Now page
This now page is a running log of what’s going on in my life. Sometimes short and sweet is perfect, but if you want more checkout my blog!
Projects
- I wanted to have less repos and a more unified codebase for my web presence so I integrated the content of my tech website into my primary website. You can see it in the "Tech projects" link above! The old site was made for viewing on retro computers and I still want a retro-viewable site so I'm working on something that'll enable that!
- Busy getting ready for Twin Cities Zine Fest! Come see me on Saturday Feb. 7 at the Minneapolis Central Library from 10 AM - 4 PM. I'll have a new zine, some retooled zines, and all my other zines! Plus art prints, stickers, and pins.
- Because of everything going on in the United States I've decided to migrate from DigitalOcean for cloud services to Exoscale, a Swiss-based cloud provider. It's sad because I've loved DigitalOcean for over a decade, but the current regime's complete disregard for privacy and their overreach into people's personal lives (among other things) is of too big a concern.
- My next zine, The Journey North, is slowly getting closer to being done. It’s a little different than my other zines as it’s almost entirely poetry. So hyped for you to see it!
- Work on gen.em.otion (my local, self-made generative image model trained exclusively on my art) has been slow going. Turns out, writing detailed and storied descriptions for each piece (up to three times per piece to show process) is exhausting. Who knew?
What I'm loving
- Kagi, a privacy-focused, ad-free search engine, has been my primary search engine for a few months now and I'm still loving it! Very little chance of me ever going back to Google after this experience.
Miscellaneous
- Recently I heard about the app Capacities on the Hard Fork podcast and I've been giving it a try! The UI is heavily inspired by Notion, but the underlying way of thinking about your content is very different. Not sure if it will stick in my life, but I've still been diving in head-first!
- I've been in a fierce fight with my Nespresso machine (it hasn't been dispensing the coffee it's making but instead it just overflows from the inside of the machine). Maybe I've fixed it? Time will tell...
Archived
- Just finished retooling my zines South Pole and Slut to be digest (5.5" x 8.5") size. They were my first two zines and were designed to be 8.5" x 11" and 5.5" x 5.5" respectively. Now all my zines are digest size so I wanted to keep the uniformity
- Purchased a UniFi Layer 3 switch (the Enterprise 8 PoE) and am SO hyped to dive into it and learn more about networking
- Made some small modifications to my website! A revised color palette, a new serif typeface, and a new "More works" page are all live
- I'm a Tailscale user and I love their new services feature that exposes services on a node as their own node
- Obsessed doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about Rosalía's new album Lux. I have more feelings about it in my next newsletter but damn. What an album
- Constantly drooling over folding phones and wishing I wasn't so deep in Apple's ecosystem so I could live the life of a folding phone nerd. Sad
- Caribou Coffee's seasonal spicy mocha has been keeping me warm. It'll be retired soon though, which is very sad
- My new blog and free newsletter are here! I'm so excited to get to share more with you all when it comes to emotional art, zines in progress, tech shenanigans, and so much more. Please subscribe if you're interested! No spam I promise!
- Adding new features to Prolific—currently working on the “Certified Fine Art” feature for storing, referencing, and editing entries where each entry serves as a single piece of “fine art” I made and am selling
- Running the Emotional by Design store is one of my life’s dreams. I’ve been building it slowly on Shopify and want to soon bring on more vendors, start building my social presence, and setup some pop-up markets!
- Working hard on bash scripts to help aid backups of my cloud and local servers, daily-driver laptop, and certain cloud platforms. I'm trying to get to a 3-2-1 backup plan but need to setup some infrastructure first
- I converted from G00gle's analytics platform to Plausible! I'm using the free community version and so far it's been great. It was easy to setup and it's so much cleaner and direct than its predecessor
- Recently I’ve been gently dipping my toes into using LLMs (first ChatGPT but I've decided I like Claude more) for helping me with things like preparing lunches and breaking down steps for building my shop in addition to working on gen.em.otion (Listen I know LLMs and this AI bubble/boom are touchy topics. I write more about my thoughts and relationship with AI tools in my new gen.em.otion blog post)
- Sadly the best pair of glasses I've ever owned broke, but I've ordered new ones from Zenni Optical and I'm really interested in how they'll look. Their mixed-reality try-on tool is both cool and needs work
- Anxiously awaiting Brandi Carlile's next album and listening to "A War With Time" on repeat
- We moved into a new townhome apartment in Minneapolis featuring gorgeous dark wood trim, lots of built-ins, and beautiful natural light! However the unpacking is a whole other story... yuck... (Also! We have the most lovely neighbors!)
- Coming up soon is another sick zine fest! I’ll be tabling at Midwest Queer + Trans Zine Fest on October 18 and 19! It runs from noon to 5 PM on both days and will be held at Open Book here in Minneapolis
- Recently I’ve been gently dipping my toes into using ChatGPT for helping me with things like preparing lunches and breaking down steps for building my shop (Listen I know LLMs and AI in general are a touchy topic and I think a lot of current uses are… bad… but these are some really solid helpers and I think it’s a tool that can fit some use cases)
- Charli xcx’s discography (I’m inside a never ending brat summer)
- Loving iPadOS 26 (especially having the Journal app on a device with a keyboard) but it’s so painfully slow on my 4th gen iPad Air
- I’ve been working on getting more of my art printed, mostly on aluminum with Bay Photo Lab, but am also working on my small jewelry line: It’ll feature designs inspired by modern architecture as well as my own artwork and will come out as pins and necklace pendants first
- Moving to a new townhome apartment in Minneapolis featuring gorgeous dark wood trim, lots of built-ins, and beautiful natural light
Last updated: January 30th, 2026