Weeknotes 30

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!

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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:

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.

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.