may 2, 2025
april recap
April was kinda wild. Some interesting things this month:
- I saw Hamilton in theatres and that was awesome. Harmonies are awesome and good music really does bring me to tears.
- Ben Grosser - a digital artist creating some really cool stuff. Remind me of my creative coding days
- Tyler Yin - also another really cool digital artist out of brooklyn. Making some really interesting stuff and a great inspiration for my own website too.
- Crawlspace is interesting to browse. I'm coming across a lot of nice looking digital art sites while exploring for the new Foundation site.
april 27, 2025
wool vs silo
I just finished Dust today. I wanted to talk about this before I forget because I also just finished season 2 of the tv adaptation of this called Silo. Dust had a really great ending and I felt so much relief for the characters. It was really satisfying yet bittersweet and reminded me of what I've heard about The Mist, which I have not yet read or seen. Some thoughts:
- I appreciate the way Hugh Howey didn't feel the need to write the logistics about how they got from point A to point B, they just get there and now you get to read all the actually interesting parts of a dystopian story. I guess it was written as a series of short stories but props to him anyway.
- It was a really interesting prespective on revolutions. Of course as people we want transparency and to be treated as humans and dying for that cause is noble. But what happens after? Who can we trust to lead us now? Is the fight worth it if you lose all your loved ones along the way? What is worth rebuilding for? It takes so much resilience to be able to keep going and that might just be our innate instinct to survive as a species but I think those were questions that this book brought up for me.
- It's wild how much of our history can be shaped by a single man. A man who thinks he knows better than anyone else smh.
- I think what's frustrating about the show is the focus on the spectacle of rebelling and fighting and not much on the characters or the consequences. It's noble to fight for justice but there's so much nuance to the choices that people make and the show was very gratuitous self-sacrifice and monologue. "For the greater good". The show wanted you to see that something was moving on screen and that meant progress and you don't need to think any deeper than that.
april 25, 2025
ideas
Just want to rant about what I might want for this site. I'm not sure what I want to write about yet but I'm planning on gathering a bunch of things that bring me joy and see where that takes me. I'm hoping this can be a place where I can share random design inspiration, thoughts on new things I'm learning, and my opinions on books and movies. A place where I can share my art progress and thoughts on life. I'm also hella unfamiliar with html rn. I haven't touched it in 5 years and it's honestly a little frustrating but I'm excited to learn it again. I can be more playful this time and not worry too much about usability. It would probably be the most unusable site but it's mine!
Seeing all the cool sites that people have built on here reminds me of the days of building my guild on Neopets in elementary school. Spending all day in the computer room while my parents worked or Dad was outside and there's Jack in the Box on the kitchen table waiting for me to eat. I guess this is kinda like journaling. But to the world wide web.
april 24, 2025
hello world
So cheesy, I’m sorry. They taught you to do that in school and I think it’s kinda cute — the way we talk to computers. I saw an article the other day that said OpenAI lost a shit ton of money so far because people say please and thank you to chatgpt. That’s what they deserve tbh. But I think we forget how much humanity there still is in the world. People argue with bots on twitter and reddit and no one is leaving their house anymore to pickup food but we still say thank you to our chatbots. I guess in a way we all want connection and people see chatbots as a safe space and can’t hurt us the way humans can. They’re predictable. And people want the certainty that they’ll get an answer to their questions without being embarrassed or shamed. They can create art without the feeling of failure that comes with being vulnerable and not even achieving what you wanted.
Anyway, chatgpt isn’t “thinking”. It’s just showing you what you’re most likely to hear if you asked literally anyone else. goodbye world