First Edition
2026 April 11
11 May 2026: This post is missing photos, which need to be optimized and rehosted on this site. You can find the original newsletter here.
Hi everyone! Trying something new, and seeing how it goes. This is a free Patreon where I will post more sides of my work and newsletters on life and creative projects.
Why Patreon, of all places?
Why not a personal website/blog? I enjoy coding personal sites (thank you Neopets petpages days), and though I like the flexibility and customization, it is a lot of mental bandwidth and upkeep time that I do not have currently. Even using a static site generator to expedite the process has been a small hurdle when it comes to actually getting the "templates" set up for what I'd like to use it for... that isn't to say I won't ever have a site—I'd love to—it's just not something I can sit down and fully dedicate the time to right now. At some point, when I make one, I may port some of what I post here over there. (Coding also activates a rabid perfectionist energy in me, in a not-fun way.)
10 May 2026: Funny to read this part in the midst of porting this to a site..
Why not social media? Without getting too into it, I am not able to use public social media in a way that is comfortable for me. I've struggled for a long time to try to use it more, mostly so I can keep in touch with my friends, but I am accepting now it is just not compatible with my brain the way things are now.
I follow a lot of my favorite artists on here, and saw Patreon has now introduced more robust newsletter features. In a move my friend described as "silly, but we need more silly in the world", I've decided to give this a try. I'm hoping this can be an alternative way to keep up with friends and share what I am enjoying that's more agreeable with my brain.
Life Updates
Busy as always with school. I applied for a one-year extension for my grad program, so I'll be hanging out here a little longer. It is what it is, and it's lonely now that most of my friends have moved on, but I'm in a much healthier work environment now and so I am finally enjoying my time here again. This semester, I've even gotten out of TA'ing the soul-draining introductory class I've always done and instead have been TA'ing a more advanced class (birds!), so while that has been more time-consuming it's been much more enriching.
Not much on the cooking front lately, except that I have been focusing on low-energy meals that are also somewhat nutritious. Egg rice bowls w/ a frozen vegetable of choice have been my workhorse lately. I have my method down to a science and it takes <12 minutes, and generates only 2 dishes + 2 utensils to wash unless I run out of portioned frozen rice and need to take out the rice cooker. It's an expedited riff on this BudgetBytes recipe. But it's a bit of a slopbowl in appearance, so here's a picture of bibimbap from the HMart food court a few weeks ago that is a much more elevated version.
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Creative Updates
In the middle of a modest "rebrand", mostly for online privacy reasons. I am experimenting with using the nickname Petrel online. Stolen from a bird most excellent, of course. Friends can still use my actual name—I like my name, and it fits—but I'd rather move away from using my IRL name online these days just for separation and privacy from my professional life.
So, where does this exceedingly random Patreon username come from?
"A marginal sea is a division of an ocean, partially enclosed by islands, archipelagos, or peninsulas, adjacent to or widely open to the open ocean at the surface, and/or bounded by submarine ridges on the sea floor."
I won't bullshit you, I just thought it was a cool term and it's kind of sticking now the more that I think about it. But one could make an argument that this is a division of the ocean of my life... enclosed by the Patreon archipelagos... whatever. Most people know me by my online username of 10+ years, ETOURVOL, so it's hard to start to move away from that, but at this point it'd be nice to pick something fresher. Not being able to commit to one username has resulted in a scattering of different usernames across the few sites I use now, though...
I've also really been feeling the itch to work on longer-term projects, eventually working my way up to doing something more involved with my primary OCs. For now, I'm looking into writing a short-story, self-contained comic just to flex some of those rusty writing and drawing muscles first.
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Thinking of doing a short (<50 pages ideally), weird comic about bird women at the worst job ever in Antarctica. This Patreon is intended to be free, but if I get to the point I'm working on longer projects routinely I may make a cheap "tip jar" tier for full backlog access and WIPs of PMVs, that sort of thing.
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Offline, I have really fallen in love with acrylic markers. I try to do a sketch a week of something random and biology-related in my pocket notebook. Continuing our petrel theme, this week's was a baby Leach's storm petrel. Which resembles a dust bunny you'd find under your couch (reference image here, highly recommend clicking), but I wanted to practice texturing.
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It's also (finally) spring, and my photography subjects (birds and bugs) are making their return! I made a storage blog for my photography on Tumblr earlier this year, which you can find here. I've done a lot of bird photography the past few years, but I've wanted to learn more about the invertebrates around me so I'm hoping to get out more and see more bugs so I can identify them. I might make a separate post on here about bug photography as the season progresses because my macro lens I acquired has a pretty funny story behind its origin.
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I think that's it, thank you for reading to the end if you made it down here. These won't be so long every time, but I wanted to get things started and feel it out. Let me know if you enjoyed this.