anhvnModify

2025-08-01 08:00:00

that’s it that’s the post

2025-07-20 08:00:00

This website

I redesigned my website!!!

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.

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.

Links

• HTML named colors by Frills — very nice resource for HTML colour names!
• Mildliner Reference by Robb Knight — yes, more colours, I love it. I need to use my mildliners more!

If I had a nickel for every time I found a colour reference site that did its job perfectly, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Photos

Some comic/zine purchases recently:

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

2025-06-22 08:00:00

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.

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.

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.

2025-05-23 08:00:00

Links

• A Summer Retrospective by Gracia Ventus in The Rosenrot — a beautiful outfit log!! I spent ages scrolling through her instagram and admiring her style, and now feel like I need to reinvent my wardrobe!!
• Internet Phone Book by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost — now, sadly, sold out online, but a very charming project. I am in there! (Here’s a photo by veronique.)
• I was on Manu Moreale’s People & Blogs the other week, where I talk about my website and blog and things :-)

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.

• 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.

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.

2025-05-22 08:00:00

antilibrary; intentions; my ideal self; aspirations. stuff on my mind; stuff i want to think about but just not quite yet. i am the ashamed owner of a dozen browser windows, many containing a dozen+ tabs—what is in there??

• 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.

2025-05-04 08:00:00

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.

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.

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.