the last month in 3 chapters

i'm back from self-appointed summer break! <3

TLDR: Slinging zines, reading important worm news, trying to get outside more often.

chapter 1

california nature remains (unsurprisingly) cool

• Red-tailed hawks are nesting at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum! Don’t miss the very fuzzy, very cute baby hawk photos in the article.

• A Bay Area community science program found a bee species that hasn’t been documented in over 40 years (and was only documented less than 100 times before).

• 11 new predatory worm species were documented in Bodega Bay by a college student. (Sidenote: 1 new predatory worm species was also discovered by me in my apartment from my couch on a Tuesday evening during a movie night.)

chapter 2

public prototypes of new projects

An incredibly sweet new friend @renwrrites (on the right) sketched my partner and I watching Joyce Kwon’s set at Tuesday Night Cafe!

I spent this past Tuesday evening tabling at an incredibly unique event in LA.

It’s called Tuesday Night Cafe, it happens every other week from April to October, and it was created by the Tuesday Night Project about 26 years ago to highlight Asian American artists and build community in Little Tokyo. The sentence I said most frequently while there: “I started making zines around this time last year and … I haven’t been able to stop.”

All of this made Tuesday Night Cafe feel like the perfect place to debut my latest project, a fill-it-in-yourself family recipe book designed with a couple categories of people in mind: 1) intuition-driven cooks, 2) children of first-gen immigrants who primarily connect with their families via food, and 3) a combination of 1 and 2.

If any of those descriptions sound like you (or like someone you know) and you’re interested in grabbing one of these early copies for yourself, please reach out! I printed the first run at home, but I’m planning to eventually create something more durable so it can (ideally) be passed on to future generations.

I’d love to hear thoughts and feedback on this first prototype so I can make the next versions even better. To be honest, I’m a little terrified to order a bunch of copies of this project through a proper printer — the classic “what if I end up with boxes of silly books no one actually wants” dilemma. To (hopefully) avoid this, I’m trying to embrace what my college professors and mentors suggested about prototyping early ideas in public to work out problems earlier rather than later.

Music from singer, composer, and gayageum player Joyce Kwon, who was featured at the Tuesday Night Cafe event I participated in:

chapter 3

documenting various -ings of the past month

I’ve kept a daily journal since the start of 2023. Some notable things extracted:

• Playing Pikmin Bloom. My partner and I now take daily evening walks to grow our silly little guys and plant our silly little flowers. He’s running absolute circles around me and our friends in leveling up because he easily walks 10,000+ steps a day in his lab while I sit like a shrimp at my desk all day.

• Finally sorting my field guide collection after years of hoarding them across several corners of my apartment.

• Thoroughly enjoying the fact that I had 3 friends (who don’t know one another) independently send me disco snail.

• Prepping for upcoming events. Here’s a calendar — if you’re in the area, come say hi!

  • Aug. 25, 11am–5pm: Armory Arts Zine Fest (Los Angeles)

  • Sept. 1, 11am–5pm: SF Zine Fest (San Francisco)

  • Sept. 7, 11am–4pm: OC Zine Fest (Anaheim)