Doing

Towards the tail end of 2024 I had some software ideas and managed to make a few into reality in 2025:

1. Link Dump - an ephemeral link canvas that I have talked about probably like all the time. Please give me feedback I’m all ears!!

2. inprogress.works (side project accountability app - in very early beta) is a weekly check in on your side projects and way to cheer each other on! It’s also a way to visualize your progress at the end of the year. I wanted a bidirectional social network where people could find each other based on what they make (which I consequently believe is to be a truer representation of self)

I also to my surprise went on a retreat, gave a talk, and demos of Link Dump which I didn’t expect at all. I feel very lucky and blessed to have been able to connect with others over my art instead of just solely squirreling away into my room.

Looking back, when I bought the connie.surf domain name in July 2023, I wasn’t sure what it would become. It’s nice to see how much my practice has changed through the development of my website. I’ve recently converged my work archive into a more thesis-based archive. Currently, I’m very interested in values based software…

It’s nice to see a form to take shape…

Failing

Sometime in the fall, I was asking someone for advice, complaining I was burned out. He told me he didn’t think burn out exists, and if you are, that means you are doing things for the wrong reasons.

Sometimes you know exactly what trap you should avoid, and even write a blog post on it, yet make the same mistake again. In 2024 when I started making art seriously again, I came to the eventual conclusion I cannot do things solely for the outcome. Yet in 2025 even though everything I did was in earnest, I still held a specific expectation that at the end of it all, if I tried my best, I would get exactly what I want.

Part of the issue is what I wanted existed at odds with each other. I wanted to create software that ascribed towards my art practice. I wanted to be an amazing product designer. What I spent time making on the side critiqued software and took several sentences to explain and didn’t make money. What would have helped my product design career would be designing more beautiful surfaces that made money.

I spent time trying to pursue both and took poor care of myself. Because I had told myself this year I would do The Thing, even if it was hard, that meant I would get home after work to do more work. Because it wasn’t a muscle I was used to, I would procrastinate or lose focus, work into late hours once I realized time was running out, and wake up sleep deprived which made me irritable and prone to stress.1

Being stressed would then lead me to take things even more seriously. I remember one day I couldn’t debug my app during coworking2 and was acting like it was the end of the world to my friend’s confusion. I often felt frustrated, which made me feel like I was working towards something valiant and important but in the long run also erased the fun out of everything. I knew people doing whimsical things in SF but could not understand how to do that when it felt like to me time was always running out. I used to love doing things for the bit and lost that part of myself.

And then at the end of it all, around December, I felt like all that self-imposed stress I went through wasn’t worth it.

Learning

There are certain outcomes I wanted, I wanted my 9-5 to align better, I wanted to become more known for what I do (okay I wanted more followers on social media), I wanted to eat the marshmallow instead of waiting, whatever it was. At the same time, I wasn’t willing to do what was necessary to achieve certain goals. I wasn’t ready to jump into a 9-9-6 without finishing my passion projects first or create a “24 things I learned by 24” and put my face in front of a camera. I just wanted to make my app that took a sentence too many to describe.

In December, my friend lent me the Motern Method, a book by the guy who write hyperspecific songs about places and things, and has made enough money from streaming that it’s become his full time job. After he writes 20,000 songs he writes “I finally quit my day job after 17 years. I was now a full-time artist. It was glorious!”.

I took myself so seriously this year, expecting to get everything I wanted by the end of it that I was no longer having fun anymore. Maybe it’ll take 17 years, or even longer, or even never! To make without expectation is to make because it’s fun. I hope to approach 2026 with more levity this year!

Bonus notes: media I liked this year

• Stories of your life and others, Ted Chiang - the titular short story and division by zero changed my life. Great stories about change and acceptance

• April’s Struggling artist game - still a WIP but recognized myself in the cards!

• Here for the wrong reasons, Charles Brokowski (Are.na founder) - I’m very aligned with this essay, this is why I do things. This is why I worked on Link Dump.

• Sonny boy - anime about students stranded in surreal worlds and how they change. the first anime series I’ve watched in two years so that should be saying something.

• Zootopia 2 lol

To write in 2026:

• legibility - catering to the algorithm, fact from fiction, I’m having trouble being vulnerable online… this blog/my art account existing in the paradox of being public yet wanting to be private

• everyone should be an artist/anyone can be an artist

• overrendering in product development and oil painting

I am schedule sending this for the last minute of 2025 - happy new year!!!

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Ever since I started three years ago, my writing has gradually become more vague overtime. I’ve begun to realize I mostly don’t write about myself anymore, but rather about topics I’m interested in around me. It’s still a part of me I’m sharing of course, you just have to read between the lines to see.

These days, I’m fascinated by the Instagram photo dump. Images perfectly morse-coded into a message only a few can really pick up. I delight at poorly taken photographs: blurry, low contrast, and hard to understand. It’s in the non-obvious you can find meaning and tell a story. To tell a story from continual noticing is the truest I can be.

Although I’ve never read Alphabetical Diaries, it’s a continual noticing that feels familiar. The author arranges every sentence from ten years of journal entries in alphabetical order. Scrambled yet coherent, when you rearrange the every day there’s a new connective tissue that emerges. All this preface to say that I’m not here to write a deeper analysis on autofiction but rather present a list of items and thoughts that have passed through me the last few months. Perhaps then I can parse out a story. If you couldn’t tell, the satisfying conclusion has yet to emerge, and this is the most specific I can currently be.

A list of specifics:

Activities I’ve enjoyed

• Chinatown Basketball Club - I’ve only been to one practice but it’s been really nice so far! The last time I played basketball was in high school with my friends who were much more serious about it than me and entertained my incessant fouls on occasion.

• Catch and Release Fishing - one of my favorite artists mobblele fishes and lately I’ve seen a rise of co-opting the fish bro aesthetic. Aspirationally I wanted an excuse to sit by the water and feel the slowness of time. Realistically I underestimated the slowness of time (even slower because it might be too cold now), and I slightly worry about hurting the fish. That being said I have caught no fish (so far).

• Working on my computer at Silence Please - an immersive soundscape, mostly quiet (depending when you go) cafe that plays the best ambient music.

• Locking my phone in a box and Flight Simulator - M recommended the former, it’s a box that literally won’t reopen for the specified period of time. Flight simulator is an app where you go on “flights” (airplane mode). Lately I’ve felt slightly too wired to the internet at all times, so been experimenting ways to go offline. Let me know if you have any other recs!

• Printing like Time is Never Running Out - I recently printed a fish zine. I designed it from 12-2am one night and printed it at 9am the next morning. The last year I acted like my projects were of utmost gravity that had to be Finished Immediately but it’s been nice to just do things with no deeper purpose. There’s enough time to do everything, serious and unserious.

• Bike to Randall’s island in the summer. The best part was the ride around the water. Warning: getting a citi bike onto the bridge is Not Great

Art that I’m thinking about

• Jiffy by Chris Kim a 130 page comic about a hotdog trying to find its way. The full pdf is available through Shortbox Comics Fair which just ended, but the preview on Twitter is Very Good and made me want to try writing fiction again.

• Avocado Ibuprofen - I borrowed this comic anthology from L. It’s hard to describe the exact kind of comic this is - a mixture of crunched up images and verbose text that Hits Different. I have no idea how someone would find this work if not for the FYP; when I tried to query the vibe nothing came up. It’s inspired me to be looser and more experimental with my work.

• Tehching Hsieh Life Works at the Dia Beacon - I will spare going into details, but the level of durational performance from Cage Piece to Thirteen Year Plan really made me think. I’d recommend looking him up on wikipedia, more on this later.

• Mitski: The Land Movie - At the end she sang Washing Machine Heart and got off stage with a smile thanking her fans. A joyous concert!

• Tuna Hake - I played this once at an event it was awesome. Fish Tony Hawk.

Notable life events

• I left my wallet, airpods, and keys overnight in a chipotle. Last year I left it on a moving train. Thankfully I got both back. Less dire but still sad, I’ve lost my are.na hat and yellow shacket too. These I did not get back… there’s something to be said about being more present…

• I moved to SF and then back to NY. I half-wrote a reflection on it, DM me if you want to read it (it’s a semi WIP)! I think I have talked about the similarities and differences between the cities many times now, and am still surprised that each time I reflect slightly differently.

Thinking about

• Word and Image: Jenny Holzer, afffirmations, words on hats and shirts, that instagram video that is comic sans on a gradient background your friend keeps on dm-ing you…

• Being known v. being true. Performance art in the digital age…

• Collaborating! I am open to lightweight collaborations on experiments if we’re on similar wavelengths. I’ve done most things solo so far and want to exercise this muscle again (time dependent). More specifically, I am trying to understand coding more heuristically… will trade any design knowledge I have for some insights…

Have a great one! As always, feel free to reach out if anything is of interest.

Connie

PS It may appear that I’ve posted this from a different account. Basically my original substack account was attached to my old email that I made when I was eight (pandaninjaspy6676@gmail.com). In the process of transferring the publication I didn’t realize it wouldn’t move all my followers. Not that I post on Notes yet but anyways if you want to follow my new account it’s lol

The day prior I had met up with some people from the co-op, the first time this particular group of people had met in three years. An intersection of time - do you think you can be in two places at once? You are at an intersection and you look both ways before crossing.

The song traced a bittersweetness in my memory - the lingering desperation I had in college for approval and foolish belief that if I achieved certain goals I would finally become the person I wanted to be without looking any closer. I had forgotten parts of myself as a result.1 With no one around to witness them, it was if they were never there.

Three years since is so much time, yet so little. I had done so much, yet so little, but at the very least I was slowly becoming myself again. Towards the end of 2023, I made a website as a declaration that I was going to make art and share it and it was going to be bad and inconsistent and unpolished but at the very least! At the very least I was going to try!

nestled in winter

I wanted to make a website to hold the entirety of myself and spent a lot of time fiddling around trying to find definition. I didn’t really know what I was going to create and judging by what I had done in the past, there wasn’t a clear theme. Looking back, I’m somewhat impressed with being able to consistently chip away at designing and coding the current version of connie.surf over a few days2. At the end, it was nice to have a vessel to explain my current self and what I wanted to become.

the borders of winter and fringes of spring

Into the spring, I self-published a comic compilation to express and get out some feelings I had going through major life changes. Speaking things into existence only makes them more real, but it was what I needed to see clearly. It was how I could move forward.

Spring was also a chance to share said work with the world, I started posting more on social media and put my comics and zines up at some consignment stores. I didn’t expect for a few friends and random people to reach out to me to tell me how much the work resonated with them. How beautiful it is to be seen for myself as I was!

Later on, I also got the chance to teach my first workshop at camp, at the end we all made mini 4-8 panel comics and did a small show and tell which was so incredibly heartwarming. I also did an array of experiments for camp under a general theme of machine yearning (or more aptly different manifestations of my own yearning).3

as spring washes into summer

I started writing as a way to understand the world, not just myself. I’d record articles, quotes, and things from my every day life over a few months in my messenger app, until enough bubbled up into a coherent stream of thoughts. A looser kind of research that was a slow accumulation over time, which felt like a new way of seeing.

I rounded off the year with several more ambitious software projects simmering in my brain, to only run out of time with other random life events (moving, getting sick, work) which left only scattered time to dedicate to them and some major skill issues where I didn’t know how exactly to develop them or start.

Into the new year, I want to develop more practice to tackle these harder projects. Good work in a new medium takes a very long time and a repeated, consistent effort. I never had a semblance of a routine until I started running two miles a week this year. If I could do that, maybe I could set aside a few hours too to dedicate to practicing, instead of running away behind a laundry list of ideas and obligations.

As part of practice, I also want to live lighter. Instead of spending so much time trying to predict the future and analyze what the “right thing” to do, I want to let go of expectation and be guided from what stirs within me.

The past year I felt like I had lived in a way that was markedly different from how I spent the four before that. At the end of this year I read “The Creative Act” and felt a deja vu for a fair share of the book. I had not done that much, but I had done something at the very least, I moved forward.

When I first graduated I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. The most I could articulate was a vague desire to maybe illustrate some things and sell it at an art fair. I sold at a few this year with the help of friends who had extra space on their table, and even tabled with friends at the very end of the year! I can understand it more clearly, it wasn’t the act of selling at a fair really, it was being able to connect with others over creativity as a way to interact with the world. And it didn’t have to be at a fair even, just passing conversations on the train, at a chance encounter, on the interwebs, anywhere and anytime at all was more than enough for me. I’m so grateful to everyone I’ve met, and have yet to meet!

I hope everyone has a great end of the year, see you next year!

But despite all that, I always hesitated when calling myself an “artist”. Back in high school, I had felt like it was something that needed to be proven. Every time I picked up the pen, I would fall into the trap of evaluating the meaning of my work based on the outcome. How many likes did it get? How many notes? How many people saw it? If no one saw it, did it even happen? If I had poured hours into a piece for it to be consumed in a second, did it even mean anything?

In an effort to get more views and likes I’d try and pander to whatever was popular in culture. If a show had just ended, I’d draw fanart of it. If I drew a girl, I’d tag #blackpink (even if there was no relation). I saw those quick drawings as necessary means to an end where I would have enough followers to break through the algorithm and finally, I could just draw whatever I wanted and have it be seen. Because of the sheer wealth of content competing for attention, I was outputting work, not for self-expression, but in hopes one post would become my lucky golden ticket to becoming known.

And so at the end of all that, I stopped really drawing.

I wasn’t drawing for myself or of myself. Instead, I was drawing myself into what I thought would cater to other’s tastes.

So now, years later, why do I create? What does that mean to me now? What am I doing differently?

I make art, first and foremost, for myself. That way, no matter the outcome, if no one in the world sees it, if no one thinks much of it, if no one likes it, it will have been worth it. Self-expression for me is a way to remember how I want to live in the world. It’s a way for me to make my values and dreams more real through processing my lived experiences.

I still make art for others, not to cater to people’s tastes but rather as a form of connection. We remember art that makes us feel seen and that helps us know how to live. I don’t cry easily, but I cry when I hear Mitski sing Star on stage and I cry reading this article about love and I cry playing this game where someone is lost in space. Maybe that’s why people love participatory art projects, where people respond on a piece of paper to a prompt. And when all those stories are all around you, you realize maybe you aren’t alone after all. And if one person could relate to my work, that would have been more than enough.

And in the end, my art, a record of the people and versions of myself that I’ve met, is a part of my existence that will never go away.

I’ve always loved comics. They embraced the nonlinearity of thought, the connections that teased between truth and vagueness, a fluid space where things could make sense if you looked at it sideways. Oftentimes thoughts and feelings can’t be expressed in two dimensions, maybe they can’t even in three or four or five. Even when I think I have something figured out, there was another truth in my subconsciousness that had been there, nestled between the folds, coloring my actions. But I like trying to capture it, even imperfectly, because the gaps between action and thought are still beautiful too.

I think a degree of this also has to do with my feeling of perception. Writing has always been slightly scary, because I’m never sure if I’m presenting myself how I want to be, and always worry about my words being interpreted the wrong way2. But with comics it doesn’t matter, there was never a correct interpretation, and it’s unclear what part of myself is in the panels anyways. In a way, the abstraction from the author is freeing, I never wanted it to be about me anyways, whatever meaning that was there, I meant it for you.3

notes

• Comic recs! I love this comic by mabel ye, formyth’s comic work is also wonderful, look back and goodbye eri by tatsuki fujimoto were also good oneshots

• I could also never forget koko be good the first book that got me into comics

• Initially I debated writing something this month. I didn’t know what to do, because none of my thoughts that had floated through my mind the last few weeks could manifest into a 3 minute essay of a couple of vague anecdotes and satisfying ending. But I wanted to keep this monthly habit, at least until the end of the year, so here we are.

• I hope everyone is hanging in there as we approach the end of the year ⋆｡‧₊

When I read this article I scoffed, I was going to be different and follow my dreams of finding the intersection of art and technology, which I had then believed to be UX Design. To be fair, no one in my immediate circles at the time knew what that was so I had thought it was a magical intersection of art, which I enjoyed, with some practicality of a stable job and real-world applicability (tech? maybe this also meant I could positively impact the world?).

But years later, I realized that I had fallen into the trap of optionality. I did exactly what he said I’d do. I maximized all my options. I joined as many clubs as possible on campus. I filled all my weekends and weekdays up. I maximized the classes I could take. I met as many people as possible and did as much as I possibly could. I think there was a purpose to every hour of my day.

Partially it was because I was terrible at deciding. Every opportunity I didn’t experience could have been life-changing. I saw so many futures in front of me that I wanted to choose them all. I wanted to be a product designer, I wanted to be a researcher, I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to do things that I had never experienced before.

In a way, it was very unsustainable. I never really did that many artistic things after high school and during college and now, trying to do it again, I find it very hard. It was hard doing research and school at the same time and I struggled to fully focus on the concepts I was learning. I ended up still doing product design which was something I enjoyed and am happy things worked out that way, but whatever my crazy artistic dream was, it was still cooking.

In New York, I still do the same thing. I say yes to a lot of things. I don’t know how to choose, I don’t know what compass drives my path in life. I’m okay with meandering to figure it out, but I think I want to commit to some sort of dream even if it turns out to be not what I thought it would be. There’s a fallacy to think I can optimize for the safest, happiest, best path, so much so that I do too much and decide very little. For once, instead of accumulating choices, what if I just chose?

Placing constraints is a very scary thing. But it’s also wonderful. I still love slow summers, a constant cycle of the same things and same people, the same jokes and same sunsets, gently blending together until I can’t tell the difference between the days. Before you know it, it’s another day, and the sun has risen again.

I tried to code a word art thing in javascript yesterday.2 It’s cooking.

notes:

• shower thought: I feel like both doing random stuff is yolo but also committing to something even if it might fail is yolo. sorry i’m like this… genz…

• I’ve been trying to read - I really liked reading Stay True

• initially this newsletter was an accountability thing a year ago for me to make things purely for myself with no end goal of becoming famous but little things I have actually made so I’m going to dump all my anime drawings here

  

• pls text me any thoughts ab this idk I am trying to connect my thoughts

  lowkey I find writing my thoughts semi publicly to be a bit stressful disclaimer as usual down here tbh there’s nothing wrong with choosing optionality and am incredibly grateful for the way my life has gone and the opportunities I was able to do, there is some dramatization in here for the sake of the point which is I’m going to try and do art/tech/experimental related things instead of thinking of doing them

Where does the moral responsibility of it go? Is it up to businesses to source more sustainable materials, pay fair wages, and reduce their emissions? Or is it up to the consumer to buy the more “eco-friendly” choice, to stop spending so recklessly on single-use goods, to do everything in their power to minimize their carbon footprint.

For a while, I thought it was my responsibility. In high school, I tried to organize a single-use straws movement in my town. For some reason at the time it had been idealized as a gateway into getting rid of single-use plastics as a whole. Once the straw problem had been tackled, then perhaps next water bottles, disposable cups, etc. etc. In reality, the retrospective on the straw craze had concluded that it ended up being an easy way out for businesses to be greener when in reality they would continue doing more damaging activities under the guise that they were saving the environment by switching their plastic spoons to wooden and plastic straws to paper. I always wondered about that take because I suppose if I was Big Business, and given the choice to save the planet or increase margins, I’d always choose the former. No one wants to do the bad thing right?

Perhaps I felt and still feel a visceral connection to this sense of personal responsibility because in high school they took us to see a landfill and a recycling plant (where I learned only 10% or some crazy low number ever gets recycled) and I felt incredibly shocked seeing the enormity of stuff being buried into the ground or manually sorted.

Even though it’s been a while since the landfill tour, I feel like I find all the more reason to care. Every day to work I see the climate clock counting down the time left, I read passages about superfunds and fires, and during lunch we discuss the smoky east coast summer. We’ve known this for so long that even when the effects are in our face so much we can’t look away, we still don’t know what to do.

It feels like all I can do is vote, donate, and do minor acts of individual action that I know might be a blip in the sea but offers hope to me. I try to bring my reusable utensil set/waterbottle/containers wherever I go, I try to not get too much takeout, I try to avoid buying new things and using e-commerce websites and those snacks in tiny bags, but sometimes I realize that this whole world’s economy relies on making waste and on making new things1. I would have to live an incredibly monastic life to avoid making waste. But I can’t resist thinking that doing all this means something.2 I mean, the consumer resistance against Shein means something right? Consumer action means something right?

left image - a dream for circularity instead of straight waste https://twitter.com/LegoLostAtSea/status/1614674823220985856 right: an art piece where an artist didn’t throw out any of their waste over a month and a recording of all its accumulation

My individual action is my tiny beacon of hope for the future, even though it’ll probably do nothing to stop the stream of making things, buying things, and burning things into the air. But it’s too sad to think of hopelessness as the inevitable. I toil and live my life in hopes of a better future. If I was given the choice, even if I’m not really given the choice, I’ll take it and do my best.

notes from my brain crevices

1. I’ve been meaning to write for so long that I’m pretty sure I’ve been thinking about it weekly - I appreciate that people I know and don’t know follow this but I think I got wrapped once again in a - I’m producing content that’s going to spend people’s attention and I want people to spend it well so maybe I shouldn’t write ~ also tiktok brain even though I’m not even on tiktok ~

2. Lately I’ve also been very interested in ambient images - something about it being a little off from reality is kind of the magical-ness of real life

   

3. I’m in NYC for the next year for my first postgrad job - if you’re here please lmk!

Disclaimer: In 2 min post-writing this retrospect I know I have a more extreme sense of individual responsibility regarding environmentalism, but I think on my personal evaluation of How Much Ability I have over what I could do, it’s my own bar I set myself to. Everyone has their own bar and level of ability to take environmental actions given individual circumstances etc. etc.

During the final days I felt like I was dividing the time I had left into tinier and tinier pieces. Kind of like mitosis, or binary search1, I started seeing weeks into days into half days and hours and minutes. Trying to see in each subdivision how many things I could cram while still an undergrad. It was never a goodbye, but a see you later, and sure enough I’d seem them again maybe late at night maybe in the early morning maybe while walking to commencement. It turns out the “some infinities are bigger than other infinites” argument in the fault in our stars is wrong and in reality the space between different pairs of numbers is all the same. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t sad when leaving campus, I had said so many preemptive goodbyes to only see people again that a part of me got stuck in the infinity between the numbers. There was still time, there will always be time, and it’s never running out.

A small part of me, maybe because it seemed like I was going to be a student forever, thought that time was like a horizontal field and I was only choosing to go forward2. I could go back if I wanted to, undo the mistakes I had, change the course of action that was my future. There’s a show about that, where this college student is stuck in an endless time loop and joins different clubs trying to see if he could make his college life perfect, and falls short each time. In the end, the reality is the choices he made didn’t matter, the real catalyst for change was altering his attitude at the end.

I can’t split time any further and I can’t go back either but regardless I’m hopeful the compass that was shaped carries me into gentler waters. I’ll see ya’ll again and happy grad (even if you haven’t congratulations on the end of may)!!

pic cred: https://twitter.com/whotfisjovana/status/1659316589366214657

notes:

• I am in Japan/Korea for the first time ever :O and then visiting sf/van real quick

• idk why my posts sound kind of serious I think writing more than a paragraph just causes it to be that way I blame to all the kings men cuz now I really like long metaphors

• I want to create more!!!! hmu if you wanna make art tgt

Honestly the reason I procrastinated is because I’m bad at digital presence. The other day my friend said something along the lines of ‘are you going to write it in your newsletter?’ in a joking way but then it hit me the visceral-ness of the action that a literal email from this newsletter goes into people’s inboxes (? is that how substack works). Something’s scary about shouting into an audience I can’t really see, and maybe that’s why I only post on Snapchat (RIP). I want to be known but I don’t want to at the same time. Ever since middle school I thought it would be cool if I could become famous without my identity being revealed, but after 10 years of trying to do an art tumblr I gave up and told people to follow my handle. Even though more people were looking at my art, I still felt the same unfulfillment back when no one was.

I’ve subscribed to this semi popular writer on this app a few months ago, and at first I felt critical that she wrote in a purposefully vague way where it almost seemed like I was reading a story with no characters and no continuity. Kind of like a nice picture of how the light goes through the leaves of the trees. I didn’t know why people read it, but maybe I had got the whole digital presence thing wrong the whole time and things don’t have to make sense to be appreciated. I hope I was able to say what I wanted to without saying anything it at all.

Things I like! →

• buttondown.email/formyths (an art newsletter that I love seeing updates from)

• this field guide is amazing →

  

• in other news I’m graduating in a month - it’s very spooky !!!

I’ve learned three printmaking techniques so far, each one being more tedious than the last. Most recently, aquatint, requires cleaning and degreasing a copper plate (1 hour), covering it in a resin dust and baking it for 400 degrees (1 hour), covering it in multiple rounds of hard ground to protect the plate and dipping it in acid so it could bite grooves into the virgin plate (2.5 hours), before finally printing, which requires covering it in ink, cleaning it off in a heated stove, and putting it in a press (.5 hours). It’s a lot of waiting and has a high accuracy of error. You could put too much or too little, wait too long or too little, or even do things out of order (which I did).

What was the point of wasting my Saturday afternoons to sit and think of nothing at the studio. There was a reason why everything was digital, why no one even bought physically printed things anymore. What’s the point of putting hours into something that you can’t even predict? What’s the difference between this 5 hour print and something from the copy machine?

Every class I had taken in college to that point was pretty pragmatic and was immediately validating. You pass the test cases or you don’t. Everything I did was also pretty pragmatic. I planned all my homework on my gcal and I immediately went to office hours if I couldn’t get the answer. I was pretty good at talking about feasibility and MVPs and a/b testing. I didn’t reply to people on Tinder because it “wasn’t the right time” because I had to focus on recruiting and then by the time that ended it had been six months (it was never the right time). Even though printmaking was abnormally slow, I forgot what slowness and tediousness was like.

Perhaps I was allergic to slowness because the entire world spun quickly. In a class I took, there was some thesis about how trains made the world go too fast and too blurry for people which was why floral baroque fonts disappeared and in its place came Futura. And now the world turns ever faster, with automations and AI becoming the promise of a future where thought becomes synonymous with reality. I should get the “coolest” job as fast as possible. I should “change the world” as fast as possible. I shouldn’t dream of the life I want to live, because I should be living it right now.

Everyone told me to drop the art class and I couldn’t figure out why I was still in it for a while. Maybe I like how illogical it is. How slow and messy and how the outcome really doesn’t feel worth it. A while ago, when I was going through it, my friend told me all I could do was bide my time. I had to wait for the oven to heat up, I had to wait for the hard ground to dry, I had to wait for the acid to bite through the copper, I had to wait for the ink to be scrubbed off so I could finally see what mattered.

random updates:

1. I went to a pliny exhibit and it was very cool turns out ithaca had this pseudo barter economy thing until 20 years (ago?) and it reminded me of a rlly good scene from lady bird

   

2. trying to take a chill senior spring but idk what to drop which is why I’m still in printmaking but maybe it’s not that deep

3. my skin has gotten better because I put a heap of cerave on it everyday

What had changed in the last three months? Factually, I was able to do design work that made me love design again and had a good time in NYC and SF. Although more successful time spent then I thought, there were still a lot of things I said I would do with this time off that I continued to not do - I didn’t make anything with creative tech, I didn’t write a thesis (even though I talked to a professor about it), the amount of objectively creatively new self-expressionist things I made was an incredibly low amount.

But nevertheless I’m happy that I kept on writing these Substacks. Something about writing these fundamentally changed me. I started a running Notes about things I wanted to write about, things I had more than an inkling of a thought on. My friend in high school said he’d never talk about his crushes out loud because it made the feelings even more real. But I want to make these feelings more real, to unravel these opinions, to assert the future I want. I want to have a compass to follow, that no matter what happens, at the very least I know it will never have been a waste because I was doing what I love. I hope to map it out with ya’ll in the coming months and years, and hope everyone follows their dreams too!

notes I wrote down that I want to explore in the new year

1. paradoxically wanting to be known and not wanting to be, the rise of influencer culture and internet presence

2. an even faster world with ai?

3. what is truly the right future with sustainability?

4. capitalizing off of identity to gain influence

5. is there a modular approach to social media?

6. who controls the media

7. I would like to grow up more slowly

8. change through collective action/consumer behavior

9. art consumption through the years

10. binaries

11. accepting transience

12. information categorization and retrieval

13. the state of media and the fight for attention

14. making functionally useless things

15. making the world a better place

As a last note, the year as a whole for me has been a lot of growing and understanding why I act the way I do, which should be obvious because who knows me better than myself, but even so it’s hard to actualize sometimes. I still don’t know what I’ll be doing six months from now, but send me anything interesting you find!!

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Yet in the last couple years something had happened that left me shook. It was something that was so unexpected and surprising that even as I replayed the events that led up to it I didn’t understand how it could have happened to me, how I couldn’t have foreseen it. If I had truly lived in this rational world, then why had the leaves furled out at that time? Had there been something wrong with me?

I processed it in different extremes. In one, I started practicing magical thinking, superstitiously thinking I could prevent it again by avoiding certain actions. Yet in the other, in an attempt of kindness towards myself, I adopted a Jack Burden-esque Great Twitch-esque mentality towards life. Everything that happened was already written out in a table of contents I couldn’t see, by an agenda I didn’t understand, and my actions were inconsequential.

There wasn’t a particular resolution to this, gradually with time, sand had suffocated the worst of it away. Despite everything, I was still myself. But as the future looms with uncertainty, I find myself unable to decide. How do I get to the future I want? How much control do I even have over that? What should I do? Why doesn’t the fortune-telling shop on the street offer a free trial?

Perhaps I should just trust it’ll be okay.

lol kinda more srs newsletter this month than expected (I think I j tend to write in a very lofty way sometimes) - here are sm things I’ve been up to →

1. my skin has gotten suspiciously bad like not sure if this is a metaphor for something rn but if someone has skincare recs pls lmk

2. the twitter chaos makes me sad bc everything I post is a shitpost and everything I write longform is just a post

3. Not sure when this happened but recently I’ve been missing Pennsylvania as if it had become some sort of synonym for a soft place where nothing happens

That being said all I have around are several drafts with half-formed statements and an anime screenshot or two. There ended up being several contradictory factors that limited me actually writing something 1. this urge for it to be meaningful and well polished and 2. the then chore of making something beautiful. By sharing this project I had inadvertently made the audience no longer myself, but the people subscribed. I wasn’t catering to my needs anymore, but to others, and a pressure to capture some vague universal sentiment. Then honestly it had become the same thought process I had when posting some life update to Instagram, a pressure to make something worth people’s time and think of me a certain way, a performance rather than a recording.

I have a lot of half-formed thoughts about online existence and what it means to craft our identity publicly but for now I think I’m going to end it with I figured out why I can’t bring myself to write. Perhaps instead of writing for the sake of crafting some kind of picture of myself or writing thinking about what people with think of it I should write for the sake of writing and nothing else.

I wanted to leave this update with a bouquet of links of things people have made that really resonated with me (to the point that they aren’t saved anywhere but my brain which is actually pretty impressive considering how much stuff I consume everyday):

• https://thesoundof.love/ by Chia

• the 100 year snowstorm by Jenni

• UNDER A STAR CALLED SUN bitsy game by cecile richard

• Leaves by Lloyd Schwartz, a classic

• On morality, hero worship, and why judgement isn’t helpful by Tatiana Mac

• this random ad my friend took a picture of and posted on her story and lowkey I thought it was really deep

  

  Anyways I hope to accidentally make things that resonate like these did for me.

random life updates:

• going to kernel mag launch in nyc tomorrow !!! literary arts magazines hold a very special place in my heart since high school

• idk why I haven’t seen The Rehearsal yet but I really want to

• talked to research professor about a thesis but ideas are still … festering … if anyone has interesting links please send them my way

• have become a glasses gorl

• will be in boston for hack mit bc why not xD

I decided I needed to gap for several reasons. One was that the mentality I had in university was taxing, I felt like I had to constantly be productive otherwise the 30k I spent on tuition had all gone down the drain. The second was that if I had graduated early, I didn’t know what to do next. I could spend the next weeks avoiding thinking or trying what I truly was interested in, which would lead me to confront what questions doing absolutely nothing entails. Rather, I could do it earlier and perhaps grow into a stronger person because of it.

Last night, when I was thinking about all the decisions I had made in my life, I had grown scared I made the wrong one again. For all the times my friends had told me the unlucky events were out of my control, I truly believed that I would be the cause of my own demise, which made moving forward brashly into life a terrifying one. Even after thinking it through, even after multiple affirmations this wasn’t as rash as it seemed, I laid there, paralyzed, that I had once again messed up. Time moved abominably slowly, I couldn’t bring myself to march forward with assurance.

What ended making me feel an inkling better was the weirdest thing. It was LinkedIn histories of people meandering for years and years out of school to gradually reach towards where they wanted to be. I had long believed that a circuitous path was out of the norm, one to be avoided. I wanted to see the hoops and hurdles that lay ahead, a clear monopoly board that detailed what to do to get towards what I thought I wanted. But seeing the gentle curves of experiences led by the joy of heading down a path with no end in sight made me feel like it was all going to be alright.

generic updates:

• helped make the layout for reboot’s annual kernel magazine and lowkey felt incredibly satisfying and made me reconsider what brings me joy and makes me happy - kind of want to detail that in a different post

• proclaiming you’re going to start making things for no utilitarian purpose is incredibly hard to actually do esp. when the reasoning for gapping is to also focus on recruiting x.x

• hung out with PA kids after 2 months of traveling was very nice

• feeling very anxious for letting go of my club commitments but hoping it will turn out okay