Hello wonderful people! I hope you’ve been enjoying these middle months of the year and, for those in the northern hemisphere, this last half of summer. I personally have enjoyed time away from the social parts of the Internet. More on that and other things below…

WIP: “The invisibility of spouse”

I’m finally working on a zine for which I wrote the copy a little over a year ago. Without giving it all away, it’s a personal reflection on how the term “spouse” seems impossible for some (cishet) people to say when queer people (like my spouse and me) use it, and how that feels for me.

Drawing feels challenging yet desirable, but collage feels accessible yet spontaneous, so I went with collage for this one. I’ll be hand writing the copy onto pages and gluing mini-collages throughout. I made these mini-collages from random magazine clippings I had lying around (I swear I’ve cleaned up my art supply hoard…). I’m looking forward to creating layouts for pages by hand as opposed to on a computer; I loathe layout design on the computer, which is part of why most of my zines are hand-drawn.

My goal is to have this done in time for September art events, which brings me to…

September zine fests!!

I’ll be vending at not one, but TWO zine fests this September!

• San Francisco Zine Fest: Sunday, September 6, 11am-5pm at The Hibernia

• Bay Area Queer Zine Fest: Sunday, September 27, 11am-5pm at The Oakland Asian Cultural Center

They’re both on Sundays and from 11am-5pm, which feels like it should make them easier to remember. If you’ve never been to a zine fest, these are both really great fests full of lots of friendly people making cool weird stuff, so I recommend making time for them!

Sans social media for a month: a mini-reflection

I have yet to download Instagram or Bluesky back on my phone. Ngl, I love that for me, though tbh I will probably download it the day after this newsletter comes out because I miss knowing what some friends are up to (and I know there are memes awaiting me from certain friends). My time away from the social Internet was not as peaceful as I would hope (for good reasons actually), which led to me not really creating much at all artistically, but I’m still glad I did it. My dreams are more vivid, I have finally gotten around to some longstanding home/life improvement tasks, and generally I feel like I have a more adequate amount of time per day.

On a deeper level, I’m finding myself doing things because I actually want to do them, not because that photo would look cute or because it would land a lot of likes or maybe it would catch the attention of someone cool. I feel more mental space for the relationships I want to cultivate.

Yet I still haven’t quite cracked how to translate this to my art practice. Granted, I’ve had a wildly busy summer, so I remain emotionally tired; but I wonder if that is becoming an excuse. Because I kept such a rigorous posting schedule on socials for a year, have I inadvertently tied my posting schedule to artistic validation? I fear this is a stronger tie than I would like to believe. I need to dig deeper here.

The next couple of weeks will be pivotal ones for me, for reasons I might allude to later. I’m not sure how I will make my own art fit into that. But I know I need to challenge myself to think more deeply about it, however uncomfortable that sounds.

Latest inspo

• Trinket libraries are popping up around the USA; I’ve already encountered a few in the Bay Area. They are exactly what they sound like: little boxes on stands on the street where people can exchange tchotchkes, and they are delightful. They are a super easy way to spread joy and find a cool little pocket treat!

• If you’re in the Bay you might’ve already heard about ChatTJB, which is a way to chat with an AI (Average Individual / Artisanal Intelligence) online. It’s an art project by a guy with the initials TJB where he literally responds to whatever question is typed into the site. He’s using it to show people how they probably just want to talk with a person after all, and to help people use their brains more/again. Coyote Media has a nice write-up about it. More of this, please!

• Speaking of AI, I personally despise the stock image of humanoid robots in articles about anything remotely related to “AI”. Th website Better Images of AI collects artist-created images that more thoughtfully depict artificial intelligence and a variety of things associated with it. Lots of food for thought here, and maybe also some nice images to use in your articles, presentations, etc.

• At the end of June I read one of the most stupendous books of 2026: Plastic, Prism, Void by Violet Allen. This is for anime lovers, typographic freaks, and people who read the footnotes. It’s a campy mashup of Sailor Moon and House of Leaves and This Is How You Lose the Time War with a sprinkle of Neon Genesis Evangelion. It is WILD and it is for people who love fun, which I hope is you.