posting while afraid

originally posted on substack

a number of my friends have gorgeous, concise ways of describing their practice ( “agent of whimsy”, “technology steward”, “culture organizer”) and i envy them. artists are often asked to boil their creative practice down into a few good sentences, and as far as i can tell this is one of the most arduous, painful parts of being ~a creative~. to write that kind of short, purified bio requires a self-knowledge that comes either from sifting through your own thoughts long enough to edge on the narcissistic1, or otherwise having been struck some kind of curatory lighning. i can’t call down lightning, so here i am in a self-centered exercise of creating this newsletter.

i’ve been told that some of that clarity comes from being in public, writing about their work. right now, i’m afraid of posting. my social media tagline is “process > product”, but where i used to post works in progress (experiments, stuff i was playing with) it now feels like a product in the eyes of strangers and an algorithm. i took a lot of joy in sharing my process. how do I remember that relationship? how do I remember the internet is alive, that it’s tender, that it’s experimental, and that i can be all of those things on it?

tender // honest // experimental // alive

internet as the open studios, lab notebook open on your desk. less journal, more research notes & public prototype

so i want to pick apart my thoughts, post them in public to be referenced, pinned up and placed in proximity with others; point at them and say, “ that’s a good one” or “oof, not that ”, or “ wait, let’s look closer”. i’m afraid of posting, but __ some thoughts need to be put in the open and said out loud until you untangle something good.

let’s talk out loud together. hopefully somewhere in these writing exercises, public experiments, documentation of my work, i can winnow out a way of describing what i do. welcome to my studio walls.

open studio

1. in december i saw this coincidence of light and realized you could probably use photochromatic materials as part of an image that revealed itself through exposure to the sun. as a result, i have spent $50 on a roll of headlight uv tint (who wants their headlights to be darkened in the daytime? i don’t understand car culture) and gently cajoled a friend into teaching me about stained glass. so far, we have cut and sandwiched and foiled.

you’re not seeing a shadow, that’s just the transition lens in partial exposure

1-inch wide glass squares, with photochromatic materials sandwiched inside

2. when i travelled this year i bought fabric; i finally finished a long-stalled project of making placemats out of japanese cotton, which will be added to our bin of stuff-that-comes-out-when-we-host-dinner-i-guess. i’m sure the fabric itself is a mass-produced, printed cotton; in the fiber arts world, nothing impressive or interesting. but i’ll remember sifting through the bins and packing these bolts around ceramics in my suitcase on the way home.

3. how far has my mouse has moved across the lifetime of this computer? an exercise: capture a 50x50 pixel square around my mouse every 10 seconds, a timelapse/snapshot/visual log of all the places it goes. thusfar i am unsuccessful, as the built-in screencapture tool for mac hides your mouse if you ask it to capture particular coordinates, so i only have where the cursor has been, not the cursor in-situ. shoutout to: cliclick, and the macos screencapture terminal program

4. things I’ve bought with a plan, and a promise to show experiments with them next month:

and just for fun ~

2026 Ins/Outs

In:

• overly verbose personal websites

• experimenting out loud, open studios

• postcards and care packages for no reason

• camping, sometimes2

• materials as travel souvenirs

• orange plastidip

• printing things out, hand annotation

• dedicating time and energy to community > comfort

• bicycle transit

• cutting your own hair

• collages3

Out:

• trying to save the day

• houseplants that are unhappy in my home & care cycles4

• short form video content (making, consuming)

• scroll time

• aesthetic minimalism

• putting my face on the internet

• “x is such a depression indicator”

• knitting socks5

2025 shoutouts:

• hollowknight: silksong (~75h)

• keen hyperports with the orange strap

• auto-launching scripts on interactive installations

• tiat.place

• stoggles6

ok, that’s all. talk again soon.

1

this is, um, a kind of projection on my part.

2

outsidey rather than outdoorsy

3

junk journalling is just collage made approachable

4

some new advice; give up on the plants that don’t work for you. water them as you will, and move on to a different species if this one just doesn’t work out. that said, the man who picked up my dying corn plant shamed me for not watering it enough, which is pretty bold for someone getting a free houseplant off of craigslist.

5

i’m pigeon holing myself as a sock knitter

6

at some point my actualy glasses fell apart, and these became my daily driver. anti-shatter lenses scratch a little easier, and aren’t polarized, but get them in prescription and transition and you’ll basically never need another pair