2025-05-04 08:00:00
itsgonnabemay.jpg
I did 19/30 days of PleinAirpril! Most days, I spent about 30–90 minutes. A couple of them were actually done en plein air, rather than from a photo reference, and a few I gave up on because they were going badly.
19 days is the most I’ve ever done for a monthly art challenge. I missed eight days from travelling, and three days from other life priorities. All in all, I’m proud of myself for this level of consistency.
All paintings are compiled over in my sketchbook, along with any stray notes about them and timelapses.
I visited New York for the first time, which was very cool and exciting. Highlights:
Here are a bunch of photos and sketches.
2025-03-30 08:00:00
Almost April—wtf.
Fragmented thoughts: been thinking about how to go about ‘knowledge management,’ but it’s not really knowledge management—I feel like there’s an element of synthesizing that I’d need for it to be knowledge—but more sort of ‘collecting’ things to be findable later.
I pin stuff on Pinterest because it’s easy, and my interests are properly organized in the right place. It’s nice for surface-level exploration, but quite bad when it comes to things like sourcing, quality, and generative AI images. I save ‘things to look at later’ or ‘interesting links’ or ‘useful tools’ with the web clipping extension for Raindrop, but that rarely ever gets sorted and often does not get looked at ‘later’ at all.
My most successful collection habit is on Tumblr, where I have an art reblog blog and have tagged most posts I reblog on it with the type of art, artist name, and any other useful info. It’s the most organized collection of digital links I have, something I’ve been maintaining for over a decade. And it’s something I do come back to look at. If I ever want to see all of the #marvel fanart or cool #comics I’ve ever reblogged, I can.
I never apply this level of organization to any of my private bookmarks. I’ve been thinking about why that’s the case, and I think it comes down to:
So, anyway, all that to say, I’m trying to use are.na more publicly, to encourage better habits.
April is looming and I feel distressed about not creating enough. The time is passing and what do I have to show for it! Nothing!!!
I want to do Plein Airpril again this year, and having done it last year I feel more confident about it.
I’m slowly embarking on my ambitions of creating a font based on my handwriting!
I’ve tried the Fontself iPad app, which is easy to use. Sadly, the iPad version doesn’t have features that would be essential to making a handwritten font—namely, alternates and ligatures—so I may pick up their desktop version.
Related reading: Behind the Scenes: What goes into creating a messy handwriting font? by Laura Eddy of TYPEHEIST, my favourite foundry for handwritten fonts.
I took out some of my woefully-underused pens recently. I’ve been using my Muji 0.38 gel pen for so long, I’ve forgotten how different and satisfying it is to use a pen that can produce varied line weights.
Every single person in the world continues to tell me to watch Severance, to which I tell them, no. Until I do, eventually. One day. But for now, no.
I spent a Sunday doing Salvation’s Edge—six hours of raiding during prime time afternoon sunlight! But it was fun and we succeeded in a red border chest run, which demands doing the raid in one sitting.
I rarely raid anymore (getting six people together is…not easy; also I’m so over the grind of chasing specific weapons now) but this kind of makes me want to get back into it. My ideal setup is raiding in two hour blocks, and it would take at most two sessions.
(Tangent—I looked at my raid report and I haven’t done Vow in like, 2.5 years?? What? I guess it doesn’t feel so long since Caretaker and Rhulk were both part of Pantheon, but I kind of want to go through Exhibition again to see how it is now.)
I started replaying Control, which I first played back in 2022. I’d been wanting to replay it for a while, and after seeing the new trailer for FBC: Firebreak, which is based in the Control universe, I’ve decided now is a good time to revisit the Oldest House ahead of Firebreak’s release.
I booted up Stardew on a whim the other week and have fallen headfirst into 1.6 game updates—there’s so much to do! I hadn’t done Ginger Island yet! There are so many QOL improvements! I’m going for perfection now! This is now my second job.
Sadly, I’m playing this pretty slowly because it’s one of those games that make me dizzy. It’s cool so far though! I’m pretty excited to get to the third game in this series, Arkham Knight, which I keep hearing good things about.
Here are some photos I’ve taken recently:
the reason art with ai at the creative helm will never get traction in any long term or meaningful trot is because art is more than what is in the text of the book, or notes of the song, or runtime of the movie. art is whats OUTSIDE of the medium, a performance piece between creator and experiencer
If you’ve followed me long enough, you’ll remember—in a previous life, I was into mechanical keyboards. I never fully shut the door on that until now though, in which I’ve officially chucked my keycaps project into the garbage—we all knew it was dead for years now, but there were remnants of it floating around. No more! I’ve deleted the email list, the instagram, and the website is long gone.
With that said, I’m intrigued enough by Yuzu Keycaps that I have it bookmarked for if I ever get the urge again to do a graphic design.
2025-02-27 08:00:00
I had grand plans for this post, involving intricate artwork, interesting layouts, and bold colours, but—I lack the willpower to execute on them, this time around. Instead, here we shall have: several straight-forward lists, covering the events of the last month or so, which is a period of time universally acknowledged to be basically the same as “a week,” hence this qualifies as “a weeknote.” Thank you.
Apparently, we can use CSS counter-style and symbols to style unordered lists—wow technology!! I’ve been styling my <ul> list markers with pseudo elements for years, but no longer!!
For example, instead of:
ul {
list-style-type: none;
}
li::before {
content: '→';
}I can now do:
@counter-style ul-primary {
system: cyclic;
symbols: '→';
suffix: '';
}
ul {
list-style-type: ul-primary;
}Very cool!!!
I realized that having decimal places in some of my font sizes can render weirdly on Windows:
But I can use round() (which is baseline 2024!) to round it to the nearest whole pixel:
p {
--font-size-sm: 0.85em;
font-size: round(var(--font-size-sm), 1px);
}I always feel like such a fucking idiot who doesn’t know how to web development—do I look like I know what a java script is?—and I feel especially embarrassed about being late to cobbling together some GSAP basics. It’s cool! I enjoy it! One of these days, surely, I will use it to make something interesting.
I feel hesitant to share early WIPs because there’s a good chance I’ll never finish them and it’s kind of embarrassing (hey, remember that things I’m working on post from last summer? lol?), but I was excited about this so I posted it on Mastodon anyway—
The idea is: weeknotes, but it’s fashion. Recapping stuff within the framing of outfits and style: what was I wearing at this time? What was my character wearing? What was the fashion of [insert media here]?
I’ve been looking at a lot of fashion illustration lately and I’ve been wanting to do some kind of fashion/OOTD thing for a long time. Hopefully this will go somewhere! I had planned it to be the basis of this weeknotes post (this is the aforementioned “grand plans”), but alas, it’ll be a future thing.
I’m starting to listen to podcasts, which means of course I have to build a new page for it.
I’m still chugging along with my site’s version 7 redesign. It’s very slow going, because I have so many dang pages and also aspirations for writing better CSS, which is kind of an obstacle when I’m not particularly good at CSS. But we’ll get there! Lol!
I visited the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time! It was a mostly spontaneous trip and I met up with a bunch of internet friends.
I got to eat good food, visit some pretty museums, and sit in highway traffic. I saw a cybertruck for the first time. (Cringe, gross, fuck that.) I saw all sorts of other cringe AI ads. I went to In-n-Out! I took a bunch of pictures, which I would like to compile into a future blog post, but as we all know, I said that last year about Portland and here I am, sans blog post.
Here are a few photos:
In government, that infrastructure is built by laws, policies, and regulations. But regulations alone do not infrastructure make. Regulations require workers to become infrastructure: those workers who labor to understand new policies, how best to enact them, and then work to make them legible and understandable to the American public — and, yes, to enforce them. Without those federal workers, and their labor, these systems fall apart. And the architects of this assault on the federal workforce are keenly aware of that fact.
What is the mathematics of self and how does observing, hypothesizing, and experimenting change you?
I’m not watching Severance (never seen any of it) but every single person in the world has told me to, so. Eventually. Though I feel irrationally resistant to it now that I’ve been recommended it so much. I have tried to mute the hell out of it though so I don’t get spoiled for whatever is going on for when I do get around to it.
I regret to inform you that, once again, Destiny is good, which is great news for sickos (like me) but also terrible news for people who need to touch grass (like me).
But actually—Nether, the current seasonal activity, is fantastic, and the Sundered Doctrine dungeon is cool! The Barrow-Dyad exotic mission is interesting but also the most horrible environment I’ve ever seen in the game (it is…hole…) and I never want to do it again. I got jumpscared by a giant stabby knife! Fuck that!!!
Another year, another Hourly Comic Day on February 1! I think this is the first year I’ve broken out of a uniform, boxy panel structure—not that this new paneling is particularly interesting, but I’ve been doing hourlies for some ten-odd years (!) and I haven’t tried to deviate until now.
(Read: 2024)
Say happy birthday to the first Tumblr theme I ever published, ten years ago on February 13, 2015. She’s part of what kickstarted me into my current career, as one of the first times I took web design seriously as more than just a hobby for myself.
2025-02-06 08:00:00
The big picture goal this year is to take my creative work more seriously.
I feel like most of my work is very casual—I publish blog posts without editing, leave my artwork in the ‘sketch’ stage, and go fuck it, good enough more often than not. This year, I want to take things more seriously and push myself to really improve my craft, which involves actually doing the hard work and expecting more out of myself. This is the non-fuck-it year.
2025-02-02 08:00:00
Thank you Ethan and Gosha for kindly tagging me in this! ^_^v
I’ve always been posting on the internet. I started this specific blog (“anhvn.com”) because I wanted to write stuff that would be tied to my online professional self, for the Rewards (affirmation from strangers, building an online presence, potential career benefits); before that I wrote on a different, now defunct, blog about meandering things, which wasn’t private but also wasn’t known by more than like three people; even before that I was pseudonymously Posting and Oversharing in different places, but not at all about professional work things.
Mostly, though, I decided with this website that I would no longer be posting passively into the abyss but I would invite people to read it, which was a scary thing to do after many years of said abyss but was ultimately a worthwhile and fulfilling choice.
My site is built with the static site generator Eleventy, which I’ve written about before. It’s very flexible, allows me to make all sorts of custom designs, and requires minimal upkeep.
My previous abyss blog was built with Jekyll (unwieldy, frightening); I’ve written diary entries in Blogger and LiveJournal; I continue to use Tumblr, which somehow remains the platonic ideal of a blogging platform, social network, and archive.
Most of the time, I write in VS Code in markdown, since all my blog posts are markdown files. This is somewhat gruesome, but it allows me to see how the post will look on my site as I work on it. The unsightly editor doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’ve been trying to draft notes in Obsidian lately—in fact, I am writing this very post draft in it right now—and if I’m on my phone and want to record a thought, I write it in the Notes app.
There aren’t any special circumstances that make me feel inclined to write—if I have a blog post-worthy thought (wow!) I’ll try to write down a note somewhere, and those thoughts can come from any number of things. Maybe I’ll see something cool and it’ll trigger some thought and then I have to write it down.
Most of my posts, however, have been either 1) recaps, or 2) process writeups; they didn’t exactly come out of inspiration, though I may form more thoughts while writing them.
My ideal writing environment is at home, at my desk, alone. Any other setup is simply too unergonomic—writing on my laptop in a coffee shop is romantic in theory but full of far too much physical and mental discomfort to work in reality.
I usually publish immediately, which I’m sure is evident—I don’t do much editing beyond cursory proofreading, to imperfect results. But I really should edit more.
My latest Media Recap 2024 was a lot of fun to write and illustrate! I also like Weeknotes 14, aka the weeknoter post.
Haha, I always have future plans. I want to redesign my whole site this year, because it’s been more than a year with the current design and I’m craving a change, but of course that’s going to be a long and hard process because I have an impractical amount of website content. Eleventy serves me perfectly, so I have no need to migrate.
Some future things I would like to add are:
I would love to read answers from: Sage, Erica, Veronique, and Jedda. (Only if you want to!!! No worries if not!!!)
Also if you just want to do this, then I tag you as well.
2025-01-15 08:00:00
