/reader

 

Highlight of the week: we had a great day out on Whidbey Island with some internet friends (where I repeatedly failed to guess what mountain we were looking at then finally landed on Kulshan which I did not realize was an indigenous name for Mt. Baker)

Looking forward to: resting this weekend, busy week!

Stuff I did:

• 1.25 hours consulting
• 1.75 hours writing
• 7 hours business development — updating my SOQ
• made sourdough pancakes for Sunday brunch
• finally hooked up my 20-year old monitor as a secondary (I know monitors are cheap nowadays but $200 is $200 and hey, it still works 🤷‍♀️) — it flickered a bit at first but resetting to factory settings fixed it, back-compat is de-lovely
• grabbed takeout and went to eat at the park one nice night
• met with the window treatment people again to finalize color picks and get measurements for the exterior shade
• had a moment of political despair so rerouted my feelings into advocacy — emailed State Parks about some inaccessible bathroom features I noticed and submitted a comment to the governor about Right to Repair bills
• started researching ebikes
• rewatched V for Vendetta
• walked with my friend — ten minutes faster than last week and I felt it 😂

Dinners:

• baked feta pasta
• breakfast burrito + ginger beer (not a great combo)
• Taco del Mar fish burrito — in college someone told me they got Irish food on Cinco de Mayo and Mexican on St. Patrick’s Day to avoid crowds, and since then I’ve generally followed that flip but this year we were going to get fish and chips from the Irish pub then were like burritos would cost half this
• Moroccan-spiced chickpea soup from Let’s Do Lunch
• black bean burgers + (overdone) curly fries — I recently hung a new smoke alarm that was meant to have fewer false positives but it’s gone off like five times in the past two weeks (these weren’t burned, just a little dark at the tips! 😤)
• vegetable salad at a fancier than expected restaurant (conveniently had eaten a bunch of snacks right before)
• pasta with premade sauce and chickpeas

Reading:

• Read Compromised into a Scandalous Marriage by Lydia San Andres
• Re-read Chasing Cassandra by Lisa Kleypas
• Started reading More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner, The Plenitude of Distraction by Marina van Zuylen, and Cooking As Though You Might Cook Again by Daniel Licht
• DNF’d The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond and Witch Hat Atelier 1 by Kamome Shirahama
• Ordered and received The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Woman’s Revolution and Democratic Confederalism by Abdullah Öcalan
• Received The Last Battle at the End of the World by Jeffrey Alan Love

Words I looked up:

• splenetic
• chorography
• Panglossian
• limn

Choice phrasing:

• The copy for this T-rex perfume is perfect 🦖
• I recently followed George Penney on Mastodon and have been charmed by their joyous slice of life observations from Aotearoa NZ

Pretty stuff I saw:

New music I listened to:

• Purity Ring – Obedear 👍

Nature notes:

• camas in the ground are starting to bloom! (the camas in raised beds opened a week or two ago)
• pink rhodie is starting to open
• spotted a garter snake warming up on our front walk
• saw a kildeer fly by at the park! 😍
• saw a bunch of neat bird stuff out on Whidbey! Pigeon guillemots nesting in the cliff below Deception Pass bridge, a bald eagle landing on the road in front of us to grab something, a hummingbird drinking from madrone flowers, a kingfisher calling as it zipped by, an owl hooting at our friend’s Airbnb in the late afternoon
• found a detached chiton (with creature still inside 😳) at Ebey’s Landing in the wrack line

I’m writing to urge the governor to sign the Right to Repair bills HB 1483 and SB 5680.

I worked at the City of Kirkland in the recycling program for nearly eight years, and even in a well-off community, there is significant demand for repair. We hosted Repair Cafes in collaboration with King County which were extremely popular — since leaving the city I attended one as a resident and despite signing up in advance, the event was so busy they couldn’t guarantee I’d receive help.

People don’t like things to go to waste, and it’s disheartening when a minor issue means an item must be replaced altogether. Additionally, cell phones are not covered by Ecycle Washington so there are fewer places to recycle them — many households have a pile of old devices. Keeping materials in use is also beneficial for the environment, and reduces demand for rare earth minerals that are often mined in areas with limited protections for workers.

I urge the governor to sign these and support future right to repair policies.

While supposedly studying hard, in Montpellier and then in Bologna, he put much of his energy into collecting books instead. This was long before printing technology; the only way to get reading matter was to find manuscripts to buy, beg, borrow, or transcribe—all of which he did eagerly.

We’ve been so technologically abundant now that it is easy to forget that once upon a time there was no way to reproduce books easily. I can’t imagine having to copy every word of a book I want to read.

The following passage also jumped out at me:

Often, Petrarch did more than mechanical copying. Besides trying to remember what he read, he also applied his own growing scholarship to each new discovery. He pioneered the art of sensitive editing, using fresh manuscript finds to build up fuller versions of ancient texts that had previously existed only in fragments, doing his best to fit them together correctly. His most important production of this kind was an edition of Livy, a historian of Rome whose huge work survived only in parts. (It is still incomplete, but we have more of it now than in Petrarch’s time.) Having found several new sections in different manuscript forms, he assembled them in a volume together with his copies of other existing parts. The resulting book would belong to a great scholar of the next century, Lorenzo Valla (whom we will meet properly later on); Valla added more notes of his own, improving it further. This was exactly what generations of humanists would continue to love doing—enlarging knowledge, using the evidence to make texts richer and more accurate.

This is what human beings did: enlarging knowledge, by taking the effort to assemble the truth or learnings from different fragments, so that someone else can benefit from it. I relate to this as I am also personally attempting to piece together what I’ve learnt on my own journey and share them here.

Is this like the ancient substack/newsletter?

Finding the Cicero letters at a point when he had just turned forty and was ready for a midlife summation, he realized that he could do the same. He could retrieve and revisit his own letters, copy them, polish them, put them in a satisfying order, and then circulate them to anyone who cared to read them—which in turn would bring more correspondents and new friends to whom he could write even more letters.

…and like me and some others, Petrarch seems to like socialising with books too:

For Petrarch, books are sociable: “They speak with us, advise us and join us together with a certain living and penetrating intimacy.” The ancients make just as good companions as people who consider themselves alive because, as he writes, they can still see their breath in the frosty air

I’m still far from finishing the book, but thought I’ll note and share these highlights before I forget the impressions they had on me. History really puts a perspective on things, and I would like to be a person who will always remember the awe when I encounter books.

In a time when books did not really exist, Petrarch is just doing his own thing copying manuscripts for long periods, collating volumes of text from various sources, sending letters. Nobody asked him to, but he just did it because he wanted to. He did not do it for money or fame, as far as I know. I feel this way about this website. I do it because I want to, yet it is strange how it feels weird in this current society to do something simply because we want to. We can love acquiring and sharing knowledge just for the sake of it, like Petrarch. The act of enlarging knowledge, is truly an uniquely human endeavour and I would say, pleasure.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I'm Anh, a designer and artist based in Canada. My hobbies include, predictably: making and looking at websites, drawing, playing video games, and collecting all of the above on my website.

By day—and also by night, because I maintain chaotic working hours—I design web things at a nice company.

What's the story behind your blog?

I've been Online™ for a long time, and I suppose I've always been "blogging" in some way for years—I'm much more comfortable with writing than speaking, and I'm a weird shy nerd, so I've always drifted towards oversharing on the internet.

anhvn.com started back in 2020 when I decided I would stop using a pseudonym and actually post stuff under my name that people would see. Before that, I had a blog that maybe three friends of mine knew about and looked at, which was freeing but also very lonely. I used to share more personal things then too, like what I did day-to-day or things I was struggling with, but now I'm more private about that. I appreciate vulnerability, but I'm more wary these days for privacy's sake.

anhvn.com is also more than just a blog—as a personal website, it's where I put other interests: unfinished notes and references ("the digital garden"); artwork I post on social media ("the sketchbook"); tracking the media I consume, like movies and books ("the media diary"). I like the freedom of being able to put whatever I want on it and designing how it's showcased.

“anhvn” stands for, of course, “anh visual novel.” (JK, this is just one of my former homepages.) I've used a lot of different names online over the years, and I've also grown out of a lot of them. I based this domain on my actual name because I know I won't be tired of it in a decade or two.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I write "weeknotes" consistently, though not at an actual weekly cadence. To write them, I'm usually pulling from some archive rather than trying to remember what I did—I'll look at my watchlist to see what I last watched; I'll go through my bookmarks app to see what cool links I've saved; I'll scroll through my own social media to see what I've posted about. This all gets dumped into a Markdown document in VS Code, and I keep adding to it and writing until I think I've covered everything or I grow sick of it.

When I'm tired of my usual blogging ways, I'll switch up the format. I've recently started doing chat-style posts—i.e. posts that are formatted like text messages—which are more casual and freeing to write. Once in a while, I'll design a new blog post layout just for a single post, because I'm bored of my current site design and want to play with some different fonts or colours. Sometimes this starts in Figma, and sometimes I do it directly in the browser.

I never have anyone review my posts before I publish, but I'd probably introduce that step in the future if I ever write anything more ambitious—all of my blog posts are quite informal. I do the most minimal of proofreading myself.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

It depends on the creative activity. For computer stuff, I work best when I'm at home—I need the ergonomics of a full desk setup, otherwise I feel slowed down. When writing, I need to be alone (also, preferably, on my regular computer setup), otherwise I can't focus. In my ideal world, I'm designing and writing in the morning while drinking my first coffee of the day.

I like drawing just about anywhere though. Unlike designing or writing, which involve a lot of paring down nebulous ideas into something presentable, drawing feels more expansive and benefits from external stimuli.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

My site is built with Eleventy, a static site generator. It's perfect for me: relatively straight-forward to set up, flexible in how to structure my content, and has a large community. I have a lot of custom pages on my site because it's so easy to set up a new one. And of course, I've written a post about this.

I host all my code on GitHub, and deploy it through Netlify. My domain is registered on Namecheap. It works fine! I don't really know how it all works under the hood—I don't know what npm is, and it's fine—but setting it up was straight-forward enough, and it hasn't broken on me yet, which is a great relief.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I would perhaps take tagging/categorizing more seriously—my blog archive has now grown to a point where it's unwieldy to peruse, and I'll need to go back and tag things for when I add post filtering. Otherwise, I'm quite satisfied with where it's at.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

My domain costs $15.88/year (a steal, really, for a five-letter .com domain of my own incredibly common name). That's the only website cost; I don't pay anything for GitHub or Netlify, and my company pays for my Adobe account, which allows me to use their webfonts.

My website generates zero revenue, which I'm perfectly fine with. If I find myself in a situation where I need to generate income though, I'm sure that would change. I've entertained thoughts of monetising in some way for years—such as through selling digital goods, taking art commissions, or having a ko-fi donations account—but I don't need to right now and that's not a burden I want to take on without good reason. I enjoy having the freedom to do whatever I want online; if I turn it into a business, then that comes with its own set of responsibilities and expectations.

That door isn't closed, though. At the end of the day, we all need to pay rent, so I'm all for blog monetisation.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

• wavebeem's blog — Sage writes about their various side projects, blog redesigns (frequent! love it), and interests.
• A.C. Esguerra writes about journaling and art — exactly the kind of art blogging I want to read more of!
• Melanie Richards' fiber crafts blog is the kind of hobby blogging I want to do more of.
• Reports from Unknown Places by Ninn Salaün—does this count as a blog? you can follow it on RSS!—is a wonderful art project with daily posts about the weather.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Floating around in the back of my mind, always, are comics—two very cool things you should check out are the Comics Devices Library and Standards, Semantics, & Sequential Art. And then I humbly offer you my budding thoughts on webcomics, from my digital garden.

This was the 89th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Anh. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

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