay, okay: existential crisis about writing weeknotes—okay, writing a silly little personal blog is not the same as writing a newsletter aimed at growth, so the criticisms of sameness aren’t necessarily relevant. I think we are allowed to do stupid unoriginal shit if we find it personally meaningful. But I have been reconsidering my weeknotes, why I write them, what I want to get out of them, etc. etc. for the past little bit, so this was useful to read.
- A lot of my posts in the past have caused me a bit of dramatic anguish! Writing is hard and trying to publish regularly is hard, and the pressure of it can be both useful and grating. I don’t regret any of my efforts but I’m rethinking what I want to focus my time and energy on in 2025, now that I’ve been going about this for a year.
Slop Infrastructure by Eryk Salvaggio in Cybernetic Forests — deeply enjoyed this. It’s a critical analysis of generative AI slop and what it means.

AI-generated images of celebrities or disasters are not meant to suggest reality. They diminish the value of reality in constructing opinions or informing decisions. To post this image is, of course, a manipulation of Swift’s image, a violation of her agency, and to be very clear, I’m talking about this specific “Uncle Sam” image, not the pornographic content with her in it. All of it points to the idea that if we share an illusion, that illusion matters in ways that are just as valid as any political reality. It is about controlling the symbols of the world, and it buys into a purely symbolic structure of power.
Teachings by Katherine Yang — THIS IS SO TENDER AND BEAUTIFUL!!! Katherine is always introducing me to poetry in the mundane.
The Tragic Downfall of the Internet’s Art Gallery by Nitish Pahwa in Slate — about deviantART! It mentions how DA predates the rise of Facebook, which I never thought about before, and huh. I actually didn’t make a Facebook account until I went to uni, but I had been on DA throughout all of high school. Wild.
To Log Into WordPress, You Now Have To Agree Pineapple on Pizza Is Good by Samantha Cole in 404 Media — every update to the WordPress clowncar saga has me shrieking in horrified laughter. Matt Mullenweg keeps escalating to comical heights. He is the personification of the @dril tweet screaming i’m not owned! i’m not owned! and it would be mostly funny if I hadn’t read about his lawsuit, which describes a pattern of behaviour that enabled abuse, harassment, racism, and other things against a nurse in his family’s personal employ. Which is significantly less funny than the pizza checkbox and makes me think he is not only a clown but also a piece of shit and therefore unfit for leadership.

Substack

As you can see from those links, I fell into a weird Substack-shaped rabbit hole. I don’t subscribe to any newsletters but I do read individual posts when I come across them. I’m just terrible at Keeping Up—instead reading new blog posts via RSS, for example, I go through my browser bookmarks folder and manually click on the websites in it to see what’s new (lol), or I type the url into the address bar, or I see someone in my mastodon feed and think huh I wonder if they’ve published anything recently and go to their profile. Newsletter subscriptions would just die in my black hole of an inbox.

So I’m not very attuned to whatever is going on over there in newsletterland, which is apparently interesting writing about interesting things.

This started when I was reading Robin Sloan’s newsletter (robin sloan dot com, which I manually visited), who in turn highlighted this observation from Max Read’s newsletter:

My standard joke about my job is that I am less a “writer” than I am a “textual YouTuber for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” What I mean by this is that while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist.

— Max Read, How to Substack

Which is. Yeah! Guilty as charged! I hate watching videos but if interesting videos were made available in text form, then I would consume that. This comparison of newsletters to video feels apt.

Anyway, I was reading a bunch of newsletters, and thought it would be useful to highlight stuff to save, which led me to downloading Obsidian.

Obsidian(h)

ha! ha! ha!

My ‘personal knowledge management’ system is non-existent, which isn’t a huge issue because I’m not an academic, but sometimes I want to be a bit more—organized? about it? I chuck links into Raindrop out of convenience, write scattered notes in the apple notes app, and sometimes compile something in my digital garden, but there isn’t much rhyme or reason to it. I’m certainly not able to draw conclusions from stuff or form coherent arguments.

Obsidian seems like it can solve at least one specific problem for me: organizing highlights/notes from different sources about a topic. Like saving all my generative AI-related readings so I can one day synthesize that into a thesis (a blog post). Or whatever. Or just better understand things!

I feel overwhelmed by the software possibilities—there are plugins? and customizations? that I could be doing? but I’m going to hold off on looking into that. I want to use this until a need for specific solution x emerges, and then I will pursue it. In this house, we do not fall victim to premature optimization.

I googled various permutations of obsidian setup notes structure though, because after a little bit of notetaking I ended up with like, ten different notes in my root folder, one for each piece of writing, which seems like a wrong way of going about things, so at minimum I should figure this out.

Maybe I should put them all in one note by topic? e.g. my ‘Netflix’ note was me trying to fit all Netflix-related commentary into one note; versus putting different sources into their own individual notes and putting them all in…a folder? I found this post about the ‘SCTO system’ (Sources, Compendiums, Thoughts, Ontologies) by Ilya Shabanov that may be fitting.

I dunno! Feel free to @ me if you have concise suggestions about this specific thing. Because I don’t care enough, I am not too receptive to other optimizations at this time. There are apparently a lot of YouTube videos about Obsidian, but as I have mentioned, I am a hater of the Video so I will never watch any of that.

IRL

I went with my partner to their holiday work dinner, which is always fun—my company is remote so we have no such thing, so it’s nice to go to someone else’s, as much as I am an anti-social introvert. It’s a once-a-year affair, I can handle it. I also like to eat and drink on someone else’s dime.

Relatedly, every year I revisit the iconic Ask A Manager holiday story: ‘I will confront you by Wednesday of this week,’ about a holiday party gone off the rails, which lives on in my head rent-free.

Media

The DC fanart continues! Honestly, I am having so much fun! It’s kind of embarrassing but also this is why I drew anime as a kid!! So I could draw my favourite characters in outfits and situations! Truly the meaning of life. I am cringe but I am free?

boy wonder

This week I watched Man of Steel, because the new Superman trailer looks fun, and I’ve never watched a Superman movie before. I had heard Man of Steel is dreary and unenjoyable, and I did indeed find that to be the case. I also heard about the city destruction / collateral damage aspect of it being pretty over the top and yeah wow, it really was.

Holiday

This holiday break, I’m hoping to reset my brain, which has sucked for weeks now. I feel like I’ve developed some kind of horrible work-life imbalance in my brain that is incapable of being normal about work. Not in the sense of working too much but more like, because of the overlap between work and hobby (websites), I’m unable to do hobby website stuff on a work day, even if I have the time and energy, because I feel inexplicably anxious about it. Like the residual anxieties from work seep into the personal, no matter how unfounded. (To be clear, my job is nice and I enjoy it, I’m just a needlessly anxious person and this is a me problem.) Then I get anxious about not being ‘productive’ and my brain suffers and it becomes a whole cycle. I would like this to not be the case? I hope the time off work will be a nice mental reset and I don’t have to feel so tense about it.

Weeknotes 25

2024-12-16T00:00:00Z

Links

Balatro dev swings at PEGI for rating it 18+ because of its ‘evil playing cards’, jokes that he should ‘add microtransactions’ like EA Sports FC 25 to ‘lower that rating to a 3+’ by Harvey Randall in PC Gamer — everything I read about LocalThunk fucking rules.
How Video Streamers Conquered the Media by Justin Charity in The Ringer
Introducing o(m)g:image by Jim Nielsen — hahaha
I Went to the Premiere of the First Commercially Streaming AI-Generated Movies by Jason Koebler in 404 Media — depressing! i watched one of the shorts (“sun day”) and it is bad, not just for generative ai reasons but also the story is bad! even if they didn’t use generative ai, it would still be bad! and then the gen ai is bad not only because of the wonky quality but also because of the cliche imagery! the mediocrity! in the wise words of dan egan veep, ‘of all the -ocres, [this is] the mediest’

Media

All I’m listening to these days is the Arcane season 2 soundtrack. just fuck me up!
I went to see Wicked and it was good! I’ve never listened to the musical so I don’t have a point of comparison to make, but I liked it. (oh my god, they were roommates)
I finally read my first batman comic: Batman: Year One, written by Frank Miller and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. The artwork is SO good—the shadows! The noir atmosphere! The characters!

shadowsssss

Tumblr

I’ve started posting my art on Tumblr again as @vanhn. Currently, it’s just a bunch of DC fanart. thoughts about this:

I decided to do this because I want people who like DC to actually see my DC fanart—tumblr is a proper social media network with superior discoverability and archival tools, among other things. Mastodon is—not.
I had trouble deciding on a username, and I’m unsure if I like having it based off my real name versus another pseudonym, but I’m wishy washy about my screennames and I didn’t want to pick something I would outgrow in a year, like I have with many past names.
- And I suppose, since it’s presently publicly connected to this website anyway (anhvn → vanhn, but not vice versa), anonymity isn’t a huge concern. You all know it exists now! you may gaze upon my future crimes.
I dunno how I feel about watermarking—seems prudent to do so but I wish I didn’t feel that way.
I’m currently crossposting 1:1 with mastodon, but that may change in the future depending on subject matter.
Everything will, of course, continue to be archived in my sketchbook on this website.

anyway. I’m there now!

Here’s the latest DC thing I drew:

this website

still trucking along with my media recap post. I’m a bit apprehensive that the end result will not look as good as any WIP screenshots that I share and I should just stop talking about it! But I feel pretty determined about it still!! I can do this!! I can make thing look good!!!

Weeknotes 24

2024-12-08T00:00:00Z

Twenty-four is a pleasing number, so I feel inclined to make these weeknotes a bit Better, but not by much.

Links

dontfuckwithscroll.com by Adam Siekierski — what it says on the tin. I feel very old man yells at cloud whenever I encounter an annoying website that is avoidably so. You didn’t need to make a miserable experience! You could have left the scrolljacking at the door. And yet here we are—your website, infuriatingly slow and dizzying, the least delightful thing I have ever experienced in my life; and me, thinking unproductive, violent thoughts.
Game on! A look into the rise of design-led board games by Chappell Ellison in It’s Nice That
Godot Isn’t Making it by Edward Zitron in Where’s Your Ed At
Living in alignment by Mandy Brown in A Working Library

It is useless work that darkens the heart. But good work? Work that serves the living, that brings us into alignment with ourselves and with each other and with the earth? Good work lights us right up.
The Off Set font pack by Off Type

Sentiments

I like this tweet from @jasonsbmoc about music:

I spent this year paying more attention than ever and hunting for new releases and I have been blessed with so much amazing music as a result. I refuse to be poisoned by such jaded cynicism. great art is made every day if you care enough to look for it

And relatedly, a post on tumblr by @annabelle–cane:

niche indie art is great because most of it is very middling in a genuine and charming way. this song melody is kind of nothing but the lyrics are clever. this novella plot is flimsy but the prose has a lot of bounce. this video essay could have been a text essay and lost nothing but it’s still intellectually interesting. and then one day you take a gamble and click something that you don’t really know much about and you’re like. ah. they put some god in this one.

Media

Arcane season 2

I finished watching Arcane season 2, which is the most beautiful show in the world. It’s so lovely to witness art like this. You know? What a gift.

jinx, ep 2. you know, when she does the thing with the arm

Batman

I rewatched Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, because I’m apparently in my Batman era. There are so many iconic lines and moments that invite pointing at the screen, Leo-style. Die a hero. The pencil thing. The voice. Watch the world burn. do u even lift, master wayne?!?!

Destiny

I played a bit of Destiny—a two-hour stint in Iron Banner PVP, in pursuit of a Cool Reward. I suffered, gathered mostly L’s and then, finally, my reward, and absconded. Destiny is very backburner right now. I don’t feel like booting it up to collect More Loot, this specific reward excluded. I’m sure that fancy will strike me later, but right now I just—don’t want to.

Spotify Wrapped

Top artists:

Vaundy
Chappell Roan
Taylor Swift
Polyphia
YOASOBI

Top songs:

恋風邪にのせて (Koikaze ni nosete) by Vaundy
Good Luck, Babe! by Chappell Roan
odoriko by Vaundy
Silhouette by KANA-BOON
Fortnight (feat. Post Malone) by Taylor Swift

Gratuitous gratitude interlude

On Thursday, I got 8 hours of sleep, which is revolutionary. The usual is something like 4–6, which makes me feel dead inside.
It rained Saturday morning—not really cozily, because my apartment is kind of chilly—but then it cleared up by the afternoon and we went to eat noodles and walked down to the coffee shop and I drank a nice peppermint mocha, the superior winter drink.
I received my new notebook—technically a sketchbook, I suppose—which I ordered from Hemlock & Oak (they’re local!), by recommendation of Jedda.

new hemlock & oak jardin sketchbook in deep forest / current leuchtturm A5 notebook in mint green (excuse the horrible colour reproduction here)

This website

Say happy birthday to my current site design. I published this redesign—‘version 6’, with the cozy brown autumn palette and rounded corners—last December 11, 2023! It feels like it’s been much longer. I also shoved an unfinished blog post about it into my digital garden last month, because I accepted that I will never finish writing it but I made too much progress to leave it in my drafts forever.

Weeknotes 23

2024-11-30T00:00:00Z

internet links

Creating an HTML “spoilers” element with no JS by Sage (wavebeem)
Gabriele Pala’s website — omg!!
I have some notes on Sam Altman’s note-taking advice by Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge — now this is hard-hitting journalism!!!

“I am not going to get into the fountain pens question because it, like the paper discussion, is for sickos.”
- I even wrote a sickos garden post about my hunt for a new notebook so this was especially timely. Also amusing how the article calls out the leuchtturm A5 notebook and muji 0.38 gel pen, which are what I primarily use lol
The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry by Mia Sato in The Verge
tiny wanderer — such a cute personal site!

noise-cancelling airpods are good, actually

Apologies in advance for talking about fucking Apple products here. God, ugh. I hate it too.

I bought the AirPods Pro 2 on Black Friday. I resisted for a long time, but my current pair—2nd-gen airpods that I’ve had for several years—were dying horribly in that one of them would lose connection within 5–30 minutes every time and I was rationing my use of them, which is quite frankly a ridiculous way to live.

I thought about simply buying another pair of 2nd gen airpods because they’re cheaper and like Fine, I don’t need the fancy new features anyway, but upon further discussion with a friend, I decided to get the newest Pro model because maybe I do need the fancy new shit—particularly noise cancellation and hearing protection.

And okay, my dudes: I have never used a noise cancelling product before. I legitimately did not realize how effective noise cancellation is until I put on my new airpods and it shut out the loud ass noises from my air fryer. Bruh. What the fuck. This surprised me so much I was kind of just sitting around staring into space, marveling at this, and then I forgot to flip my air fryer food. So you know. What the fuck.

Anyway. I’ve had these airpods for one day and I’m completely sold on them. I haven’t even worn them outside yet! But yeah okay I get it now. Noise cancellation is good. I hope these last me fucking forever, I am loathe to buy new electronics and I’m irate about the horrible working lifespan of modern tech.

In conclusion:

from somewhere on applerankings.com

media aka DC

I finished Young Justice season 1! Shit’s fun, I love these superhero sidekick kids. I’m less a fan of how only season 1 is available on N*tflix—girl, what is up with this kind of licensing—so now I have to like, watch the rest of it somewhere else? It’s available on *squints* “”“fubo”“”?? Really?? Ugh.

As part of my horrible, embarrassing descent into DC comics, I’ve also been drawing Robin fanart.

tim isn't even my favourite robin but i just like his costume

a brief aside

I stumbled across a very old Marvel fancomic I made—dated November 27, 2014!!—and I feel like I need to redraw it. It’s from ten years ago! Jesus Christ. It tickles me that ten years ago I was deeply into Marvel, and now I am getting into DC after never having been interested in it. Life is so weird and delightful.

(to briefly summarize the comic: it’s like, 10 panels long and doesn’t make much sense. it’s vaguely amerikate. that’s all!)

some WIPs

No idea how my media 2024 post is going to actually turn out, but I’ve been having fun pushing some rectangles in Figma for it:

It’ll probably change a lot! My plan is to draw lots of art for it, and I’m an expert at being too ambitious and paring down my vision as I actually get into the thick of things. I like how it looks here though.

Weeknotes 22

2024-11-24T00:00:00Z

In general

November is the worst month. Cold and rainy. The days are short, and the holiday season hasn’t quite kicked in enough for it to be romantic.

URL

1-bit Puerto Rico by Rubén Rodríguez
against the dark forest by Erin Kissane
Apple Intelligence is for the Stupid Ones by Bridget Carey for CNET
Belmonte Ballpoint font by TYPEHEIST — every time I see a nice handwritten font, I’m reminded of my nebulous goal of making my own. A holiday project, perhaps? My biggest obstacle at the moment is that I have no idea where to start in terms of software and process.

IRL

I played Flamecraft, which is possibly one of the cutest board game concepts I’ve played. It’s got dragons! With punny names! Visiting shops! Doing enchantments!

Media

I started rewatching Batman: The Animated Series. I watched this after school as a kid, and it’s strange to revisit it as an adult and see how dark it is. It’s very noir. I had watched the movie Mask of the Phantasm last year, which was similarly dark and eerie.
I went to the library and borrowed a few books: A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara, and Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. Maybe I can reach my 10-book reading goal in the last six weeks of the year? It’ll be a Christmas miracle.
I’m not gaming much. I haven’t played Destiny in several weeks. I might resubscribe to FFXIV?

Working on

I started working on my media 2024 recap. I want it to be—dramatic, overkill. So far, it sucks! I love this horrible beginning phase of things where everything I’m trying is bad. It’s nice to look back on when I do muddle my way out of it.
I want to publish these weeknotes, ah, weekly, for the rest of the year. They’ll be shorter and more lowkey as a result. After being overkill with a lot of my weeknotes this year, I’m allowing myself this.

Weeknotes 21

2024-11-16T00:00:00Z

note for rss reader enjoyers: this post uses a custom layout, so i recommend reading it on my blog itself. it’ll probably read like hot garbage without the layout
(like, hotter garbage than it already is)

so what’s all this then

ugh, writing this post was KILLING me
so now i’m doing this
am i perhaps taking the coward’s way out by taking advantage of this chat layout again?
i GUESS
good thing this is my blog and i do what i want
apologies in advance for the quality and tone of this post

cool link section

CSS sprite sheet animations by Lean Rada — this made me nostalgic, because back in the day, b4 css transitions were a thing, i did some css sprite stuff too! it was fun! now i want to revisit it?!? (also this is a frickin cool personal website)
some cool fonts: Charlottenburg and Queens by Kilotype; the GT Flaire website by Grilli Type is so chaotic lmao
How to Write a Blog Post About How to Monetize a Blog by modem.io
I am my own legal department: the promise and peril of “just go independent” by Molly White
Lilies & Roses – Restored illustrations of Pierre-Joseph Redouté by Nicholas Rougeux (plus the accompanying making of blog post)
this sunlit effect by Jacky Zhao is super cool
A World Encoded by Katherine Yang in Pleiades Magazine

watching

rewatched the fall, ugh visually beautiful movie
i meant to write way more about it here but honestly
the words r not coming 2 me
as u can see
but anyway. good movie. will try 2 write about it later
also started watching arcane season 2. this show is unbelievably beautiful
against my better judgment, i also watched the jake paul vs mike tyson boxing match
i have never watched boxing in my life, i did not know what was going on
but pro wrestling is better

reading

i read the entirety of wayne family adventures, the dc webtoon about, ah, the wayne family
wayne as in bruce wayne batman
who AM i? i’ve never been into batman. i’m lukewarm about every single batman movie and batman as a character. but clearly all i needed was silly slice-of-life fluffy shit to be like hmm
maybe there ARE depths to bruce wayne batman
maybe i will read. a robin comic
(why is all the robin backstory stuff so dramatic? wtf?)
???
i thought i was OVER this superhero shit. i fell out of marvel/mcu years ago
clown emoji @ myself

this website

this weeknotes post is clearly in shambles but maybe my next thing will not be
the next thing being
my media 2024 recap post
i’m planning on expanding its scope to include internet writing (articles, blog posts, essays); content creator content (content, video essays, vlogs, content); webcomics; art
it’s like, “creative works people made that i enjoyed”?
i also want to redesign my website but what else is new
who doesn’t want to redesign their website these days
also just thinking about creating and art and what i want to make. artistic goals. creative goals.
etc. etc.

the other day i stumbled across this company whose product is about generating images to go with input text for storytelling purposes
like, input some story text and it’ll spit out artwork for it
and i read one of their sample creations which was just
LAUGHABLY bad
cringe
feels like i am losing my mind when i read shit like this, like, did a ten year old write this?
do these companies realize their chatgpt writing is incredibly juvenile and hollow?
is this what you consider to be marketing material? this is what you’re proud of?
just
jfadksfasdf afjhdklsaf eajfkdlsaf a eifjadskf asdfk

misc

i have a bluesky account but idk what i would use it for
i’m perfectly happy on mastodon!
and i don’t want to double post stuff, so my bluesky may remain dormant. but it’s there
i have nothing new and funny to say about the us election. depressing as hell

endnotes

this post is more embarrassing and chaotic than normal
and honestly! i may delete it!
we’ll see!
i actually wrote a whole bunch of normal words in proper paragraphs here before i deleted it all
just, it was not working. it’s in my drafts now and i might bring it back for the aforementioned 2024 media recap
but til then
luv 2 write like this

Spooky homepage process

2024-10-28T00:00:00Z

After aspiring to for the past few years, I finally succeeded in updating my site for Halloween! I have a new (spooky) homepage.

⚠ Note: I discuss the homepage’s easter egg here, so I recommend checking it out before reading this post.

Concept

Making this was a lot less of a linear process than when I was making my previous comic homepage. I started sketching stuff back in late July, but didn’t pick up on it until September. I waffled endlessly about the concept. The storyboard kept changing throughout, even as I was drawing the final art.

Early sketch. Very spoopy, very creppy

I had a few ideas in mind:

I knew I wanted to welcome you (the reader) back to my homepage, but with a different setting.
The setting is vaguely a hotel. I wanted the vibes of of: unwelcome guest, don’t stay (contrast to don’t leave of my previous comic), The Shining, Bluebeard. Welcome back, but also, something is off.
- I went back and forth a lot with how to execute on that and how to build an eerie atmosphere. I thought maybe I would lead you down a dark staircase; I would allow you to visit the public places but forbid you from the private (à la Bluebeard); there would be ghosts on some pages; I would threaten you to not overstay your welcome. A lot of different directions!
- In the end, the setting ended up not playing much of a role—it’s kind of hotel-shaped, but this could easily be a home or a continuation of the coffee bar. It doesn’t really matter.
I wanted some kind of lights on/off mechanic. I was still attached to my 2022 idea of ghosts existing in dark mode (i.e. spooky mode). This also took various forms when I was ideating. There would be a lamp on the table, and I would switch it on. Or there would be a lamp and you would interact with it as an easter egg. Toggling the lamp would reveal something, or change the comic in some way.

Light mode

I didn’t know how this lights on/off mechanic would take shape until I was in the weeds of sketching. I had those various ideas, but not a clear picture of how they would work in practice.

There were two things that I figured out during the process: the ghosts, and the light mode switch.

Ghosts

I settled on the comic ending by leading you down a dark hallway, and I thought maybe there would be a ghost in the darkness.

And so I drew the first ghost. Then I thought should draw some variants so I could choose the Scariest Ghost. The problem with being a scaredy cat is that I was too afraid to look up horror visuals, so I had to rely on artwork I could handle and my meager imagination.

But after I drew some various ghosts, I realized they worked as animation frames—I had kept drawing them in a way where they were advancing on the viewer and it occurred to me these could be the same ghost, but getting closer… So that was the first thing I figured out.

these look goofy out of context lmao

Light mode switch

In the beginning, the switch just toggled the lights while the ghost floated around. And then I was thinking about how to end the comic, with the ghost getting up close to the you. It then…kills you? eats you? fade to black? But then the toggle gets disabled somehow? But how? why?

But then in my sketches, I happened to put the toggle in the right corner, in reach of my character, and at some point I looked at this and thought huh. What if—

that’s a cool toggle u got there

would be a shame if something happened to it

The idea fell into place. I tested this flow by animating it in Photoshop as a frame-by-frame animation. I wanted to see if flashing through the ghosts and then having my character turn on the last frame worked. Once I confirmed the concept held up, I moved onto drawing the actual artwork. And so, that was my second discovery.

Artwork notes

Most of the comic artwork is simple: a bunch of straight on shots of my character looking the same across multiple panels. Nothing new here! I finally draw something slightly more interesting in the last panel, which involves a bit of 1-point perspective.

hey look, a vanishing point! haven’t used that in a long time

I intended the setting to play a larger role—for example, the picture frames on the wall were supposed to actually link to things—but after I figured out the light mode interaction, I decided that was it! That was my concept. Everything else could go in the garbage.

basically

The final panel follows the pattern of scary eyes glinting in the dark, in an even spookier way than glasses-glinting-in-the-dark is. This was the limit of my scary artwork tolerance. Here’s a choice selection of inspiration:

1. xuhxyn; 2. I think it's from the webtoon Hand Jumper by SLEEPACROSS, but I couldn't confirm it; 3. frank @hostile1968; 4. Rebecca Mock; 5. Julia Lepetit; 6. Feliks S. Reinfuss

During this process, I also read two volumes of Framed Ink by Marcos Mateu-Mestre, both of which are superb and inspiring.

Technical details

This was built the same way my previous comic homepage was—the artwork as various images absolute positioned within panels that had a fixed aspect ratio.

For example, suppose a panel has an aspect ratio of 2:1 and I wanted the artwork to be placed in the bottom right corner:

.panel {
  aspect-ratio: 2 / 1;
  position: relative;
}
.panel__artwork {
  bottom: 0;
  right: 0;
  position: absolute;
  width: 50%;
}

I adjusted the aspect ratio of panels based based on two arbitrary breakpoints: 800px and 500px. The clearest example of this is in the I’ve redecorated panel. It’s meant to be a large panel that fills the screen.

On ‘desktop’ it’s 1:1—it takes up a lot of space. As the viewport gets more narrow, it gets taller. At <800px, it’s 2:3; at <500px, it’s 1:4.

That 1:4 sizing is the most dramatic. You have to scroll an entire screen’s worth of height to get to the bottom of the panel, which is meant to emphasize the shadows that engulf my character.

‘Desktop’ 1440×900px / ‘Mobile’ 375×812px. On mobile, you don't even see my character when you first encounter the panel.

Light mode was initially a traditional light/dark mode toggle, but I changed it to a <button> because I didn’t want to build a toggle switch.

Positioning the button required a bit more thought. In my sketches, it’s floating in empty space, but this would look awkward on the actual page. It needed to be offset from the right edge so that the hand angle would work, but just having it float there looked weird.

So I moved my navigation links out of the site footer to sit right below the comic, so that I could stick the button at the end and have it fit in better.

The light mode button needed to be in that specific place, so I pushed around the navigation links until the positioning worked.

I also considered styling the button to look like one of my nav links, so it would be an actual surprise if you chose to click on it. However, I decided I wanted everyone to click it more than I wanted it to be a true easter egg, and I think it looks conspicuous enough that it invites a bit of curiosity.

Idea graveyard

hotel idea: I would give you a ‘visitor pass’ which would serve as an ominous invitation to go places you shouldn’t. or something. (Text transcription: ‘here’s a visitor’s pass. keep it on you at all times. but don’t stay.’)

as a hotelier, my outfit was meant to be fancier. There was going to be jewelry.

I also spent an embarrassing amount of time trying and failing to figure out some kind of clever wordplay involving ‘hotel’. I bet if I did have a fun pun, I would have pushed the hotel setting more, but alas.

Conclusion

When I look back at all my ambitions and plans from the start of this, I feel like I gave up on so many things out of a lack of skill. Taking a nebulous idea through to execution is the entire point, and it feels disappointing to fall short.

But I also feel proud of where this ended up. My favourite parts of this—the light mode switch, the flashing ghosts—emerged from the drawing process. I had a moment where I realized huh, that’s interesting about the artwork. Even in my tiny, unsophisticated project, it was through that meandering that something surprising came about. (I know this isn’t groundbreaking, but it was a good reminder to myself!)

I feel my artistic shortcomings very acutely when drawing comics. They require so much skill—in the most technical, artistic sense with character art and environments and composition, and then with skill in writing, and then the pacing and flow of it all. It’s very humbling, and it’s exciting to be a beginner and have so much I can improve on. I’m excited to make my next thing, whatever it may be.

Weeknotes 20

2024-10-21T00:00:00Z

An extremely long post because I haven’t written this in a month and there is so much to catch up on. More like MONTHnotes amirite??!?!?

Mille Fiori (2012), Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle, Washington

A New Homepage (Spooky)

I updated my homepage for spooky season! I’ll hopefully write a longer post about it sometime soon (aaahhhh lol) but I’m happy I finally did something for Halloween, after aspiring to for several years now.

It’s another short comic, with a little bit of an easter egg type thing at the end. Read it here.

Weird Web October

This month I’m trying to participate in Weird Web October, which has a daily prompt for making a weird website every day this month.

For example: #3 Colour and #6 Notifications. I’ll be adding them here throughout the month.

Internet links

Using static websites for tiny archives by alexwlchan — I’ve been thinking about doing something similar so this was nice to read.
I stumbled upon A.C. Esguerra’s blogging about their journaling/sketching, which was such an exciting discovery. This is exactly the kind of blogging I was looking for and wish I found more of. Some samples: Autumn Travel Sketching in a Passport TN and Catching Up with Calendar Drawings.
A most unusual brightness by Chase McCoy, written about the Digital Divinity project — whoa, how cool.
Cabel Sasser’s XOXO talk — what a joyful presentation about an incredible artist.

Media diary

Notable things I enjoyed over the past few weeks:

Film/TV

Fight Club — I finally watched this! And somehow never got spoiled for it. Now I understand why it’s associated with toxic masculinity.
Suzume — just a really beautiful journey around Japan, with magical music.
Look Back — saw this in theatres, not knowing anything about it, and felt all the emotions. Why do you draw?

I’m going to see The Fall (2006) next week. I first watched it probably 10+ years ago, on a shitty not-legal streaming site, so I’m excited to see it in 4K on a big screen—it’s a visually striking movie.

Music

I went to see Michael Kiwanuka and Brittany Howard perform.
I’m listening to a lot of Kenshi Yonezu.
Suzume by RADWIMPS is very good.
an oldie but le temps des fleurs by Dalida is a bop.

Books

I finally read Framed Ink (volumes 1 and 2) by Marcos Mateu-Mestre and they were great. Sadly, I did not become a brilliant comic artist upon reading them, but I do feel an even deeper appreciation of the craft.

Here’s an example page (forgive my crappy photo quality) from volume 2, Frame Format, Energy, and Composition for Visual Storytellers, where he discusses how to adapt a frame to different aspect ratios. Hello, responsive webcomics ?!?!?

Games

Destiny 2 — happy new episode/season! I like the new Vesper’s Host dungeon. As a Witherhoard enjoyer, I’m excited for the grenade launcher artifact mods.
I got back into playing sudoku — mostly through the excellent Good Sudoku app. I’m trying to learn the advanced techniques now.
- Related watching: The Miracle Sudoku by Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube. I think my brother sent me this way back when it was making the rounds during the height of the pandemic lockdown, but I didn’t watch it. Now though, I actually understand what’s going on and it’s delightful. He makes it look so easy to solve!
I finally tried Balatro. It’s fun! I like it a healthy amount, which is to say, I don’t feel inclined to hyperfocus on it and play for hours (thankfully). I downloaded it specifically to play while travelling, which it was great for. According to Wikipedia, it’s partly inspired by the card game Big Two, which I played a lot of in high school. (I link to Steam here, but I played it on iOS. It worked perfectly on my phone.)
I played Minami Lane while procrastinating on writing this post. It’s cute and very short—I finished it in under 3 hours. The cats meow and mrao when you pet them!
There’s a Neko Atsume 2? I’m trying it.

Sojourn: Seattle

I went to Seattle for a couple of days to see Across the Spider-Verse: Live In Concert, i.e. the live performance of the movie’s soundtrack. Here are a bunch of photos from my trip.

Train ride

I took the train there and back from Vancouver, which is a slow 4+ hour journey. (Imagine if we had a high-speed train!!!) Fortunately, during the daytime the views are spectacular as you go by the water. These are from my early morning train.

Seattle Art Museum

My third time here. It was fun to go around and recognize items from the permanent collection that I saw five years ago.

Neon American Anthem by Nicholas Galanin. There was a warning sign prior to entering about sudden screaming, which I did indeed hear, but I didn't understand what was going on until I came to the installation.

Concretion of Chinese porcelain fragments and coral from a shipwreck, 17th or early 18th century

Male and female tomb sculptures, Mexico ca. 200 BCE–300 CE

Seattle street view

I ended up walking around a lot. It rained when I got into the city and on the morning on the second day, but was otherwise agreeable walking weather. (It seemed like not a lot of people used umbrellas? I felt out of place with mine. Is this tourist behaviour?!?)

Seattle has a more interesting skyline than Vancouver, because Vancouver has that specific look to it due to the condos that all look the same.

Moore Coffee Shop

Caught up on some sketching here

Across the Spider-Verse

I love this movie, I love the music, and I loved watching it again while a live orchestra played the soundtrack.

Chihuly Garden and Glass

This was my first time visiting! I watched a glass blowing demo, which was very cool.

Photography

In other news, as part of my Getting Back Into Photography thing, I bought another lens: the Fujifilm XF 35mm f/1.4. Here are a couple of birb photos I took with it last month.

Misc. things

I’m gradually switching from Arc back to Firefox for work. I can’t stand the sidebar, sadly—I need the horizontal real estate, and I detest the hover interact to show/hide sidebar pattern.
I ordered a new planner for 2025 and I’m excited to start it.
I’m tentatively (?!?) trying (?!?) to use Are.na (privately). I dunno! I’ve been collecting stuff on Pinterest but it’s kind of messy there.

Weeknotes 19

2024-09-12T00:00:00Z

Reading

The Canary by Michael Lewis for The Washington Post. h/t to Geoffrey Adams on mastodon, who introduced it so nicely and incited me to read it:

This is a remarkable piece of long-form journalism from the Washington Post about a US federal government employee who has used his position to transform the way mining operates, saving thousands of lives. The public has this idea that federal employees are just pencil-pushers who love wrapping things in red tape. But I know from personal experience that many of them are just like Chris Mark: people with a strong sense of service who want to solve problems for their country, and don’t care much about wealth, fame, or credit.

— [email protected]/113075114993539122">@[email protected]
A drawing a day · Agosto 2024 by Erica Fustero — wonderful! inspiring! delightful!
How to Monetize a Blog and Scrollbars by modem.io – these posts are so beautiful. Put them in the MoMA.

Another interesting angle to figuring out ad placements on your website are the potential for combo moves — you can earn bonus points if you can load two separate correlating advertisements for the same advertiser. These bonus points apply to your limit break meter, and if that meter fills up you get a wicked sick nasty bonus payout.
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes by eieio – this is such a delightful story about teenagers botting One Million Checkboxes. The internet is so cool.
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art by Ted Chiang for The New Yorker

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Working on

Writing my XOXO / Portland post…I feel suffocated by my grand ambitions for it (I wanted to make a new custom design for it) and I think I might throw in the towel with that and dump photos / not write much, instead of anguishing for weeks lol.
Thinking about halloween
Thinking about drawing more…

Here is a sketch of Chappell Roan, based on her look at the VMAs:

James Jean

I went to see James Jean’s solo exhibition Meadowlark. It was so beautiful! Art is so cool.

Slingshot

Dragon II, perhaps my favourite piece here

Colour test for Bear. Love seeing this process!!

just one of many water drops on many paintings

Media

I DID IT

FFXIV: I finally finished A Realm Reborn!!! FOR REAL THIS TIME. The ending cutscene was wild, I’ve never been more engaged in the storyline.
- In October 2022 I similarly wrote “It took almost a year, but I finally finished A Realm Reborn!!!” not realizing that there was a whole post-ARR storyline to do, which would take me two more years. Lmao.
Destiny 2: unlimited sword ammo week was funny and using One Thousand Voices, which is definitely a sword, for ad clear was extremely funny. Big Season of the Lost vibes.
Stardew Valley: I started a new co-op farm with some friends! I haven’t played Stardew on co-op before, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Weeknotes 18

2024-08-19T00:00:00Z

Reading & Links

How to draw an owl by Jenn Schiffer
platforms.fyi, a rhetorical exhibit by Robin Sloan
Responsive Comics by Taylor Hunt
Un paseo por Mataró by Javier Arce — beautiful photos, photo log goals…
Why I Finally Quit Spotify by Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker — yah, I use spotify and the UI annoys me more than any other UI I use on a regular basis in both large (algorithm stuff) and small (e.g. text truncation) ways.

Media

I’m still obsessively listening to Chappell Roan—Good Luck, Babe! is perhaps the most perfect song? (or maybe it’s Picture You. Or Pink Pony Club. Or My Kink Is Karma.)
I finally watched RRR, and it was the most sickosmeme movie watching experience I’ve ever had. Every action scene was like, yes…hahaha…YES!!! and it just kept escalating. I will be listening to Dosti and Naatu Naatu on repeat.
Destiny finally loosened its grip on me and I’m not spending much time on it these days, which means I may pick up FFXIV again soon!! (i’m so close to the award-winning heavensward expansion…)
I went to see St. Vincent perform, which was very cool and very loud. Favs: Reckless, Los Ageless, Cheerleader.

we love blurry zoomed in concert photos…

fit

lòók

Photography

I’m getting back into photography!! I bought a new lens for my mirrorless camera, batteries for my point-and-shoot film camera, and a new half-frame film camera, lol. I really need to figure out a good way of sharing photos now.

new pancake lens 🤏

the point-and-shoot

Some film photos

Some digital photos

I finally learned what film simulation recipes are. I cycled through a few here and don’t remember which I used for specific pics, but I had Pacific Blues, Kodachrome II, and Kodak Gold 200.

Other things

I watched my best friend get married, celebrated my birthday, and finally harvested some of my cherry tomatoes.

c’est moi

took my bridesmaid flowers home after

i grew these

more flowers

And this week I’m off to Portland with my partner for XOXO! (Say hi! Find me in the Slack! Talk to me about websites, art, comics, Destiny, or other weird internet things!)

Things I’m Working On

2024-08-11T00:00:00Z

I have a bunch of nebulous ideas for my website bouncing around in my head or splattered horribly across Figma files, which would probably all die in obscurity if I don’t get my shit together, but I’ve been somewhat inspired by Jim Nielsen’s post about his ‘failed’ site redesign, and publicly documenting incomplete work.

Also, I’ve had a bit of wine to drink and I feel like my blog is terribly boring (all it is is just redesigns and weeknotes) so maybe I should change it up and post some INCOMPLETE designs!!! Hell yeah!!!1

So here’s some work in progress stuff! Feel free to yell at me to finish them!

Photo post

I’m working on a photo post of all the shots I took when I visited Steveston, a cute little neighbourhood in my area. I haven’t posted a photo post in a long time, so I’ve been trying to figure out things like:

How to best do the markup for a bunch of photos
What layout best suits it
Having a custom layout (as seen below) for each, to emphasize the collection’s theme or location or something

Fonts: Neue World, Monument Extended, Guyot Text

Font: Elza Round

New about page

I’ve been wanting to update my about page for a while now. While I like the current messaging app concept, I wanted to do something different!

My current idea, which I’ve been punting around since like, December, is based on the evidence board/string theory trope.

whomst is she??????? this is one of the earliest mockups

The idea is that I am a mysterious entity that the reader is trying to piece together by pinning things up on a board and connecting them with string, like a conspiracy. When I started this, I was inspired by the show Only Murders in the Building and the Patrick (H) Willems video essay about Who Is Killing Cinema? – A Murder Mystery, which uses an ‘evidence board’ as a framing device, which I thought was fantastic.

I thought the concept would be well-suited for an about me page because of my online ‘branding’—I deliberately have inconsistent names/handles across my social accounts, because I don’t want them to be easily connected. (Of course, in this day and age, this is a somewhat futile effort, but I like to think that this minor obstacle is better than none.)

So, for example—my Mastodon and Twitter accounts both use a new hope as my ‘name’, because it’s somewhat SEO-proof in making me un-Googleable (‘A New Hope’ is the name of Star Wars episode 4, so results for that will likely outweigh any results about myself). My Twitter location is listed as san junipero, which is a fictional place—conspiracy?? My Twitter handle is @euphens (which I don’t use anywhere else); my Mastodon handle latte, which is as generic as names get.

And then the evidence board could be filled with more humourous things like made-up news stories about my incomplete side projects, or my inexplicable unplayed Steam games, or the like.

Technically, this is quite complex, if I go with the type of design mocked up above—a bunch of elements that are haphazardly positioned, with lines connecting them all. That’s been the primary obstacle to bringing this out of Figma: how would I actually build this?

I could try a more grid-like layout, à la Isle of Dogs, which would make positioning easier.

I do like the idea though, because it’s silly and plays on my wannabe-mysterious vibes.

Uses page

I have a half-assed uses page but have wanted to make a more comprehensive one for a while.

I’ve always wanted to do a more updated ‘what’s in my bag’ drawing (I made one like ten years ago), which is an art trend where artists draw themselves and what they carry in their bags. The point is the personal artistic rendition.

A selection of what’s in my bag drawings from Pinterest

My favourite ‘uses’-type posts to read are the ones with lots of photos, with detailed labels about everything. And I like the personalized nature of ‘what’s in my bag’ drawings (I think these art trends are great at showing how you can take a pattern/template and really make it yours) and want to incorporate that into my own.

But of course that requires drawing and etc. so I haven’t made much traction on this. I had some early ‘what’s on my desk’ concepts that laid out my computer setup, but I got bored of it.

These bore me to tears. I think I need to go back to the literal drawing board and do this in a notebook, rather than dragging pixels on my screen. Back to my artistic roots!

Media diary room

I’ve mentioned this project before but it still floats around in my head every so often.

I wanted to update my media page to display my categories in a room setting, kind of like my listening room for music. It uses a bunch of SVGs to form the setting, and then inserts my most recent media items into it.

I’ve just gotten stuck on the technical details of it—it’s a whole load of hacky positioning stuff—and I lost steam on it long ago. But I do like the idea, and I do want to finish it in some capacity. My listening room uses the concept but is comparatively very simple, which doesn’t satisfy me. This one is at a 3D angle! It’s got better lighting and shading! It’s got more objects!

Other things

I want to make a Halloween version of my site, which has been a dream for several years now (lmao). I want to do more comics for my weeknotes (like #9). I want to finish my Destiny comic. I want to do something—cinematic. Dramatic. I want to incorporate more illustrative elements in general. I want my site to be as beautiful and stylized as artists are, rather than patterned or trendy as corporate web/product design is.

Weeknotes 17

2024-07-28T00:00:00Z

It’s July, and the passage of time continues to be disorienting.

If you’re reading this in your RSS reader, I must implore you to read it on my blog itself because I designed a nice new post layout just for this and I want you to look at it.

an approximation of what it looks like

Reading list

AI Is Coming For Your Children

by Robert Evans in Shatter Zone

about AI-generated slop in the form of children’s books. how utterly depressing.
An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch

by Keenan

a fun account of the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of creating an 11ty site.
The Doc Web

by Elan Ullendorff in escape the algorithm

Google Docs as a publishing tool! A spreadsheet is a website!

These public docs are web pages, but only barely — difficult to find, not optimized for shareability, lacking prestige.
Fast Crimes at Lambda School

by Benjamin Sandofsky
Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

by Maggie Appleton
I Paid $365.63 to Replace 404 Media With AI

by Emanuel Maiberg for 404 Media
jeddacp.me

a cool photo blog that makes me want to also make a photo blog (or at least, share more photos)
RegEx Poetry Machine

by Katherine Yang
research as leisure activity

by Celine Nguyen in personal canon

I love this so much.

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.

Sometimes I feel like collecting ‘research’ (links, unfinished thoughts) in my digital garden but am pulled back by self-imposed doubts of what ‘research’ is supposed to be and how my link-gathering is embarrassingly pedestrian. This post is such a wonderful articulation of how research can be informal and fun!!
Research as leisure activity:
- Is directed by passions and instincts.
- Is exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary.
- Involves as much rigor as necessary.
Also, Nguyen starts off by making a lovely destinction between a useful versus beautiful description of Are.na:

It’s kind of like Pinterest for artists, researchers, and academics. This is a useful description, but not a beautiful one. The beautiful description was written by the librarian Karly Wildenhaus, who described it as: “Research as leisure activity.”

Anyway, I’m obsessed with this.
Should this be a map or 500 maps?

by Elan Ullendorff in escape the algorithm

about 500 priests drawing 500 maps of their own part of Italy, which together form a mess rather than a cohesive map, but the individual maps are fascinating.

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.
Weeknotes 17

by anh in anhvn

pretty mid but has some interesting links. some recurring themes like the rest of her weeknotes

It’s July, and the passage of time c̶o̵n̴t̶i̶n̶u̸e̴s̵ ̶̛̘t̷͓͐o̴̠̾ ̷̮̃b̷̡̀e̶̫̚ ḋ̵̛̝͉͂̕͝ḯ̸̢̮͔̪̔̕̕ś̶̨̪̟̮̟̝o̵̡͚͌͗̌͠r̴̺̗̪̈́ĩ̶̳͌̚ẽ̶̗͎͓̤̋̐̍n̴̹͗ṱ̵͎̼̱̭̅i̷̳̇ń̶̬̼̄̈́̔̆͘g̵͔̠̝̰͚͗͠

Destiny segue

I’m sorry, I’ll shut the fuck up about Destiny once it stops being so interesting to me. Two of the links above—The Doc Web and Should this be a map or 500 maps?, both written by Elan Ullendorff in their newsletter escape the algorithm—are here because I was blathering on about Destiny and some friends sent me them. It went something like this:

semi-related gaming thot
need a name/description for the on-the-fly maps/diagrams people make during new raids
which are always hilariously chaotic and imbued with whatever lore is going on in voice chat at the time
but are also used as the definitive guide for x thing
like the anti-graphic design of it all
(pictured here: a map of a 3x3 grid of rooms we made the other week)

vidya maybe could be described as some kind of scrawl cartography that defies complete effectiveness and efficiency but has expressiveness + lore
https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/should-this-be-a-map-or-500-maps

The Destiny context: raids are cooperative 6-player activities. This kind of on-the-fly map is common when there’s a new raid. You need to create it quickly, because your teammates are waiting. You have limited information, because the raid is new and no one knows how it works yet. You’re already conversing on a voice call, so you have prior shared knowledge. The map serves as a cheatsheet for names and mechanics that you might forget.

another example diagram, this time a flowchart of a puzzle encounter. by @ritzzcar on twitter

Anyway, Should this be a map or 500 maps? touches on this topic. I wish someone smarter than me would write an essay about this as it pertains to Destiny (maps, guides, callouts (which is the ‘front’ vs ‘back’ of the room? (sorry oryx flashbacks)), names, chaos strats, etc.). Maybe I’ll start a garden post about it.

Anyway

The grind never ends!!! I am now a proud completer of the Salvation’s Edge raid and owner of the raid exotic. I even know how to dissect shapes, among other mechanics.

it me. my favourite helmet (‘statue of liberty’) works well here

my titan fashion will never get better than this

the second encounter arena is so cool

References

I’ve started collecting links and writing my own reference material for stuff—I was reminiscing about gamefaqs.com a while back, which was the perfect website. I’m throwing it all into a neat little post in my digital garden, and it’s optimized for exactly what I need: brevity, quick to access and load, viewable on my narrow second monitor, and devoid of any information I don’t need myself, even if other people might need it. This is for me only.

For example: Substratum

I made a little page to act as a map for Substratum, the first raid encounter. The map is of a 3x3 grid of rooms, which each get a name to help with callouts. (This is what the goofy map above depicts.)

However, room names will vary across raid groups. Sometimes the names are common enough (e.g. the middle room is usually ‘mid’) but others can vary greatly. The names are editable, in case I need to use callouts I’m not used to and don’t otherwise have a good map reference.

Another example: Verity

I wrote out step-by-step instructions for Verity, the notorious fourth encounter puzzle. While I know the steps and understand why I’m doing each step, when things get chaotic it’s easy to forget what I need to do next.

My instructions are written so I can look back and forth between my monitors in the middle of an encounter and actually read what I need to read in a split second. But, I also include brief descriptions of things for when I need to refer to this to refresh my memory.

keywords are bolded; bullet points to help with hierarchy

I’m constantly adjusting this as I use it. The other day, I realized my steps were too verbose and took up too much vertical space, because I also needed to fit another cheatsheet on my screen, so I shortened it even further.

Anyway, it’s truly not much, but it’s nice to hyperoptimize something for myself.

When I’m not raiding I’m overthrowing

The nice thing about the Pale Heart is that it’s a good place to spend time when I don’t know what to do. I like mindlessly shooting stuff, opening chests, and collecting Ergo Sums. The downside is that I now spend too much time doing that instead of logging off like a responsible person.

Nature (grass)

Earlier this month, I went out of town for a few days with some friends and visited a lavender farm, touched grass, and pet some cats.

The cat was very friendly and demanded many pets, which were enthusiastically given.

Nature (sea, sky)

I also saw the sunset! I should go outside more often. My photos hardly do it justice.

This website

Not much else is going on here right now. I occasionally open it up and ponder making something new, because it feels like that’s something I should be doing (a woman in possession of a personal website must be in want of updating it) but all my nebulous ideas feel either too dull or too daunting.

Etc.

I am thinking about: playing The First Descendant; reading a book (lol); how hot it’s been these days; Chappell Roan; confronting my fridge/pantry; buying a standing desk; eating jalapeño chips; continuing my Destiny comic (lmao); ill-advised online shopping; other tasks I’m avoiding (or rather I’m not thinking about those).

I also tidied up my normally horrendous desk to take this photo (cable management is my enemy):

macbook airs not being able to support more than one external monitor is a crime

Weeknotes 16

2024-06-16T00:00:00Z

Truthfully, there is not much to recap from the past couple of weeks because I spent all of my time playing Destiny.

Destiny 2

The Final Shape, the newest expansion, came out on June 4 and completely consumed me. My review: it’s excellent, and Destiny is the most beautiful game in the world.

Highlights:

Contest mode raiding: as usual, I spent a silly number of hours attempting the new raid when it came out; unlike other times, it was so hard that we only got past the first encounter.
Excision: cool as hell, good cutscenes, no notes. Raiding in a team of 12 back when it was glitched was one of the funniest things I’ve ever done in the game, so getting a real 12-player activity was fun.
Dual Destiny: cool, novel, loved it. I love to choose violence.

Some screenshots:

Truly, what a time to be alive.

Other than that: I’m slowly making my way through the Interactive SVG Animations course by Nanda Syahrasyad. I made a fun website at work and some nerds (affectionate) liked it. I’m excitedly watching a new leaf unfurl on my monstera. House of the Dragon is back?

I’m slowly emerging from my Destiny-induced haze though so hopefully my next post will be more interesting, lol, lmao

Weeknotes 15

2024-06-01T00:00:00Z

Reading

Blurry Type on Stealing Rocks — ooh CSS effect oooh
Canonize: Creating a Personal Canon Template by Brendan Schlagel — ‘personal canon’ is a good term…i have a half-assed ‘influences’ page I should work on
Coding my Handwriting by Amy Goodchild – cool handwriting
Design outside the computer by Eva Decker — writeup of a super cool guestbook on a super cool website!!
Printing music with CSS Grid by Stephen Band — nice
Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content by Simon Willison — u hate to see it
Why AI art will always kind of suck by Rebecca Jennings for Vox

But if you look at art and all you see is content, or if you look at a picture of a hot girl and all you see are JPGs in the shape of a sexual object, that’s all you’ll get out of it.

11ty Conf

aka International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good:

Building a Town that Doesn’t Exist by Dan Sinker
Digital Frontiers, IndieWeb Cowboys, and A Place Online To Call Your Own by Henry Desroches
Chinese Type Systems by ivan zhao

VanCAF

I went to the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival.

comics and zines I bought

Golden Record by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Of Thunder & Lightning by Kimberly Wang
Heartwood: Non-binary Tales of Sylvan Fantasy (anthology)
Blind Alley (no.1) by Adam de Souza
Italy: summer 2019 travel zine by Irene Lam
Let’s Mosey! a final fantasy vii fanzine by Ashlena Sharma

Gardening

It’s gardening season!! This year, I’m growing:

Cherry tomatoes (hoping birds don’t eat these before I can)
Lettuce
Green onions
Spinach
Arugula
Vietnamese coriander (rau ram)
Thai basil (rau quế)

Also some flowers! And I bought a monstera yesterday.

Bonus green onions next to the window.

Games

Destiny 2

I thought my Destiny lull would last all the way until the expansion in a few days, but it turns out a limited-time event is enough to drag me back and I’ve spent an embarrassing number of hours playing in the last two weeks. I grinded my way through Pantheon weeks 2 and 3, and did 3/8 encounters in week 4, but have now officially given up 🫡 The Final Shape, I am ready for you!!!

explicator, aka the fire tornado encounter

mood

Tiny Glade

I’ve been excited for this ever since I saw the WIP videos the devs would post on Twitter last year. The free demo is out now and it’s very beautiful as expected.

Misc. want to play

Final Fantasy VII (yeah, yeah, I bought a fanzine for this but I’ve never actually played it), ANIMAL WELL (which I’m hearing universally good things about), and I wishlisted some cute games in Steam’s Cozy & Family Friendly collection.

Concert

I went to see Glass Beams perform:

glass beams

arushi jain opened

Northern lights

best i (phone) could see

also exciting: a cat was hanging out outside

I’m going to XOXO in Portland in August! Would love to meet you if you’re going? Is there an indieweb meetup? Someone tell me how this works.

Weeknotes 14

2024-05-06T00:00:00Z

I was clicking around Pinterest and fell into the rabbit hole of editorial illustration (very cool, wish that were me (some day)) and then homage covers of The New Yorker. And I thought, huh, that could be a fun thing to do.

the tokyoiter by waneella, the parisianer by icinori, the home stayer by luis mendo

I’ve long been interested in editorial design—i.e. longform writing and mixed media on the web–whereas illustration is a newer and more nebulous daydream. I figured—well, I write these weeknotes regularly, which makes it a good opportunity to play around more since these posts are structured and predictable. Keyword play: I want to make it fun and do something weird! (Admittedly, this post is derivative rather than weird, but maybe in the future!)

So here is: The Weeknoter, issue 14.

Annals of the web

maggie cheung, in the mood for love

Some light reading, courtesy of the internet.

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

by Molly White

The A.I. Lie

by David Palumbo

It has become standard to describe A.I. as a tool. I argue that this framing is incorrect. It does not aid in the completion of a task. It completes the task for you. A.I. is a service. You cede control and decisions to an A.I. in the way you might to an independent contractor hired to do a job that you do not want to or are unable to do.

Designing The Cascade

by Robin Rendle

It’s always so interesting to see someone’s design process. Robin’s cool new CSS blog is so fun.

The Era-Defining Aesthetic of “In the Mood for Love”

by Kyle Chayka

There is a particular aesthetic floating abroad in the world. You could call it an atmosphere, a vibe, or just an essence of style. It’s made up of a collection of ingredients: humid alleyways in dense cities, neon lights cutting through darkness, quietly flashy fashion, nostalgic music, tragic romanticism, and the smoke of many, many cigarettes.

Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things

by Niki Tonsky

How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create?

by Michael Nielsen

Depth over engagement and audience-building. Far better to have one brilliant, knowledgeable person respond strongly and in depth to a piece than to have a hundred thousand respond shallowly.

When you invest time in the design, when something looks and feels beautiful, you take it more seriously yourself.

We think better when the stakes are higher, and one of the best ways of raising the stakes is to make a document into something you’re sharing with people whose good opinion you desire.

Oh the Humanity: Why You Can’t Build Apple with Venture Capital

by Ben Sandofsky

About the Humane Ai Pin, which was a trainwreck I enjoyed watching.

Goings On

mariko, shōgun

Here are some of the things I’ve been enjoying in the past few weeks.

All Born Screaming St. Vincent album — Reckless is a bop.
Destiny 2 video game — The new Pantheon activity—kill four raid bosses!!—is a fun challenge, and the rewards are excellent. I haven’t struggled so much on Atraks since I was new to the raiding. Caretaker gave me day one flashbacks. I’m excited to get destroyed in subsequent weeks as it ramps up in difficulty.
Dungeon Meshi anime series — this is such a delightful anime about cooking.
Hades video game — with the new Hades 2 hype, I went back to play a few runs. I’m so excited for the new game, though I’m abstaining from early access and waiting for the full release.
Shōgun tv show — I didn’t fully pay attention to this (sorry)—my partner watched it while I hung out and worked on this website and drew and whatnot. Mariko though was riveting.
The Sympathizer tv show — I’ve only watched the first episode but I’ve enjoyed it so far! I’ve seen some comments about how the Vietnamese accents are bad, which is funny to me because I found myself understanding more Vietnamese than expected. Maybe this can be attributed to both myself and the cast having (seemingly) second-generation immigrant accents, lmao. Related reading:
- Park Chan-wook Gets the Picture He Wants by Jia Tolentino — a profile on the director
- The Fascinating Ideas Behind The Sympathizer’s Dazzling Visuals by David Canfield
THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT Taylor Swift album — I like Fortnight and Florida!!! (Florence, my beloved). The rest, ah, blended together for me.

the captain, the sympathizer

An artist at large

At the end of March, I wrote that I wanted to make a good attempt at PleinAirpril, which is an online art challenge to do daily paintings in April.

I didn’t start until halfway through the month, and ended up doing ten paintings in total. As someone who barely does digital art, this was thrilling consistency and progress.

collected here. ordered from newest to oldest.

En plein air technically refers to drawing from life outside, but I did all my paintings indoors from photo reference. It was a lot of fun—while I’ve done a lot of plein air sketching of urban environments as well as drawing from photo reference (notably, movie frames), painting is a different muscle. It required different technique.

I struggled a lot with buildings, with their complex lines and windows and reflections. You can see this in #2 Montreal where the cityscape is terrible but the statues are competent—clearly, I have far more experience with drawing people than buildings.

My last painting, #10 Cafe, is definitely the best—partly from me having more experience at this point, but also I think because its composition is a lot simpler. There aren’t complex buildings; the details are scant; the lighting does most of the heavy lifting. But I really like it and feel proud of how it came out—this one feels like I succeeded.

Metacommentary

I’ve collected these in my sketchbook collection with its default post style, but I want to improve on how it’s displayed. I want to build my ideal art archive, with considerations to things like:

Metadata: tools used (e.g. brushes, programs), time spent, location info
Commentary/reflections about the work: how I feel about it, why I did x, what inspired me to make it
Supplementary media: timelapses, closeups, WIP screenshots, references

The record-keeping aspect is important to me. If I write a quick thought about a work when I share it on Mastodon, I want to record it permanently here. But a quick thought is not necessarily the same as a reflection, so the display should reflect that. What would my ideal UI look like for all this?

Looking, seeing

I took pictures of unremarkable sights because I thought, that might be interesting to paint. The corner of a skytrain station, the street I live on, the light out my window at sunset. Everything was suddenly interesting enough to examine and consider: could this be the subject of a painting?

I’ve mentioned this post before, but I think about it all the time:

the difference between you and a zoologist or you and a botanist is that the botanist, when she looks at a flower, has a question in mind. She’s trying to generate questions. For her the flower is the locus of many mental threads, some nascent, some spanning her career. […] That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.

— James Somers, More People Should Write

Extrapolating from zoölogy and writing to art, but you know what I mean. When I went looking for interesting sights, I saw more.

Poems

are these results useful?

by google lens

I want to know what
I’m talking
about. I can’t wait to see
what I’m doing.

9 years ago, 20 years ago
9 years old, 20 years old, I want to
know what I want

100%! 100%! 1%!
I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!
I want to know what
I want to know

What is the meaning of the word?
Sorry to bother you
I’m in love with you

Sorry! Sorry! Sorry. Sorry.

Weeknotes 13

2024-04-13T00:00:00Z

website

I finally made a new homepage, and wrote about it in my last blog post.

links

Art in the Pre-Apocalypse by Jacob Geller – a video essay! about games and movies and the end of the world. It’s lovely. I’ve had this saved to watch for a long while now.
Christopher Kirk-Nielsen’s website redesign is so stylish and 80s.
F.C. Variable by Rob en Robin – what a cool use of illustration as a variable font!!!
Indoor Kid by David Jonathan Ross – what a cool variable font designed for comic lettering!!!
Johannes Klingebiel’s website – is this the most beautiful personal website in the world? Perhaps. I love the fonts (calendas by atipo foundry…when will I get over oldstyle serifs?); the sidenotes (love em); and the digital garden is so organized and pretty, it makes me want to redo mine.
What You Need to Know about Modern CSS (Spring 2024 Edition) by Chris Coyier via Frontend Masters
- He wisely noted, ‘Feels like we need a few years for the latest CSS to settle in and become part of regular usage. Even if you know about the stuff, it takes time to build the muscle memory around it.’
- so tru lmao
- though in all seriousness, I scrape by with the bare minimum css knowledge needed to make my site work, so there’s a wild amount of new things I don’t even know about. This article is a good, digestible summary of some super cool stuff. I feel like I need to refactor my whole website to use it!! (though more likely: I make some new one-off thing)

media

you can’t pet the cat but you can look lovingly at it while it just chills amid broken ghost shell pieces. also: coldheart my beloved

There was a new Destiny 2 content drop on Tuesday, and lots of exciting news announced about the upcoming expansion in two months, so naturally I have been reconsumed by it. Nothing does hype like Destiny does hype.
I’m enjoying Khruangbin’s new album A LA SALA. There’s a cool animated music video for one of the singles, May Ninth, and an article about it on It’s Nice That.

other

I bought a couple of art books: SKETCH by Terada Katsuya and Unknown Pleasures by Tomer Hanuka.

ugh, gorgeous gorgeous

I went to a cute cafe to draw, and then out to dinner that I’m still thinking about.

the walls were full of cool portraits

working on version noir

truffle carbonara udon / seafood bibimbap. ugh, i’m still thinking about it.

art vs artist

I was poking around some old files and rediscovered my 2023 art vs artist grid that I started making and never posted. Here it is:

Making version noir

2024-04-06T00:00:00Z

Earlier this week, I published a new homepage (version noir), which takes the form of a comic. Haha, get it, anhvn.com, the vn stands for version noir, but also anh stands for a new homepage, haha hahahaha. I’m hilarious.

Half of my conviction to finish this over the weekend was so I could make this joke. Finish it I did, and now I’m going to tell you all about it, as I like to do.

preview. read it here.

Context

Comics are, in my opinion, the perfect medium: they combine art and writing in infinitely interesting ways. I’ve had childhood dreams of becoming a children’s book illustrator (didn’t happen, but hopefully sometime in my lifetime) and a novelist (not even in the realm of reality), but these days, creating comics is more of my jam.

My previous homepage featured 4-panel comics. This is the style in which I’ve drawn a lot of my comics lately: a cartoony drawing of me, rough lines, simple and repetitive artwork, a whimsical tone. While I enjoyed this, I wanted to do something different next.

my usual cartoony style

I didn’t initially plan on something noir-inspired. I was actually working on a completely different concept for a new about page, and enough clicking around on Pinterest for inspiration led me to noir detective images, and I thought, huh, that’s an idea.

And thus: Version Noir.

Some inspo artwork. Clockwise from top left: Mike Mignola, Valentin Demchenko, Eduardo Risso, and Annie Wu.

Done is better than perfect

I wanted to finish this over the long weekend—I never finished my first and last attempt at a serious homepage comic—so it was important to keep moving forward. If something was imperfect, I accepted it as is. I prioritized the comic being short and manageable over being well-paced. I didn’t want to leave too much time for self-doubt to take ahold of me, as it is wont to do.

(Even towards the tail end of this all, I started to second-guess myself—no one will like this! it’s too fucking weird and makes no sense! the pacing is off and I need to redo it completely!—and I went to bed feeling a bit less excited about how it turned out, and the next morning I published it without looking it over again. Looking back at it now, I no longer feel those doubts.)

Storyboarding

I started by drafting stuff in my notebook. This was the very first thing I drew:

The only panel I kept from this is the closeup of the eyes—this image stayed in all my following sketches.

As I explored this, there were several key images/styles I wanted to use, based on the noir theme:

Heavy shadows and contrast
A silhouette / shadow of a figure
Dramatic smoke
Glasses or eyes reflecting light out of the darkness

My storyboarding process involved drawing tiny thumbnails and writing the text next to it to test out the flow.

Early storyboard. Some ideas persisted: the eyes closeup, head tilt, staggered columns. Initially, I was drinking wine.

later storyboard and notes. I wanted a shot of myself peeking through some window blinds (another noir aesthetic which would produce some interesting lighting), but couldn't make it fit. I also had a bigger emphasis on hands, but ended up scrapping that as well.

when I moved to drawing digitally, my art got more refined.

Art style

In this comic, I am a cool noir detective in a trench coat. I don’t even own a trench coat, but it’s about style, not realism.

some character/style sketches. I settled on a dark outfit + light trenchcoat, which would provide contrast on black backgrounds.

The artwork, annotated

I love a detailed breakdown of the creative decisions that go into something, so I’m going to try that here.

The setting: a coffee bar. A shadow in the doorway. A brooding detective figure?

It’s a coffee bar because I needed to draw myself drinking coffee, because I wanted to draw smoke, because smoke is a classic part of the noir aesthetic, but I don’t smoke and didn’t want to draw myself smoking, so I settled on dramatic coffee steam.
I really wanted to draw a dramatic silhouette somewhere. The fedora of this mystery figure (who represents you, the reader) is part of the aesthetic. I couldn’t draw myself in a fedora because I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing one, even as a dramatized noir detective. I’m sorry. You are assigned the m’lady role in my comic.
I needed an establishing shot of the environment, and also a shot of the floor for the silhouette, hence the top-down angle.

The text—what is this place?—is meant to come from you. There’s a pause—the white space—as I look at you before answering.

I drew creepy eyes like this because, honestly, I didn’t want to draw proper eyeballs, lmao. This continues into the next couple of panels. Sometimes the style choice is due to laziness. My second justification is that it adds a touch of creepiness that ties it together with the final panel. Sure, that tracks!

Here are a couple of friendly panels to introduce my homepage :) I look friendly and not creepy :) :) My coffee is making some dramatic smoke.

All of this dialogue could take place in just one panel, but I wanted the slower pacing, so I broke it up into three parts.

from left to right, these link to: my blog, media diary, digital garden, and sketchbook. Of all the things I'm pleased with, I'm inordinately satisfied with how those books turned out, haha.

The vertically staggered panels are meant to pull the flow downward. Initially, they were going to show my four media diary categories—film/tv, music, games, and books—but then I decided that was too specific, and I changed it to show the four main sections of my site instead.

I didn’t figure out a good affordance though, so there’s no indication that you can interact with these panels at all—a problem for future me to address.

These also used to be staggered from top left to bottom right, but after I drew the artwork I realized they tied together better going from top right to bottom left. This results in a more confusing right to left reading flow, but alas, I accepted this flaw. I didn’t want to redraw things.

I knew I wanted a creepy, glasses-glinting-in-the-dark panel like this early on. I liked the idea revealing myself as a malevolent character and ending on a spooky note. No. Don’t go anywhere. Stay with me.

With that said, I was unsure about how cohesive this was—the creepiness veers a bit outside of my initial noir concept. But I liked it enough to keep it despite this.

It also touches on a previous failed project of mine—a halloween homepage, which was meant to be creepy. I failed to finish this, but at the time, I wrote:

I’ll come back to these ideas, and use them somewhere else, eventually.

I like to think I did indeed come back to this, even just a little bit, a year and a half later.

Making it responsive

I’ve pondered the idea of responsive comics a long while back, but that musing went nowhere. Version Noir is a bit responsive.

To sum up the CSS:

I hard-coded a breakpoint for ‘mobile’—I know desktop/mobile aren’t hard and fast categories anymore, but that’s how I built this and how I refer to them here.
Panels have a fixed aspect ratio, and I used absolute positioning and percentage units to place elements within them. The aspect ratios changed between desktop/mobile.
The staggered panels use a grid layout.

desktop vs mobile example. I move the text around to fit the empty space.

The principle: there’s a lot of negative space in the shadowed area around the figure, and the ‘don’t leave’ text floats in it. To maintain this on a narrow viewport, I stack it above the drawing, making use of the available vertical space.

Other technical details

I drew everything in Procreate on iPad using the 6B Pencil brush listed under ‘Sketching’, and then exported it to PSD to edit in Photoshop.
I used Tiempos Text instead of a typical comic font, because I wanted to maintain the serious tone of a serif font. During development I was using Garamond, but ended up switching because I thought it was too serious.
I added a faint noise texture + sepia overlay in CSS, because the stark black + white was hurting me. (Though I didn’t do this until the very end, so my eyes kept taking damage throughout the whole process, lmao.)

Conclusion

I feel quite satisfied with how this all came together. I’m happy I finally drew a comic with more serious and high-effort artwork. I like the noir vibes and the slight creepiness. In the future, I’d like to draw something with more complex compositions, so I can do more complex responsiveness.

here is a deleted panel—it was meant to go in the empty space below the staggered panels. I scrapped it because it ended up not flowing well.

Weeknotes 12

2024-03-29T00:00:00Z

This website

Media diary filters

At long last, I got around to adding filters to my watchlist and reading list. They’re never going to be as flexible or data-rich as Letterboxd or Goodreads, but I enjoy this bit of extra control. I’ll have to add similar filters to my games list as well, and probably make use of a more sophisticated tagging system.

watchlist filters

reading list filters—i don't rate my books frequently enough to add rating filters

Thinky thots

I’ve been mulling over what to do with my homepage—it’s been a year since I made it, so it’s overdue for an update, but I like my comic concept quite a bit, though not the execution anymore (it’s obviously very rough), but I don’t necessarily want to redo it, but every other idea feels like a let down, and I’m stuck on other comic ideas…idk. I’m overthinking it. I’m hoping lightning will just strike me and give me a cool and beautiful idea.

looking at me homepage

Photos

I started working on a photos 2024 page, but then got stuck.

work in progress

My previous photo pages was good for posting individual photos, but this time I want some way of grouping them together (e.g. all photos from a certain day)
It would be nice to have a way of embedding a certain entry in a blog post—e.g. embed the four photos above in this blog post, since they fall under the idea of my March recap
At that point, should photo posts just be—blog posts? As part of my main feed? I guess I’ve lost interest in high-volume, low-quality photo posting. There’s too much friction so I don’t want to do it.
I’m unsure of why I want this to exist and how to go about it. Need to keep thinking about it.

Task list

I wrote out the things I want to do on my site, so I stop forgetting, like optimizing my images, adding filters to things, and reinventing other websites.

Wishful thinking

an aside: I daydream about attending some kind of week-long retreat with other nerds to sprint through some big personal website project. A week, because that’s probably how much time I’d be willing to take off of work and also the limit of my introversion; local, because travel and accommodation costs are expensive; the, uh, intersection of art and technology™ niche because that’s where I sit and I’m not good at either of the two individually, but can cobble something together with both. Kind of like Recurse Centre, except not in NYC and not for programmers.

someone please start this and @ me. I need to be peer pressured into finishing my projects.

Internet reading

Academish Voice by Ink & Switch – I love a good technical writing guide.
Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain by Kate Wagner for Road & Track (archived link) – I don’t Formula 1 or do cars, but this was interesting. Wagner talks about the sheer amount of wealth and the engineering involved, among other things.

But when time comes for the sprint to begin, team members move in perfect coordination, synchronized. They have stances and footwork. This is most true of the pit crew and the astonishing speed at which they travel through space as one organism, totally practiced in set plays of their own. This was beautiful to watch in real life.
Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2023 refresh by Lynn Fisher – Lynn’s website redesigns are singular, and this is such a great writeup of how she made her latest one. This is the type of SVG manipulation I want to do—so inspiring.
e?xpress by Katherine Yang – I love documentation and I don’t really get most of this (it is, ah, programming), but I love the vibes, and Katherine’s poetic work is so good.
Elizabeth Goodspeed on the delicate art of nostalgia in branding for It’s Nice That – brand design is not my passion so I learn so much from everything that Elizabeth Goodspeed writes.
I archived my tweets by Lynn Fisher – another Lynn Fisher post; I want to get around to archiving my tweets as well and this is a nice reference.
The joy of incremental website improvements by capjamesg — lovely and true.

Thus is the personal website. It can grow over time, if you want. Or it can be static. It’s up to you. Most importantly, aim to have fun. Be whimsical. Push the boundaries of the web. Use your site as your creative outlet.
Making Films and Making Websites by Jim Nielsen – this is such an interesting analogy. He compares screenplays to UI mockups.

Nolan: writing words on paper (screenplay) in service of making a series of images people experience (a film).

Me: designing visuals in Figma (mocks) in service of making interactive software people experience (a website).
- Related: I also read this interesting post about why screenplays are formatted the way they are
- Coincidentally, I read a couple of short film screenplays recently for work. Maybe I should go learn a thing or two about filmmaking, if only to better understand the collaborative process.

Media

Music

Lately, I’ve taken to using my laptop while sitting on the floor in front of the TV, while YouTube videos play in the background. This is just somehow cozier than sitting on the couch itself.

My latest YouTube rotation is:

Various concerts by Vaundy — e.g. Vaundy LIVE - one man live at BUDOKAN “深呼吸”. I’ve had the first song of this concert on repeat all week.
Chill DJ mixes — e.g. this city pop one by ANNDJ. They have such pretty settings, and I want to update my listening room artwork to be more maximalist/vibey like these.
Performances on the channel THE FIRST TAKE — e.g. Kataomoi by Aimer

vaundy

Games

I haven’t been gaming much this month. I barely touched Destiny, outside of getting destroyed in competitive PVP in pursuit of Cool Weapon Drop.

I tried Lethal Company—I was cajoled into buying this by a friend who clearly did not know about my non-existent tolerance for horror—don’t look up anything about it, he said, thanks—so playing this was an great exercise in Being Brave. Admittedly, we did easy things and nothing truly scary ever happened, but I was on edge the entire time. I would like to get better with horror though (there are too many interesting creepy games I want to eventually play), so I’ll begrudgingly keep trying this until it either becomes too much or I become beautiful and strong.
I’ve started a new Stardew Valley farm, because of the 1.6 update. This time, I want to try to be more chill about it, instead of minmaxing.
I bought SUMMERHOUSE, and it’s relaxing and cute.

build idyllic houses…mmm wish I lived here

Real life

I am an exceedingly boring person who spends way too much time at home, and there was this weird week this month where I went out several times and even put on Outfits to do so.

commemorating the fits

I attended two events:

Type Brigade

By chance, I discovered that Type Brigade, a local typography event, was having its revival. I was going down a rabbit hole of seeking out design events to attend in Vancouver, which led to me logging into meetup.com for the first time in years, in which I learned that Type Brigade was returning after four years and having an event in like, two days. What a coincidence!

Franco Jonas talked about his typography work
Lisa Taniguchi talked about transforming her lettering work into a font—emphasizing how a font is a system, unlike lettering.

Pop Politics

I trekked all the way to campus to attend a talk by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which was a fun time. He talked about, you know—writing to offend everyone, the world-changing power of literary criticism, history, the war, Hollywood, and so on. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

I didn’t take notes, but here are some disjointed ones anyway, based on my faulty memory:

the idea of narrative scarcity—Asian-Americans don’t have many stories about them in Hollywood, so the ones that do exist have the burden of representation. Crazy Rich Asians has to be more than a romcom, it has to represent Asian people; a romcom about white people is simply a romcom about white people.
you have one trauma to write about; it’s what people expect of you. Nguyen is, understandably, tired of writing about the war, and said he’d like to write something else after he’s done the third (!) book in the series.
Hollywood as the ministry of propaganda. Watching Apocalypse Now as a turning point: Nguyen sympathized with the American protagonists up until the point where they kill Vietnamese civilians.
President Jimmy Carter called it a war of ‘mutual destruction’—as if the tens of thousands of American lives is equal to the millions of Vietnamese killed and displaced, the spillover into Cambodia and subsequent Khmer Rouge genocide. It’s not equal.
Nguyen joked about writing The Sympathizer to offend everyone. He upped it in the sequel—‘who else can I offend?’—in which the answer was: the French. (in his opinion, the French have been treated too kindly in the memory of their colonialism.)
there was a question about whether Nguyen adjusts his talks based on his audience (such as, a liberal vs conservative audience); he answered no, what use is a principle if you don’t adhere to it all the time? that’s not a principle. If he says the United States is a country built on colonialism and genocide, he says that everywhere and doesn’t qualify it to make it more palatable. (not that that is a controversial statement, lol)
the HBO show sounds like it’s going to be very good. He highlights that we’re about to spend several hours watching a majority-Vietnamese cast (yeah, yeah, Robert Downey Jr. is also there, whatever), which is unheard of in Hollywood. We’re going to see Hoa Xuande on screen all the time. How revolutionary.

Other ordinary things

I went to a teppanyaki restaurant for the first time (fun!), made tiramisu (and am now eating it too quickly), tried some of those Japanese instant coffee powders (interesting!), and enjoyed balmy 15ºC temperatures (get fucked, seasonal affective disorder!!!). The days are getting longer. I’m writing/editing this as I drink coffee, which is extremely ordinary but still wonderful. I’m on day one of a four-day long weekend. The day is bright and full of possibilities.

This April, I would like to make a good attempt at PleinAirpril, an art challenge to do a plein air painting every day. I have the time and the energy to try this. I haven’t made any progress on my 2024 creative goals, and I want to change that.

My Eleventy site setup

2024-03-03T00:00:00Z

I haven’t written about my website setup in a while, and I thought it’d be nice to compile all the different parts together in one place for easy reference. This post assumes some familiarity with Eleventy, the static site generator I use.

I don’t mean this to be instructive, but rather just an explanation of how I do things on my site.

this is my garbage

Overview

I think Eleventy is well-suited for my needs: it allows easy layout customization (I have a lot of custom pages), is mostly low-maintenance and ‘easy’ to setup (I don’t know what node is and at this point I’m too afraid to ask, but I managed it), and has enough of a community that I can Google stuff, haphazardly copy and paste things I don’t understand, and have something work.

I make extensive use of Eleventy data files to store my media diary and other structured content. A bunch of other stuff (my blog posts, digital garden…) are collections. I use a lot of shortcodes.

I host my code on GitHub, and my site rebuilds itself via Netlify every time I push to master.

Blog posts

All blog posts are markdown files within my posts directory. They’re structured like /posts/2024/post-title.md.

Some of my older posts have dates attached to the file name, which is a remnant of when I used Jekyll.

Front matter

I use the post front matter to customize posts. Here’s Weeknotes 10, for example:

---
date: 2024-02-05
title: Weeknotes 10
excerpt: latest creative things, internet reading, media highlights, misc.
toc: true
image: /img/2024/02/wk10_book.jpg
tags: 
  - weeknotes
mediaCard: true
mediaDesc: latest creative things, internet reading, media highlights, misc.
imageAlt: Ink sketch of a hand holding open a book. From the book are speech bubbles in the form of computer windows.
---

toc: true adds a table of contents. This pulls my H2 headings and sticks them at the top. (Further reading: Table of Contents in Eleventy)
I record tags but don’t do anything with them currently.
mediaCard: true enables meta tags on the post. By default, I don’t use these—if you link to my site on Mastodon, for example, there won’t be any kind of preview. It wasn’t until very recently that I’ve started enabling this on a per-page basis.
- mediaDesc and imageAlt fill out the meta tags.

Custom CSS

I apply custom styles to individual posts as needed. Creative pursuits, for example:

---
date: 2024-02-06
title: Creative pursuits
excerpt: things I want to do
smol: true
---

The customStyle property adds smol.css, which adjusts my heading styles to be, well, smol. (Further reading: Small headings.)

I use this for my one-off custom styling as well. For example, Weeknotes 9 is a comic, and adds weeknotes-9.css to handle that styling.

Overriding defaults

My Media Recap 2023 post is completely custom—different layout, colours, font, etc. I override my default site layout by setting layout: media-2023.liquid in the front matter.

my default site styling

custom post styling

Shortcodes

I use a bunch of shortcodes in my posts, to make writing everything in markdown more bearable.

For example, most of my images use a figure shortcode, rather than the default markdown syntax of ![alt text](image.jpg). In the post markdown, I’ll write:

{% include 'figure.liquid' 
src: '/img/2024/02/listening_room-light.jpg'
alt: "Web page showing a vector illustration of a room with a turntable and records displayed on the wall."
caption: 'the listening room'
imgClass: 'screen'
figClass: 'breakout'
%}

Which outputs this HTML:

<figure class="breakout">
  <img class="screen" 
  src="/img/2024/02/listening_room-light.jpg" 
  alt="Web page showing a vector illustration of a room with a turntable and records displayed on the wall.">
  <figcaption>the listening room</figcaption>
</figure>

I wrote about this way back in Markdown Optimizations.

Shortcodes are useful for components that I use a lot because I’ve broken things in the past whenever I tried changing my markup or styling, and writing the raw <figure> HTML hurts me. (Writing these shortcodes also hurts me, but I’ve accepted it as part of the limitations of markdown.)

My shortcodes include:

figures
asides
callouts
footnotes

Other collections

Digital garden

My digital garden is much like my blog except it has some additional front matter properties:

date to mean the update date; datePublished for publish date
epistemicStatus to indicate my level of confidence/effort in something

This section of my site is admittedly neglected though.

Sketchbook

My sketchbook is made up of normal blog posts. I’ve previously pondered structuring this as a JSON file as well, but decided against it.

my sketchbook

I think this is an imperfect setup, but I don’t currently draw enough to warrant overhauling it. My ideal setup would involve less friction to adding stuff, the option for works to exist in multiple collections (e.g. a movie study I do can exist in either ‘movie studies’ or ‘2024 sketches’), and more layout options.

About

My about page is a collection of posts, which each represent one of my ‘personas.’ I wrote about this in: About Me* (* multiple versions of me).

my about page

Media diary

I track four media types: film/tv, music, games, and books.

I use data files (i.e. JSON files) to store most of my media: watched.json, books.json, music.json. This works well because my media log is consistently structured, and each entry (a book, movie, etc.) is short. My games collection is a collection of posts.

Watchlist

Here are two example entries for my watchlist:

{
  "title": "The Grand Budapest Hotel",
  "date": "2024-02-10",
  "category": "movie",
  "rating": 5,
  "poster": "the-grand-budapest-hotel",
  "review": "perhaps, the perfect movie. i've been listening to the soundtrack a bunch lately",
  "rewatch": true,
  "favourite": true
},
{
  "title": "Only Murders in the Building (season 3)",
  "date": "2023-11-27",
  "category": "television",
  "rating": 4,
  "poster": "only-murders-in-the-building",
  "review": "delightful",
  "url": "/media/watch/only-murders-in-the-building"
}

Currently, I store more information than I actually display—the category (a movie or tv show), and whether I saw it in theatres or not. Eventually, I would like to add filters/sorting to my list.

JSON works well here because the structure is consistent. To add a new entry, I copy a previous entry, paste this at the top of the file, and edit it. While editing JSON isn’t exactly pleasing like using a GUI, it’s low-friction enough that it’s not a burden. I don’t need to remember my structure, because I can just copy and paste old entries.

In the rare cases where I want to expand on a particular item, I create a separate post for it—e.g. my Only Murders example above has a url field that links to its own post (which, in turn, uses a custom bloop-post.liquid layout).

Books

My reading list is largely the same as my watchlist.

{
  "title": "A Psalm for the Wild-Built",
  "author": "Becky Chambers",
  "format": "fiction",
  "date": "2023-07-14",
  "cover": "a-psalm-for-the-wild-built.jpg",
  "review": "mmmm I enjoyed many things about this. It’s quite philosophical at times but it was the kind of optimistic, sincere thing I needed to read.",
  "excerpts": [
    {
      "text": "Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city."
    }
  ]
}

An optional field I have is excerpts, for saving quotes. Like with my watchlist, I plan on adding filters eventually.

a book with a quote

Music

This is the simplest list:

{
  "title": "I Wish You Love",
  "artist": "Laufey",
  "album": "Typical of Me",
  "cover": "laufey_typical-of-me.jpg"
}

Games

This media type is an exception: it’s stored as a collection of posts. Unlike my other media types, I usually have more to say about the games I play, as well as images to add, so JSON isn’t as fitting.

Here’s the post front matter of Stray, for example:

---
title: Stray
platform: PC
datePlayed: 2022
status: complete
favourite: true
tags:
  - single-player
  - atmospheric
  - adorable
gameLink: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1332010/Stray/
gameLinkText: Steam
image: /img/2022/07/stray_midtown.jpg
---

The datePlayed field takes freeform text instead of an actual date, because games are played over a period of time (unlike movies), and usually don’t have a definitive completion date (unlike books). I can enter things like since 2022 or on and off or whatever.
I half-heartedly add tags, but this is not consistent at all. (Yeah, yeah, eventually I will add filters).

Other data files

I also use data files for:

Tracking my past designs
My (also sadly neglected) photos
My /uses page (another WIP)

Basically, anything that is structured and doesn’t involve much writing, I stick into a data file.

Custom pages

Custom pages use a different layout than the default. For example:

A normal page: Meta, which uses the default post.liquid template.
A custom page: The listening room, which uses the listeningroom.liquid template.

Whenever I want to make something custom, I create a new whatever.liquid file and stick it in my /_includes/ directory, and its corresponding CSS file in /css/.

Archiving

I have a lot of custom pages, and I also redesign my site quite often. (Is once a year often?)

While I don’t have older versions of my site available, I do like to keep around my old custom pages, particularly if I’ve written about them. Whenever I change my homepage, I move the contents of the last one to a new page that exists independent of the current site design. (See: Past Designs.)

For layouts that gets thrown into the archive dungeon where they will never see the light of day again, I chuck them into an archive subdirectory within /_includes/.

Images

I try to strike a balance between low-maintenance and project-based image organization.

By default, I organize images by date added: /img/2024/02/image.jpg for any images in my February 2024 blog posts, for example.
- This is how WordPress media gets sorted, which I think works well. I don’t have to think about what folder a random blog post image goes into.
My media diary images (except games) go in their own project folders; e.g. /img/watchlist/movieposter.jpg, /img/music/cover.jpg. This makes them consistent to refer to.
Other specific projects go in their own folders, such as /img/4koma/ for my homepage comics.

I need to figure out image processing at some point this year. This is probably the most glaring flaw with my website.

Conclusion

These days, I prioritize ease-of-maintenance over efficiency. I manually add items to my media diary, manually track down images, manually rename files. I’ll copy and paste things before I build some kind of reusable template. An app can be a home-cooked meal. I used to feel like I was doing things Wrong or Suboptimally, compared to Real Developers, but nowadays I feel more confident in what I’ve built here. My website is simply mine, and I love it.

Weeknotes 11

2024-02-29T00:00:00Z

Note: If you're reading this in a reader app, the layout's going to be borked with all the images—my apologies. Please check it out on my blog itself for the proper display.

These days, I feel more appreciative of art.

I think, AI can't make this.

People continue to create and share things that are surprising, beautiful, personal.

There's so much to discover on the internet.

Twitter sucks, but a lot of artists still post there.

art things

The other week, I was flipping through the artbook Rooms by Senbon Umishima, and went to look them up because I wanted to see more of their art. I came across this wonderful interview on pixivision where they talk about their work and process. There’s a lot I like about it.

“I believe that the interpretation of not only the style but the work itself is in the hands of the viewer. Once I’ve finished a drawing, a one-to-one relationship with the work is created between it and everyone who sees it. I can’t barge into that relationship just because I’m the artist. Of course, I remember all of the pieces I’ve created, but in a sense, it is almost like my relationship with a piece ends once I’ve finished drawing it.”

Q: This solo exhibition is centered on the Rooms series. How did you come up with the idea?

A: “Green tiles are so cute, aren’t they? If I were to draw some, the drawing itself would have to be set in a restroom,” was the simple idea that gave birth to my first work. After I had done quite a few, my editor suggested that I should make an art book series with rooms as the theme.

I love this—they wanted to draw something specific because they liked it, and then an entire series was born. It’s such a simple idea that I want to internalize more. Instead of trying to create something grand and ambitious, start from something small, that I enjoy, and see what comes out of that.

(Sidenote: there are lots of artist interviews here—super fun to see how they approach their work, style, business, etc.!)

From another interview with Akakura:

Q: Does even a popular illustrator like you sometimes fall into a slump? How do you get out of it?

A: I hit plateaus regularly! (laughs) When that happens, I try to incorporate some new elements into my drawings. For example, I’ll give a go to popular post-processing techniques, such as offsetting, where the main lines are blurred. Trying new things is good for a change of pace and makes me feel like I’ve learned something, so it also motivates me. As I mentioned earlier, I draw sketches of designs that interest me instead of taking notes. If you can keep that up regularly, you’ll still have some work to look at even after falling into a slump.

AI

I feel like I’ve spent too much time looking at Web Design and WebsitesTM lately, that reading about artists feels like a revelation, even though the art community is where I started on the internet. I’ve spent too much time away.

I mused about this while writing my last weeknotes, though I ended up scrapping the section—but lately, I’ve been particularly enamoured by art. When I look at it, I feel more wonder and awe. I feel inspired. Perhaps it’s a byproduct of seeing too much about ‘AI art’ (as of writing this, OpenAI just revealed their video generator Sora, which is a whole different can of worms).

I don’t have a good way of articulating my distaste of AI-generated art yet. It feels: cringe, tasteless, manufactured, clickbait. It’s like a SHEIN ripoff of something beautiful and handmade. It has a novelty factor that feels cheap. I don’t respect it.

Other people have expressed these sentiments better than me. Here are a couple that I enjoyed recently:

“Most AI images look like shit. AI “artists” are quick to lecture me that generative tools are improving every day and what they spit out won’t always look this way – I think that’s beside the point. What makes AI imagery so lousy isn’t the technology itself, but the cliché and superficial creative ambitions of those who use it. A video of a cyber-punk jellyfish or a collie in sunglasses on a skateboard generated by Open AI’s new video-to-text model Sora aren’t bad because the animals in them look unrealistic; they’re bad because they’re mind-numbingly stupid. AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste; a product of knowing which inputs and keywords to feed the image-mashup machine, and the eye to identify which outputs contain any semblance of artistry. All that is to say: AI itself can’t generate good taste for you.”

—Elizabeth Goodspeed on the importance of taste – and how to acquire it (via It’s Nice That)

“nobody asked, but AI is fundamentally incapable of producing worthwhile art, because what makes art worthwhile is its humanity. as tech is able to do new stuff, our cultural understanding of what is worthwhile art will shift to center whatever humans can do but tech can’t”

—Adam Chase (via Twitter)

Reading on the internet

How To Center a Div by Josh Comeau – I read this thinking that I already knew how to centre a div so it’d be a refresher, and then I learned that margin-inline: auto is the equivalent of setting margin-left and margin-right to auto, and I realized that I know nothing, actually.
- Josh describes the place-content: center method with css grid as the most ‘terse’ way to centre something, which I think is a delightful way of putting it.
- He also writes: ‘An element with position: fixed is like a ladybug that lands on the window.’
- Ah, if only all CSS writing were full of such reverence.
Muse retrospective by Adam Wiggins – an interesting post on the app Muse. I wanted to try Muse way back but never got around to it, since I ended up using Figjam and I never did the kind of research it’s well-suited for.
Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools by Samantha Cole for 404 Media – how utterly depressing.
Where I’m at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing by Chris Coyier – it’s a bummer how DigitalOcean bought CSS-Tricks and then left it to die. CSS-Tricks is the blog. The flexbox guide is legendary.
Review: Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own by Molly White

Media

It’s been slow on this end.

There’s a new trailer for The Sympathizer – I’ve been looking forward to this since I saw the first trailer way back, and I’m excited we finally have a release date (April 14). I’m going to try to reread the book before then.
I rewatched Dune in theatres, and I’m going to see Dune: Part Two tomorrow and I am very hyped.
I’m still playing FFXIV (though my friends will point out how I haven’t logged on in nearly two weeks). I am so close to the award-winning Heavensward expansion.
I’m on Destiny 2 sabbatical. Feels nice.
I’m still listening to Naruto music, which feels like a sign that I should go and finish my reread of it.

Other things

I’m casually on the hunt for a new RSS reader, and I got lots of lovely suggestions on Mastodon, but haven’t been able to sit down and do a whole proper evaluation yet.

Creative pursuits

2024-02-06T00:00:00Z

Here are some things I would like to tackle this year

Write a long, in-depth, high-effort blog post about some topic—my website, a project, a travel post, a setup post, whatever.
Experiment with lino printing
Experiment with and practice creating comics
- Daily comics
- Comic Anhs (in its initial incarnation)
- A polished work (a short strip, a page…something more than a sketch)
Take a new self-portrait
Redesign my website
Practice writing fiction
- Flash fiction
- Comics
- Poetry
Sell digital goods

I want to develop a habit of

Writing weeknotes regularly (once a month ish is good)
Putting more effort into writing my media reviews
Drawing digitally regularly
Doing art studies

Maybe not this year, but I want to try

Public speaking (talk, presentation, that sort of thing)
Creating tutorial / instructional content
Attending in-person meetups / events

Sometime in the future, I want to

Write a children’s book
Display my art in a public place (coffee shop, gallery)
Try drawing professionally (i.e. commercial artwork, editorial, otherwise get paid to draw. This may not be for me, but I want to be good enough to try it out.)

Weeknotes 10

2024-02-05T00:00:00Z

creative things

In the past few weeks, I:

Built my listening room (and wrote a post about the process)
Participated in hourly comic day. Most years I do it traditionally, and they’re always extremely low-effort. I’m glad I drew quite a number of hours this year.
Drew more often overall, which feels really good!

thinking about doing next

/defaults page
future blog post: creative pursuits 2024, which has been a draft for weeks now lol
using instagram for art? maybe? I also learned about pixelfed, so maybe that. idk.

on the internet

Ten Gallon Tank by Jan De Wilde - not so much reading as it is a Cool Website. It describes itself as ‘overkill aquarium stats tracking’—‘overkill’ is such an delightful word for this kind of thing. I should aim to be overkill in all my endeavours.
Future CSS: Anchor Positioning by Roman Komarov – ugh, this would be wonderful. Its use with sidenotes is definitely the thing I’m most interested in.
The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams by Andy Baio – how depressing.
the experience of completing a sketchbook for my japan trip by Winnie Lim – I love this post. Winnie writes so beautifully:

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.
AI Art is The New Stock Image from iA – I don’t like AI art and this is a nice articulation of why it’s kind of…cringe.
Everybody has to self-promote now. Nobody wants to. by Rebecca Jennings for Vox – a depressing look at how ‘marketing’ and ‘branding’ are inescapable when trying to be an artitst, writer, musician.

media log, highlights

carmy, the bear

I’ve been listening to a lot of Naruto music recently, so much that it’s distorting my Spotify daylist and giving me stuff like ‘anime mangas friday night.’
- For those of you who care about Naruto: my favourite opening is distance by LONG SHOT PARTY (shippuuden op #2), and favourite ending is undoubtedly Wind by Akeboshi (naruto ed #1).
I finished The Bear season 2. I liked it more than season 1—it was a bit calmer and had lots of great character moments.
- Minor spoilers: loved Sydney eating in Chicago and the menu forming; Marcus’s trip to Copenhagen; the chaos of Fishes, of course; everything about Forks, which has the most incredible Taylor Swift usage; the front of house vs kitchen atmosphere of the soft opening.
I watched Royal Rumble. The athleticism in wrestling is so impressive. Maybe I’ll watch WrestleMania when it comes around? I want to see Rhea Ripley.
I logged back into the critically acclaimed mmorpg Final Fantasy XIV and did a bunch of extreme trials for the first time with my friends, which was exciting and also silly because I forgot how to play.

in ordinary life things

ingredients

Ate hot pot a couple of times
Stayed indoors during that week when it was like -14°C (which is unheard of in Vancouver)
Ordered an ereader, which is surely the thing that will make me read more.
Bought some new pens for drawing—I have a somewhat stupidly large collection of them, but I didn’t have any super thin ones. I picked up a set of sakura microns 005 (.2mm) pens, which I think will help with my cross-hatching problems. I used them in the drawings here.

Building the listening room

2024-02-03T00:00:00Z

Last weekend I built a page that I’m calling the listening room. It showcases the six latest songs from my ‘on repeat’ music list in a fun little room setting.

the listening room

I had been wanting to do something new with my music list for a while, and I had an abandoned project along these lines—place SVGs and images together—that I could reuse. That concept was more complex, as it was isometric and had far more objects, but I was tired of working on it.

Hence this simpler version: a flat perspective so it was easy to draw, scoped to just my music albums, made the same methods as that WIP room. I wanted to start and finish it in a weekend, instead of languishing in complexity.

Summary

tl;dr this room is composed of:

A bunch of SVGs and PNGs, which are absolute positioned and sized with percentage units
Album covers, taken from the six latest entries in my music list
Lots of colour adjustments, slapped on top of everything

Here’s the process.

Drawing the SVGs

It went like this:

Draw rough sketch in notebook
Draw shapes in Illustrator
Copy and paste shapes into Figma
Copy as SVG from Figma
Paste as inline SVG into the HTML

sketch idea (and on the other side of the page: anime drawings!)

illustrator shapes

I kept the composition simple. Everything is a one-dimensional object. In the interest of efficiency (i.e. laziness), I reused the plant and the chair shapes from my previous project, with slight adjustments.

Painting textures

I added a bunch of brush textures on top of the SVG objects, because I like textures and they spruce up my amateur SVG drawings.

SVG shape + texture transparent PNG ➜ layered together

To make the texture, I used the SVG as a mask and shaded it in Photoshop. The process is kind of like—use a brush with low opacity (say, 20%), and start painting and layering brush strokes. Take an eraser, also low opacity, and erase where it’s too strong. And keep doing this until it looks sort of interesting.

CSS positioning

Everything is sized and absolute positioned inside a .room div with percentage units. The room itself has a fixed aspect ratio of 16:9.

Whether the window is 1600px or 500px wide, items will always be sized and positioned the same way within the 16:9 room.

Textures are positioned and sized the same as their respective SVGs, so that they overlap. To add visual interest, I offset the textures by a couple of pixels, so that the edges would be visible. The inspiration here is chromatic aberration and the like.

misaligned chair, lamp, and speaker textures.

.room {
  position: relative;
  aspect-ratio: 16 / 9;
}

/* Example: the plant */
.plant {
  position: absolute;
  right: -11%;
  bottom: -20%;
  height: 100%;
}
.plant-texture {
  right: calc(-11% + 1px); /* 1px offset */
  bottom: -20%;
  height: 100%;
}

This has the added benefit of blending in other imperfections—I’m not going for pixel perfect, so where things are unintentionally wonky, I can get away with not fixing them. (Example: the shadows on the album covers are a pixel or two off, but it’s all good because that’s the aesthetic.)

Colour & lighting

I knew I was going to throw a whole lot of colour adjustments and filters on top of everything. The textures were done in fuchsia because I selected it in Photoshop on a whim, and I knew I could change it afterward in CSS.

So for example, the plant texture:

filter: hue-rotate(130deg) to change it to green
opacity: .15 to soften it. Another method could be adjusting mix-blend-mode with something like soft-light or screen.

original colours ➜ with hue-rotate(130deg) ➜ at 15% opacity

Lighting the entire room

In addition to all the texture adjustments, I added colour on top of the whole room.

the room without any adjustments

By default, the room is kind of cold. For ‘lights on’ mode, I added a reddish orange overlay; when the lights get turned off, the overlay is purple.

lights on

lights off (click the lamp!)

This colour adjustment is made with a pseudo element that covers the entire room:

.room::before {
  /* positioning the pseudo element */
  content: '';
  position: absolute;
  left: 0;
  top: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  z-index: 20;

  /* the colour adjustment - lights on ver. */
  background: #ba725c; /* terracotta orange */
  mix-blend-mode: soft-light;
  opacity: .6;
}

/* for lights off ver. */
.room.lightsoff::before {
  background: #671d6d; /* purple */
  mix-blend-mode: multiply;
  opacity: .6;
}

For lights off mode, in addition to the whole room getting a purple overlay, I also adjusted some textures to be blue with a new hue-rotate:

/* Example: the plant */
.lightsoff .plant-texture {
  filter: hue-rotate(300deg); /* change from 130deg */
}

Animation

There are a couple of moving parts: the turntable arm (just barely) and the plant leaves. These are CSS animations.

For the plant:

Each leaf is a separate path in the SVG
Each leaf animates independently: they’re all rotating 1-3 degrees at varying speeds
The texture on top stays still, so the two layers are distinct. Again, the visible mismatch is the point.

For example:

@keyframes breathe {
  0% { transform: none; }
  100% { transform: var(--leaf-transform); }
} 

.plant__leaf--1 {
  --leaf-transform: rotate(-2deg);
  transform-origin: bottom right;
  animation: breathe 6s infinite alternate linear;
}
.plant__leaf--2 {
  --leaf-transform: rotate(1deg);
  transform-origin: bottom right;
  animation: breathe 7s infinite alternate linear;
}

Etc.

The rest of the page is straightforward. I used a new font for the title—Sfizia by atipo foundry, which I bought a while ago but had yet to find a project for. I got to put a little fancy swash on the ‘R’ in ‘Room’ (font-feature-settings: "ss01").

mmm italics

The album covers are pulled from my music collection (an Eleventy data file) and positioned to sit on the shelves. I added a slight tilt to them and some shadows with pseudo elements.

Below the room is the full title and artist info for the albums. This all links to my full music list, which is just a grid of songs.

Closing thoughts

I feel like a broken record when I say—there is way more that can be done here, and I would like to do it in future attempts. I’m held back primarily by my own artistic shortcomings; the technical web aspects of this are straightforward and the art is really where it’s at.

I think the correct process for me is to do as much artwork as possible using a pen/stylus. I am—regretfully—limited by my tools. If I can only draw rectangles labouriously, by pointing and clicking my mouse, then I will draw as few rectangles as I can get away with because of this friction, and the whole piece will suffer as a result. So, next time, I should draw more with the tool I am strongest with: a pen.

But in any case, I’m happy I managed to finish this over the weekend. It feels good to publish a concept I’ve been kicking around for months, even as a stripped down version, and also change up my music list, as was one of my goals from my Media 2023 recap.

Thanks for reading!

Weeknotes 9

2024-01-13T00:00:00Z

As more time passes since my last weeknote

I feel more and more stressed about the number of things I need to cover

and feel too overwhelmed to start the next weeknote

sitting down to write

and not writing.

So, I've decided. I don't have to write a long review every month.

There are no rules!

I'm going to write this in a format that currently brings me joy.

(fun comic edition)

Redesigned my website and recapped my media

Watched a lot of TV

Depression

Played Dave the Diver (and got eaten by sharks)

Saved things to read (and didn't read them)

Played Garden Galaxy

That's all, folks!

Media Recap 2023

2023-12-31T00:00:00Z

Another year, another recap. Here is the highlight reel of all the stuff I enjoyed this year: film & tv, music, games, and books. I record all this in my Media Diary.

Film & television

My watch habits this year turned out to be similar to last year’s: I watched 49 movies and 15 TV shows (versus 48 and 13 in 2022, respectively). I bought a TV, which was exciting. I haven’t had a TV in more than a decade, and it was nice to sit on the couch and watch stuff. I also went to the theatres a lot.

My favourite thing

My favourite thing I watched this year was Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. There was this wonderful period in June where I saw it repeatedly in theatres. Imagine: a warm summer night, and you go and watch your favourite movie on the big screen, and it’s so enjoyable and then you go do it again. Everything about Spider-Verse was exciting and beautiful: the art and animation (of course), the story arcs, the music, the characters.

Colour key by Kat Tsai (@Chuwenjie), whose work is gorgeous

Character design by Kris Anka (@kristaferanka)

Highlights:

The art and animation: I could sit here forever and talk about this. Perhaps, my favourite thing: how Spider-Verse applies other mediums to animation—e.g. the half-tone effects on Miles’ suit, Gwen’s watercolour verse, the comic bubbles and text.
The music: I love Gwen’s theme—her swinging over to the Guggenheim is such a thrill—and the entire intro Vulture sequence; the mounting intensity of Falling Apart (when Miles exits the Go Home Machine); the Across the Spider-Verse (Start a Band) reprisal at the end.

Other highlights

The Bear: I’m still on season 2, but this has been superb.
The French Dispatch: I enjoyed this so much, and have rewatched it several times since. I listened to its soundtrack for ages.
Ratatouille: I rewatched this and it made me cry. It’s not only beautifully animated (it’s Pixar, after all; the food looks sublime) but the final message, spoken by the food critic, hits a lot harder as an adult:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.
Tokyo Godfathers: a truly excellent Christmas movie. It’s about three homeless people who find an abandoned baby, and then try to find its parents. It’s both very comedic and very heartfelt.

Retrospective on last year’s goals

Did I succeed in watching:

Prestige™ / classic films: sort of. I did watch two of the three movies I highlighted—Pride & Prejudice and In the Mood for Love, but not Fight Club—but there wasn’t much else.
Stuff with nice cinematography: yes, a bunch of Wes Anderson movies; Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers.
Casual stuff for background viewing while multitasking: eh, not really. Also, this is probably a crime.
Ridiculous movies like Hackers: no
Recommended movies from friends: not really
Web series: no

Music

I listened to mostly the same kind of stuff this year, instead of new music and complete albums as I aspired to last year. Perhaps next year will be more adventurous.

according to Spotify—

I attended four concerts this year:

The Budos Band, whom my partner is a fan of. I didn’t really vibe with this.
Red Hot Chili Peppers, also along with my partner. I don’t listen to them but it was fun!
Janelle Monáe, who I do adore.
Portugal. The Man, who were fantastic. I’ve really enjoyed their new album this year.

portugal. the man

And some of my favourite songs:

Aline

Jarvis Cocker – CHANSONS d'ENNUI TIP-TOP

Spotify | YouTube

Mona Lisa

Dominic Fike – Sunburn

Spotify | YouTube

vampire

Olivia Rodrigo – GUTS

Spotify | YouTube

Hit Me Up (ft. Nomovodka)

Binz – Đan Xinh In Love

Spotify | YouTube

Champ (ft. Edgar Winter)

Portugal. The Man – Chris Black Changed My Life

Spotify | YouTube

Odoriko (踊り子)

Vaundy – replica

Spotify | YouTube

Games

Just like last year, most of my PC gaming time in 2023 was spent with Destiny 2. According to Steam, it took up 87% of my playtime (up from 76% last year).

Steam recap. Most played games are Destiny 2, Remnant II, Garden Galaxy, Wilderplace, and Terra Nil.

Destiny highlights

And once again, this year’s highlight was contest mode raiding. I spent a lovely 17 hours over two days doing Root of Nightmares. It was, maybe, less thrilling than last year’s Vow of the Disciple, but still intense.

rip nezarec

commemorating starfire protocol dps meta

More tragically, I also spent a silly number of hours in Crota’s End contest mode, to not much success—we gave up on the second encounter at the bridge. Being stuck in the first encounter for five hours was quite something. But the company was good and I don’t regret it at all.

typical first encounter experience

There’s probably going to be a lot of downtime between now and when the next expansion comes out in June, so I look forward to playing other games and doing minimal Destiny grinding.

Other games

When I wasn’t playing Destiny, I spent time with:

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: this consumed me for a bit when it came out. I never got into BotW—the controls were hard as I wasn’t used to playing on controller—but I finally got used to it here. Sadly, I never finished it though.

Remnant II: there was a couple of weeks in August where I played a bunch of this and then stopped. But it was fun! The environments are varied and beautiful. The gameplay is similar enough to Destiny that I could adapt, and it was fun using similar weapons (like Remnant’s version of Anarchy, or the mod that creates Threadling-like worms).

Garden Galaxy: I played this on and off. Despite loving it, I got burnt out on the inventory management aspect. I returned to it this month to play a new content update.

Minecraft: I finally learned (ish) how to play this in the fall, after briefly trying it way back in January. There was a week or two where I thought about nothing but Minecraft and it was kind of fun.

Last year’s goals

I didn’t play much more of my Steam library (in fact, I bought more games); I did play lots of Zelda on my Switch; I didn’t really get better at Destiny PVP but I started maining Blink + Ruinous Effigy, which is stupid fun when I succeed at it.

Books

I read a lot of science fiction this year. This wasn’t intentional, but somehow just happened. I also accepted that not finishing a book is a perfectly valid choice, and thus started and quit several novels. I didn’t read any non-fiction, and reread quite a bit of manga.

In sum, I read 17 books: 8 novels, 2 novellas, 2 short stories, 4 manga series, and a comic collection.

Most memorable

The book that stayed with me the most was The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It’s about a north Vietnamese spy who comes to Los Angeles after the fall of Saigon, and continues spying on his superiors. I can’t remember the last time I read anything ‘literary’—perhaps not since school—and The Sympathizer was challenging, not only in its subject matter but also its prose.

I wish I had the range to write more about it. Some thoughts:

Part of the novel deals with the topic of Vietnam War films, with particular allusions to Apocalypse Now. I’ve never seen a Vietnam War movie (be it western or Vietnamese), so I’ve added a few of them to my to-watch list.
History is sobering and sad. I feel a certain amount of—for lack of a better word—privilege, for thinking about this. There’s an interview where Nguyen’s brother is quoted:

“I have never made it through a movie about the Vietnam War,” he said. “I refused to pick up a book about the war. Does that mean it doesn’t matter? No, it means it matters way too much. This is how people cope.”
It matters too much. I am exceedingly lucky to not know war. My life will never be as hard as that of my parents or extended family, who immigrated to Canada and built a life for themselves here.

I went and bought a physical copy of the book, which I look forward to marking up as I reread it.

To end this, here is a passage:

You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation. And then, if you have not claimed America, where will you go?

Last year’s goals

I did not read consistently, nor did I read classics, non-fiction, or books I own.

Great job, self!

Goals for 2024

Okay, lol, to be serious. I made goals last year and failed at most of them. Look at those reading goals! All failures! But I feel like I had a good year reading, so I still feel satisfied.

Let’s try some different goals:

Write better reviews/thoughts on things. Write actual reviews for things I watch, instead of one-word descriptors (how many ‘charming’ things do I watch? a lot, it seems), especially if the work is meaningful and invites reflection. Not everything needs an essay, but I’ve already proven to myself the value of articulating my thoughts. Writing is a muscle I want to exercise.
Figure out a more interesting way of maintaining my music list. It’s the most boring of my media collections, I think—it’s just a bunch of songs I like. I think it’s boring to both me and you (the reader), boring to maintain, boring to look back on. Music is one of those things I have pretty much no literacy in, so I wouldn’t know how to write about it, but perhaps in 2024 I can evolve it.
Branch out from these categories to include their more informal, short-form variants: YouTube creator content, longform internet writing, webcomics. This would involve some restructuring on my media data; e.g. how would I depict a video essay alongside movie posters?

Thanks for reading! 🫡

Weeknotes 8

2023-12-03T00:00:00Z

Two weeks after my last weeknotes, I was thinking to myself, hmm I should start on my next entry, and then I thought, no, it’s too early, and now it’s been a month since the last.

Redesign progress

it’s…going. Slowly. I feel distressed that I started more than a month ago and I’m still not done. I’m trying to will myself to get it to a point of good enough, hit publish. Sometimes I feel like I’m letting myself down for not making things perfect the way I want things to be. As a professional designer, I should make my personal work good. But also, as a personal website enjoyer, what brings me a lot of joy is the freedom to make frequent, messy changes and do what I want. And usually that side wins out. So. Good enough is good enough for me.

Yesterday I did a whole bunch of file reorganizing and pruning. I moved things into folders and deleted stuff I wasn’t using. It felt good!

The redesign is still half-finished, not just merely imperfect—there are whole untouched pages—but I’m trying to lower my standards so I can tackle the remaining tasks without feeling overwhelmed. I’m sick of my current design and want it to be gone.

Media

Highlights reel. The comprehensive log is in the diary, as usual.

Things I watched

Only Murders in the Building (season 3): this series is so much fun. It’s both very funny and also very touching. The musical numbers are delightful.
More Wes Anderson: Isle of Dogs, The Royal Tenenbaums, and a rewatch of The French Dispatch. After watching The Royal Tenenbaums, I now understand the references in those Wes Anderson AI parodies, with the cast names and centered shots. Patrick Willems talks about this at length in a really excellent video essay that I appreciate even more now.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: I feel like watching this was similar to my experience of watching the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man—it’s a product of its time and I felt overly critical of it because of its reputation. Perhaps upon rewatch I’ll be able to enjoy it for what it is instead of overanalyzing everything. The action was fun though! Side note—Temple of Doom is the only other Indiana Jones movie I watched, and idk if I’m brave to watch it now even as an adult lol. It scared me when I was younger and I didn’t know until recently that it’s a particularly dark movie.

Music I liked

Look for the Light from Only Murders is sooooo gorgeous
Taeyeon released a new mini album, which is lovely. I adore the title track Mr. X.
I was listening to some old IU songs and forgot how good You & I is. Maybe I felt more lukewarm on it when it first came out (in 2011!) because it followed Good Day and was compared to it, but listening to it now so many years later, it’s lovely.

Spotify Wrapped also came out, and there weren’t really any surprises on mine—most listened genre is pop; the French movie music I kept looping (i.e. like 4 songs) were in my top listened songs; there was a lot of Taylor Swift. I hope to write a fun little Media 2023 post so I’ll talk about this more then.

Things I played

I started Pokemon Violet while in Montreal, though I didn’t play much of it.
There’s a new season of Destiny 2, so I’m currently scheduling my entire life around it.

Things I read

I finished Pet Sematary by Stephen King this morning. I read this gradually over a couple of weeks. It’s a slow burn, and there’s a pervading sense of dread. It made me too nervous to read at night, so I mostly read it during the day and in public. I liked it! The only other King book I’ve read is The Shining, which I found scarier—but perhaps that’s due for a reread too.

I just got 11/22/63 from the library again. I read a tiny bit of it last year and I’m excited to read a non-horror King book.

In other things

I went to Montreal and came back! I plan to write a fun little Montreal recap over the holidays. (I have so many blog posts I want to write, lol.)
December is upon us, which is equal parts distressing (where did the year go?) and exciting (new year, new me; holiday break means no work means time and energy to do personal stuff?; I am going to couch potato so much.)
I feel like I didn’t read much on the internet. I saved a whole lot of things to my to-read app though.

Weeknotes 7

2023-11-05T00:00:00Z

to summarize: trying to redesign, internet reading list, way too much minecraft, and some other media

The latest hyperfixation

Redesigning

I’ve started working on a site redesign. I’m bored of how my site currently looks—this design (which I’m calling version 5) has been around since May 2022. The homepage has changed a couple of times but the site design has remained. Enough of that. I must change it. I’m back on my redesign bullshit and you’re going to hear all about it.

This effort started, as most redesigns do, badly. I initially wanted to use the font Sfizia, which I bought earlier this year and left to collect dust. But I discovered that the italic variant I wanted to use had some strange spacing issues with certain characters, and I had to scrap it because I couldn’t control that.

The W is ruining the left alignment

As it turns out though, I think this was the right move, because I switched to the font Woodland that brought a whole different mood and I felt compelled to adjust the rest of the styling to match it. And so my colour palette changed from the cool blue (familiar ground) to a more autumn-y palette.

Title font: Woodland; body font: Be Vietnam Pro (which I've used in a previous design and quite like)

Trying to make it cute. Rounded corners, dashes, warm tones.

I quite like how it’s coming along, but it’ll take a bit of work to finish the whole thing. I have a lot of content, lots of different pages and layouts and edge cases.

Reading on the internet

Something Good #88: Irene – an amazing, melancholic story about looking for a long lost love. Imagine that: you live a long, rich life. You’re in your 70s. And then you learn, from the YouTube comments section, that you made a profound impact on someone more than half a century ago. It’s born from Sad YouTube.
The World’s Most Popular Painter Sent His Followers After Me Because He Didn’t Like a Review of His Work. Here’s What I Learned – about art and art criticism, the internet, hero worship, parasocial relationships, authenticity. It’s wild to see the artist in question say ‘love will always outshine being a hater’ while simultaneously sending his followers to harass the critic. The critic writes:

Basically, I’m arguing that we should think of [Devon Rodriguez’s] social media posts as part of his practice, to be reviewed in and of themselves. These are, after all, not just how he got famous; in some sense they are what he is really famous for.
Comics Devices Library – an incredible library of visual devices used in comics. It really makes me want to pick up my long-dead webcomic sideproject again.
How To Map A Number Between Two Ranges – I’m allergic to math, but this is a really nice article about doing a math thing in JavaScript. I think this is the ideal tutorial format: a tl;dr for the lazy and hurried, a theoretical (well, in this case, mathematical) and then practical (in js) explanation of the thing, and links for further reading. I wish every tutorial were written like this.
Color Me Curious – colour is one of those things I really need to properly learn—in all mediums—and this newsletter issue does a lovely job at explaining some of the new CSS colour features.

Media

I feel like I consumed a lot of things in the past few weeks. Here are some highlights:

Things I watched

Killers of the Flower Moon (sort of) – I was on the fence about seeing this in theatres (it’s 3.5 hours long) and did end up going. Except, the fire alarm went off about 2h45m into the movie, and everyone was sent home with some consolation tickets. And now I don’t know if I want to go back to finish the movie—do I have it in me to rewatch all that again? Do I simply show up late? Interruption aside, the movie is slow and stunning, and I do want to see how it all unravels.
The Bear (season 1) – this was vaguely on my to-watch list for a while because I had heard it is excellent, but the thing that pushed me to start it is seeing this clip (from S1E2) out of context, which lived rent-free in my head all day. The show really is excellent. I’m hoping to get around to watching season 2 soon.
- I’ll Uber, thank you
- SURGE RATES FUCKO
Coco – I hadn’t seen this before, and last Pixar movie I’d watched was Brave. I thought Coco would be a fun jaunt for the evening but in true Pixar fashion it completely wrecked me by the end (yeah, the reunion song got me). My favourite rendition of Remember Me from the soundtrack is Carlos Rivera’s (the horns!!).
Loki (season 2) – I wasn’t planning on watching this (I have Marvel fatigue) but then I remembered Ke Huy Quan is in it so I have to. We had Temple of Doom and The Goonies on DVD when I was a kid, which I’m guessing my parents bought because he was in them. Seeing him achieve such success later in life is, well, a joy that I must follow.

Things I read

There was a week in October where I did nothing but reread Bleach. I had stopped my Naruto reread because I got bored, and Bleach was the other big series from my manga years. A lot of it is silly (the shounen powerups are endless) but it’s got such style and the artwork is so pretty.
I finally finished reading Dune. I had started this way back in fall 2022, but had to return it to the library, and didn’t get around to continuing it until the last few weeks. It was fun! I’m hoping to rewatch the movie again soon with this new context.

Relatedly, I bought a physical copy of The Sympathizer. I want to mark it up, highlight passages and make notes. I don’t think I’ll get to rereading it anytime soon though because it’s a heavy book and the ending bit still weighs on me.

Here's a photo I took while trying out the camera app West, which emulates the gritty look of a film camera. Flash on here for bonus effect.

Things I played

I spent a week entirely consumed by Minecraft. I first tried it back in January this year, but only played it a couple of times because it was confusing and overwhelming and I wasn’t interested enough to dive deeper.

This time, something clicked in my brain and I thought about nothing but building my little house (an ugly, roofless box of wood planks), digging down into caves (down to y16, to mine iron), and taming village kitties. It fully took over my brain. I think I’ve relaxed with it a bit more now, but I’ve enjoyed how meditative it is to find resources and build things. It’s like how I felt playing Stardew Valley, except without the focus on optimizing every single second I was playing.

Something I’ve learned while playing it though is that I truly do not have what it takes to play a horror game. Sometimes I think about returning to Bioshock or trying Prey (which I own, for some reason), but ‘exploring’ dark caves in Minecraft actually fills me with so much fear and anxiety that it’s basically confirmed I would not be able to play anything actually scary. I get jumpscared by every single boxy, cartoony Minecraft enemy.

nope nope nope nope nope

I haven’t been playing much Destiny lately, outside of an intense stint in Iron Banner (i.e. PvP) a few weeks ago, in which I went on quite a few losing streaks and was generally unsuccessful. It’s a seasonal lull, which is nice, I guess. It’s nice to have Destiny-Life balance.

Things I listened to

1989 is when I started listening to Taylor Swift, so I was looking forward to the 1989 (Taylor’s Version). But I think I’m resigned to the fact that I have no music taste to distinguish her version versus the original release, so really I’m just here for the vault tracks. I like Now That We Don’t Talk.
Rereading Bleach got me listening to its music again, and Life is Like a Boat by Rie fu (ending theme #1) is a standout.
REALiZE by LiSA – this came up in a Spotify playlist, and I went to rewatch the music video again, which made me miss watching Across the Spider-Verse in theatres. The song has such frenetic energy that fits the movie and the animation is just—you know, so unbelievably beautiful. (Also, I’ve been listening to this on repeat while writing this.)

Weeknotes, revival

2023-10-13T00:00:00Z

I used to write weeknotes—weekly recaps of Stuff—several years ago, with some regularity. Then I stopped. And now I’m trying again.

My reasons for doing this are:

Consolidating interesting links, things I find. I tend to yeet everything into the abyss of various ‘knowledge management systems’ (notion, raindrop, discord, my bookmarks) and forget about them, which result in not much knowledge management happening.
The act of writing forces me to reflect on and then write about stuff, instead of passively thinking about it. I plan on repeating myself on topics I already write about elsewhere on this website—e.g. recapping my media again, changelog, etc. Recapping a movie I watch a few days later in a weeknote will feel different than writing a quick review right after I finish it, so I want to see what comes out of repetition.
Expecting myself to write these will force me to reflect on other things I encounter that I want to include.
I want to write regularly.
I want to meet people who also enjoy these topics.

In the wise words of James Somers, whose blog post ‘More people should write’ I return to all the time:

You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live.

[…]

I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation.

Something different this time around versus a couple of years ago is that now I do a lot more of my website ‘in public.’ Before, I felt like I was always doing stuff by myself in the corner, and the number of people who knew about my website was countable on one hand. But I publicly post about it a lot more now, and I expect strangers whom I don’t know will see it as well as a lot more online friends. I think this will change how I approach things.

Anyway. That was a long explanation. Here’s a recap of ‘recently.’

Projects

These days, I am working on a new homepage redesign. I started this, sort of, months ago back in July, and stopped one day.

To summarize this: I initially wanted to create an isometric illustration with images dynamically inserted on top—those are items from my media diary. My goal was to play around with CSS transforms and integrate art with these images. I’ve had a lot of fun with it. Now, I’m trying to pull it all together into a new homepage because I’m tired of my current one.

This is nowhere near complete yet. Really, I would call this a proof of concept that I must now turn into an actual completed work. I’m hoping to finish it before the end of the month.

I also streamed myself working on this with some friends in Discord last week. I want to do this more—coworking, parallel play, etc. vibes.

after that: tunglr

After, I’d like to start working on a new Tumblr theme. I mentioned this in my last blog post, and it turns out Tumblr updated its documentation that same day, so now seems like a good time to revisit this. I’ve also said this for like, the past three years, so we’ll see.

media

I watched Fantastic Mr. Fox and rewatched The Grand Budapest Hotel. They are delightful and I’m planning on continuing with the rest of Wes Anderson’s movies this month.
I borrowed Dune from the library, but ended up not reading it because I got fully swept up in reading Boruto for the first time (weird! ended up skimming much of it!) and rereading Naruto. Naruto has a lot of nostalgic value for me, and I have endless complaints about it, but also, it’s Naruto. Then I reread a few cases from Detective Conan, which was a lot of fun.
Last month, I read The Sympathizer, which is still floating around in my mind. So much of history is very, very sad. Part of the book satirizes Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War (e.g. Apocalypse Now), and now I want to watch them for better context. The writing was also very good—reading this right after Project Hail Mary was jarring—and it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything challenging.

cool links I found

Brad Woods’ Digital Garden – this is soooo good, I can’t believe it
footer.design
Bongo Cat – a purrfect website

I was perusing random Are.na boards and there’s so much stuff to discover.

I wish Tumblr would invest in its theme features

2023-10-04T00:00:00Z

Like many internet girlies, I learned to code on tumblr dot com. My technical skills have never really progressed far beyond this (html and css), which has always been a source of embarrassment, but alas, I was simply not interested.

My friend Faiz recently posted about some of his pet peeves about how Tumblr themes work, which got me thinking about how I desperately wish Tumblr would invest in its whole themeing ecosystem. I’m biased, since my skills are a product of it, but I really do think that it’s such an excellent platform to learn how to code.

There are a ton of online learning resources now—it’s such a bananas field, when I started I looked at w3schools and codecademy (which was in its infancy) and that’s about it—but I think what makes tumblr really special is that it’s a social network.

Learning how to code is a byproduct of the time you spend on the service. It enhances your experience because it gives you the tools to customize your blog. It has a low barrier to entry: you edit your blog theme in one big html file in the browser. The rewards of learning are immediate and tangible.

I set out to write out things I wish Tumblr would do differently, but then I realized I haven’t actually used its themeing features in a few years and things may have changed since then. It doesn’t look like it, but then it got me thinking that it would be a worthwhile endeavour to revisit this and refresh my theme a bit. This platform has a lot of sentimental value to me, so it always feels comforting to return to it.

So. No promises (I am already trying to do a homepage redesign rn as well, lmao), but maybe this month I can put together a new theme to use and be able to have a more informed opinion about this.

How I use my hobonichi planner these days

2023-09-13T00:00:00Z

I’ve been into ‘planning’/‘journaling’ (and adjacent stationery hobbies) on and off for a long time. This year, I’ve been a lot more consistent at it, though not necessarily good. I define ‘good’ as writing a substantial amount of detail about a day, which usually takes more than 2 minutes, and often I am failing to commit that amount of time and effort. But I make low-effort records every day, which is better than zero.

What I use

I use a Hobonichi Techo original planner, which has one page per day. I previously used a day-free planner, and then I bought this daily one and stopped using the day-free one. It’s now collecting dust until I will myself into doing something with it. I write with a colourful pen from Muji.

How I use it

Here is a recent page, which I’m showing here because it’s relatively sanitized and makes me look like a functioning human being (e.g. I had a non-embarrassing diet that day and also went outside).

september 8

These days, I’ve been recording:

What I eat
What activities I do
Where I go

I don’t exactly have goals when it comes to this, but some motivation for doing this is:

Having an idea of my diet, so I can adjust it accordingly (I have not yet made adjustments based on my record-keeping, but maybe one day)
- Relatedly, notes on new recipes I try
Having an interesting (I hope) and accurate summation of events so I can look back on this 10 years later and have an idea of what a typical day was like.
- When I was in my last year of high school, I had a short-lived but detailed diary like this, which is kind of fun to look at now. I want this to provide some amusement to myself in the future.
Not pictured here, but earlier this year I wrote more of this in Vietnamese. I speak it very badly, and never learned how to read or write it. Google translating select words (mostly foods and places) was a low-effort and consistent way of practicing it.

Stuff that’s tricky

I like writing in a physical journal, but the convenience of a digital calendar is hard to beat. I used to write down my upcoming events, but then it was too inconvenient to refer to or edit. Now, all my scheduled events live in my google calendar, but I record them afterward here.

This is also not any good way of managing aggregate ‘data’, in the sense that I can see trends or anything like that. I think it’d be interesting to see a breakdown of what I eat, for example, but that would require some kind of actual spreadsheet and I don’t want to do that.

Why I’m writing this blog post

My blog consisting only of posts about my website feels boring. I have more hobbies than just messing around with pixels.
I want to meet other people who also enjoy this hobby. Please say hi!
I like seeing how other people use their planners, so I must also put what I want to see into the world. Here is how I use mine.

About Me* (* multiple versions of me)

2023-06-17T00:00:00Z

I made my about page a while back. Here are some brief notes on it.

my about page

origin story

In the past few years of this website’s existence, I didn’t have an about page. I always used my homepage to write a few (if any) lines about myself, and that was it. I find writing about myself to be really hard, which I think is a common sentiment. How do you introduce yourself? What’s relevant to say? How do you not sound like a robot?

I also struggled with balancing the professional requirements of having a website—it needed to be a portfolio I could attach to job applications—and my general distaste of presenting my worksona in non-professional contexts.

Part of this issue resolved itself when I stopped using this website for professional purposes and fully embraced its personal nature. Being able to write without the thought of what would a hiring manager think? in the back of my mind was freeing. How would I introduce myself if professionalism were no longer a factor?

language

That’s just—one part of the puzzle, I think. Even in informal contexts, I communicate differently depending on the audience. Subcultures and social groups have their own language. In my more artsy and shitpost endeavours (think: Tumblr, Twitter), I’ll keysmash sdjfksldjsldf. I use the :joy: emoji (😂) in the weird middle area between full shitpost and professional writing—like in slack channels at work or with my parents. I’ll use uwu with one group of friends, and LOL as punctuation with another.

Anyway, my point is—the language I use is always context-dependent, and writing an about page that satisfies all those contexts is hard. Not that it needs to, but—I was trying and it’s hard.

multiverse of anh, or whatever

The whole idea for this about page came about from that. Here I am, in my many (okay, three) different selves.

professional. her name is Anh with a capital A

The messaging app concept is based on Discord and Slack. The idea is that each persona is a different contact in the message list. They have their own statuses and names and writing style.

For example: my ‘personal’ self:

hi there!

i’m anh, a designer and artist

this website is where i do silly web experiments and put all my personal content. it’s often experimental and messy so please pardon the dust!!

(づ｡◕‿◕｡)づ

My ‘personal’ self writes informally, without capitalization, as I do in messaging apps. It’s anh with a lowercase a. It uses double exclamation points. There’s a cute little kaomoji at the end. I would write like this on Twitter, and probably spruce it up just a little bit to make suitable for casual Slack channels.

Versus my ‘professional’ self:

I’m Anh (pronounced like ‘Ann’), a designer and artist based in Canada. Currently, I design web things at a nice company.

Here, there’s proper grammar. It talks about the worksona-type things, like what I do and where I live. I’d write like this in formal Slack channels/contexts, or on LinkedIn, or in client emails.

My third ‘artist’ persona is another informal variant of my personal self. It’s not very fleshed out, but it would likely veer into a more unhinged territory. But I’m not doing that on main yet. OwO

anhbot

‘anhbot’ is kind of a shitpost. I wanted to include a bot because they’re essential to Discord and it would add to the whole messaging app concept I have going on. anhbot is a utility and lists a bunch of links. Initially I just had contact info there, but then I added a few other links to pages that didn’t fit anywhere else. My main site navigation was getting crowded and I didn’t want to restructure things, so the easy solution is to just dump them here in the meanwhile.

Since anhbot is a bot and not a version of myself, it talks about me in third-person. This is also nice because then I can slide in some pronouns.

online and activity statuses

The online status—the little green, red, or grey circle—is meant to indicate my openness to being contacted in that context. Since I’m not looking for work, my professional self is busy and you cannot send a message to this user. My personal and art selves are online and happy to receive messages. anhbot is a bot.

I recently added the activity status (“playing ‘links’”) for one reason: I was throwing miscellaneous links into anhbot and needed to indicate this somehow. On Discord, people will often have Playing Destiny 2, or Sharing their screen, and etc. so I figured I could use this pattern for it.

Then I realized I could do a silly little Playing Zelda on my personal self (since I am playing a lot of Zelda these days) and Playing ‘links’ for anhbot, which brought me great joy.

playing zelda. playing links. ha ha ha. get it.

under the hood

How this works: I have a collection called about, and each persona is a markdown file in that collection (e.g. personal.md). Each file has metadata, filling out things like the status and activity. The message of the content is in the post body.

To display this, I load all of the posts from that collection, and then selectively hide it with JavaScript based on which persona is currently toggled.

There’s more I could do to improve the whole experience—for example, navigating away from the about page and then hitting back should send you to the last persona you were on, instead of the default personal one each time—but that is a problem for future me.

future things

As usual, there is like, way more I could do with this. Three personas is not very many personas. I thought about doing a gaming related one, and maybe one for photography, and one for journaling. But that involves establishing a voice for them and figuring out what I even want to say, which is a bit trickier. So eventually.

Comic Anhs, process

2023-06-01T00:00:00Z

Last weekend, I updated my homepage to feature some short comics that introduce different sections of my website.

my homepage

I made this because I had just attended a local comics festival and was freshly inspired—truly, the level of creativity and craft in comics is mindblowing—and of course, I like to try out weird things. Also, I wanted a change from my previous chat bubble concept.

example of the comic introducing my sketchbook page.

So here’s the process.

The Idea

In my earliest idea of this, I wanted to introduce a section of my website—my blog, the media diary, etc.—with a comic that shows my feelings about it, and then descriptive text explaining what the section is.

I decided on a 4-panel comic format because I knew I could do it quickly. I’ve always struggled with finishing my side project ideas, and part of that comes from having lofty goals and fleeting attention. So here, I prioritized picking a format that I was confident in: 4 panel comics, quickly drawn in pen.

Drawing

Each comic started as just a quadrant and some text:

The outline for my sketchbook comic.

To transcribe my handwriting:

sketchbook

wow I drew smth & I want to share it

[tweet]

:3

[L8R] wait what have I made :(

about collection/archiving. can’t find/share easily in twt

I didn’t think too hard about this. Each comic basically had one text version, and I didn’t really iterate beyond that. I’m sure they could be better, but the point was to do it quickly.

After I did these text outlines for my comics, I drew them all together:

All the comics. I tried to make them relatively uniform, with clean(ish) lines.

They’re all really small—each panel is about 2.5cm × 2cm (1" × 1/4"). I didn’t use a ruler. The ‘tweet’ bubble extends outside of the panel—technically a Mistake, but really, it adds to the whole casual nature of it.

I omitted the text because I was going to add that in the webpage itself.

I took a photo of this, and then edited it in Photoshop:

Add black and white filter
Adjust levels → make the background white, lines black
Export each panel individually, at the same canvas size

Build and iteration

I exported each panel of the ‘Recordkeeping’ comic to test.

Each panel is a jpg with a solid white background. I added mix-blend-mode: multiply so that they would be transparent over my tinted pink background. The panels are laid in a 2-column grid with a fixed height.

My first version looked like this:

There are a couple of obvious issues:

Crooked panel lines, while fitting on paper, are distractingly bad here due to the underlying grid and the combination with text.
The serif font (Tiempos Text, my site’s base font) doesn’t fit

Fix: straightened panels

In Photoshop, I went and straightened out my panel lines with the transform tool. Out of laziness, I only did this for one set of panels because it ended up being more tedious than I thought. I used these same panel lines for all of the comics.

orderly panels — mmm much better

Fix: font change

I went and found a nice handwritten font to use: Poppy Fineliner, by Laura Eddy of TYPEHEIST. It has the right balance of legibility and handwritten beauty that I was looking for. I’ve had TYPEHEIST bookmarked for a while now, so I was excited to finally have a project for it.

I bought the license, swapped it in, and it instantly transformed the comic:

MUCH better

like wow! this looks like a real comic now!!!

Punchline

Each comic (except the last) is punctuated by a closing line that links to the section it’s about. This pattern is based on how comics like xkcd and A Softer World use hover effects, and how ‘read more’ links were used on LiveJournal.

Abandoned ideas

I had a couple of ideas that I ended up not doing.

Descriptions

I had planned on adding descriptive text to all of these sections, to explain them. It looked like this:

Explaining my media diary

But I removed it because I was having trouble integrating it into the page. Using my site typography was jarring. I tried setting it all in Poppy, but I didn’t like using a handwritten font for a non-comic element. Maybe it’s fine, but in the end I just removed it.

I liked having the description because I know my page can be confusing, and explaining the whole thing helps, but I decided this isn’t important enough for me to spend more time on it at the moment. Maybe I will come back to it in the future? Who knows! In this version, I left it out.

Interaction

I was planning on one of my comics to be interactive, where (to put vaguely) you would click on it and it would change. There was a pun involved. I think I will implement it in a future update because I like the idea and it goes into the territory of integrating web capabilities into the comic medium, but there were just too many steps involved and I wanted to finish and publish this by the end of the weekend.

So, no fun interaction. But maybe this month I will get around to it.

comic anhs

I call this ‘comic anhs’ because haha, comic sans, comic anhs, get it. There are more jokes to make here.

Closing thoughts

I set out to draw comics for my homepage, and I succeeded. Does it fulfill my lofty webcomic goals from last year? Not the slightest. But it meets my intended small scope and I can file it as a completed effort.

I’m trying to let go of the idea that each experiment I do needs to be a big, dramatic thing. There’s definitely More I could do, but I’m working on practicing ‘done is better than perfect.’

Also, my final comic kind of encapsulates my feelings about this:

If this whole comic endeavor is bad—why is it bad? Who decides that? Does it matter? Is it bad to me? If you (general you, the reader) think it’s bad—is that important? And many such questions. And it was unproductive to keep pondering this, so I stopped.

utilities

2023-02-10T00:00:00Z

kicking off 2023 (in february, lol), with a quick note about something I want to do:

create small utility pages that I (and only me, this is not to satisfy anyone else) find useful, instead of googling them and having to fight junky SEO pages to get xyz info

example: I repeatedly google lorem ipsum to get the actual text to copy and paste into my mockups, but the results are always laden with junk—ads, superfluous ui elements, bonus trivia about the lorem ipsum origins…it’s not what I want when I go to look for it, so I should just create my own. I’ve been meaning to do that for a long while now but today was just the breaking point.

you can see it here: lorem ipsum. it’s not like, ground-breaking design, lmao, but I made it so:

nice, pleasant, sepia colour palette
nice, pleasant, highlight colour
big top padding for an easier target area to click and highlight text
no ui elements to complicate the click and highlighting text action; i.e. you can select all on the page and get the text
minimal css for fast loading

like, extremely basic stuff, but different from the top lorem ipsum search results. I enjoy having the knowledge to make this tiny incremental improvement to my experience.

other utilities I would like to create are:

frequently used kaomoji
frequently copy/pasted symbols (kind of WIP here: copypasta)
cheatsheets: regex, git, macos, vscode…

Media 2022

2022-12-26T00:00:00Z

Here’s a recap of my media consumption for the year. I track all this in my Media Diary.

Film & TV

This year, I watched 46 movies (wow!) and 15 TV shows (to varying degrees of completion). Here are my very scholarly highlights:

Everything Everywhere All At Once – a whole Experience in theatres. This makes me want to embrace maximalism.
House of the Dragon – I had low expectations for this (considering Game of Thrones) but this was surprisingly good. It’s like all the good parts of GOT’s characters and political scheming, and without the bad parts (disjointed plotlines and poor pacing).
All Of The X-Men Movies (Except Logan) – I now understand all of the memes. I watched these over the summer while obsessively playing Dorfromantik. I haven’t watched Logan yet, only because I want to dedicate full attention to it instead of having it play in the background.
Dune – shit’s good, wish I saw it in theatres
Hackers – the best Bad Movie, absolutely ridiculous, incredible stuff
Barry (season 3) – this show continues to be really fucking good
Spy × Family – WAKU WAKU ✨✨✨

the full watchlist →

highlights

favourite movie

favourite show

favourite worm

Next year, I want to:

Watch more Prestige™ / classic films, because I haven’t seen any of them and I feel like I should? Like idk…Fight Club. Pride and Prejudice. In the Mood for Love. Whatever else wins Oscars or gets talked about at parties.
Watch stuff with nice cinematography. (Wes Anderson? idk I need to google a list or something for this)
Watch casual stuff while playing my casual games.
Watch some Ridiculous Movies in the same vein as Hackers.
Actually watch the movies that people have recommended me. (Feel free to rec me stuff!)
Watch more web series.

Music

Here’s my Spotify summary:

I saw three of these artists live this year: Florence, Carly, and Sunmi.

No surprises here.

I think some variation of ‘pop’ has topped my list since like, 2016.

To elaborate on them more:

Concerts

This year, I was fortunate to attend four concerts:

Khruangbin – an outdoor concert on a perfect July evening. They performed as the sun went down and it was perfect.
SUNMI – my second time seeing her! She’s one of my favourite k-pop artists so I’m happy she went on tour and visited.
Florence + The Machine – I can’t believe I was debating about whether or not to see her—this was my favourite concert of the year. It was a magical time.
Carly Rae Jepsen – an extremely good time!! Someone gave her a sword!! Everyone knew the words to Call Me Maybe!!! The saxophone!!!

Khruangbin

Some Favourite Tracks

(all links go to youtube)

King is my favourite track off Florence’s new album, and now I love Never Let Me Go after seeing her perform it.
Carly’s The Loneliest Time is such a perfect melancholic bop. and in the morning / sun hits the water / is this nirvana?
Rules by Khruangbin really grew on me this year.
I was obsessed with Enchanté by Dirt Poor Robins from the first time I heard it. One of those songs that burrowed itself into my brain. Great Vacation is also very good, and I feel like I’ve heard it somewhere—like in a movie, or something.
Heartburn by Sunmi is a summer bop
Paprika by Japanese Breakfast is really lovely. They opened for Florence and the gong was ✨ magical ✨

I add these to my music page.

Next year, I would like to:

Listen to more full albums
Listen to new music – I’m really bad about this. I tend to listen to the same things over and over and rarely branch out to new artists.

Games

As usual, this year I mostly played Destiny 2—according to my Steam recap, it took up 76% of my playtime.

Destiny Highlights

This is a silly game that I play too much of, but it’s really enjoyable. The Witch Queen expansion in February was exciting to play, and doing raids and dungeons with friends is fun. I like to shoot my silly guns and throw my silly space magic grenades.

The highlight of the year was spending 18 hours clearing the new Vow of the Disciple raid on contest mode—an incredibly intense and exciting Destiny experience. I feel like I never want to do that again, but of course I’m going to try and do that again when the new raid comes out.

the Witch Queen campaign, with my void 3.0 fashion

contest mode clear. shout out to my excellent teammates

I’m really excited for the new expansion in a couple of months, and it’s such a fun experience to share that feeling with a bunch of friends.

Other Games

There was a lull in January-February before the Destiny expansion came out, so I spent that time playing other games. And now towards the end of the year I’ve gotten burnt out on Destiny, so I am once again playing other stuff.

I tried really hard to get into FFXIV—I finished A Realm Reborn and did a bunch of stuff with friends, but ultimately my interest waned. I may come back to it in the future, but it’s officially on the backburner now.
Dorfromantik was my favourite casual game.
I played Control back in January and it was fantastic. I loved the environments and art. The gameplay I was less good at, but I still finished it!!
Stray was wonderful
I attempted but didn’t get far in: Elden Ring (hard, dark, idk if I liked it), Breath of the Wild (hard, because joycons), and DEATHLOOP (hard, because I’m a clown), among other things
I started Genshin Impact and my interest is safely Pretty Casual.

full games list →

kiss

dorfromantik

Next year, I would like to:

Play more of my steam games that I bought but never touched
Play some games on Switch, which I never use anymore
Get better at Destiny PVP (lol, lmao)

Books

I actually read books this year! Last year, I read 1 book, but this year I read 13. Wow me.

I read some Agatha Christie novels, which are all very enjoyable. I’m terrible at mysteries so I never figure out what’s going on, but that keeps them fun.
I finished the manga series 7 Seeds, after having started it many years ago and dropping off. It’s magical! The heart of the story is about how the world is beautiful and worth living in.

I have a reading list.

Next year, I would like to:

Read more consistently – normally I read sporadically, in long sessions. I’d like to build up a habit of reading for shorter periods on a daily basis, instead of waiting for the whim to strike, whenever that may be.
Read some classics
Read something non-fiction in a subject I normally wouldn’t be interested in. This year I read Field Notes on Science & Nature, which I quite enjoyed.
Read some of the books I bought but have been collecting dust on my shelves 😬

good week for gamers

2022-12-10T00:00:00Z

I feel like this week has been an exceptionally good week for gamers, which has filled me with a sense of deep appreciation for getting into video games in the past few years.

a new season of Destiny started, which is always extremely exciting. I’m still kind of on burnout-sabbatical from it, but I look forward to every new release. New content is always fun to discover.
relatedly, a new dungeon in Destiny. I spent a few hours suffering through it tonight and it was an excellent (and frustrating) time. Dungeons/raids in Destiny are, I think, their best content and it is wonderful that we get a new one every season.
I started playing the demo for Garden Galaxy. I am completely enamoured by it and am very excited for the full game release (next week!!!)
Supergiant Games announced Hades II. I was watching the stream when the reveal trailer came on and I (internally) YELLED when the Hades riff played. I absolutely loved the first game when I played it and I’m so excited for the sequel.

All of these things felt quite wonderful.

:-)

Bloop, aka, writing for chat

2022-11-25T00:00:00Z

This week I redesigned my homepage to look like chat bubbles.

an introduction to myself, like i am texting you

Writing vs. Texting

I initially made this because 1) I was bored of my existing homepage, and 2) I wanted to try a format that made writing easier.

This tweet from David Perell sums it up (highlighted emphasis mine):

Most people are bad writers, but excellent text messagers.

Their writing is bad because they try to sound smart once they open Microsoft Word.

But when they text, they write with clarity and enthusiasm.

If you’re stuck, write like you’re sending an important text message.

— @david_perell, March 19, 2022

I initially planned to just write the HTML directly into the template, as I did for my previous homepage due to the complexity. The markup looked like this:

<section>
  <div class="dialogue">
    <p class="dialogue__bubble">welcome to my website!</p>
    <p class="dialogue__bubble">i'm **anh** ✨</p>
    <p class="dialogue__bubble">and i'm a designer & artist based in canada!</p>
  </div>
</section>

But after writing this out for a couple of sections, I realized it was too unwieldy and I needed to make the authoring experience to be as low-friction as the format implied. Even if I displayed the text in a casual format, if I was bogged down by syntax while writing, I wouldn’t really be getting the casual experience of texting.

So I went back and revised the template to be compatible with markdown.

Now, the above text would be written as a list:

- welcome to my website!
- i'm **anh** ✨
- and i'm a designer & artist based in canada!

And the CSS styles each bullet point to be a text bubble. No extra formatting is needed in the markdown.

the output

Simple! Low-friction! Now I can type away to my heart’s content!

The whole thing is a two-column grid. Images are in the left column, bubbles (wrapped in a <ul>) are in the right, and headings and horizontal rules would span both columns.

the underlying grid

This format is pretty limited; I have to have an image on the left to accompany each section. I’m okay with that though—if I need to expand this, I will. But right now, the whole page (save the header/footer) is a markdown document that’s easy to edit, so I’ve succeeded at my goal.

Ideas considered and discarded

In pursuit of an easy authoring process, I decided against putting in additional UI elements that would fit the theme but not be doable (or would be hacky or cumbersome to implement) in markdown.

Example UI – this is what LINE messenger looks like

For example:

Metadata for each chat bubble – messaging apps show read status and timestamps, so I was thinking about what kind of metadata would fit here. I think having asides or tangents accompanying relevant bubbles might be interesting—I’m a big fan of sidenotes—so it’s an idea I’d like to come back to in the future, when I feel like complicating things.
Author icon next to the bubble to indicate who the message is from—in this case, I’m the singular author, so all icons would represent me. But I thought about having a different icon for each section to indicate mood or style, like how you could choose different icons for LiveJournal posts. Maybe my photo section would be an actual photo of me; my sketchbook section would be a cartoon drawing; my journal section would be an emoji of me lying facedown on the floor; etc.
Opposite chat bubbles, so that these would look like conversations. I considered having conversation options for the reader to pick from, kind of like how you might pick options when talking to a chatbot for customer support. I decided against this because I personally dislike chatbots and didn’t want to impose that feeling upon the reader here. Also, it would have been a lot more work to implement.
Other chat UI elements, like wrapping the bubbles in a portrait container to look like a screen, or datestamps. It felt too—literal, I guess. This is also why I kept my site’s typography instead of opting for a sans-serif font like a typical app UI.
Chat bubble tail because I was lazy, lmao. I didn’t want to draw an SVG. I reduced the border-radius of the last bubble instead, which is how Twitter DMs style their bubbes. EZ CSS!!

Other implementations of this, and some other tangential inspiration

Some other people have done their own versions of this, which was very cool to learn about:

Max Krieger’s Chatting with Glue, which is presented in a comic form with chat bubbles and discusses conversations as a medium
Tyler Angert has a streams section created for the same purpose—to be read casually, and low pressure to publish
Aaron Z. Lewis published a blog post formatted as a DM conversation

And some other works that were on my mind when I was thinking about this:

this comic by ghostgods that uses messaging bubbles to narrate the story
this comic by Jessica Hayworth that uses closed captioning for text. I really love the effect this has.
Jonnie Hallman’s status page
Twitter’s current, slow death that made me think about the things that it excels at—dumping unpolished text onto the timeline is the standard behaviour, and I wanted to capture that feeling here

Unpolished by nature

This whole thing feels super incomplete! I barely proofread my words. It rambles. My images are not optimal. The CSS is gruesome.

But, the whole point was to allow myself to publish unpolished content. I tend to die in development hell trying to make things close to perfect, which is just not useful for experimenting. So in the long-term, I hope this enables me to publish more.

Admitting defeat

2022-10-30T00:00:00Z

It makes me feel depressed to give up, but I’m shelving my ~halloween website idea~ that I’m unable to finish before, well, Halloween.

So, the context

Back at the end of September, I started thinking about doing a fun spooky homepage on my site, because I enjoy fun spooky things and a homepage project seemed doable for the month. I cycled through various ideas, sketched a lot of things out, drew some other things, prototyped two ideas, and have hit October 30th.

My initial ideas were very ambitious, and I gradually pared down the scope and changed direction as the days went on and I realized I was running out of time. Today, I sat down to bang it out and realized that I’m no longer interested because it’s so watered down from my initial vision. I don’t find it interesting anymore.

It sucks to accept that this whole effort went nowhere, and it sucks more when I’ve publicly Posted About It. But, alas, I’m giving up on it.

Is there a point if I don’t enjoy it

It wasn’t sparking joy to keep building a watered-down idea, and it’s important to me that I enjoy working on my website. And trudging along with this wasn’t, and I thought about whether I’d be satisfied if I did finish this project at all—and, well, no, I wouldn’t be.

If the process sucks, and the end result would suck, and I would still feel disappointed in it all, then I think I should just let it go.

But it’s not a wasted effort

It went nowhere, but I don’t want to say all this time I spent was wasted. It feels that way, but I think I will eventually return to these ideas in some form or another.

Some time ago, I read the blog post Your Work is Starstuff by Joel Califa, about work that ‘fails’ but is still meaningful in the grander scheme of things. A project that fails to launch, but the building blocks get used in a later project that far exceeds the original. And so on.

The context is a quite different—he’s writing about work work and building upon the work of your teammates—but it was helpful to think about even in personal projects. I’ll come back to these ideas, and use them somewhere else, eventually.

Anyway, here’s one thing I wanted to do

I wanted to implement dark mode on my site, because that’s what the cool kids are doing, but also play with content that changes. It’s spooky szn, after all. If you turn out the lights, what happens?

(You get ghosts.)

Well, I didn’t have time to put dark mode ghosts on my site. But who knows, maybe I will sometime in the future, during non-spooky season. Ghosts can hang around all year, as a treat.

Here are some archival screenshots:

there was going to be mildly spooky imagery

haunted homepage concept

RIP, into the graveyard of ideas you go.

A permanent sketchbook

2022-10-01T00:00:00Z

I’ve added my sketchbook back to the site nav.

I can’t remember why I originally removed it. It may have been because I hid it on my homepage and thus had to also hide it in the site nav. Whatever the case, I’m over it. I put it back.

It’s October now, which means it’s Inktober, which is why I’m thinking about my online sketchbook. I’m not satisfied with how it is currently, both in workflow and execution. The problems:

Adding sketches to it is cumbersome. I have to write a bunch of markup, and it’s an afterthought to when I publicly post them from my phone on Twitter.
The organization is unsatisfying. Currently, I’m posting by year (2021, 2022 sketches…) which works but ultimately doesn’t consider different categories the works could fit into (subject, medium, series)

I don’t have a solution for either of these yet.

Some things I’m musing upon:

How to manage sketches in eleventy. Currently I throw images into posts, like a traditional blog. This forces them to live only in one post at a time, so there’s no per-sketch organization.
If I stick everything into a data file, then I can tag each sketch individually, and they can live in multiple contexts. But I’m unsure if this is the best option, or just one I’m gravitating towards because it’s the only tool I know for managing data. There’s a bit less markup involved here than the previous option, but it’s still writing JSON.
Collections I would like to display, which are multi-year endeavours or specific subjects: inktober works, hourly comic day, figure studies, urban sketches, xyz series fanart, film studies.
Yearly sorting is nice for demonstrating skill progression (and embarrassing for highlighting the lack of)
Emphasize that this is an archive more than it is a showcase or portfolio, so it also includes the unremarkable and bad works.
Where to put the nsfw stuff?

Small headings

2022-09-11T00:00:00Z

A standard heading: large, eye-catching text. It announces a new topic, organizes your writing, helps the reader skim.

A small heading: it blends into the text. It says, rather than announces, that here is a new topic.

An example

Last week, I wrote the post Status update, where my topics were separated by horizontal rules and I introduced them with italicized text.

Italicized text that functions as a heading, but is not a heading.

I was thinking about how this is a pleasing way to go about more lowkey posts. The post was meant to be a casual note, rather than a more organized article, and using my default heading style didn’t seem to suit it. Using a heading feels like it lends authority or polish to the writing, which is not what I wanted for a quick note, especially since my current styling is quite fancy.

What my heading 2 currently looks like—the capitalized text and roman numerals seemed too much for a hastily written post. Screenshot taken from my post The photo gallery, returned.

I wrote my latest site redesign post in this manner too. It’s quite long, but it’s quite disorganized. It was easier to write by simply writing what I wanted to say as it came to me, instead of trying to organize it in a way that made sense, and I wanted to just have it done and published. So—the less polished nature.

I didn’t use headings at all, and separated topics by horizontal rules, and it meanders enough that even labeling each section would be hard, but—this process of writing casually is freeing, and I would rather write this way and publish more. So, I was thinking about how these small headings feel more suited for this unpolished content.

In practice

Semantically, <h2> tags are useful, and I probably should use them? Stylistically, I would want the headings to be understated.

Actually making this work in markdown is…well, annoying. Part of the appeal of casual writing is having as little markup in my markdown as possible, and there’s no straightforward way of doing custom h2 styling

No wait, literally as I typed that above paragraph I realized I could apply a custom style to the entire post based on frontmatter parametres. Wow, writing is thinking.

Example below: adding a custom class to every h2 heading, in addition to writing out the h2 html tag, would be annoying.

<h2 class="sm">A small heading</h2> 

And then your paragraph text goes here.

But! Less annoying: setting a custom style once in the frontmatter and proceeding as normal:

---
title: Title goes here
smol: true
---

in which customStyle applies smol.css, which overrides the default styling.

In the <head> tag of layout.liquid:

{% if customStyle %} 
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/{{ customStyle }}.css">
{% endif %}

So for example

This above is what my smol heading 2 looks like. It’s lowercase, italicized, with a trailing em dash for aesthetics. It’s not the inline text of my status update example, but I couldn’t figure out a way of making the text display as inline and I don’t feel like digging further into it at the moment. So this is what I’ve got.

Status update

2022-09-06T00:00:00Z

‘I should blog more,’ I think, as one does when one has a personal blog. But writing is so hard, and writing about something worth reading about is hard, and self-doubt is so easy.

Here’s what I’m pondering lately:

The current project: my homepage redesign. As usual, I have grand, ambitious plans for it, and the scope continues to creep. The original idea was a ‘responsive comic’; and then I wanted to incorporate the higher-quality artwork I didn’t have a chance to do in my visual novel; and then I wanted to put in my secret easter eggs; and then I actually went to create and build all of this and found it hard.

What a surprise! Making the thing is hard.

But—I’m finding it worthwhile. Even as I oscillate between being excited about this and feeling tremendous self-doubt about whether it’s even worth it—well, the excitement outweighs the doubt, I think.

I’ve been tweeting through it.

The beauty of personal projects is you can do nonsensical things because you feel like it. Here, I've added a snake because I like the imagery, even though it doesn't make any fucking sense. (But: I'm going to reverse-engineer a reason to include it. The comic's internal logic will check out. Or something.

The digital garden: I want to work towards this, but it’s stalled by things like not yet knowing how to structure it, or what topics I want to include, or what level of unpolished notes I’m comfortable with sharing.

One of the goals would be to force myself to write notes that are comprehensible to the public, but the focus isn’t on having polished content to share but rather the process of writing for clarity, which is important for thinking. Writing is thinking, or whatever.

I have some drafts that would do well in a digital garden, but they’re drafts and I’m unsure about how ‘complete’ or ~rigorous~ I want something before publishing it. I don’t think garden notes need to be perfect, but I think there should be some baseline for quality, and I’m trying to figure out what my baseline is.

And particularly for topics that are more opinionated or critical—I don’t want to throw rocks at things without being sure about it, but I don’t want to flatten my anger at xyz thing in order to be palatable, especially if I want to uphold the ethos of what my personal site is. It’s a hard balance!!!

(A while back, it was like one in the morning when I got angry and wrote a tirade against software that intruded on my privacy and other annoyances, and I feel too nervous to post it in an incomplete state, which is why I’m wrestling over this at the moment. But I don’t want it to die in my drafts either.)

Search engine optimization. Listen. Listen. I too detest junky commercial keyword soup. But. There is definitely value in the long-tail keywords of my extremely specific development adventures. Nearly all of my Eleventy problem-solving has been aided by other strangers on the internet writing about exactly the thing I was trying to do, in blog posts with specific titles that got picked up by my desperate google searches.

Their writing has been so invaluable to me, and I don’t want whatever esoteric dev writing I put here to never be useful. I write it because I want it to be useful. But it needs to be findable, first.

I’ve blocked my site from getting indexed by search engines since the beginning, but I’m planning on changing that soon.

Other ideas to write about, in either a blogging way or a gardening way, who knows:

How I use FigJam for personal projects – the ideating, storyboarding, inspiration-dumping, notetaking. Not a ground-breaking topic, but whatever, it’s unique to me.
Documenting all of my Eleventy customizations – I wish other people wrote the most basic, detailed, ELI5 explanations of their setups and workarounds as possible, so I must be the change I want to see in the world.
Something about my general personal website ambitions. I’ve written briefly about this before, but it’s been scattered in various places, never to be found again.

Starting a new project

2022-08-17T00:00:00Z

I’m starting a new homepage redesign—the concept is ‘responsive comic.’ Here’s an old sketch I sliced up to test. One of my goals is to play around with how to rearrange compositions based on screen size.

Sketch based on a scene from Dune. Originally one image, I split it into two in order to rearrange them vertically.

This idea was floating around in my head for years since I learned about CSS grid and wanted to rearrange a comic grid for different screen sizes. I think there’s a lot of cool things you can do!

Beyond simply stacking panels on mobile, I think it’s interesting to explore how you can maintain the pacing/flow/rhythm of panels when they’re rearranged vertically (or however), which can involve changing entire compositions.

I did some very cursory research and found Standards, Semantics, & Sequential Art: Toward a Digital Comics Praxis by Pablo Defendini, which goes into detail about how comics can adapt to the responsive web. It’s really interesting! I’m excited to work on this.

The photo gallery, returned

2022-08-10T00:00:00Z

I’ve rebuilt my photo gallery. There have been many iterations of this as I try to maintain a personal alternative to Instagram; here is the latest.

the new gallery

History

A few years ago, I spent a few months maintaining a daily photo log. The highlight was writing captions, which displayed with a short line-length as to induce a poetry-like effect.

old gallery — a memory from march 2019

old photogrid. Hover for the caption in a tooltip; click through to view the individual photo.

This evolved into a monthly photo dump, as maintaining this was cumbersome.

a compilation from August. also, whew, my old blog design.

I eventually scrapped that when I migrated sites, started using IG again, and took fewer photos due to COVID. I didn’t rebuild the gallery feature at the time, and it was just—easier to post on social media. You don’t have to think about formatting and metadata and etc.

The Renewed Gallery

Here it is. Given its simplicity, it was a quick and easy thing to build.

This started because yesterday I posted some pictures to Twitter and thought that it would be nice if I could archive them somewhere more personal. And guess what, I can! Amazing what you can do with your own website.

Design

Unlike my previous gallery, I’m not displaying the archive in a grid. I don’t have very many photos yet, and I quite like showing the captions instead of hiding them behind a click.

I’ve shortened the caption line length to 18ch, for that aesthetic poetry effect. And the photos have little rounded corners, because that’s trendy now and I’m into it.

Backend Structure

These photos are pulled from a JSON data file and looped through as a collection:

In _data/photos.json:

[
  {
    "src": "/img/2022/diary/07-khruangbin.jpg",
    "alt": "An outdoor concert with a crowd standing in front of the stage. In the background are mountains and clouds, and the sun is getting low.",
    "caption": "Khruangbin, on a perfect summer day"
  }
]

And looped through in _includes/photography.liquid:

{% for photo in photos %}
  <figure {% if photo.style == 'lg' %} class="photo--lg" {% endif %}>
    <img src="{{ photo.src }}" alt="{{ photo.alt }}">
    {% if photo.caption %}<figcaption>{{ photo.caption }}</figcaption>{% endif %}
  </figure>
{% endfor %}

If I want a particular photo to be displayed bigger, I add "style": "lg" to the entry, which would add a photo--lg class for the layout change. I’m not sure what other styles I could eventually add to this, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

On the old gallery

It brought me a lot of joy to maintain my old daily photolog, even though I eventually got tired upkeeping it. For posterity, here’s how that gallery was built:

Daily Photos

My old site was a Jekyll site that didn’t (to my knowledge) have the equivalent of Eleventy data files. Each photo post was its own markdown file, sorted by month.

The old directory

Post metadata was contained in the frontmatter, and the caption took up the post content.

---
title: the bar
date: 2019-05-03
image: '/assets/daily/05/03-bar.jpg'
alt: a selfie taken in the mirror across from me at the bar. there are bottles of alcohol around the mirror.
---

made direct eye contact with the sommelier, who recognized me

Monthly Photos

This proved to be too cumbersome to maintain after a few months, and I started doing monthly compilations instead. This involved writing a horrible amount of HTML in my markdown posts, so it’s hard to say if this was any better than the individual posts:

<div class="images">
  <div class="images-row">
      <img src="/assets/daily/08/wall.jpg" alt="Side of a building with overgrown flowers and plants hanging down the side.">
      <img src="/assets/daily/08/greenhouse.jpg" alt="A restaurant patio under a glass roof, like a greenhouse.">
  </div>
  <div class="images-row">
      <img src="/assets/daily/08/icecream.jpg" alt="Me holding an ice cream cone while my partner takes a photo of it.">
      <div class="image-card">
        <img src="/assets/daily/08/sam.jpg" alt="A drawing of a bird statue from the art museum.">
        <p class="post-image-caption">Seattle Art Museum</p>
      </div>
  </div>
</div>

Previously, quite recently,

I actually did attempt a photo compilation on my current site some time ago, in the form of my photo diary, 2021 post. The formatting is all borked now, but it used to be a 3-column grid.

I can’t remember why I stopped adding to it—probably, I just lost interest and motivation.

This, too, involved a gruesome amount of HTML:

<div class="image-gallery">
  <img src="/img/2021/08/cameras.jpg" alt="Cameras and a sketchbook on a park table.">
  <img src="/img/2021/08/ducks.jpg" alt="Ducks and baby ducks in a pond.">
  <img src="/img/2021/08/geese.jpg" alt="A bunch of geese at the park.">
  <div class="post__image">
    <img src="/img/2021/08/cat-cafe_watermelon.jpg" alt="Cat with a watermelon toy.">
    <p>visited the cat cafe, pet lots of cats</p>
  </div>
</div>

Other photos

In addition to my phone photos, I have a lot of film photos I’d like to showcase; they’re currently scattered across various blog posts in a state of disarray. They’re probably not suited for this JSON data file format as they’re low-volume and can be organized into many smaller collections (notably, by excursion or film type), so I wouldn’t want to dump them all into a single data file nor create a data file for each collection.

Putting them in blog posts (like: Seattle in August) enables the control I want over them, but they’re really quite cumbersome to write and even worse to maintain (hence, the disarray). I’ll have to ponder on this.

a photo from the latest roll of portra 400

Markdown Optimizations

2022-08-09T00:00:00Z

I love to discover new things that make me feel colossally stupid for not doing them sooner. That’s the best kind of discovery! This is the Markdown Optimizations Edition.

With that said, this involves a fair bit of Dependency Stuff, so it makes sense I hadn’t bothered with this when I first set up my site. But it’s been a long while and I should have done this sooner.

Post status: kind of work in progress; will probably edit and add more to it as I optimize.

Curly Quotes

I finally looked into how to turn my typed straight quotes into curly quotes, and the solution was very simple, as it involved adjusting markdown-it options.

`.eleventy.js`

const markdownIt = require('markdown-it');
const markdownItAnchor = require('markdown-it-anchor');

let options = {
  html: true,
  typographer: true
}

let markdownLibrary = markdownIt(options).use(markdownItAnchor);
eleventyConfig.setLibrary('md', markdownLibrary);

Shortcodes

A problem I’ve had for a long time is that having nicely formatted posts involves writing a lot of HTML in my markdown (i.e. manually writing out an entire <figure> block for images). This is tiresome and falls apart when I change my markup.

The obvious (in hindsight!) solution to this is to use custom shortcodes, which are a built-in feature of Eleventy! Amazing! Why didn’t I do this sooner! I am but a fool.

My discovery of the blog post Custom Markdown Components in 11ty by Aleksandr Hovhannisyan was essential to this; it does a much better job than I could do explaining how this all works. I’m merely listing out my code here.

Example 1: Callout Block

In my .eleventy.js config file, I add:

eleventyConfig.addPairedShortcode('callout', (children) => `<div class="callout">${children}</div>`);

and in my blog posts, I can write:

{% callout %}

This is a callout block!

{% endcallout %}

which outputs:

<div class="callout">
  <p>This is a callout block!</p>
</div>

and looks like:

This is a callout block!

Example 2: Images

A more complex use case is creating <figure> blocks. I use a lot of images throughout my blog and I’ve been writing so much markup for it, and this becomes troublesome when I refactor my styles and break a bunch of things.

In the markdown:

{% include 'figure.liquid' 
src: '/img/2022/07/readinglist.png' 
alt: "A list of books I've read." 
caption: 'My current reading list design' 
imgClass: 'frame' 
figClass: 'breakout' %}

This outputs:

<figure class="breakout">
  <img src="/img/2022/07/readinglist.png" 
  alt="A list of books I've read." 
  class="frame">
  <figcaption>My current reading list design</figcaption>
</figure>

Which is:

My current reading list design

Which refers to the /_includes/figure.liquid file:

{% capture props %}
  {
    "src": "{{ src }}",
    "alt": "{{ alt }}"
    {% if caption %}, "caption": "{{ caption }}"{% endif %}
    {% if imgClass %}, "imgClass": "{{ imgClass }}"{% endif %}
    {% if figClass %}, "figClass": "{{ figClass }}"{% endif %}
  }
{% endcapture %}

{% assign props = props | fromJson %} 
{% figureShortcode props %}

And figureShortcode refers to the shortcode defined in .eleventy.js:

eleventyConfig.addShortcode('figureShortcode', (props) => {
    return `<figure class="${props.figClass}">
<img src="${props.src}" alt="${props.alt}" class="${props.imgClass}">
<figcaption>${props.caption}</figcaption></figure>`
  });

Example 2.5: Image Groups

To further extend images:

{% figgroup 'mat col col--2' %}

{% figcaption %} group caption {% endfigcaption %}

{% include 'figure' src: '/img/2022/07/readinglist.png' alt:'Reading list' caption:'Example image' imgClass:'frame' %}

{% include 'figure' src: '/img/2022/07/readinglist.png' alt:'Reading list' caption:'Another example image' %}

{% endfiggroup %}

Outputs:

<figure class="imagegroup breakout mat col col--2" role="group">
  <figcaption> group caption </figcaption>
  <figure>
    <img src="/img/2022/07/readinglist.png" alt="Reading list" class="frame">
    <figcaption>Example image</figcaption>
  </figure>
  <figure>
    <img src="/img/2022/07/readinglist.png" alt="Reading list">
    <figcaption>Another example image</figcaption>
  </figure>
</figure>

Which looks like:

group caption

Example image

Another example image

figgroup shortcode in .eleventy.js:

eleventyConfig.addPairedShortcode('figgroup', function(children, classList) {
  return `<figure class="imagegroup breakout ${classList}" role="group">${children}</figure>`;
});

Add Default Classes to HTML Tags

WIP: markdown-it-class

Pondering this as a way to get around my convoluted selectors-messy CSS.

Rethinking my rating system

2022-07-14T00:00:00Z

I’ve been using a 4-star rating system for my watchlist for a while now, but I’ve had a consistent problem: most of the time, I end up rating something 2/4 because I think it’s fine.

Currently, my system is:

★ = didn’t like
★★ = pretty okay
★★★ = liked
★★★★ = favourite

‘Pretty okay’ is how I end up feeling about most things I watch, but after using this system for a while I think there’s more range in this feeling.

I initially used a 4-star system because I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, and I thought the fewer the tiers, the easier it would be to rate something. And I did end up using 2/4 for most things, saving me the trouble of picking apart what’s okay versus what’s pretty okay. I would have to think a bit harder with a 5-star system. But after rating so many movies, I think that’s worth the trouble.

The New System

A 5-star system would be:

★ = didn’t like; do not recommend
★★ = was okay → on the negative side
★★★ = was pretty okay → on the positive side
★★★★ = liked it; it was good; would watch again
★★★★★ = loved; favourite; etc.; have strong feelings about.

Some feelings I think I can capture more accurately:

I didn’t like the entire work, but I didn’t hate it (2 stars)
I didn’t like the entire work, but I did enjoy some elements of it (2–3 stars)
I liked it I guess, but I wouldn’t necessarily watch it again (3 stars)

So for example:

I originally rated The Batman as 2/4 stars, and my review was:

I enjoyed the plot and characters, but like everyone else, I felt this was too long. I wish we saw more Bruce.

Now, I think it’s more of a 3/5 movie, where I liked some parts but not others, but it was a worthwhile watch. I didn’t actively like it and probably wouldn’t watch it again, so it’s not 4/5. But it had qualities that I enjoyed, like the cinematography and the characters.

Most likely, all my 2/4 ratings will be revisited as either 2/5 or 3/5. Remaining unchanged will be 3/4 (→ 4/5) and 4/4 (→ 5/5).

For example

So, to illustrate an example for each tier:

★ = Men In Black International – unenjoyment
★★ = Charlie’s Angels (2019) – whatever, not super great; some things about it were okay; not recommended
★★★ = Back to the Future – was fun, worth watching; but not a movie I feel strongly about.
★★★★ = Dune – enjoyed it, would recommend, would rewatch, would read the book. Not a love, but maybe upon rewatches it could be.
★★★★★ = Pacific Rim – love; rewatch a lot; have strong emotions about. Really excited when someone else likes it.

Quantifiable

Quantifying abstract feelings is hard, like how I think of something as ‘okay’ (2/5) versus ‘pretty okay’ (3/5). I guess I don’t have to rate the things I watch—and indeed, I’m not rating books yet, because it’s hard. Numbers don’t capture the whole picture.

For example, the movie Hackers is one of those So Bad It’s Good movies; how do I rate that? A number can’t convey the depth of its ridiculousness. If I give it a 1/5, it looks like a Bad Movie despite my enjoyment; if I give it a 3/5 it looks like a Decent, Good Movie.

I guess the problem is also in how ratings shouldn’t be the only thing observed when it comes to rating movies. Because, again, it’s quantifying something that contains multitudes. So the visual design of how I present this shouldn’t emphasize ratings over the review, or display the rating without the review. Though with that said, most of the time, it’s not that deep.

Reading List

2022-07-02T00:00:00Z

I’ve created a Reading List.

When I designed it, I knew I wanted something different from my watchlist, which I’m no longer a fan of. I like the neat grid of Daniël van der Winden’s reading list, and admire the effort and detail of Justin Duke’s. I am not yet writing substantial reviews, so de-emphasizing reviews would probably do me just fine, but I don’t want to encourage that habit. So perhaps the empty space of my page will inspire me to write more? Or at least, it would shame me every time I look at it.

The current design – version 1.

The design is sort of based on another design draft I made, for a different project—the font is Editorial New, and I wanted to have a big blob of text at the top. I wrote the blurb for the sole purpose of filling out four lines of text, which to me is an aesthetically pleasing length.

I used Poppins as the body text, because my site’s main typography featuring Tiempos Text didn’t seem to fit.

I’m reaching the point where I think I should make an attempt at creating a ~*~design system~*~ so my CSS isn’t in disarray.

My reading list uses the colour palette of the main site, but none of the typography; my layout method is sort of the same (using grid for most things); my spacing is probably the same. I duplicated a bunch of stuff over, deleted what I didn’t need, wrote some new stuff. It’s very messy.

So the things I should make a system are:

Spacing – margins, padding, that sort of thing
Layout utilities – how do I centre things
Colour palettes – light mode! dark mode! clown mode! etc.
Overall, some kind of scaling system. I’m starting to fiddle with using vw and clamp for responsive typography and such, but it’s not something I have a strong grasp on yet. This can be applied to the spacing and layout.

Also, my CSS at scale needs work.

I haven’t linked this on my homepage yet, simply because I would have to fix up how my neat 3-column media diary section is laid out, and I don’t feel like doing that at the moment.

On reading: I don’t read much these days (I’ve said, for the past 5 morbillion years), but this month I’ve picked it up again as an activity for when I’ve been struggling to fall asleep. It feels much nicer than scrolling through social media feeds, though it’s sort of a trap because I’m inclined to finish a book even at an unreasonable hour.

Refactoring the garbage

2022-06-06T00:00:00Z

I finally went and fixed up how I was managing my data on my Lost Sectors and Nightfalls sites. When I first created them I structured the data by season, and now that multiple seasons have passed it was annoying to manage duplicate sets of data.

So instead of having a season-15.json and season-16.json and season-17.json and etc. forever and ever, I now have a single data.json and filter that in the JS to output the current season’s data. I really should have set it up that way in the beginning but the whole build process has been quick and dirty, so now I have fucked around and am finding out. As they say.

I have a lot of content to fill in now. I didn’t maintain the sites very well last season, because there was so much other stuff to do and I was getting tired of it, but I’m hoping this season I’ll be able to make them more useful. And maybe next season I’ll start ~marketing~ them? (i.e. actually promote them to people, since I do think there’s some utility in text-based, permanent reference sites.)

Quick notes on the book

2022-05-22T00:00:00Z

I meant to write a comprehensive post about my site redesign, but honestly I’ve run out of steam and instead I’m just going to write some messy notes for the sake of actually publishing it.

Context: I redesigned my site the other week! The visual design was originally intended to look like a printed book: serif font, centered layout, sepia colour scheme. I fell into various rabbit holes while moodboarding though, and ended up spending more energy than expected on my writing and tone, and also easter eggs.

You can look at the homepage here: click me!!!

Initially, I wanted my site copy to be more formal, to emulate the formality of printed books. An early idea I had was to put small inline doodles. And then I decided that it was too…whimsical? I was going for formal book, not whimsy book.

Early draft of the intro section.

But my print design inspiration hunting led me to reconsider this.

Early on, a major source of inspiration was the thread Book design: advice and examples on Edward Tufte’s site. One of the books mentioned is Concrete Mathematics, a math textbook. It’s full of surprising humour. In the preface, the authors write (highlighted emphasis mine):

Some people think that mathematics is a serious business that must always be cold and dry; but we think mathematics is fun, and we aren’t ashamed to admit the fact. Why should a strict boundary line be drawn between work and play? Concrete mathematics is full of appealing patterns; the manipulations are not always easy, but the answers can be astonishingly attractive. The joys and sorrows of mathematical work are reflected explicitly in this book because they are part of our lives. (vii)

Concrete Mathematics does something very cool and fun, which is include ‘graffiti’ from students in the margins of its pages.

graffiti, both humourous (top) and helpful (bottom) (p.34)

I would have thought mathematics is cold and dry indeed, but maybe it isn’t? This textbook has such personality, and you can tell the authors enjoy their work. So I decided to include doodles in my site, because they’re fun and that can coexist with work.

The doodles are part of the marginalia feature, which I’ve hidden as an easter egg.

⚠️ Spoiler Alert

I explain the hidden marginalia feature here, which I encourage you to discover for yourself before reading!

I had two reasons for hiding it:

I play too many video games. I did similar hidden feature shenanigans on my visual novel redesign and wanted to continue that spirit here.
I wanted to experiment with gating access to my ~informal~ content. I haven’t fully executed on this idea but it got me thinking about what kind of content I want available up-front, and what I want tucked into a hidden corner somewhere.

The video game influence is clear in the hidden mechanic. To reveal the marginalia, you have to click on three diamonds on the homepage.

This is blatantly stolen from a typical puzzle mechanic in the game Destiny 2, where you shoot three objects or stand on three plates or the like in order to progress an encounter.

On my homepage, you click on the diamonds, each which animate and send you a little toast notification informing you of your progress, until you’ve hit all three and reveal the next step. To toggle the marginalia, you have to scroll to the top and click the final diamond in my eyeball.

this is called the eyepatch

Why require this extra step, instead of enabling marginalia mode upon the third diamond click?

I want you to be at the top of the page when the mode is enabled.
I want you to be able to toggle this on/off with ease, without needing to press the three diamonds. There’s no clear ‘turn off’ mechanism if it’s based on activating the three diamonds.

Honestly, this is not discoverable. I sent this to a few friends and none of them found this until I told them that this hidden feature existed. I do want it to be more discoverable, so I need to iterate on this.

I’m considering turning this into an obvious on/off toggle, like how sites will have light/dark mode toggles, and remove the secret aspect entirely.

Marginalia—‘marks made in the margins of a book or other document’ (Wikipedia)—is a really fun concept. It adds personality in ways that typical site copy wouldn’t. I think there’s a ton of room for improvement on how I’ve executed on this idea—really, I feel like I’m scratching the surface on how different formats within a webpage can convey information and tone—but I could sit here and iterate forever on it without publishing. So I will accept its imperfect nature and build on the idea in future updates (maybe).

I called it marginalia mode as a reference to the whimsical mouthful mode in the game Kirby and the Forgotten Land.

I considered using actual typed text instead of handwriting for the marginalia, for readability, but I didn’t like it. A couple of things I considered:

Annotating my homepage like a case study. The marginalia would discuss things like build and design details.
- I didn’t do this because I didn’t have substantial things to say, and it didn’t feel interesting to me. It didn’t embody the spontaneous nature that I wanted ‘marginalia mode’ to have.
Annotating my homepage like a case study with typed text, and then annotating with handwritten text for fun, whimsical notes.
- I didn’t do this because it required too much thinking on the content. It was too overengineered.

testing out ‘case study’ type notes, which ended up feeling terribly uninteresting to me.

I think part of the challenge was that having actual typed text led me to subconsciously trying to write more ‘formal’ content.

As Mark O’Connell writes in The Marginal Obsession with Marginalia:

Marginalia are supposed to be spontaneous and fluent. “Noting” something on a Kindle feels like e-mailing yourself a throwaway remark. There’s also something attractive about the contrast between the impersonal authority of the printed page and the idiosyncrasies of the reader’s handwriting.

The medium shapes the thought; I was shifting towards writing more formally when I was typing out words versus handwriting spontaneous notes.

I settled on adding informal notes about the content.

The flaw with handwritten text is that it’s unreadable in bulk, so I would have to use it sparingly. This ended up being fine, because I didn’t have much to say and thus didn’t feel inclined to write great blocks of text. But it’s something I was conscious of. Eventually I would like to create my own handwritten font to make this whole process easier.

By the way, my process for turning handwriting → SVG is:

Write it with pen and paper.
Take a crappy photo with my phone.
Edit in Photoshop to black and white, adjust levels.
Import into Illustrator and image trace.
Manually adjust kerning, line height, and overall crookedness.
Paste that vector into Figma.
Export to SVG.

I did this for all of the little doodles and writing.

When it came to writing, I tried to keep in mind something that Katherine Yang tweeted:

long titles, captions, legends, labels, and/or when the metadata delivers the emotional punch >>>>>

– @bookwormgirl910, April 12, 2022

What meaning can I put in my metadata? I wrote my labels with some dramatic personalization. On my homepage, I have a bullet point for my design projects: my favourite thing about it. My About section is called an introduction to the designer. In my video game section, I tagged Destiny 2 with five million hours gametime.

It’s all very personal and dramatic. Does it work? Who knows! It certainly feels more interesting to me than a blander purpose or highlight label, and I’m fine with erring on the side of overdramatic for now.

Some other visual design notes:

I like the visual effect of having two-column text (as used in my introduction section on the homepage), but this is, honestly, a bit annoying to read. I used to have a three-column text thing for my design section, to continue the printed book style, but this annoyed me so much I changed it. As much as I like how this looks, it interferes with how I expect text on a website to look.
- I can stand it when it’s short enough the height fits in the viewport and there are enough visual anchors to draw interest (in this case literal link anchors); otherwise it looks like a giant text block.
- I might still get rid of it because my desire for readability is greater than my desire for adhering to the concept.
Design page headers are modeled after book title pages.
I really enjoyed using small caps, and had to stop myself from making everything in small caps. They’re just so cute and square and satisfying.
Designing a centered layout gets tricky when I require having a column for asides. I’m displeased with my ~tablet~-sized breakpoint design, which shifts everything into a left-aligned layout with a right column for asides, because it’s inconsistent with the centered layout on larger screens and phones. I want to revisit this later.

IN CONCLUSION. Here are some things I would like to explore further and build upon!

Separating types of content by audience, and how to restrict access to them. For example, I don’t necessarily want hiring managers looking at my hypothetical NSFW artwork. (Wait, what?)
Adding cute hidden mechanics that execute the aforementioned audience-segmented content. (How would my audience for NSFW artwork know to find that artwork but not anyone else, versus how would my audience of hiring managers know how to find the Professional stuff?)
- For example, pointing out directions from Twitter (where informality is the norm) so people already in that audience can find it; however, external folks who land on my site directly from a job application (like hiring managers) would not.
- Obviously, this is not foolproof, but the idea is to add friction.
Adding cute easter eggs that are actually discoverable.
Playing with different text formats within a site and how they’re suited for different types of content; i.e. informal marginalia vs. official text. I want you to read my professional words and also my snarky asides and I want them to be distinguishable as such.
Ultimately, making my website a personal website.

So I meant to write a messy list of notes, but as it turns out, I wrote a messy and long blog post instead. Please forgive the disjointedness. Thank you for reading.

New Notebook

2022-04-01T00:00:00Z

I started building a to do app, which is really more of a journaling app. I’ve reached the point of getting tired of the build process though, so I’m switching to writing about it to reboot my brain.

This post is intended to be a public notes dumping ground that I’ll continually add to and edit as I work on this.

✨ Visit: the published app

Note: Desktop only. I’m continually updating this. As I add and change things, things may work weirdly.

me when i first shared this

The origin story is that I was going to follow the tutorial How to Use Local Storage with JavaScript by Tania Rascia, which is a very excellent tutorial on building a simple to do app in your browser using localStorage. Then I thought it would be fun to make a digital version of journaling à la Midori Traveler’s Notebook, and it’s growing into this.

My priorities for this are:

Learn how to use the browser’s localStorage and generally practice my JS (which I am a beginner at).
Make a fun, aesthetic journaling app that emulates the art journaling trend.
Make it passably usable. I’m not too concerned about general UX here (sorry!!!) because in the interest of time, I’m prioritizing spending time writing JS instead of designing. I’ll think about it, but like, not too much.

Notes

Planned Features

Note templates: text note, to do list, weekly template, monthly template
Annotation tools: stickers, stamps, tape, post-it notes. This is for the fun element of this.
Organization tools: bookmarking, delete/restore
Appearance options: notebook size, colour themes

General Thoughts

For the first time, I’m working with data/storage. I’ve done rudimentary DOM manipulation before, but this is new to me. It’s interesting!
I’m constantly writing and rewriting functions, which is showing me that I need to plan more and think of the whole system.
It’s a struggle to accept that this is a learning project and therefore not beholden to perfection. I always feel like I have to impress the abstract professional software developer person that might see this and therefore I have to write a professional, presentable app, instead of allowing myself the space to learn and experiment and not get it right all the time. It’s hard!

Progress Updates

Here’s where I’ll dump my progress updates and notes as I make this. I would like to finish and publish this in a week or so, just to keep the scope from creeping up and out infinitely. I was tweeting this, but I think it’d be good to store those thoughts somewhere more permanent and findable.

Apr. 6

Some guiding questions, as I get stuck in thinking of what to do next:

Why am I not using this? What is it about the UX or UI that makes me not want to use it?
Does it look nice? Aesthetics is a core part of ~art journaling~ so I want to make sure I like looking at my app. Having a half-polished UI doesn’t spark joy or inspire motivation to work on it.

I’m trying out using HSL colours along with custom properties, to better manage my colour themes. It’s based on this technique from Jhey Tompkins, for individually manipulating H, S, and L variables. (In the tutorial, it’s used to switch light/dark mode, and I’m extrapolating here to use it for adjusting shades.)

It doesn’t work as well as manually picking colours, but I was trying a lot of different colour tints and it’s much faster to change the hue of something to generate a new palette.

For example:

.dark {
  --h: 100;
  --s: 15%;
  --l: 95%;
  
  --card-bg: hsl(var(--h), var(--s), var(--l));
  --card-border: hsl(var(--h), calc(var(--s) - 15%), calc(var(--l) - 40%));
  --card-text: hsl(var(--h), var(--s), calc(var(--l) - 70%));
  --card-bg-alt: hsl(var(--h), var(--s), calc(var(--l) - 5%));
  --card-selection: hsl(var(--h), var(--s), calc(var(--l) - 7%));
}

I also added a Trash feature that lives in a little card with a slide-out animation. Personally, I dislike animation in web design, because I dislike things moving around. But I’m doing it here because…I can? It seems to work for my notebook

Trash/deleted notes feature. I am simply adding new features on top of the UI because I can.

I’m thinking of adding an Archive feature as well, which would work in the same way.

Apr. 1

I decided to come back to this to update the UI, which I’m not satisfied with.

Light mode, original notebook theme.

Previously, I had a few different colour palettes to choose from for the notebook. The webpage itself had only a dark mode theme.

I think it’d be nice to have a light/dark mode for the page, so that if your notebook is light then the entire page is light, and vice versa. I also want the theme to complement the notebook, so say the primary colour of the Original notebook theme is beige/brown, so the page theme will also be tinted beige/brown, or something complementary.

I think I’ll use this opportunity to try out some kind of colour themeing system that’s a little less manual than me picking out every swatch. This would involve messing with HSL and manipulating the variables, which I haven’t done before, so it should be interesting.

Mar. 16

I decided to publish a stripped down version of this, where I removed all the features that were half-built and left only what was complete. This meant:

Note type: to do notes. Removed: text notes or weekly notes.
Tools: colour palette changer. Removed: stickers/stamps.

I got tired of looking at it and wanting it to be more than it was and keeping myself from publishing it until I was satisfied. I’ll never be satisfied! I need to be more comfortable with publishing and iterating.

As I published it.

Feb. 24

Adding stickers. Currently it’s click to select and click to place, and click + drag to move; I’ll have to update this. At some point I’m going to have to actually draw a collection of stickers, which I’ve been putting off.

Overlapping elements is satisfying.

Feb. 17

Fun with overlapping elements! I’m also animating how they transition in.

I got stuck on where to put UI elements, and decided to incorporate them into the notebook theme as overlapping cards.

Feb. 14, 2022

I took a long break from this. My interest was waning and I was getting stuck in my poorly written code. I decided to spend some time making it look nicer since the in-progress state of visual disarray was not sparking joy.

The to do list page.

Dec. 10

Slowly adding templates.

Dec. 2

I, unfortunately, made no progress on this for the past week, and am depressingly aware of my failed ‘let’s publish this in a week!’ goal. I put together some braincells to reorganize some things and work on the edit function.

Having two notes open at a time, each with independent edit functions, is showing me that my code isn’t modular enough. I knew this when I initially wrote it and I am now suffering the consequences and have to go back to fix it.
Apparently, align-items: baseline works differently for Grid items between Firefox and Chrome. (It works in Chrome? but not in FF? hence my below screenshot of non-vertically aligned elements.)
I don’t like the editing UI, but I don’t feel like expending more energy into figuring something else better at the moment.
I started creating the To Do template.

I mocked this UI up in Figma and decided ‘good enough’ before implementing it. I thought about sanitizing this screenshot so it looks more polished, but decided against it. Behold, the mess.

Nov. 25

I stared at this project for about ten minutes, resigned to the fact that I now have enough features to require thinking about my page design, which I don’t really want to do. I’m a designer and I like designing things! But right now I just wanted to mindlessly build stuff.

In my overdramatic despondence, I switched to writing this post.

Nov. 24

Created a table of contents template
Added a sticker/stamp function. I’m using emojis here as a placeholder, but I’m planning on drawing my own artwork for it.
Added a Delete function, so you can yeet your notes into the trash!
Added a couple of alternate colour themes.
Drew a little flower as a placeholder icon. I’ll probably do something in this style for my ‘stamps.’

The TOC lists the title and 'page number' (actually, the note ID). Stickers/stamps can go anywhere on the page. I built the stamping function, but haven't written a way for it to be stored yet.

Blush pink colour theme.

Nov. 21

How it started:

my first preview, featuring a weekly page and a regular notes page. At this stage, this was a static mockup to figure out the design.

the void, again

2022-03-11T00:00:00Z

I haven’t written anything lately and I also feel like I’m not thinking about much worth writing about lately, so I’m not writing. And the longer it drags on that I don’t publish something, the more pressure I feel to make my next addition Good, which is just a lot of pressure to feel about something that doesn’t matter.

Here are some things floating around in my brain:

I’m not sure my visual novel is serving me any longer, at least in its current state, so I may shelve it into its own section and restore my homepage to something Normal.
I need a better way of writing and publishing notes, which are meant to be shorter, messier, more frequent, etc. etc.
Working with images continues to be a nightmare in markdown.
I would like some fancy custom post formatting for my fancy longform posts.

PC Build

2022-01-17T00:00:00Z

I built a new PC last week. I had bought my previous PC from a friend five or so years ago, and it was showing its age in its inability to run games smoothly, which is really the only thing I care about.

I’ve wanted to build a small form factor (SFF) PC ever since I learned about them years ago, so it was exciting to downsize into a smaller, cuter case. I was fortunate to have the moral and technical support of my much more PC-savvy friends throughout the entire process, from selecting parts to actually building it (an hours-long ordeal).

Small.

Specs

Case: Cooler Master NR200P
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
Motherboard: Asus STRIX 550-I
GPU: AMD Radeon RX Vega 64
PSU: Corsair SF600
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB
Storage: 256GB + 1TB SSD

The GPU and SSDs are taken from my old PC; all other parts are new. I also specced out an Intel build, but decided to go with AMD because it ended up being less expensive.

Build Issues

A hilarious number of things were a struggle during my build, because I am a clown. Here’s a list for posterity:

Thought I had to take off the plastic logo piece attached to my CPU cooler, because it seemed like it wouldn’t fit on my motherboard if I left it on. I spent a while struggling to take it off before giving up, and it turned out it was unnecessary.
Took a long time to figure out how to screw in the CPU cooler screws.
The I/O shield on the case was hard to put in.
GPU didn’t go in smoothly at first.
Connected power cables in the wrong spots.
Used the wrong PSU <> CPU cable.
Had to remove PSU several times from my case because it was in the way of other cables and/or components.

Amazingly, it booted up fine when I first turned it on.

Details

2022-01-01T00:00:00Z

I published this site redesign last month knowing it was imperfect, and I’ve finally returned to it to fix all the little details that weren’t great.

Typography

I changed up my typography with the redesign, which was cool and fun at first, until I realized some problems:

The visual hierarchy among H1/H2/H3 was off, especially on smaller screens.
Hatton, my title font, didn’t look good at smaller sizes because of how thin it is.
Using Hatton for two heading levels felt too much, like using an accent colour too many times.

Old typography.

H1/H2 - too similar

H1/H2 - H2 is too strong

H3/H2 - H3 is too strong

Changes

Use Hatton only for H1 page titles, and shifted all of my heading styles up a level.
- H1: Hatton
- H2: Tiempos Headline
- H3: Inconsolata
- H4: Tiempos Text, italic + bold
Use the variable font file for Hatton, and adjust the weight depending on font size. Smaller font size → heavier weight, to compensante for the reduced readability of its size.
- Larger screens: font-weight: 200
- Smaller screens: font-weight: 250

Updated typography.

H1/H2

H3/H2

Drop Shadows

I discovered this post by Josh W Comeau on creating better shadows with CSS box-shadow a while back, but didn’t get around to implementing it until now. It’s wonderful.

Before, normal box-shadow

After, made beautiful with the generator

I love my website

2021-12-14T00:00:00Z

Winnie Lim wrote, I love my website too, which was part of a chain that links back to Tracy Durnell and James, and then to Jeremy Keith. And here I am continuing it.

Like them, I love my website too. It’s something that I’ve built and rebuilt—in various structures, with various goals, across various domains—for more than 5 years. It used to be a portfolio, and I didn’t love it then. It was a source of stress. Now, it’s more of a personal site, where I put things I like on it and write meandering posts and tinker with the design. The portfolio and career goals still exist, but it occupies a smaller focus. Now, it’s a joy to work on my website.

Website Visual Novel

2021-11-24T00:00:00Z

Last week, I got around to turning my website into a visual novel. A visual novel is a type of game similar to a choose your own adventure book: the player chooses actions and dialogue and the story responds to it. (Wikipedia ↗)

I had this idea last year, when I bought the domain anhvn.com and my friend was like ‘lol anh visual novel.’ I started writing out the flow of it and built out a skeleton for how it might look, but quickly abandoned it out of disinterest.

I finally decided to revisit it last week since I just finished my site redesign and wanted to do something ~fun~ instead. So I spent a few days drawing and building it, and I’m happy with how it’s turned out.

✨ Try the visual novel experience →

Note: this post goes into detail about the ‘secret’ features, so I encourage you to try it out yourself before reading this.

The Content

My main goal was to make something fun. I wanted to include the main pages from my website, but also add in silly or ‘hidden’ features to discover.

The journey starts at the lobby.

The main website pages would be:

A projects/professional work page, targeted towards potential employers ~~(I am available for work!).~~
An about the website page, to quickly address any confusion about the structure.
An about me page.

In order to keep to a limit of four options per page, I omitted my blog, artwork, and media diary, which are present as top-level navigation items on my regular site.

The snackbar gets top billing along these other three website items because I wanted to prioritize at least one fun thing.

Writing

Some small writing details:

I initially planned for each option to be an action; i.e. start with a verb. For example: Read about x, learn more about y; check out z. For the most part, this worked, with the exception of my Projects page and the snackbar.
The object of each choice would be bolded (e.g. ‘Go back to the lobby.’) for emphasis.
Internal links that go to my normal site are appended with →, and external links are appended with ↗.
I use you to refer to the reader, and I to refer to myself. At first I wrote in third person for the actions (e.g. ‘Learn more about Anh’), but decided that this sounded unnatural when writing my bio (‘Anh is a designer…’) and changed it to first person.

Opting Out

I’m aware that not everyone desires a whimsical, meandering website experience all the time. This is fine! I included a link to go to my normal website on every page, so you can opt out of the VN experience at any time.

The Art

I drew a bunch of new pixel sprites to go with this, and kept them simple as to not consume all of my time and energy. This was the part I got stuck on last year when I first tried making this—I kept thinking I needed to make lots of high-quality pixel art to go along with every page, and I felt pressured to do that, and then I was using placeholder art that didn’t inspire any direction when building it.

The pixel art.

Simplicity

This time, early on in the process I drew a very simple coffee mug for the snackbar, stuck it in the page, and decided that this style was fine. And so I became mentally unblocked on the art.

Keeping things simple also allowed me to create new pages without being stressed about needing to draw accompanying art for each one. While I would love to draw something beautiful and complex for each page to truly emulate a visual novel, that was beyond the scope of this project.

Pixel Art

Pixel art was my first choice for the art style, not only because it relates to gaming, but also because I could create it using my mouse, which made it low-friction to start. While I’m most comfortable drawing with a pen or stylus, doing so requires switching devices. Throughout building this VN, I switched between drawing and writing whenever I got bored or tired of what I was working on. Switching to pixel art only required pulling up an art program, and I would continue drawing with my mouse.

Design & Development

A couple of my early ideas were to style the frame to look like a browser window, or to build a decorative GBA-like console around it. I decided against these in the interest of keeping things simple.

I settled on a two-column layout that would stack vertically on narrow screens.

Mobile layout.

I didn’t give my layout or styling much thought beyond this. I took the colours from my normal website styling, and used a monospace font for it because my site’s current body font looked unsuitable.

Structure

My site is an Eleventy site, and the VN structure is a bunch of files inside my /vn/ collection. Each page is its own markdown file, and each player option is a list item. Whenever updating any file path, I would update the text links in each relevant file.

Example markup of the lobby:

You have reached ✦ **the lobby** ✦ of my personal website. What would you like to do?

- [See **what I'm working on**.](/vn/projects)
- [Read about **the website**.](/vn/the-website)
- [Learn more **about me**.](/vn/about-me)
- [Check out **the snackbar**.](/vn/snackbar)

Since this is manual, any wide-reaching edit would be annoying to do (like if I decided to rename my lobby, I’d have to update every single page that refers to it). Fortunately I haven’t had to do that yet. At this stage, I think it’s more practical to do things manually than to overengineer a system that links everything together and renders stuff via liquid shortcodes.

I also considered nesting the files inside folders and adding breadcrumbs to the You are at › Page Title header, but didn’t because the structure isn’t strictly hierarchical and it was easier to manage everything in one place.

I would revisit these decisions if I had a lot more pages to manage.

Secret Content

⚠️ Spoiler Alert

This section talks about the ‘hidden’ content I put in my VN. Before reading this, I encourage you to discover it yourself if you haven’t already.

I knew I wanted a gratuitous snackbar section from the beginning, but I didn’t come up with anything hidden until I started writing the snackbar pages and thought, what comes next?

This is where, I think, this project gets interesting and really captures the spirit of a fun experiment.

I made two secrets:

The Dark Lobby section
The Secret Menu mini-puzzle

The Dark Lobby

You get to the dark lobby by rejecting my snackbar and then clicking on the OK button a bunch of times. I initially thought about making this OK page a dead end, with an ‘OK’ option that just refreshed the page, to really represent the mood of the nah option. Then I thought about what could happen if you kept clicking on a button that went nowhere—maybe the page would get weirder and weirder, and something would unlock.

nah, the ultimate choice of disinterest → OK. gets weirder and weirder.

The dark lobby is an 😈 evil version 😈 of my regular lobby. It’s got dark mode, a deathly laptop, and some dark paths to pick from. I thought about what kind of website content would thematically fit in this ‘dark’ version, and settled on placing my non-work/unpolished content here to mirror the professional projects page on the light side.

The dark lobby. The laptop features a skull instead of lines of code because it's dark. Haha.

Instead of the dark lobby, you can go to the the secret menu, which is a puzzle of sorts. This started from my desire to include a Konami code Easter Egg. I had one set up on a previous project, so I copied that over and decided the result (a confetti of watermelon emojis) was suitable for the snackbar theme. The watermelon would be the ‘secret’ menu item.

Version B

The Konami code version is called Version A. I created Version B of the puzzle after I realized the sudden confetti effect was inconsiderate of motion sensitivity. I could have kept the same Konami code to output a different, non-moving result, but I decided to use another mechanic. Instead, in Version B you have to look at the source code.

Version B. This icon is a variation of the icon used on my website page, except the windows are reversed, placing emphasis on the code editor. HMMMMM.

The spirit of Version B draws from Harry’s Online Puzzle Extravaganza, a puzzle I first played more than a decade ago in high school. Checking the page source code for clues was a running theme, so I put in some ASCII art of a watermelon into the page <head>.

Hints and Solutions

I added hints after my partner told me that this was confusing. The problem with the Konami code is that if you don’t know about it, then there’s no way for you to deduce it, and I didn’t want this puzzle to be a dead end.

I think that effort put into a puzzle needs to be matched with the reward for solving it, and this result is so minor that I didn’t want to encourage spending time ‘figuring’ it out, especially if it could be impossible to do so.

Personally, I also enjoy playing all of my video games on easy mode, because if I struggle too much with something, it inhibits my enjoyment of it. I wanted to mirror that philosophy here: if you don’t want to sit and think about what the hints mean, you don’t have to.

The Solution Solution

Knowing what the secret menu item is isn’t the end, though you could stop there. You have to manually type it into the address bar and navigate to the page, the same way you pick one of the drinks and then go to the page where I give you the drink.

The only ‘clue’ I give about this is when I say that you'll have to find and get it yourself in the beginning. I wanted one extra step that would be ~suprising~ if you thought to do it, but not take away from the experience if you didn’t.

Future Improvements

For the most part, I’m happy with how this came out. But of course, there’s always room for improvement and I’m aware of some shortcomings that I’d like to address in the future, if I go back to update this:

Voice & tone: I think this varies a lot, which keeps it from feeling like a cohesive work. Some parts I wrote last year in my initial draft, some I took from my existing website, and some parts are newly written and not edited.
Pacing: Going through pages should feel appropriately paced for the content. For example, I think my personal websites page is too long and feels like a big text dump, versus if I had made it multiple pages that you choose to explore, page by page.
Interactions: Ideally, the flow of the VN should be that you pick an option, and I respond to your choice. Outside of the snackbar, I think my VN is more like you pick something and I show you it in a passive way. I think the conversational element of it is lacking.

Overall, I think I could work on making my content better fit the medium. Right now, it feels more like a website outfitted to look like a VN, but isn’t quite there for really embodying it. This is unsurprising though, since I worked backwards from having a website to making it a VN.

Making a Games Collection

2021-11-19T00:00:00Z

I started moving my game review content over to a separate collection, with each game being its own item. My previous Games 2020 post as a single long post of every game worked well at the time, but the number of games I’m trying out is increasing and I would like to maintain more metadata about each one.

Content goals that this restructuring works better with:

improved metadata: when I played something, rating/fav status, outgoing links, platform, game tags
updating new thoughts over time: I would like to figure out a better way of doing this that support datestamped updates. For now I’ll just use headings.
better findability/archiving

I’ve migrated over most of my 2021 games; I’ll do 2020 gradually.

I’m sorting the list alphabetically, which isn’t natively supported in liquid (why? what?) so I had to make a custom collection, taken from this issue on github:

eleventyConfig.addCollection("gamesSorted", function(collection) {
  return collection.getFilteredByGlob("games/*.md").sort(function(a, b) {
    let nameA = a.data.title.toUpperCase();
    let nameB = b.data.title.toUpperCase();
    if (nameA < nameB) return -1;
    else if (nameA > nameB) return 1;
    else return 0;
  });
});

and used as a normal collection:

{% for game in collections.gamesSorted %}

If I ever start reading books again and make notes on them (haha), I could reuse this structure for highlights/quotes. My movies list will remain short and abridged as a JSON file.

Redesigning

2021-11-09T00:00:00Z

I am, as they say, back on my bullshit. I’m redesigning my site. I’m writing about it here.

This is inspired by the work of others who have “redesigned in public”—i.e. wrote about their redesign as they worked on it. Sara Soueidan, Frank Chimero, and Jonnie Hallman have done this, to name a few. (I am most certainly forgetting more.)

I have several goals for writing about this:

Record my decision-making processes. I forgot why I did what I did for my current design. They’re probably mundane reasons like “I thought this looked good” or “I really like this font and wanted to use it for literally everything” but it would be nice to have some detail.
Exercise my ~writing muscles~ which I am not using much these days.
Connect with people who are also interested in this whole personal website endeavor? I feel like I spend too much time thinking about this and spinning my wheels. If you also like to think about personal websites, please say hi!

How It Started

This effort began when I designed a new media page that looked nothing like my actual site, and I realized that I quite liked it.

Light mode, a trendy font, and white space.

This page is currently published and it’s jarring to visit it from my site because it looks different. The solution to this is obviously to match the rest of my site to this new light-mode design.

How It’s Going

I like my site’s design. But I think I’m also getting bored of it since I’ve been looking at it for months, so changing it up is wildly appealing to me. My opinion on my redesign might mellow out after some time, but I’m currently excited about it.

My current design, featuring the journal archive page.

The redesign of the same page.

The Details

Notable changes include:

Dark mode → light mode. I use dark mode in all my apps, but I’m craving the light airy look of white backgrounds. I might make a theme switcher, because that’s what the cool kids are doing?
Sans serif → serif body font. I’m trying out Tiempos Text, my favourite serif body font. I’ll have to decide when I publish my redesign whether or not I’ll stick with it and buy it.
Along with that, changing my title font from Span → Hatton, and my monospace font from Antarctican → Inconsolata.
Other things that my brain can’t come up with at the moment.

Some branding thoughts I have:

Using Hatton makes me feel like a trendy DTC brand, which is an aesthetic that unfortunately appeals to me despite seeing it everywhere and also does not really fit with a “personal website.” The good thing about personal websites though is that I can do whatever I want, and this doesn’t bother me enough at the moment to give it any more thought.
Tiempos Text, likewise, makes me feel like a SAAS company, but I also think it’s just a very good serif font. I also feel like using a serif body font confers a stronger sense of formality, so I feel like my content needs to also be more polished.
I would like to port over my pixel graphics, which means adjusting them to work with light mode.

Some development thoughts, that extend beyond the redesign and into general websiteness:

I have a pretty convoluted set of CSS rules that manage the vertical rhythm in my posts, and I would like to clean this up so thinking about it doesn’t give me a headache. (I have a larger goal of having impeccable typography, and this relies a lot on proper vertical spacing, which gets messy whenever I introduce a new element.)
My digital garden aspirations have been paused, but I should start thinking about it again so I can structure my future content to work better. The gist is to have content organized by topic rather than chronology, and allow for publishing things in varying stages of “completeness.”
A laundry list of things I would like to build: a lightbox feature, a more sophisticated sitenotes/endnotes system, a tagging system, proper pagination, possibly webmentions (unsure if I like this idea or not), a lower-friction sketchbook posting experience (unsure if this is possible, given the limits of using a SSG and writing markdown files).

Timeline

I would like to publish this redesign sometime this week, with the minimal changes necessary for every page to look and work properly. I have some larger layout changes in mind but I’ll try to hold off on that as to not delay the whole effort. Incremental progress!

wobsites

2021-11-05T00:00:00Z

I recently built a client site in Webflow, which was all fun and good and Webflow is a very good website builder, but I ran up against some platform limitations that frustrated me. This led to a renewed interest in tinkering with my own stuff, and I ended up creating my nightfalls reference site and then fiddling around with my media diary. It’s satisfying to make stuff!

Table of Contents in Eleventy

2021-10-10T00:00:00Z

I set up my blog so that I could include a table of contents to long posts if I want to. It’s based on what headings I have. Currently, I’ve set it to work only with <h2> tags, as I rarely go deeper than that.

Here's how it currently looks on my long Games 2020 post.

There are three parts to this:

Use npm plugin markdown-it-anchor to add an id attribute to every heading.
Set toc: true in the post’s frontmatter.
Use JS to pull all of the headings, generate a list of links, and insert at the top of the post.

Anchor Plugin

Using the plugin markdown-it-anchor adds an id tag to each heading so you can do in-page links. This article explains how to install and configure it.

For example, a heading titled ‘A Short Hike’ would look like:

<h2 id="a-short-hike">A Short Hike</h2>

Liquid Markup

In my posts template post.liquid:

{% if toc %}
  <details class="post__toc">
    <summary class="post__toc-heading">Table of Contents</summary>
    <ol class="post__toc-list"></ol>
  </details>
{% endif %}

The <ol> list is empty, because each item will be inserted dynamically.

I nest all of this inside {% if toc %} so that it only shows up if I’ve designated toc: true in the post’s frontmatter.

JavaScript

In post.liquid:

For every h2 on the page, create a list item
Get the id of each heading
Create a link in each list item, with the heading as the text and the id as the link URL
Insert this list item into the <ol> tag.

const headings = document.querySelectorAll("h2");
const tocList = document.querySelector(".post__toc-list");

function generateTOC() {
  for (let i = 0; i < headings.length; i++) {
    let listItem = document.createElement("li");
    listItem.setAttribute("class", "post__toc-item");

    let listURL = "#" + headings[i].getAttribute("id");

    let listItemLink = document.createElement("a");
    listItemLink.setAttribute("href", listURL);
    listItemLink.setAttribute("class", "post__toc-link");

    let listItemTitle = document.createTextNode(headings[i].innerText);

    listItem.appendChild(listItemLink);
    listItemLink.appendChild(listItemTitle);
    tocList.appendChild(listItem);
  }
}

generateTOC();

Notes on Lost Sector Today

2021-10-01T00:00:00Z

I made Lost Sector Today to display the day’s rotating activity in Destiny 2, a game I spend too much time playing and thinking about. This information is available on other resource sites, but I made this because I wanted the info to be organized in a specific way and easily accessible.

👉 Visit the site: Lost Sector Today

The homepage. It shows what today's sector is, details about it, and the day's reward drop.

Background

Lost Sectors are a type of activity in Destiny. There are 11 different sectors, and one is available to do every day, rotating at 10am Pacific. Lost Sector Today shows what the day’s sector is, as well as specific information about it.

Doing a Lost Sector gives you the chance at getting a rare armour drop. There are four types of armour available: Chest, Head, Legs, and Arms; these also rotate every day.

This information is available elsewhere. I used to check the daily Reddit thread, but it doesn’t post what’s coming up in the future or have details. Other sites have those details, but they’re often commercialized (i.e. ads and fluff) or are too clunky to navigate.

So I wanted to have the following info:

What the daily Lost Sector is
Details about the day’s Lost Sector (e.g. enemy types) with my own notes
What the daily armour reward is
Schedule of upcoming Lost Sectors and rewards, for planning

And display it in an organized and uncluttered way.

A calendar view is helpful for planning out what armour piece you want to get, and what sector you want to do, as some sectors are easier than others.

Structure

Similar to my watchlist, it’s an Eleventy site that pulls data from a JSON file and displays it. Eleventy pagination creates a page for each entry.

The structure looks like this:

Data is in /js/legend.json. Putting it in the /js/ directory makes it accessible to the rest of my JS.
This is referenced in _data/legend.js, which makes it possible to access it in my layout.
The layout template /_includes/ls-pages.liquid creates a page for each item in the data.

`/js/legend.json`

I put all the lost sector data in a global data file. Since I’ll be using JS to do some stuff with it, I’m putting it in the /js/ directory, as /_data/ is only accessible server-side.

Here’s an example entry for the Chamber of Starlight:

[
  {
    "name": "Chamber of Starlight",
    "location": "The Dreaming City",
    "champions": [
      {
        "name": "Overload",
        "number": 1,
        "desc": "On far away platform and can be sniped at."
      },
      {
        "name": "Unstoppable",
        "number": 3
      }
    ],
    "burn": "Solar",
    "shields": [
      {
        "name": "Void",
        "frequency": "many",
        "desc": "Taken Acolytes all have Void shields. Wizard Boss has Void shield."
      },
      {
        "name": "Solar",
        "frequency": "few",
        "desc": "A few Taken Knights."
      }
    ],
    "modifiers": [
      {
        "name": "Epitaph",
        "desc": "Taken combatants generate blight geysers when defeated."
      }
    ],
    "notes": "Lots of Taken Acolytes and Thrall."
  }
]

`/_data/legend.js`

Adding this allows me to reference the data like a normal global data file:

module.exports = require("../js/legend.json");

`/_includes/ls-pages.liquid`

Designating pagination in the frontmatter creates a page for each entry:

---
layout: layout
pagination: 
  data: legend
  size: 1
  alias: legend
permalink: "sector/{{ legend.name | slug }}/"
---

And I can use it like a normal collection:

<div class="ls__meta">
  Legend (1320)
  <span class="ls__location">{{ legend.location }}</span>
</div>
<h1 class="ls__name">
  {{ legend.name }}
</h1>

`_includes/sector-list.liquid`

I display the list of sectors by looping through the data:

<ul class="ls-list">
  {% for legend in legend %}
    <li>
      <a href="/sector/{{ legend.name | slug }}">{{ legend.name }}</a> 
      ({{ legend.location }})
    </li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

Homepage

The homepage shows what the day’s sector is, which is calculated client-side. It pulls the data from the JSON file and inserts it into the page on page load.

Since Lost Sectors work on a set rotation, you can figure out the schedule once you know what order everything goes in. The logic for this goes:

Find out what day of the season it is; → e.g. September 30 is the 38th day of the season, which started on August 24
Loop through 1) the Lost Sector list, and 2) the Exotic Drops list until it reaches the 38th item
Display that info

I don’t love doing this kind of thing client-side, since it takes a moment to load and you get the unfortunate flash of [no content].

The Ideal Alternative Method That I Couldn’t Figure Out

Schedule the site to build and deploy every day at a fixed time (10am PT, when the daily schedule changes)
Calculate server-side what the day’s rotation is
Filter the collection to display only that item
Build and deploy

I couldn’t figure out a way of filtering a collection based on a value that I determine in JS. I feel like this should be possible, but I don’t know enough JS/eleventy to do it. Send help.

Calendar

I think a calendar view is helpful for planning out future sector runs, because calendars are how I determine when I’m available to do something. Seeing just a list of raw dates doesn’t mean anything to me since there’s no context, but if I see that x sector or drop is available on a Saturday, then that’s more meaningful.

I’m doing several suboptimal things when building this calendar, which I would like to revisit at a later time. It works like this:

Build the calendar in JS, by manually choosing how many days to include (e.g. October = 31 days, so loop through the build function 31 times)
Fill out the empty days from September/November (counted manually; it’s not great!)
Insert the sector and drop rotation in each day
Highlight the current day by assigning a custom class to it

Of course, I wanted my calendar to look nice on phones, so I styled it there too as a list. I’m not sure if this is better than displaying it as a traditional calendar view, but that would require displaying the info in some different way due to limited space, so I didn’t do it. Yet.

The calendar, but make it a list.

In my ideal world, I would make this so that the calendar updates to the new month automatically and I don’t have to create a new month each time. But since the month days are assigned manually, I can’t automate that yet. This isn’t a huge deal though, since I only have to update it every 30ish days and it’s easy to do so.

Easter Egg

I put in an easter egg. If you input a silly little code, you get a refreshing surprise.

Future Things

I’m considering adding Master Lost Sector info and recommended loadouts in the future, at the risk of cluttering the site.

For Master sectors, I’d like to personally run the sectors to get this info myself. It doesn’t feel right to simply take that info from other sites to use on my own, even if it’s technically game info that doesn’t belong to anyone. I dunno, I don’t want to do that. I’d add my personal notes as well.

For recommended loadouts, I’m hesitant to include this because what I use isn’t necessarily “good” or what I would recommend. I don’t want to recommend things without being confident in it. However, I do think there’s some value in it if it’s presented as a very personalized thing, and not as expert advice. I would probably frame this as “what I would recommend to a friend”; i.e. this is not the best way and could very well be bad, but it’s what I myself do.

Spring

2021-09-22T00:00:00Z

Back from April 2021. I like flowers. Portra 160, shot at 200.

Media Diary with Eleventy

2021-09-21T00:00:00Z

I built out a media diary of stuff I watch, because I don’t enjoy using letterboxd and I’m on an eternal quest of reinventing existing platforms on my own site, because I like controlling how things look and work.

🌟 The Eleventy Structure: a JSON data file of each movie, which includes the name/review/rating/etc. Each item is looped through like a collection, and displayed on a page.

The media diary as it looks right now. I'm gradually adding posters to each one.

Eleventy JSON Data

I use a global data file that contains all of my movies. My data sits inside _data/watched.json, and a movie entry looks like:

[
  {
    "title": "Moonrise Kingdom",
    "date": "2021-09-04",
    "review": "Charming. As expected, the aesthetics are gorgeous: lovely colour palettes, symmetrical frames, and fun music.",
    "category": "movie",
    "rating": 3,
    "poster": "moonrise-kingdom"
  }
]

I used to create a new post for every movie, which would contain frontmatter of the movie metadata and then a review in the content, but decided this was too cumbersome to maintain. Since my watchlist is expected to be high-volume, structured, and brief, a JSON file would be easier to maintain.

Layout Template

This is rendered in my watchlist.liquid layout. I can use my JSON data like I do for post collections; e.g. {{ watched.title }} calls the title of the movie.

My watchlist.liquid markup looks like:

{% for watched in watched %}
  <article class="watchitem">
    {% if watched.poster %}
      <img src="/img/watchlist/{{ watched.poster}}.jpg" alt="" class="watchitem__poster frame">
    {% else %}
      <div class="watchitem__poster-placeholder"></div>
    {% endif %}
    <h2 class="watchitem__title">{{ watched.title }}</h2>
    <div class="watchitem__content">{{ watched.review }}</div>
    <div class="watchitem__rating">{{ watched.rating }}</div>
    <div class="watchitem__date">{{ watched.date | date: "%b %e, %Y" }}</div>
  </article>
{% endfor %}

To summarize it:

{% for watched in watched %} loops through each item in my watched.json data file.
{% if watched.poster %} – if I have a movie poster included in the data, it’ll display it; if not, it’ll display a placeholder div. All of my images are inside a single /img/watchlist/ folder with a .jpg extension.
{{ watched.date | date: "%b %e, %Y" }} shows the formatted date.

My star ratings are done in some rudimentary JavaScript that translates my numerical rating into stars. I don’t know if I like rating things—I feel so wishy-washy about all of them and I find it hard to quantify how I think something is, so I might not keep it. Who knows!

Inspirations

Many folks have done this before; some of my inspirations include:

Melanie Richards’ book highlights (so beautiful!)
João Beleza Freire’s library
Justin Duke’s catalogs
Maggie Appleton’s library

I’m calling mine a media diary or watchlist for now. The goal is to organize data on my media consumption, and display it in a pleasing way on my site. This could eventually include things like music, games, or books; for now, I’m keeping the scope small as I have a clear idea of how I want this to be.

Weeknotes, August

2021-09-05T00:00:00Z

and autumn comes when you’re not yet done / with the summer passing by

mitski, francis forever

little websites

Predictably, I made a little website for Destiny 2. It’s for Lost Sectors, a type of activity that rotates every day. I would check a daily Reddit thread every day to see what the day’s rotation was, so I decided to make my own site that cycles through it.

It’s still a work in progress. I have to update the info, check over my timezone stuff, write a better calendar script, and other things. I’m embarrassed by how rudimentary the code is, which makes me not want to share this publicly because I feel like some engineering dude will look at it and make fun of it for being stupid. Of course, that’s an irrational fear (literally, who cares), but I’m always hyperaware of Destiny being a very male-dominated space.

movies

I’m watching so many movies. I watched a bunch of Spider-Man movies over the past couple of weeks, and now I think I’m tired of Spider-Man. I’m also drawing a bit more as I watch movies in the background, which is nice.

other

This was going to be more substantial, but it’s not. I did not have a substantial August? Trying to be okay with that.

photo diary, 2021

2021-08-20T00:00:00Z

visited the cat cafe, pet lots of cats

painting my nails makes me feel extremely beautiful

Games 2021

2021-08-19T00:00:00Z

Games I played in 2021, continually updated. Really, this is going to be dominated by one game.

Back 4 Blood

Tried the beta version of it. It lagged a lot for me and eventually my game crashed. It was fun though, like Left 4 Dead 2 with better graphics. I didn’t quite understand the deck-building mechanic but was able to ignore that for the most part.

Destiny 2

I play this too much. It’s horrifying.

selfie in my first run of expunge labyrinth

Dishonored 2

(in progress)

view from the end of the first mission

Neko Atsume

Returning to this. It’s cute.

Stardew Valley

I’ve abandoned my farm, my crops, and my wife. I logged in a couple of times to run around and be confused, and win the grange display contest.

Sudoku

I’ve somehow gotten into Sudoku. I’ve been playing through the iOS app Good Sudoku, which has convenient hint / highlighting / annotation features to make solving puzzles faster and less tedious.

I’ve progressed to doing Pro level puzzles (4th hardest level, of 5), but there are a few techniques that I’m still not able to recognize on my own. Currently, I always have to use a couple of hints to solve a puzzle.

Twelve Minutes

(in progress) Intriguing, though repetitive.

Dressup Progress

2021-08-09T00:00:00Z

I’ve returned to my old Keyboard Dressup project, which I made last year as a fun little javascript thing to try out different keycap colour schemes. This time I’m repurposing it to work with my upcoming ~~Gardenfall set~~. The goals are:

Visualize the set on different form factors
Rearrange novelties

Gardenfall is based around the novelties (I can’t imagine anyone being interested in the set but not the novelties, idk) so I want to make an easy way of trying them out and rearranging things to look nice.

Work in progress. Select from the bottom novelty options and click on the key you want to change. Rotate the novelties with the rotate tool.

A couple of things I added from the original dressup version are:

Change novelty image on click. Previously, Keyboard Dressup would change the keycap colour through changing the CSS class. Changing the image requires swapping out the img src
Rotate novelties. 1u keys get rotated 90 degrees; all other ones do a 180. I tried to design the novelties so that most would look good rotated in any direction (except for upright ones such as skulls), and I think it’ll be fun to arrange leaves and flowers in certain directions for balance.

I’m slowly branching out to making this work with other keyboard layouts, which requires some refactoring. Currently, Ergodox only supports novelty mods; a standard full-size layout would have text mods by default. I have to change how I wrote my novelty switching function to account for replacing text mods with novelties and vice versa.

Ideally, I would like to represent a fair number of standard form factors to give a good idea of how Gardenfall would look on them. Alice layout is probably the next tricky one I haven’t built out yet; Planck will be nice and easy to code.

Work in progress of the full-size layout, currently showing text mods.

Weeknotes, spring

2021-08-02T00:00:00Z

It feels weird to fire up the old personal website blog after straight up ignoring it for five months.

What’s happened?

Destiny

Probably the most significant life update is that I started playing Destiny 2. I don’t recommend reaching my comically horrific levels of obsession, but otherwise D2 is very fun and I enjoy it far more than I thought I would. I’ve made new friends playing it and regularly socialize with people in voice chats now, which is quite nice during the pandemic.

Funemployment

Just kidding. This is a bigger life update: I left my job! I am moving back into my main career interest, which is doing stuff with websites. That’s what I was most interested in doing during my last role, so it’s what I want to focus on next.

I think of web development as pretty intimidating—on good days, I’m confident in my ability to learn anything (skills can be learned); on bad days, I’m convinced that I am too stupid and I will never be good enough to do this. It’s a roller coaster. Usually the bad days are stronger and more frequent than the good ones, so it’s a bit of a battle to get over them. It be like that sometimes.

Keycaps

I’m designing a set of keycaps called ~~DSA Gardenfall~~. This has been exciting to bring to life, with the help and support of many people.

coming back to it

2021-07-15T00:00:00Z

I stashed a ‘redesign’ in progress on another branch to write this post. I need to think more in increments rather than trying to do fewer but bigger changes. Incremental progress would be better than zero progress.

I felt like writing this note because I’m struggling with my ‘redesign’ and my larger website ambitions, because I think I’m lacking a reason for why I’m doing whatever I’m doing. Why do I want to redesign my site, aside from being bored of it? What am I trying to achieve with my new site that the current one doesn’t?

Trying to change and make stuff without a goal in mind (and not even a career/professional one, but just something to give me direction) has been challenging, so I should chill out on spinning my wheels and instead ideate a bit more. I’ve been out of the website loop for a long time as well, so my imagination is pretty limited.

Just. Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh. This note is so unsophisticated and unnecessary but I just need to publish it to get back into the swing of things.

Weeknotes 5–6

2021-02-14T00:00:00Z

Keycaps

It’s coming along. I pixel pushed a lot of icons.

the lq photo filter is deliberate

Hourly Comic Day

This is the second year in a row I didn’t really do it. It feels kind of disappointing! But I’ll let myself be.

12am.

2am + 3am. I was working on my keyset at this time.

Theme

The last 10% of this theme really is turning out to be 90% of the work. I forgot how much I have to do to reach all the edge cases (that I know of), test all the weird quirks, set up all the customization options in a way that makes sense. I’m choosing to scrap some to do’s that I’ve done in the past, out of laziness and thinking does it really matter?

I mean, it probably does. To someone.

Testing colour customizations with a light theme.

memory lane

One of the more enjoyable and distracting parts of publishing a theme is curating the sample posts to display on the demo blog. I usually go through archives and look for things that are beautiful, funny, or touching, somehow. I stay away from anything too sad or serious. I like shitposts. I try not to repeat anything across my various demos, as much as I enjoy a particular post.

I read this again, which still resonates:

For everything bad, there’s a million really exciting things. Whether it’s somebody puts out a really great book, there’s a new movie, there’s a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, you know, you have your best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.

– Patti Smith

Many things are bad, but my coffee every morning is not. Slowly working on projects is nice. Eating a really satisfying chocolate. Getting stuff in the mail.

Destiny

I am still spending every waking moment playing Destiny, because I am a woman possessed. I’ve reached the point of being able to play competitive co-op, and I tried the most chaotic version of the PVP mode. I’ve played with some new friends. I am getting better at shooting things and not dying.

This dungeon, called the Pit of Heresy, was extremely evil.

Comically evil, even. I had to jump around and dodge spiky chandeliers and other evil, spiky obstacles.

Weeknotes 3–4

2021-01-31T00:00:00Z

The most notable thing I did was make a new theme. Other than that, I built a new keyboard, am designing a keyset, and am still playing a lot of Destiny.

Tumblr

I made a new blog theme, which you can see on my blog here. I used to do this back in the day (it’s my web design origin story) but haven’t for a few years out of disinterest and frustration with the cumbersome process. I banged this out over the weekend and kept it simple so I would actually finish it.

Desktop view.

Mobile views. I left all of the phone UI intact, for the true mobile browsing experience. Tumblr is very insistent that you use their app. I wonder if blogs on their own domain have these disruptions?

The process for this was silly, as is the tumblr theme ecosystem in general. I wrote most of the markup and styling up in a static HTML file, and then moved it over to Tumblr’s build-in theme customizer to insert the block tags (like {block:Posts}{/block:Posts} and stuff like that). The customizer is exactly as it was three years ago: slow to load, buggy to render, and still has a horrible syntax highlighting palette. I thought that porting things over and inserting tags would be fast, but it ended up taking as long as it did to write up the static code to begin with because of the slow loading and bugs. Ah, never change Tumblr.

I referenced a previous theme of mine to see how I did the markup, and there was a couple of times where I thought, why did I do this? at something that looked silly. Then I “fixed” it in my new theme and realized that I did the silly thing because it was a workaround for something nonsensical about Tumblr’s code to begin with. I wish that there was more investment into the development experience, since this is such a fun and low-friction environment for people to learn.

I would like to clean this theme up and publish it to the Theme Garden soon. I don’t really know if anyone checks that anymore—the sorting is weird, the collections have stayed the same for the past four years or something, and barely anyone installs my themes anymore—but just creating and putting something out into the world is nice.

Planck

I built Planck keyboard! This is a 40% ortholinear keyboard: it’s got 40% of the keys of a full-size board, and the keys are arranged in a grid (ortholinear).

Drop + OLKB Planck keyboard (high-profile, black) with GMK Olivia++ keycaps and Kiwi switches.

This was an easy build, and there was a helpful tutorial video that walked through all of the steps. I haven’t gotten around to customizing the keymap yet since it’s not compatible with VIA, which is the program I’ve used before.

A Planck is about the same size as a Nintendo Switch.

Black PCB with gold accents.

Inserting Kiwi switches into the steel plate. I had exactly 48 switches left to fill out this board.

I opted for this layout because the larger spacebar configuration would have required modifying and assembling stabilizers, which I didn't want to do.

The finished board. I later swapped out the quotation mark keycap on the right side with a black keycap. The bottom row has lots of arrow keys because they were the only keycaps I had that would fit.

The middle keys on the bottom row are flipped because it's more comfortable for my thumbs to hit #flippedspacebargang

Keyset

Relatedly, I am working on a keyset! This tends to happen when you spend too much time around mechanical keyboards. We’ll see how this goes! Here is a work-in-progress preview of a snek:

Extreme filtering provided by huji app.

Destiny

I am still playing a lot of Destiny 2. My brain is very consumed by the process of shooting things and collecting items. This is, like, the only thing I care about.

My current character.

Weeknotes 1–2

2021-01-17T00:00:00Z

Trying out weeknotes again, i.e. a review of the last two weeks of Stuff I Did.

Mavo

I’m giving Mavo another try, after first trying it three years ago. I’m using it to build a media catalogue. Mavo is neat because it allows me to create repeatable components and fill in content on the frontend, rather than writing it in markdown/html as I normally would. It’s designed to not require knowledge of JavaScript, which is the biggest obstacle I face in trying to do anything with websites.

The editing UI. The text and image blocks are Mavo properties that I've defined, which I can then edit on the page itself. The card is a repeatable component that I can add, delete, edit, and re-order.

While Mavo is very cool, I still have reservations about using it in practice so far. Some issues are:

No native alt attribute input for <img> tags, so I’ve had to work around that by creating another property (gameImageAlt) and inserting that into the img tag.
Keyboard shortcuts are a bit janky, because controls get mixed up between app-wide shortcuts versus text editing shortcuts (e.g. backspace to delete an element versus to clear all the text in a text box). This is why my description text is using markdown rather than the TinyMCE editor, as the latter is unusable due to conflicting keyboard shortcuts.
My data storage setup isn’t ideal—currently, every time I save, the changes are committed to a public GitHub repo. I need to look into the storage options, which is a general concept I’m relatively unfamiliar with.

I’m going to continue futzing around with it because I love the concept—edit your content in the page itself! Define your own components! Don’t use javascript! Style the admin UI!—and it seems well-suited for my media page endeavors, which will be repeating blocks of media.

My near-future plan is to figure out a way to create some page template that others can use to build their own microsites, as an alternative to services like carrd or linktree. I’ve been thinking about building that for a while (it harks back to the Tumblr trend of custom HTML pages) so I’m excited to work on it.

Media

Before I get that media catalogue up and going though, I’ll toss some media things here. This is what I’ve been enjoying lately:

Revisiting shounen anime songs, for the good vibes. Highlights (links go to spotify): sakura by NIRGILIS (Eureka Seven), Rain by SID (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood), Lapis Lazuli by Eir Aoi (Arslan Senki).
I started watching Revolutionary Girl Utena with my friends, and it’s very charming so far.
The first two episodes of WandaVision were very weird, and I’m excited to see where it goes. I love trippy alternate universe type things, and I’m enjoying how the show keeps such a light sitcom tone up until it doesn’t.

twenty twenty, short

2021-01-10T00:00:00Z

In the year of the pandemic, I made new friends online. I have a job that I like. I played a lot of games, which I wrote about here. I purged my blog, created this new one, and redesigned it. I didn’t go to NYC. I sold my art online. I shopped online a lot, thinking of future plans for the After Times. I’m thankful for my good health.

Games 2020

2020-12-31T00:00:00Z

Here are all the games I’ve played this year. It’s mostly PC games from Steam, with a couple of Switch games.

5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel

lmao. what a concept. I failed to make any progress in a game with the computer because I don’t know how to get to checkmate, things just kept progressing with like six different timelines. it’s on steam and I recommend it because it’s so bizarre and entertaining.

Example mechanic: a bishop moves in two dimensions in chess, right? the x and the y axes. In 5D chess, it also moves in two dimensions, but there are more dimensions: x and y and temporal and multiverse. So you can go back in time and move in x, for example. (yeah, technically it’s 4D chess.)

A rook moves any distance through one dimension. Here, it can move along the X or Y dimensions in the present, or it can go back in time (the temporal dimension) for any number of previous boards.

Then I went on normal chess dot com to play against computer level 1, lost after making a series of blunders, played more level 1 games and constantly used the undo function whenever it yelled BLUNDER! MISTAKE! at me, and won from doing that. Hahahahaha.

A Short Hike

I actually played this a couple of months ago in June, but didn’t write about it. It’s short, sweet, and cute. You’re a bird that flies and climbs around the the park up to the peak so you can get reception to take an important call. The writing is charming and full of heart. I talked to all the characters I met, and usually I’m the type of person that tries to zoom to completion. 5/5, a wholesome experience I recommend. Also, beautiful pixel art and soothing music. It was part of the itch.io bundle for racial justice and equality.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

I finally got a Switch and joined the ACNH party. I’m still in its early stages but I’m enjoying the wholesome atmosphere and taking care of my little island and inhabitants. It’s very cute, the interactions are charming, and I like discovering new features. One of my favourite moments was exploring the newly built museum and finding that it was even bigger and fancier than I imagined on the inside.

Assassin’s Creed II

(Started a little, didn’t get very far)

Assemble with Care

Brought to you buy the studio that made Monument Valley, so you know. It’s a simple game where you fix broken objects by dragging components together and using tools. The art is beautiful and the sound design is excellent. It’s mixed in with a narrated story. It takes a couple of hours to play through and feels satisfying.

👉 see the website / on steam

A broken watch

A camera

This blog post about the technical details of making the art is also interesting.

Biped

Biped is a co-op game that’s really excellent for ruining relationships. You and your partner play as bipedal robots, and the mechanics of moving an individual leg to walk is awkward by design. Moving erratically and accidentally yeeting each other off surfaces is to be expected. I played this with my partner and it was a very fun and chaotic time.

Boop

We did so poorly we had 6% harmony, died 169 times versus the suggested 3 times, and took 43 minutes instead of 4 minutes to complete the level.

Destiny 2

I started playing a lot of Destiny 2 in the last week of the year. I’ll save my review for my 2021 post. The short version: it’s very pretty, I like collecting things, planets and exploration is fun, UI is unintuitive, picking it up was frustrating, floating and driving around are fun.

Holiday lights at the Tower.

Virtual dates only during the pandemic.

Dishonored

A couple of friends recommended Dishonored when I said I wanted to play a story-driven RPG that was less scary than Bioshock. Dishonored is indeed less scary, but still incredibly stressful—I would spend hours staring intently at my screen, trying to sneak through maps without enemies noticing me.

In Dishonored, you’re an assassin framed for murdering the empress, trying to overthrow the government amid a rat plague and clear your name. It’s a stealth/action game, with lots of flexibility as to how to progress through missions (e.g. you can choose to kill people in your way, or you can sneak around them so they never notice you). There are some supernatural abilities that make it fun. I think this is the first dark-gritty-violent story RPG I’ve played.

thoughts

The setting of an ongoing rat plague was quite timely for 2020
I thought the ‘chaos’ system was interesting, where the more people you murder, the more ‘chaotic’ the world becomes. In the beginning, I was killing everyone because it was easier, and this had consequences like lots of rats (the rats, uh, eat people) and plague-stricken people wandering about. Partway through, I decided to refrain from killing and devoted my time to sneaking around and saving obsessively.
- I’m not a game scholar or anything so I don’t have sophisticated thoughts, but this just reminded me of this article on The Last of Us 2 about violence in games—if an AAA game decided to match its moral lesson of violence = bad to its gameplay, “What would [the character] even do? Literally, what would a AAA game even allow for her to do? AAA game design is built and marketed around killing.”
- if you choose the low-chaos, non-murderous gameplay in Dishonored, you get the better ending. but it can feel more boring because there’s no combat. I didn’t choose low chaos because I’m morally against violence in games, but because I didn’t like the in-game effects of playing high chaos and I was bad at the combat.
- I’m still going to go back and replay my peaceful levels with violence though.
- there are lots of sophisticated and creative ways to kill people in Dishonored, and only two ways to handle them nonlethally.
The worldbuilding was very cool. Lots of notes that added to the lore, like characters recording their final words as they died of the plague; fictional stories and notes about the economy of whale oil; posters and graffiti on walls about the plague and death.
I continue to have a hoarding problem with my items, and rarely ever used my healing items or precious limited sleep ammo (‘I need to save this for when I really need it’) despite carrying around the maximum amount I could hold.

All in all: do I recommend it? Yes. I started playing it and was obsessed for like a week while I zoomed through all the missions. I feel like I never want to play it again because of how stressful and hard it was but also I want to hyperfixate on something like it again. I’m going to eventually play the DLCs and Dishonored 2.

Here are some screenshots:

dressup games

alright, mid-2000s throwback: like every other girl on the internet in their early years, I was into dressup games (a classic genre!!!). I revisited the genre and found that dressup sites are still alive and well. Then I found this thread by Angie Jones, who wrote about how she revamped a dressup game she’s built since 2008.

how cool is that? despite how formative the internet was on my childhood, I never got into coding or designing until much later—art was the one and only influence for a long time, and I never seriously pursued that as a long-term career thing.

these days, I’m looking back at these things with nostalgia. The small, creative internet. Aaaahhhh, how to escape the addiction to the bird app and other sins.

anyway, here are images from two dressup games I played: Vintage Western and Groovy Retro.

Eastshade

I recently bought this on Steam. It’s gorgeous! You walk around, look at scenery, talk to townsfolk (who are all anthropomorphic animals), and paint the landscape. There’s a scene where you just stop to watch a solar eclipse. I got pretty dizzy playing because I’m not used to 3d first-person graphics, so I put this down for a while.

Fall Guys

I rarely make it past round 2 in Fall Guys and have only gotten to the last round twice (did not win).

i hate this level

Hades

Hades is a roguelike game where you’re Zagreus, Hades’ son, battling your way out of the underworld. I’ve never played a roguelike before and this released out of early access a lot of fanfare that I checked it out. The art is incredible, the characters are intriguing and charming, and there’s a lot of heart in the writing. I’m terrible at it though, so I play with God Mode enabled, which gives me a ridiculous amount of damage resistance from enemies. You can pet the dog.

The story progresses as you continue to die and try to escape over and over again—the repetition is a core part of the whole story. And after escaping once, the story’s just beginning. It feels so satisfying to play since failure is still meaningful progress. I love the character design so much I’m drawing fanart of it.

Kingdom Rush Origins

what can I say? I played the first Kingdom Rush game way back on kongregate dot com in like 2014, and I haven’t played any tower defense games outside of this series. It’s a solid game and great for sucking up all my focus for several hours. I revisit the series every couple of years.

Left 4 Dead 2

god, I’m still awful at this. I play co-op with my partner and he kills like twice the number of zombies I do. But we’ve (I’ve) progressed to playing on Advanced difficulty!!! And I’m not a scaredy cat anymore.

Little Orpheus

I started this without looking into it past the high app store ratings, and it blew me away with how pretty it was. It’s a platformer so the game mechanics are simple (though kind of finicky on a touch screen). I made it through the first chapter, which takes place in a foresty environment, and it was atmospheric and dreamy. The sound design is great. And there are dinosaurs!!! I got to live out my Jurassic Park dreams of running around a t-rex’s gaze. (they’re not dreams, it was very tense, i’m a weenie when it comes to stealth)

lush as hell

ughhh look at that t-rex and its giant face. you can't hear its breathing through the picture but oof its breathing

bonus content: I tweeted about this and the game studio sent me a link to this sovietwave mixtape, which is a whole new genre to me. It’s pretty cool.

Love Live: School Idol Festival

Surprisingly, I haven’t written about Love Live: School Idol Festival (LLSIF) on here yet, considering how consuming its gacha lootbox mechanism is. Gambling is bad, don’t get into gacha games. With that said, I play LLSIF to accumulate rare cards of my best girl, get a momentary high when I do get a card I like, and then immediately forget about it. Sometimes I play a song or two when I remember.

I wanted this card for years and was going to save up the in-game currency for months to increase my odds of getting it, but then I spent $10 to do a gacha pull and now that I have it, I am free from this game.

I actually really like this card, but I forgot I even got it until I went through my screenshots for this post.

To reiterate: gacha games are bad. Don’t do it.

Overwatch

(Tried out a bit, was Bad at it)

Sayonara Wild Hearts

A dreamy pop album video game. It’s got simple ‘endless runner’ mechanics (i.e. your character goes forward at a breakneck pace and all you do is control the left/right swerving) but the execution is perfect and the entire aesthetic is so strong and extremely my kind of thing. It takes an hour or two to play through, is very forgiving with mistakes (you can skip any section you keep dying in), and is never boring. I loved it and am obsessed with the soundtrack.

in their own words:

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a euphoric music video dream about being awesome, riding motorcycles, skateboarding, dance battling, shooting lasers, wielding swords and breaking hearts at 200mph.

👉 on steam / watch the very fun trailer with very fun music

Motorcycles!

Bosses with gay energy!!!

Stardew Valley

I also started a new Stardew Valley farm (my second one!) which sucked up all my attention again. It was surprisingly replayable, as I was focused on optimizing all my time and making as much money as soon as possible. I’m in year 2 winter now and am rich enough that I can chill out.

I also looked back at my first farm to compare my progress and I’m surprised by how much further I’ve progressed in my second farm, now that I know exactly what I’m doing.

First farm - Year 2 Spring 14

Second farm - Year 2 Spring 20

Townscaper

I’ve been waiting for this!! This is more of a toy than a game. Build houses. Build towns. Listen to structures pop into place. It’s incredibly cool and satisfying. I used it to create a reference scene for drawing. How frickin convenient is that.

Where Cards Fall

I resubscribed to Apple Arcade again so I could continue playing Where Cards Fall, which I first started back in June. It’s a simple puzzle game where you transform cards into structures to get from point A to point B. I love how tactile the game feels—the animation flows smoothly and the sound of cards moving over the ground and expanding and collapsing is satisfying to listen to.

There’s also a narrative interwoven throughout, but I’m finding it too abstract for me to understand.

Ergodox Config & Review

2020-09-26T00:00:00Z

Here is my keyboard:

Ergodox EZ keyboard with DSA Magic Girl keycaps. More detailed specs at the end.

Configuration

My goal was to be able to do as much stuff as possible with only the left side of my keyboard, save for typing actual words. So for example, I put an Enter key, F5, and navigation keys like Home and End on the left. On my second layer, I have arrow keys, and the numpad so I can type numbers one-handed.

Layer 0, optimizing for doing stuff with just the left side.

My only macro key is the em dash on the right thumb cluster—no longer must I have a permanent tab open to it in order to copy and paste. I have so much power now. I have F12 in the bottom right corner so I can take screenshots in Steam.

Layer 1 of more keys for efficiency. The bottom leftmost key is the layer toggle; I can hold it down with my pinky and use arrow keys or type numbers with just my left hand.

I honestly don’t use this next layer much, so I’m not used to my ‘efficient’ key configs yet (like the arrow symbols ← and → on the right side). I use the numpad to type symbols with alt codes. A bunch of other keys are just left over from the default configuration.

Deskmat from the Vancouver Mechanical Keyboard Meetup 2020

Review

tl;dr: I like it! It’s more comfortable than typing on a normal keyboard. I enjoy the nerdy customization part of it. My keycaps are cute. It is, however, quite expensive, especially if buying from Canada.

Ortholinear & split layout

The ortholinear (i.e. grid) layout tripped me up a bit, mostly for the bottom letters—I kept getting C wrong, and had to change which finger I used to tap it (middle instead of index finger). I also used to type the B with my right hand, and had to relearn it on my left.

With this layout, my hands don’t need to move much—for example, on a typical keyboard I’d have to physically lift and move my entire hand to reach the arrow keys, or navigation keys, or the escape key. Now since all the keys are much closer, my hands stay in place and only have to reach slightly to get to all the keys I need. (There are a couple of keys on the thumb clusters that I pretty much never use just because they’d require lifting my hands to reach.)

Ortholinear (grid) layout. The columns are slightly staggered.

Size

I have small hands, and the thumb clusters are a bit too far away to be 100% comfortable. My thumbs would naturally rest right in the gap next to the cluster, which is kind of a bummer. To offset strain on my left thumb, I put the spacebar on both sides. I would have considered getting the more compact Moonlander instead, which was unfortunately announced after I bought the Ergodox.

Customization

I really like changing things around! I thought I would be annoyed by having to figure out what would work for me (like, ugh, I have to think in order to use this keyboard?) but then I found it nice to be able to pick where I wanted to put keys, and remove stuff that I didn’t want. The configurator is an easy-to-use GUI and doesn’t stress me out.

Ergonomics

Does the Ergodox actually help me? When I first started using it, I didn’t have physical therapy needs, so I didn’t notice an improvement. But, when I tried switching back to my old keyboard, I noticed right away how much worse it felt. I also realized that having a wrist rest is essential—bending my wrists is seriously uncomfortable.

My old keyboard: a Ducky One 2 with GMK Olivia++ keycaps

Learning curve

It didn’t take me too long to get used to typing on this, and now whenever I use my laptop keyboard, I get tripped up by the different key placements (e.g. my Ergodox has Backspace where the Caps Lock key normally is). It’s been a few months and the only thing that trips me up now is key combinations that require multiple key presses, such as CTRL + SHIFT + ARROW KEY to highlight text.

Keyboard Specs

Keyboard: Ergodox EZ with tent kit and RGB lights on the bottom of the board. This is a split, ortholinear mechanical keyboard. Ortholinear refers to how the keys are arranged in a grid.
Keycaps: DSA Magic Girl. These were available in a limited pre-order in 2019; there will be another limited run in late 2020.
Switches: Cherry MX Brown—a nice, basic tactile switch that elitists love to hate, but they’re perfectly fine! (Switches are the components that sit under each keycap, and play a large role in how a keyboard sounds and feels.)
- October update: I’ve switched these out for Kiwi tactile switches, which are also nice! They have a big bump feeling.
- November update: I am now using Banana Split linear switches because I’ve hopped on the linear train.
Wrist rests: an add-on that I ordered alongside my Ergodox. They’re okay! I think next time I would buy something else off another retailer, as I’m not super jazzed about the rubbery texture. But they’re solid and do the job.
Layout: you can see my latest configuration here.

Seattle, in August

2019-10-18T00:00:00Z

In August, I went back to Seattle with my partner, for four days this time. (See May photos).

Day 1

We walked around the city and pier, and did some shopping. I pushed my Tri-X film +1 and didn’t like the results.

Researching where to go.

Day 2

We visited the library (beautiful!) and the art museum (not pictured).

Day 3

On our third day, we walked down to the Space Needle and Museum of Pop Culture.

The side of the Museum of Pop Culture

We took the monorail back downtown.

Day 4

We were fortunate to visit Ludi’s Restaurant & Lounge, a Filipino diner, during its last few weeks of business. Here’s an article that talks about its impact on the local community.

Our last stop was the University of Washington, which was as beautiful as I had heard. Since it was summer, campus wasn’t busy.

We visited the Suzzallo Library and ended up staying there for a few hours because we were tired, and it made for a quiet and comfortable place to sit and edit photos.

Victoria

2019-09-21T00:00:00Z

Visiting Victoria, BC. Mix of film + digital photos.

Seattle, in May

2019-06-15T00:00:00Z

Last month, I went to Seattle for two days for a workshop.

I arrived on Sunday around noon. Since everything closed early, my plan was to go to the art museum and then the public library. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have time to go to Pike Place while it was open.

Seattle Art Museum

What if I can’t find the art museum? I thought, but luckily the building had the words ART MUSEUM on it in big letters, so I was not lost.

There was a coat check, so I dropped off my backpack (which you’re not allowed to wear in) and put my sketchbook and water (which I later learned you also wasn’t allowed to have inside) in a tote bag. Since it was relatively dark, I didn’t take any film photos inside the exhibits.

I was fortunate to visit on the last day of the Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition, Like a Hammer.

“American history is longer, larger, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
— James Baldwin

DON'T MAKE ME OVER

The rest of the museum was varied and beautiful—I wish I had more time to go through everything more slowly.

Saint Woman
Amy Sherald (2015)

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ
Massimiliano Soldani (1714)

The Porcelain Room

Lkaayaak Yell S'aaxw (Box of Daylight Raven hat)
Tlingit, Taku village, Gaanax.ádi clan (1850)

Crocodile headdress
Nigerian/Cameroonian, Cross River, Ejagham

Seattle Public Library

Downtown Seattle turned out to be quite sloped, and I walked a few blocks uphill from the museum to the library.

I had seen photos of the library online, but I forgot how extraordinary it was, until I took the escalator up to the third floor, and the glass wall slowly revealed itself to me.

I switched my film here and I forgot to change the ISO setting on my camera, so most of my interior shots came out underexposed and dark. But here are the few that didn’t:

The fourth floor was entirely red, which was amazing and eerie and disorienting.

I walked around the bookstacks, which the library calls the Book Spiral. The escalator/stairs situation was confusing and I wasn’t sure how to navigate around.

I ate lunch/dinner at Cortina during happy hour. I picked it because at this point a headache was forming and I wanted to go somewhere that was enroute to my hotel.

After eating, I went up to my hotel to check in and lie down for a bit. I hadn’t been to a hotel in a long time, and it was novel to be somewhere by myself.

pike place (after hours) + the pier

I made my way down to the water. Pike Place had closed by now, so I only passed through.

Seattle has a lot of bike sharing, especially around the pier, but I opted not to try it out as it was quite busy and I didn’t want to fight another app sign up and payment workflow.

Miner’s Landing was interesting and had an entire carousel inside.

Afterwards, I went to McDonalds and then back to my hotel to watch the new Game of Thrones episode 🔪🔥

Day 2

I was in Seattle to attend Edward Tufte’s course, Presenting Data and Information. I was fortunate to have my company sponsor my attendance.

The course ended in the afternoon, and I dropped by General Assembly to meet a Twitter mutual. It was cool! Sometimes I hate being as Online™ as I am but also each time that I meet someone I know from the internet is a cool moment.

I stopped at a cafe patio to change my film, and there was a woman sketching passersby. I thought about it, and decided to ask her if she had drawn me while I was sitting there. She hadn’t, but we briefly chatted. She works at a television production company and asked me if I came there to draw a lot. I told her I was a tourist.

leaving

I didn’t have time to explore Chinatown, so I quickly went through to visit Kinokuniya. It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t spend much time here though, because the ten minutes I did spend I ended up buying three shiba inu things 🥺

I took some photos from the train window, but they all turned out too dark and/or blurry.

The view of the water was pretty spectacular, but unfortunately couldn't be captured on film. This is as good as it gets.

final thoughts

A day wasn’t enough to spend in Seattle—I managed to visit only three places (the art museum, the library, and the pier). I’ll be going back in a few months for a more leisurely three days, in which I hope to go to more museums, the market, and the university.
I think I took too many photos of the same streets and angles and buildings. I need to get better at composition and being more creative.