Hello hello! Greetings especially to the folks who are new here as of Bay Area Queer Zine Fest. Let’s get into some artsy thoughts!

BAQZF Retro

That's a wrap on my first irl Bay Area Queer Zine Fest! What a delightful fest. 🥰 As someone who's been vending at some kind of art event or another for over a decade, I can't remember an event as CHILL as this one that had this much traffic and cool people visiting it. Vendors got some super adorable favors, too; this immediately made me feel welcomed and appreciated. 💕 Mad props to the organizers and volunteers for doing such an amazing job! Keep up the good work!

I met so many lovely people and exceeded my goals for the event 🎉 I also tried out something new: shelf talkers for my zines whose covers are less self-explanatory. People definitely took the time to read them, and N=1 but it seems that this guided people around my table better. Every fest is an opportunity to meet someone new and try something out!

What’s next? Idk! I’ve applied to a couple other events; hopefully I will know by early to mid-November if I’ll be doing any more shows before the end of the year.

Pro-human button pins, reprise

I'm really glad this random project has gotten so much love. At BAQZF these pins were a hit again. Admittedly for me it doesn't feel very "artistic" in that I'm not doing super intense illustration or planning a page layout or anything that feels more laborious. But do my hands hurt after cranking out 20 of these bad boys on the buttonmaker? You bet.

(Side note: I am working on an essay where I dive more into the feelings around the “artistic enough” concept introduced above. I hope to be able to share that before the end of the year.)

The pins in the above photo are the ones that consistently go the fastest. I’d like to spend the rest of the newsletter talking about the pins that require a little more reading and context…

This one is fairly easy to grasp once you spend a few extra seconds with it: "No general but Ludd means the poor any good".

This is a quote from the original Luddite movement, hence the old timey syntax. The coordinators of the movement were anonymous and would sign letters as "General Ludd", and the movement was arguably more of a pro-worker movement than an anti-technology one. But these days it's apparent how connected those struggles are, hence the Luddite revival and me making stuff like this. I pulled this quote while reading Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, which I highly recommend if you’d like to learn more about the original Luddite movement and a sketch of its connections to our current moment.

“Misery generates hate” is a line from Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley. Yet another quote pulled from Blood in the Machine, but this one requires more context. The novel Shirley is very much a Luddite novel, and it’s the novel she wrote after Jane Eyre. Here’s a bit more from it that will make this obvious:

Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them; they hated the buildings which contained those machines; they hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings…

The odious mill owner in the novel is modeled very directly on William Cartwright, someone Brontë met at a young age and who she despised on the spot. Cartwright was one of the entrepreneurs who the Luddites hated the most and whose property was heavily damaged by the Luddites.

I don’t think it takes much imagination to extrapolate this mindset to a variety of things happening today.

“If LLMs are ‘conscious’, then why isn’t AlphaFold?” This last one is my favorite because it connects so many threads in my life, but it also requires the most background knowledge. If you aren’t in the mood to dive into some science, I highly recommend reading sci-fi author Ted Chiang’s epic LLM consciousness takedown that inspired this pin. He essentially asks this question and shows why it breaks down from a more philosophical angle. I am nowhere near as eloquent as him, but below is my more scientific attempt to explain some AlphaFold-specific concepts since the article is behind a paywall.

Some terms:

• AlphaFold is a machine learning (I refuse to use “AI” here) model first released in 2018 that made huge scientific progress in the problem of protein folding. It’s had three major releases that overall improve its ability to fold a wide variety of proteins. Put simply, given a “simple” text-based representation (a sequence) of a protein , it produces a three-dimensional structure of the protein.

• “Protein” here refers not to the macronutrient but to one of the main biochemical components inside living organisms. Proteins are extremely large molecules that catalyze biochemical reactions.

• A protein is defined by one or more sequences of amino acids (this sequence is a list of amino acids in order), which for the purposes of an art-focused newsletter let’s just call small molecules that are building blocks of proteins.

Protein folding is a notoriously challenging scientific topic that technically remains unsolved; while AlphaFold can produce structures of way more proteins than current lab methods can create, it doesn’t explain the mechanism of why these folds work. Even so, AlphaFold radically expanded the space of proteins that we can study, and this has huge implications for developing medicines and generally building more understanding of biochemistry. Half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the leaders on the AlphaFold project, to give you a sense of both how quickly rewarded the team was for this development and the recognition given by a major awarding body.

If we look under the hood at what makes AlphaFold tick, it’s comparably complicated to an LLM. AlphaFold broadly has been a force for good, yet LLMs, which are primarily creators of slop and misinformation, are the focal point of an economic bubble and a strange drive to create a machine god. LLMs are touted as sentient and conscious by some, and AlphaFold is not? I’m not arguing consciousness should be attributed to anything software-based, quite the opposite. This pin is a pithy way to call bullshit on the hype…and, I hope, to get people to be curious about science.

latest inspo

• I’ve been a Rodrigo y Gabriela fan for, like, 20 years. I’ve seen them live four or five times. Their latest album, OurHome, is one of my favorites in a while…they’re weaving a lot of threads together in a really emotionally powerful way. There also is a lot of Japanese influence in the album, from the “Monster” video featuring the artwork of Naoki Urasawa and a collab with pianist Hiromi, for example.

• At BAQZF I picked up a number of zines, but my favorite’s gotta be the latest volume of SHOOT! by RPS Collective. It’s called “Tears of Rage”, and it’s stuffed with so much raw emotion and powerful sociopolitical commentary.

• Since apparently this is the science edition of Word Doodles, I liked this laser scientist’s exploration of Steven Universe gems and their ability to work as lasers.

• For the past few years there’s been plenty of discussion around the revival of physical media, especially zines. This article dives into how this is happening with even bigger impact in places like Cairo and Beirut.