catdya's website

Everything I Know About Merch-Making

2026-07-09T00:00:00Z

this is a companion to my free downloadables and zines. there are also resources on how to get started printing your own merch (indonesia only) and helpful tools to size and layout printables.

why?

I've participated in the art convention circuit for a little over two years. I started out selling beaded accessories, to fanart, to original stories. I decided I'm not cut out to handle the business-side of things, hence why I'm giving the files to my merchandise

where do I print these?

I can only give recommendations for Indonesians, specifically within Java. All of these are shopee stores, none are affiliate links. I don't get a cut of sales and I bought and tested the products myself with my own money.

pins

sakurapin21 (affordable, bandung-based, somewhat slow shipping if unlucky)
mousierat (bekasi-based, pricier, good in a pinch within jabodetabek area)

stickers

heymagira (i haven't tried other vendors)

keychains

upsize888 (for affordability)
shopartcrylic (for quality control)

zines

the best way to print zines is using your office printer of your friend's office's printer. or library if you have a library with a printer! not jealous at all.

helpful tools for merch-making

if you're in the business of making zines or binding books, do check out bookbinder.js to make booklets easier. if you're going to a printshop you won't need to do this step, but if you print at home you'd definitely want to use this to reduce the headache or trying to layout double-sided signatures.

misc tips

ask your vendor or check their detailed instructions whether you should send your files in rgb or cymk. some places like to color-match to the digital rgb rather than go off pure cymk
unlike most holo cold laminates, glitter, doff, and "linen" laminates do not add a yellowish hue to your print
all epoxy will yellow. do not use resin on keychains if you want longevity. if you must, use it on a sandwiched (double-acrylic) keychain so the resin can be pried off while preserving the image beneath
invest in a paper guillotine if you plan on making prints at home
you don't need a long-arm stapler to make stapled zines

Putting the AI in AIr-dry Clay

2026-04-30T00:00:00Z

0: Backstory

Since my prolonged gap year, I've been scouring Jakarta for many cheap or free workshops, activities, and community events. Let me tell you firsthand how commodified community spaces are in Jakarta, moreso if you're not part of a pre-existing community, office, or university.

This is where atamerica enters the narrative. I've been aware of its existence since 2014, but only in light of my unemployment have I made the most out of the US-funded program. Because it is backed by a government to spread propaganda and "soft power" within Indonesia, all of their programs are free; you just have to get the tickets early enough before they sell out.

Outside brands and communities often host events or workshops in collaboration with atamerica. They are, to my knowledge, contractually obligated to sneak in some aspect of Americana into the end product. I've made a tufted coaster of lady liberty, decorated Thanksgiving-themed cupcakes, and have sampled Californian-made cheese.

1: Bartega

Founded by three friends who all went to USC, Bartega (a portmanteau of Bar + Bottega) started off as a wine-and-paint workshop vendor, focusing on the art experience and leaning heavily on "mindfulness" and "connection" with other people. Their early marketing publications emphasized how their workshops ought to feel more "like a party."

They are also the collaborators for this air dry clay workshop I'm attending. The "American" part? Well, we ought to make a mini figure from an American movie, or at least something that represents it. However, that's not what this essay is about.

2: Benson

As one of the co-founders of Bartega, Benson gets on stage to deliver the standard fluff that collaborators do at atamerica. Usually it goes like this: they give a mission statement, tack on a noble cause, cue the inspirational bootstrapping, and give a brief overview on the activity we're about to do today.

Here's how it actually went.

Benson starts off his presentation asking the audience to raise their hand if they use "AI tools" every day. He looks at the 30-something people in the crowd. "A lot." He remarks, "90 percent of people at least." He guesstimates. I did not raise my hand.

He goes on to boast how he uses AI tools daily both in his personal and professional life; his circle of friends would often bring up AI in gatherings to talk about all the "productivity" they've been doing with the help of the machine. One friend, he says, felt left out; this friend did not see the benefit of using AI tools.

Before he continues this anecdote, he interrupts with the next slide quoting McKinsey and Company touting a 30% increase in efficiency "in research and data synthesis." He calls McKinsey "one of the best consulting companies in the world." Benson could not fathom "the gap" between "extreme people not feeling the benefit" and "big companies investing millions of dollars in AI, into something that has been proven to be efficient."

Back to the anectode—he explains that his friend is a coffee shop owner and tried to generate a poster for his business. The screen shows a blank square next to an image prompt. Benson asks; "what is wrong with this prompt?" After a bit of audience participation he happily reinforces what ought to be wrong with it. "Not detailed enough. Lacks context."

Revealing the generic coffee shop poster, he points out flaws and assumptions that the image generator has made. The barista is white (instead of Indonesian), the coffee is in an unbranded mug (instead of a plastic cup), the interior is unlike the real coffee shop, etc. Using this example, he argues that "it is not the AI's fault, but rather (his friend's) communication skill."

If that wasn't enough, Benson continues, citing linkedin learning and the world economic forum as supporting arguments that communication is "one of the most demanded skills in the AI era and the modern era."

Communication becomes the hot buzzword for the next 90 minutes. He briefly touches on constructivism (a pedagogical theory) as a concept and markets air dry clay as a vehicle for learning how to slow down, how to think, and how to problem-solve. He emphasizes how this workshop is less about the fundamentals of air dry clay and more about how to become a better communicator and storyteller, "not only to machines, but towards our friends as well."

3: Bullshit

I have tried my best to deliver Benson's section free of snark and outright contempt. The whole livestream is accessible publicly on atamerica's youtube channel, double-check if you want. This next section is me cooking up some bullshit (i.e. this is all opinion).

Since Benson is engaging in what we call rhetoric, I will engage with him through the lens of discourse analysis, dissecting the ideology, assumptions, and logic behind Benson's speech. For those unfamiliar with the genre of discourse analysis, this is less of a scathing takedown and more of an exercise in identifying sentences that are "telling." In other words, saying the quiet part out loud.

AI

When faced with an outlier in his friend group that does not see AI's benefits, he uses 3 supporting arguments against this friend.

McKinsey says AI increases productivity, therefore it must be true
Big companies invest millions of dollars into a product, therefore it must be good, and
His friend's prompt was not descriptive enough, therefore (all) shortcomings are human-made.

When laid bare the arguments he has against AI adopters, it is clear many fallacies go over his head.

Benson touts McKinsey as a the arbiter of truth. Numerous controversies and scandals aside, he takes it as a given that because McKinsey is "the best consulting company in the world," they are correct; inversely, they are "the best consulting company in the world," because they keep being correct. This fallacy is subtle, but once you see it in speeches from people like Benson, you start to notice other leaps of logic that they make.
Some of you in the audience may have heard that Mark Zuckerberg's $80 billion dollar metaverse shut down this year. Facebook poured so much money into "the metaverse" only for it to fizzle into obscurity. This is a longer way of saying that you should not trust tech conglomerates and venture capital money to dictate what does and does not work. Benson is using investment as a shorthand for legitimacy. In lieu of showing the audience the wonders of AI tools, we are told to trust the judgement of investment firms. This is not only poor writing (telling instead of showing), it reveals the brittle foundation on top of which benson lays his arguments; he believes the audience will have enough faith in financial institutions to make the right judgement calls.
This line is what led me to nickname this workshop "a thinly veiled AI prompting workshop." It is clear his mind is made up; the technology is good, the numbers don't lie, the majority of adopters must be correct, therefore it is the human who lacks the skills necessary to optimize and take advantage of the tech. An AI skeptic, centrist, or even a better mediator would have framed it as "the AI cannot read minds, therefore humans must compensate by being extra verbose and detailed." However, Benson explicitly says "the AI is not at fault;" by saying this he absolves the shortcomings and limitations of the machine by throwing his friend under the bus.

Communication

One of the reasons why I've been joining events and workshops lately is to meet new people, discover new perspectives, experience the breadth of human connection through gestures big and small. I work towards better socializing skills because I want to connect with the people I cherish, to form meaningful bonds and make memories together.

The approach that Benson takes, however, is a complete departure from any appeal to humanity.

AI becomes the thematic throughline of his brief presentation. The hook for his argument rests on his friend that needs to git gud at prompting. In his story, he does not try to empathize further with his friend or their struggles, he rests their case on user error. It is not about retaining his friendship with someone who feels left out or mediating their struggles with the rest of the friend group, but rather it's blaming them in front of a crowd and peer pressuring them into adopting a tool that doesn't work for them.

He champions communication, not as something human or primal, but as a metric that employers look for. It is something that is "needed in the AI and modern era," to push AI to its limits, not something you do because you are human and need human connection.

When he wraps up, he says the workshop is aimed to make us better storytellers "not only to machines, but towards our friends as well."

Usually, it goes without saying, that because of the linear nature of human speech, we must prioritize certain nouns over others. We do this, sometimes subtly and other times more overtly, by placing it in front or mentioning it first. Benson puts humans connection and friendship second to none other than AI prompting.

The messaging becomes clear; communication is good when you boss the clanker around. Communication is good because it is a marketable skill. Communication is good because linkedin and the world economic forum says so. Communication becomes a means to an end; what end, you ask? Well, capital.

4: Business

"... Creativity will always exist in some sort of tension with commerce... because we need to eat." - Dan Olson

As I spend upwards of a thousand words dissecting a man's 10-minute opening presentation at a free workshop, I can't help but think of the target audience for this kind of talk. For the third section I tried my best to constrain myself to only analyzing the text (and speech), but the paratext and epitext, I think, ties together this whole essay.

Bartega was founded by three business majors who saw a market in Jakarta. Their vision was to have people come to workshops to paint, drink wine, and socialize. Lately, they've diversified into offering technique classes and making tea-drinking workshops instead of wine. Their prices are indicative of their target market. Workshops for one could cost upwards of 350k IDR (the tea-drinking sessions cost upwards of 500k). Their clientele are big prestigious brands that they proudly list on their website.

Looking at the big picture, Bartega does not sell art; rather, it sells the concept of creating art.They sell paint-by-the-number kits for you to make art, but their in-house artists are teachers and instructors. This is why Benson does not scrutinize AI. Bartega does not sell artwork. They don't sell The Starry Night, the painting; they sell Painting The Starry Night as a wellness activity that supports your career.

As seasoned business people, Benson and co. would know how to sell this idea to the art-skeptic (or perhaps, someone who refuses to hire a graphic designer to make a promotional poster for their coffee shop). The type of upper middle class white collar worker who needs to be persuaded to care about empathy, communication, and critical thinking. A person who puts their faith in systems, in big names and established corporations; a person who does not question the majority, who enjoys the status quo, even.

You tell them that soft skills are good for their career, quote Forbes, sprinkle a little bit of inspirational bootstrapping. Wrap the pill of the arts in a slice of cheese-flavored hopes of upwards social mobility.

It is a cynical, yet depressingly realistic, way of marketing art.

References and Further Reading

theJakartaPost's 2018 Coverage of Bartega

PrestigeOnline's 2019 Coverage of Bartega

Livestream of the Workshop

Bartega's Wikipedia Page

Dan Olson's Video Essay on Decentraland

NYT's Coverage of Metaverse Shutting Down

I could not find the exact study that Benson quotes from McKinsey besides this survey about AI use and adoption. There is also an article that mentions "data synthesis" here but there is no mention of 30% of anything! How would McKinsey even measure "30% efficiency in data synthesis?" Only one of those articles has a methodology! Benson! Give me your sources! Cite them properly next time! Benson PLEASE WHO MADE THE POWERPOINT WAS IS THE OTHER TWO PEOPLE?

Unrelated but the Dan Olson quote came from his mr. beast video

Epilogue: But Wait!

Oh, you're asking how the clay sculpting went? It went fine! Due to time constraints and participant size I was mostly left to my own devices making a little Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Since it was less focused on technique and more on "storytelling" I just did whatever I wanted with the clay. I don't really consider myself as someone who struggles with crafting narratives or telling stories—that's literally my wheelhouse—so I got the equivalent of what I put into the workshop.

Throughout the crafting session we were given prompts that were indicative of the creative process. They were rudimentary; the final step was "paint your figure using colors that communicate the emotion or feeling you want others to experience when they look at it." It's not a bad step for absolute beginners, but as someone seasoned in color theory and crafting I'd say I don't need to be told to do this at the 50-minute mark; I thought about it in the first 10 minutes.

I wouldn't have walked out, nor would I call this workshop a failure. Rather, I learned that there is something of a techbro-painter, not exactly a capital A Artist...? See, I have a mental division between "artist with a day job" and "worker who paints." Bartega seems to be for the latter; people unaligned with Art as an ideology or political force, engaging with the Activity as nothing more than rote mechanics of putting a brush to a canvas.

That is not to say Bartega is wrong—people have to start somewhere—but it is at odds with how I do Art. This whole experience is yet another case of me not meshing well with the preexisting culture of a given community or group of people (re: the improv class). And hey, I didn't cry this time around. I was just baffled for the entirety of the workshop.

Would I pay for any future services Bartega offers? No. Would I go back to their free workshops? Sure. Do I see a future where I find like-minded people at one of their workshops? I doubt it.

Does Design Persuade or Manipulate?

2026-02-15T00:00:00Z

Preface

In my journey of learning UX ~~out of spite~~, I stumbled across "lawsofux.com," recommended by two separate instances and almost ubiquitous in search results. I find the website to be a poorly disguised storefront for selling posters, and a shoddy attempt at being a tertiary source (most references lead to either wikipedia or medium articles).

When searching for common UX pitfalls, one trend became clear, Dark Patterns. Without going into the website into much detail, this phrase is used to describe deceptive, manipulative, and malicious tactics employed in UI/UX.

Jumping off this phrase, I searched for more instances of UX/UI being used to deceive and stumbled across a short opinion piece. Cennydd bowles writes:

"Design influences. It persuades. But if it manipulates, something’s wrong."

That got me thinking, with my background in linguistics (and multimodal discourse analysis in my toolkit) plus a skeptical eye for everything to do with corporate design and advertising, I wanted to dig deeper into the difference between persuasion and manipulation in design (if any). Surely, if there are profit motives behind the screen, one must tread very skeptically, no?

Part 1: The Easy Part

Several [1][2][3][4][5] sources define manipulation as something done with malicious intent, obfuscation of the persuader's actual goals, and loss of autonomy of the persuadee through guilt, pressure, or other unfair tactics.

If you look at the "deceptive patterns" website, you can find a quote from Cass Sunstein*:

"It should be clear that an action does not count as manipulative merely because it is an effort to alter people’s behavior. (...) A calorie label and an energy efficiency label are not ordinarily counted as forms of manipulation. So long as a private or public institution is informing people, or “just providing the facts,” it is hard to complain of manipulation. There is also a large difference between persuading people and manipulating them. With (non-manipulative) persuasion, people are given facts and reasons, presented in a sufficiently fair and neutral way; manipulation is something different"

Reading the full paper, in the concluding paragraph he writes:

"Some arguable forms of manipulation are mild, as when a politician, an employer, or a waiter uses loss aversion, tone of voice, and facial expressions to encourage certain decisions. Thus defined, manipulation is a pervasive feature of human life. It is for this reason that while the legal system is generally able to handle lies and deception, it has a much harder time in targeting manipulation"

Sunstein is more concerned about the legal ramifications of manipulation, and goes on to say that there are "mild" types of manipulation that are not outright deceptive. Though "manipulation is everywhere" feels like a non-answer, to read more about it, I revisited an old framework friend of mine.

Part 2: The Hard Part

In "Persuasion and Manipulation," Rom Harré analyzes scientific discourse using the framework of persuasion and manipulation. He states:

"In a general I will be trying to show that while concepts like 'persuasion' and 'manipulation' are distinctive morally, the persuasive discourses of the 'orators' engaged in these morally distinctive projects have certain features in common."

After a lengthy but packed setup, Harré concludes with an analysis of psychology rhetoric. Harré criticizes "the (psychological) scientific mode" for viewing their patients as, not individual free-thinkers, but in his own words, automata. He continues:

"Even if people display autonomy in the social events called 'experiments', the use of a scientistic rhetoric to describe them prevents that autonomy being registered, so to speak. Creative or novel moves in the face of the problem set by the experimenter, must be treated not as authentic free action, but as confirmation or disconfirmation of a priori hypothesis. In some cases free action is treated as statistical variation. The experiment, then, and its associated rhetoric, is the expression of an essentially reactionary attitude to social life. Divorced from that attitude an experiment hardly makes sense as a way of studying how people produce social actions."

He brings up J. Turner's "analysis" regarding discrimination within a group. Turner maps this discrimination onto a "behavioural continuum" from F to FAV, with FAV being the most discriminatory. Harré then makes a point, that this attitude undermines the autonomy of the people Turner studies. He theorizes, were people to adopt Turner's way of thinking, they would simply accept this "scientific result" and adopt a "passive conservatism" dictated by turner's continuum.

He concludes that through "relexicalization," folk-psychology is painted with a coat of "scientistic vocabulary." (i.e. science-ing up your statements) And social psychologists, though wanting to persuade using rhetoric, might actually end up manipulating.

Part 3: Wait... something about UX?

Let's go back to lawsofux.com. There, let's pick a random example, Jakob's Law.

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. (emphasis mine)

Since the phrase was coined within Nielsen Norman (NN), the references mostly point to their website. But let's apply what we've just learned from Harré onto this UX "guide."

If you click on the first link on that page, you'll eventually be redirected to an 8-year-old youtube video by the NN group. Jakob Nielsen, the host, says something telling

"Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience is not a law like what they're debating in Parliament (...) It's not something voted on by politicians. It's not even something that I decided on. Jakob's Law just describes how things are. It's more like a law of nature." (emphasis mine)

Right there. THAT'S some relexicalization. The normalization and undermining of individual autonomy to serve a hypothesis. Neilsen is even more brazen in that he does not assert his theory as a hypothesis, instead framing it as "a law of nature."

Which brings us to the main question I set out to ask, is all design manipulation?

If you've been following along (and reading the references), you'll understand that undermining human autonomy could be as subtle as framing something in scientific terms, leveraging the scientific method to parade something else as irrefutable.

When you step back and see much of UX "designing" (frankly there is some overlap with UI in this regard but I digress), many "principles" are founded on heuristics and "laws" that are phrased in a way to naturalize human biases.

Another example is the aesthetic-usability effect.

Summary: Users believe that designs that look good also work well, and UX should take advantage of this. But don't make aesthetic usability lead you astray as a designer, because the UI must actually work well for long-term success.

Is this not manipulation shrouded in an air of persuasion? Undermining human autonomy and finding a gap in this "effect"? One could argue that the very foundations of design and how humans "interact" with systems are treated as automata. UX's foundation being psychology also doesn't help in its attitudes towards trying to "nudge" human actions through "experiments" (or "user testing").

Summary

Beyond simple persuasion and manipulation, there are layers to this Discourse. With much of the human-centered design ethos that UX purports, it's good to re-evaluate "Design" as a framework. Are users given agency to steer designs, or are their relationship to the subject matter treated as merely causal? If design truly claims to persuade (and not manipulate,) how do you ensure the end-user is not acting in service of a metric or hypothesis?

But what does this actually mean? Am I saying that all design and UX/UI is bad and therefore morally corrupt and all UX designers should quit their jobs and move to the countryside and work at a dairy farm?

Yes.

Footnotes

*Cass Sunstein, as I only realized after reading and typing this all out, is one of the people behind the book "Nudge." Which isn't a good book, but there is a good podcast talking about how bad of a book it is.

**That last part is a JOKE.

Migrating to 11ty (and a mental health update)

2026-02-12T00:00:00Z

Hi. Yeah. I changed my website layout again :P

Sorry for going MIA for like… two months? In my defense I was going through a major Episode (not sure which kind) and now I'm sort of falling back to webdev to regain crumbs of normalcy and learning.

Anyways! Lot's of things happening. I'm jumping from project to project, hobby to hobby, as a result of My Episode. I sort of deserted you all for a moment there…

First up, the blog is up and running! I'm using 11ty because I saw some people on neocities recommending it. Aha. Ahahaha. Little did I know it will cause much distress.

Part One: It's a Blog Michael, How Long Would It Take?

In hindsight, equipped only with HTML, CSS, and sparse knowledge of JavaScript was not enough to carry me to use 11ty. That's honestly my fault but then again nobody in tech ever warns you about this stuff. Back to the story; I naively thought something advertised as "simple and lightweight" would have an easy onboarding process. Apparently I am a big dumb stupid baby. I was immediately thrown off the deep end with new stuff to learn like... nunjucks? terms like liquid? markdown? and... I don't even want to recall.Frustrated with the shit ton of things I needed to install beforehand (yes I hate installing dependencies I hate node.js etc etc etc) I followed the tutorial and took the base blog as a jumping off point. This is where I should have gone back to learning JS and the other jargon they said in the docs

It took me... three? four? business days to figure out how 11ty worked. And even then I know fuck-all. I only know surface level tweaks and whatever they wrote on the documentation that is labeled as "beginner" or "the easy mode."

After trying to implement my Blog into my existing static website, it all crumbled because I couldn't figure out the moving parts and how to isolate the input and outputs to ONE specific sub folder. Apparently I needed "permissions" and "a port" to "run the app."

Part Two: I kind of buried the lede here

So what am I doing, trying to "automate" a process that I was content with, hand-updating my RSS feed and all? Well. To be frank. Uhm. I. I sort of did this to chicken out of the job hunting process.

Oops!

See, In December I promised myself I'd seriously start considering getting a regular office job beginning in January. This just meant applying to many job offerrings and tracking them in a spreadsheet.

Well. Turns out. The Episode happened for at least two months. I spiralled out of control. I picked up at least 5 different hobbies in a short span of time, and when I did try to enter the rhythm of job hunting, I deluded myself into thinking a dedicated website would be a great portfolio and CV.

Ahem. Dear reader. I do not work in webdev. This is just one of my many pet projects.

Oh well! Might as well finish what I started!

Part Three: Back to the future

So we're back in my bedroom where I'm still hand-updating every CSS detail imaginable, trying to find vanilla JS scripts and, hell, even pure CSS colutions to my problems, because I love the static web. I love not having to deal with servers and all of its intricacies. The computer is not for me to meddle in.

The 4 business days learning 11ty was, frankly, a blur. I asked my dad to help me set up the "dynamic" part of my website and we settled on the blog before the catdya in the url. To make the separation part of things easier. Again, I cannot and do not want to tinker with the 11ty configuration because it scared me.

After nearly calling it quits, I managed to still keep and run my static part of the web. The blog is (so far) the only semi-automated Thing on my website.

Come to think of it, most people (on neocities, at least) blog using zonelets before jumping to a more dynamic option. I totally skipped the zonelets part of learning. Huh.

Part Four: Wait I thought we were already in the future?

My future plans for this site include but are not limited to:

1. Finishing all of my main pages (this includes the art archive and OC pages, which I have been putting off)

2. Setting up a proper portfolio of my projects (I guess so I have “something to show for”)

3. Adding more stuff in the "shrines" or "fun" category

4. Slowly. SLOWLY adding more JS and dynamic parts to my website

Now. If you'll excuse me, I have many pages to migrate and many more I have to make.

Charcuterie Board Party! (+and other happenings)

2025-12-14T00:00:00Z

Sunday, December 14th, 2025: Charcuterie Board Party! (+and other happenings)

It's been more than a month since I last updated this blog, oops! After comifuro, I was busy doing... Uh, nothing, really. Except my charcuterie board birthday potluck party! Which went really well!

I invited a few friends over and told them to bring either a cheese, a cracker, or fruit. I provided the bulk of the cheeses and I got to choose some funky cheeses. By that I only mean one. One blue cheese. Other cheeses were relatively mild. Tee hee. I bought chocolate candies and a selection of snacks to pair with the cheeses. It was my first time ever hosting an Adult House Party and a making a charcuterie board.

The camembert paired really nicely with some green grapes my friend brought. Also my friend loved the blue cheese with crackers and olives. I made coffee for my friends that liked drinking coffee. We talked and I got to introduce/mix my different friend groups!

Hm. What else? I've been working on a SECRET project every since cf wrapped up and I've been engrossed in all of the nitty gritty it takes to make it. It's a one-man project so it'll take a while until it's out. Nya :3

Yesterday I went to a book swap event! I gave my "know-it-all" fashion book that I never finished reading and intially got Song of Achilles. However, I got the privilege of trading it with another person's book, so I challenged somebody in rock paper scissors for the poetry book that they got. And I won! I made some small talk after the event hehe. I love talking to people.

I think for the past month I've just been fixated on this Project and focusing all of my time and effort into it. I love starting and finishing projects, but that usually means I'm sacrificing something else in order to prioritize this New Thing. And so, I forgot about my poetry and website upkeep. Ehe. Sorry about that.

Lastly, I have a pile of poetry books I have yet to read. So tata! I need the brain upkeep so I don't succumb to brainrot and doomscrolling.

Noblesse Content in 2025?!

2025-11-11T00:00:00Z

Tuesday, November 11th 2025: Noblesse Content in 2025?!

Poetry October is done! I've selected my favorite poems, formatted it into a folded beak zine, printed it, and packed it for comifuro trades! Yipee! I actually have a lot to talk about so I might as well start now.

Since I am done with con prep, I spend a majority of my time refreshing the search page for cf21. I like to look at other people's catalogues and see what's "in" at the moment. And dear reader, I could not believe my eyes when i saw Noblesse fan merchandise in the year of our lord 2025. I hand such a major flashback I binge watched the anime and the animated prequel and now I Have Thoughts.
\

Should you read the 400+ episode webtoon/manwha, Noblesse?

NO. NO! NO! DO NOT USE YOUR TIME LIKE THAT. YOU DESERVE BETTER. I DON'T EVEN LIKE THE PLOT. LISTEN. LISTEN. LISTEN TO ME. NOBLESSE IS POWERSCALING, THE WEBTOON. IT'S ALL FIGHTS ALL THE TIME, THEY DROP THE SCHOOL PLOT, THERE'S NO SLICE OF LIFE, IT'S ALL JUST FIGHTING WITH MAGIC AURA SHIT.

Listen. I love noblesse but it's not a great piece of fiction. It's really nothing to brag about. You get some eye candy in the form of the main characters, you get a master/servant dynamic in the form of Rai and Frankie. There's angst. But mostly it's just worryng whether or not your blorbo will survive. And sufficed to say, yes Rai lives on. Mysteriously. After nuclear levels of mass destruction. To even Frankie's bewilderment. Long story. Not exactly 400+ chapters. I think you could sum up the entire webtoon in 3, maybe 4 seasons of anime.

Anyways, where were we. Ah yes I dropped that numbered list. Uh. It's time to talk about my second revelation. Which is that frankenrai reminds me A LOT of nagisa and ibara from ensemble stars.

Now how do I say this. I HATE ibara. I wish he would DIE. If he was killed off by happyele I WILL buy official merch of Nagisa and ONLY NAGISA. I wish he would be GUILLOTINED. SHOT. COMICALLY THROWN OFF A CLIFF. I HATE IBARA. HATE HATE HATE THAT SNAKE. Hm. Now what does this have to do with noblesse.

Well 1. both ibara and frankenstein are in a servant position, although Ibara is more conniving. 2. both rai and nagisa are their superiors. they're both somewhat silent, soft spoken, a lady-killer, and have powers/skills beyond regular humans. they're basically untouchable nobles, yes. bonus points for both having red eyes.

The thing is, Frankenstein is just a maniac murderer trying to stick it up to the nobles, wheread Ibara is a *gulp* capitalist. And I hate him for that.

I could dissect all four of these characters and show you how ibara and frankie differ, but I'd rather focus on frankenrai yaoi, to be honest. Speaking of which, I hopped back onto deviantart because one of my favorite noblesse fanartist, sawitry, resides there. Check them out.

Anyways. That concludes my weekly check-in and yapfest about an IP that has lost most of its relevancy. I will buy noblesse fanmerch God willing and have fun at the con. Speaking of which there's only eleven days left until comifuro!!! AAAAAAAAAA :::

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

2025-11-09T00:00:00Z

Sunday, November 9th 2025: Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Yesterday I watched Ghost in the Shell (1995) on the big screen as part of a Japanese Film Festival being held in Jakarta. Tickets were half price and I got some goodies to bring home with me!

Anyhoo, This is less of a review and more of a think-out-loud of the film.

I have a soft spot for animated movies, since I believe they could push more boundaries and be more precise and intentional with its framing, movement, and color. Besides that, when you watch Ghost, it's hard not to be struck with the atmospheric backdrops paired with an impactful score.

After only one watch-through (which I tried to go in blind) I find myself thinking a lot about the themes of the movie. Some of the scenes feel like a blur. The action happens fast. Thankfully, there are short sequences of no dialogue and just backdrops set to music; this gives the audience time to fully process what just happened and think about the movie, while being treated to beautiful scenery.

I found the pacing to be perfect. Just enough action, enough interpersonal scenes and dialog, backdrops, establishing scenes, and ambiance to make this movie more than enjoyable. Not once did I lose interest in the characters or setting, they give just enough information but not too much that it feels dumbed down.

Speaking of not being dumbed down, I do have trouble putting my finger on the themes of this movie. I do get the anxiety and philosophical debates surrounding cybernetics, but there's something more being said about the "self."

I believe this movie is a delicate balancing act; trying to deliver its cyber themes for those already interested in the genre while still giving adequate foundations for the layman to catch onto. This gives off a clumsy effect when a lot of exposition happens through dialog. But it happens so rarely I will forgive it, personally.

Next is the discussion of "self." Is there a True Self? When you "merge" with someone (assuming through a union of marriage), you lose yourself but you create something new. The lines between you and the other party are blurred.

I can't help but think of Dan Olson's video essaus on Annihillation, where he unravels its themes as the impermanence of the "self." Constantly changing, evolving, merging, dividing. I do see a glimmer of this being brought up in Ghost. Though, this blurring of lines is seen through a cyborg's futuristic lens, where "merging" becomes quite literal on the software level.

There's also the issue of false memories. I think it's very apt in this day and age to watch Ghost, since a lot could be said about GenAI halluciations and the levels of psychosis people are being put through via AI chatbots. There's too many metaphors to catch onto just from a first viewing. Truthfully I wish I could watch it in theaters again. Motoko's affinity for the sea mirrors her "birth" scene, emerging from waters transformed.

Oh, how I love how layered the movie is. I wish I could dissect it in even more detail. But for now I could just gush about the beautiful graphics and the layers of metaphors and messages it tries to contain in its relatively short runtime of 90 minutes.

Lastly, I got a free pen and a small sticker sheet for participating in the film festival. It's a frixion pen from pilot, who's a sponsor of the fair alongside some other brands. Cheap tickets, free stuff, and the ads were Japanese tourism ads and free Japanese learning platform ads. I'd say yesterday was a success.

Ah, before I forget, 5/5 stars. Would watch again, highly recommend. :::

One Week into Poetry October!

2025-10-07T00:00:00Z

Tuesday, October 7th 2025: One Week into Poetry October!

It's been a week of Poetry October! I'm doing a weekly check-in to see how I feel about my works.

First of all, I'm loving the system of one poem a day. It forces me to write even when I'm not "feeling up to it." It pushes me to create consistently while keeping quality in check. At least in theory!

This is my Poetry October page by the way! Read through poems 1-7 first, they're pretty short!

For the first poem I talk about my beverage of choice, kombucha! I'm really happy with the metaphor of a scoby-as-child. It came to be because I harvested kombucha while my mom was out of town. I love the simple rhyming lines throughout the stanzas, it's very me

The second poem is about "Lots of vehicles break on the highway." So naturally I wrote about a reckless driver causing a pile-up. I used tarot imagery and had to double-check its meanings, sorry if you're a seasoned tarot reader and I got anything wrong. Whoops. In terms of style I like the brevity of this poem and the short stanzas. The last two line's is chef's kiss some of my best work.

Third on the chopping block is a weak one, I think. I talk about my experience in high school skipping classes to read an annotated poetry book at my school's "library" i.e. two bookshelves filled with mostly dissertations and STEM related books. I struggled a lot writing it, I kept changing structure and switching the words around but since I wrote this on the fourth (or maybe fifth?) day, I couldn't spend that much time on it.

The title "faith" is an easy one. Although I struggled with how to open the poem. I knew I wanted to talk about the well of zamzam. and YES I know it's a well and not a proper oasis but IT'S IN THE DESERT OKAY I can imagine it as such!!! Anyways. I wanted to write about a person that is too cocky, too skeptical, too reliant on miracles. It's a short one-stanza poem with religious themes that I kinda like.

"Life Hack" is pretty on-the-nose; it talks about my old childhood home being flooded and my dad using plasticine to cover up the gaps between the door and the floor. I don't know how effective this is, or how common this life hack truly is, but a cursory google search led me to some youtube videos showcasing the life hack. So it's not just my household that did that.

Number 6 is "Reunion," in which I talk about the constant change that we as people go through and how we cope with the change. The foil here is my friend, who once talked about liking their dark undereyes because it made them look like them. So I used the continuous metaphor of a changing face to signal a changing person and makeup as a means of "coping" with the change i.e. in denial about it or reclaiming youth. It's kind of up to unterpretation but I depict the speaker in the poem as insecure and less prepared for change compared to her long-time friend.

Lastly, the poem I wrote today was about ghosts. I knew I wanted to write about something to do with SEA ghosts and the Kuntilanak was a natural choice. It's about domesticity and patriarchal violence. I have some good readings (well, watchings) on the topic. This Kuntilanak video by Monstrum and another one in Indonesian from Remotivi. They're great primers on the subject! Highly recommend.

Oh, to wrap this all up, I love this poetry october challenge. My creative juices are flowing and I'm starting to write about things I would not have written otherwise. My plan is to continue to try out new formats and structures so I'm not stuck in my old ways, but there's nothing wrong with having a consistent style! :::

September Recap and Favorites

2025-10-02T00:00:00Z

Thursday, October 2nd 2025: September Recap and Favorites

September was a Month. Wasn't it? Anyways, I'll recap what I've done all month and what I've been listening to and watching!

For most of September I've been working on finding the right acrylic vendor for my keychains. The hunt is still ongoing. I also was busy arranging for my first ever pre order! That was super fun. I made graphics using Canva and asked my friends for input on the design. I got 3 total pre orders! Wahoo! That's three more than what I'd hoped for!

Frankly last month felt like a blur. It went by so fast. I can't believe cf21 is next month!!!!! Can you tell I'm jittery from coffee as I'm writing this right now?

I went to Surabaya, I went to Bandung, I bought beads, I taught my cousin how to make beaded trinkets, I went to museums, I took a solo train ride, I was home alone for almost a week, I went to a book fair, now that I say all that, this month was pretty eventful.

Onto my favorites! This month I've been obsessed with Jamie Paige's Constant Companions album. I think I've been obsessed with it since the deluxe version came out. In late September, Raye dropped her new single "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND" and it's been pretty much on repeat since. I've specifically been listening to the demo version of Aespa's Rich Man because it is miles better than the actual, released, "polished" track.

Lastly, my Big September favorite would be this website! Yes, I'm back to fixating on this website and spending hours every day tweaking it and adding new content. I've drawn a lot of assets for this project as well as brainstorm a lot for the mobile and desktop versions. I still have a long way to go in terms of learning front end development, and I wouldn't call myself an adept designer. But I'm having fun! There's still loads of stuff I'm planning to add to my website, so I won't be running out of ideas any time soon :D

Site Migration and Other Plans

2025-09-29T00:00:00Z

Monday, September 29th 2025: Site Migration and Other Plans

If you're reading this, that means I've gotten a domain for my website! Yipee. Big ups to my dad for showing me the ropes to webdev. I've painstakingly moved all my previous blog posts into the new layout but there will inevitably be some jank. That's just how it is.

Alright then! What are my plans? Well.

1. Learn Javascript

A lot of the features I want to implement need javascript. That's just how it is. And I've yet to actually, properly, study it. I'll get around to it with the help of my dad, eventually, but JS is my big obstacle right now.

2. Make an OC page

Pretty simple. Utilize JS knowledge to make a little grid to showcase my original characters. I just need to prep some thumbnails and reference sheets and- ah that's a lot of things to prep...

3. Sort out my entire art archive and upload it to the web

It's only like what, 9 years of art? haha (not haha). I've started this big archive project a long time ago, but never quite finished it. I've always wanted to host a complete archive of my art on the web, since my artwork has been scattered all across the internet for many years, and some even became lost media! I want it to be interactive and fun! Not like instagram or other polished portofolio sites.

4. Sort out mobile layout and dark mode

Yes, yes, technically I have a mobile layout and it's cute and all, but I want a toggle for it! I don't know exactly how I'm going to pull that off, but that's why step 1 of this project is important.

5. Make a dedicated assets page

What it says on the tin. I love the assets I've made for my website and want to show them off!!! Plus, I need somewhere to post my old ransom note buttons!

I think that's mostly it! I have other ideas I want to complement, but there are the big 5 for now. :::