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Some highlights from the last month (ish) About the city I biked along the seawall, which I hadn’t done in a while Watched A couple of World Cup games — Norway vs England, and Spain vs Argentina I finally watched X-Men '97 (season 1), which was good! I need to watch season 2 soon The Odyssey was good I should probably see it once more in theatres before it leaves Chungking Express makes the…
Touch Grass went to the local bird sanctuary on Canada Day where, fittingly, I saw a lot of Canada geese and ducks, which followed us around when they saw we were carrying birdseed. (you’re allowed to feed the birds at the sanctuary.) I haven’t gotten around to looking at the digital photos I took, but eventually… walked along Granville Street downtown, which is a car-free zone for the World Cup.…
Can I keep doing this weekly?? let’s see This week I started and finished reading The Odyssey , translated by Emily Wilson. I enjoyed it! Wilson’s translation was easy to read and it was fun to finally see the bits and pieces that I’ve learned via cultural osmosis in the text. There’s a lengthy introduction that discusses the context of the story and translation that I still have to read, which…
I took this week off from work and I had wanted to spend the time being wildly productive, but of course reality happened and it was [fart noises] pretty chill instead. I made zero progress on any side projects, but I did clean my apartment, touch grass, hang out, read books, play Destiny, and get cooked by the sun. I did a riso workshop at Fluoro which was very cool! I’ve wanted to take one for a…
Happy weeknotes number 40! I thought about doing something special for this, but realized I have too many unfinished projects that I would rather work on instead. Perhaps when I hit 50. Once again, too much time has passed since the previous entry that I’ve forgotten what’s happened and what I wanted to include. Plein Airpril I finished 30/30 days of the plein airpril painting challenge! This was…
These days, I am preoccupied with: 1) painting every day for plein airpril ; 2) uh, that’s kind of it, actually, I thought there would be more to this list. PleinAirpril This is my third year of participating in PleinAirpril! It’s an art challenge to paint every day of the month. Despite the name, I am not actually painting en plein air but rather from photo reference, and am using this…
I visited the San Francisco Bay Area twice last year, and meant to write about my trips but never got around to it. I figure I’ll never write that post at this point, but I still would like to share the photos I took, so here they are. Caltrain train! train! train! Stanford University I took the Caltrain to Palo Alto station , which sits at the edge of campus; I then took a shuttle bus that…
I was thinking the other week about how I should write weeknotes more often. Last year I wrote fewer, after getting tired of them and finding fulfillment elsewhere; now I’ve come back round to it. It may do me some good again to document such things. I suppose this cycle is natural. Projects I remain scatterbrained and useless, which manifests in working on many different things and completing…
if the layout is messed up in your rss reader, apologies, I did some gruesome CSS stuff—I recommend reading it in your browser. What is this? you ask. Well, it’s a tale as old as time. I had a vision, and then it was Sunday night and I hadn’t achieved it. As I result, I present you this: something that might be interesting, if I spent a few more days on it. As it is, I feel my interest flagging…
Don’t tell my boss, but I am thinking about vacation. I am thinking about spending creative energy making something that will not convert or have any business value whatsoever. I am thinking about running off into the metaphorical field of flowers and playing with toys. The standard disclaimer: the job is fine. I think labouring for a company just becomes intolerable, no matter the company, after…
Everyone wrote one of these and I wanted to too. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my incomplete projects , and then recently about my unproductive but joyful holiday break . And currently, I’m busy procrastinating on my media recap, which feels bad, and has felt bad for the past few weeks while it’s loomed over me. I was scrolling through my sketchbook gallery and thinking—hm! I did draw quite…
Cool links delphitools is an amazing collection of small, useful tools. Like this paper sizes reference , something I have had to search for before and wade through annoying websites to find information for. I like the daily game enclose.horse , where you enclose a horse with fences. I’ve played three days so far and have yet to reach 100%. A Website To End All Websites by Henry From Online.…
“Unproductive” in this context refers to my many creative projects I wanted to tackle over the holidays. Instead of working on them, I spent a lot of time hanging out with people. As someone who is unpleasantly introverted, I usually do not like hanging out with people that often. I would rather be at home! But it was good, and I was happy, and there is time in January to do what I wanted to do. I…
I start so many things and then talk about them and then don’t finish them. I thought it might be fun to compile them all here so that they’re not lost to the sands of time. Incomplete projects that I posted about that are more or less abandoned in their current state Weeknotes but fashion In February ( February! geez) I had the idea to write a recap framed by the fashion of xyz, which I excitedly…
How I’m spending my time these days and other things I’m thinking about I’ve been excitedly using my 2026 planner (a Hobonichi Weeks, which technically starts in December 2025). My desire to use a physical planner ebbs and flows throughout the year. I’m currently really into it, on account of the whole shiny new planner thing. Surely this is the year I will fix myself. Related to analogue…
i finally got around to buying and reading comics from this year’s ShortBox Comics Fair and wanted to briefly (very briefly!) record them here note: as of writing, these are no longer available to purchase on SBCF; i’ve linked to the artist websites/socials instead Dream Loop by Vakueva Nina (@inkpangur) this is such a fun comic about dreams in the first one, she dreams that she’s missing her exam…
currently got back into stardew valley paused that tho so i could play freak levels of hades 2 (rolled credits today) (lol) listening to hadestown cast recording – saw it in nyc earlier this month and i have thought of nothing else since mourning the end of sunny weather making stuff not at all! not working on anything. not doing anything for spooky website season. tons of drafts in general for…
that’s it that’s the post
This website I redesigned my website!!! here's what it looks like. if you're reading this via rss, you should go look at it. 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. the redesign view Movies Watched some good…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.”…
The big picture goal this year is to take my creative work more seriously. In execution — do it with more polish. In ambition — aim higher; go bigger. 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…
Thank you Ethan and Gosha for kindly tagging me in this! ^_^v Why did you start blogging in the first place? 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…
not every thought needs to be immortalized on my website been stamping down on my impulse to blather on my website about something stupid in a stupid way, as i already do on social media where it’s FINE because it’s ephemeral there but here it’s like. written into stone after publishing my media recap i thought i would take a nice long break from writing anything because i was tired but instead i…
Note for RSS readers : I designed a custom blog post layout for this, which won’t display properly in an RSS reader (in fact, it will probably be extremely screwed up), so I encourage reading it on my blog itself . After belabouring my favourite media throughout the year on this website, I must now of course collect it all into a single incredibly overwrought blog post. It’s like this: these are…
last weeknotes of the year! i will probably change up this format moving forward less frequent, or not on a schedule or something haven’t thought it through much idk tbh i don’t really have anything to include in this week’s edition haven’t been reading/watching anything i’m slowly chipping away at my media recap, but that’s been going on all month i really want to finish it this year (three days…
can i be real with you? URL you may notice a pattern here, called ‘a lot of newsletters.’ A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox by Henrik Karlsson in Escaping Flatland You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If…
Links Balatro dev swings at PEGI for rating it 18+ because of its ‘evil playing cards’, jokes that he should ‘add microtransactions’ like EA Sports FC 25 to ‘lower that rating to a 3+’ by Harvey Randall in PC Gamer — everything I read about LocalThunk fucking rules. How Video Streamers Conquered the Media by Justin Charity in The Ringer Introducing o(m)g:image by Jim Nielsen — hahaha I Went to the…
Twenty-four is a pleasing number , so I feel inclined to make these weeknotes a bit Better, but not by much. Links dontfuckwithscroll.com by Adam Siekierski — what it says on the tin. I feel very old man yells at cloud whenever I encounter an annoying website that is avoidably so. You didn’t need to make a miserable experience! You could have left the scrolljacking at the door. And yet here we…
internet links Creating an HTML “spoilers” element with no JS by Sage (wavebeem) Gabriele Pala’s website — omg!! I have some notes on Sam Altman’s note-taking advice by Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge — now this is hard-hitting journalism!!! “I am not going to get into the fountain pens question because it, like the paper discussion, is for sickos.” I even wrote a sickos garden post about my hunt…
In general November is the worst month. Cold and rainy. The days are short, and the holiday season hasn’t quite kicked in enough for it to be romantic. URL 1-bit Puerto Rico by Rubén Rodríguez against the dark forest by Erin Kissane Apple Intelligence is for the Stupid Ones by Bridget Carey for CNET Belmonte Ballpoint font by TYPEHEIST — every time I see a nice handwritten font, I’m reminded of my…
note for rss reader enjoyers : this post uses a custom layout, so i recommend reading it on my blog itself . it’ll probably read like hot garbage without the layout (like, hotter garbage than it already is) so what’s all this then ugh, writing this post was KILLING me so now i’m doing this am i perhaps taking the coward’s way out by taking advantage of this chat layout again? i GUESS good thing…
After aspiring to for the past few years, I finally succeeded in updating my site for Halloween! I have a new (spooky) homepage . ⚠ Note : I discuss the homepage’s easter egg here, so I recommend checking it out before reading this post. Concept Making this was a lot less of a linear process than when I was making my previous comic homepage. I started sketching stuff back in late July, but didn’t…
An extremely long post because I haven’t written this in a month and there is so much to catch up on. More like MONTHnotes amirite??!?!? Mille Fiori (2012), Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle, Washington A New Homepage (Spooky) I updated my homepage for spooky season! I’ll hopefully write a longer post about it sometime soon (aaahhhh lol) but I’m happy I finally did something for Halloween, after…
Reading The Canary by Michael Lewis for The Washington Post . h/t to Geoffrey Adams on mastodon, who introduced it so nicely and incited me to read it: This is a remarkable piece of long-form journalism from the Washington Post about a US federal government employee who has used his position to transform the way mining operates, saving thousands of lives. The public has this idea that federal…
Reading & Links How to draw an owl by Jenn Schiffer platforms.fyi, a rhetorical exhibit by Robin Sloan Responsive Comics by Taylor Hunt Un paseo por Mataró by Javier Arce — beautiful photos, photo log goals… Why I Finally Quit Spotify by Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker — yah, I use spotify and the UI annoys me more than any other UI I use on a regular basis in both large (algorithm stuff) and small…
I have a bunch of nebulous ideas for my website bouncing around in my head or splattered horribly across Figma files, which would probably all die in obscurity if I don’t get my shit together, but I’ve been somewhat inspired by Jim Nielsen’s post about his ‘failed’ site redesign, and publicly documenting incomplete work. Also, I’ve had a bit of wine to drink and I feel like my blog is terribly…
It’s July, and the passage of time continues to be disorienting. If you’re reading this in your RSS reader, I must implore you to read it on my blog itself because I designed a nice new post layout just for this and I want you to look at it. an approximation of what it looks like Reading list AI Is Coming For Your Children by Robert Evans in Shatter Zone about AI-generated slop in the form of…
Truthfully, there is not much to recap from the past couple of weeks because I spent all of my time playing Destiny. Destiny 2 The Final Shape , the newest expansion, came out on June 4 and completely consumed me. My review: it’s excellent, and Destiny is the most beautiful game in the world. Highlights: Contest mode raiding: as usual, I spent a silly number of hours attempting the new raid when…
Reading Blurry Type on Stealing Rocks — ooh CSS effect oooh Canonize: Creating a Personal Canon Template by Brendan Schlagel — ‘personal canon’ is a good term…i have a half-assed ‘influences’ page I should work on Coding my Handwriting by Amy Goodchild – cool handwriting Design outside the computer by Eva Decker — writeup of a super cool guestbook on a super cool website!! Printing music with CSS…
I was clicking around Pinterest and fell into the rabbit hole of editorial illustration (very cool, wish that were me (some day)) and then homage covers of The New Yorker . And I thought, huh, that could be a fun thing to do. the tokyoiter by waneella , the parisianer by icinori , the home stayer by luis mendo I’ve long been interested in editorial design—i.e. longform writing and mixed media on…
website I finally made a new homepage, and wrote about it in my last blog post . links Art in the Pre-Apocalypse by Jacob Geller – a video essay! about games and movies and the end of the world. It’s lovely. I’ve had this saved to watch for a long while now. Christopher Kirk-Nielsen’s website redesign is so stylish and 80s. F.C. Variable by Rob en Robin – what a cool use of illustration as a…
Earlier this week, I published a new homepage (version noir) , which takes the form of a comic. Haha, get it, anhvn.com , the vn stands for version noir , but also anh stands for a new homepage , haha hahahaha. I’m hilarious. Half of my conviction to finish this over the weekend was so I could make this joke. Finish it I did, and now I’m going to tell you all about it, as I like to do. preview.…
This website Media diary filters At long last, I got around to adding filters to my watchlist and reading list . They’re never going to be as flexible or data-rich as Letterboxd or Goodreads, but I enjoy this bit of extra control. I’ll have to add similar filters to my games list as well, and probably make use of a more sophisticated tagging system. watchlist filters reading list filters—i don't…
I haven’t written about my website setup in a while, and I thought it’d be nice to compile all the different parts together in one place for easy reference. This post assumes some familiarity with Eleventy , the static site generator I use. I don’t mean this to be instructive, but rather just an explanation of how I do things on my site. this is my garbage Overview I think Eleventy is well-suited…
Note : If you're reading this in a reader app, the layout's going to be borked with all the images—my apologies. Please check it out on my blog itself for the proper display. These days, I feel more appreciative of art. I think, AI can't make this. People continue to create and share things that are surprising, beautiful, personal. There's so much to discover on the internet. Twitter sucks, but a…