Field Notes: May 2026
2026 May 24
You can find the original newsletter here.
Posting this month's edition a bit early, as I'll be away from my computer towards the end of the week. Also, all newsletters going forward will be mirrored on my site!
Life Updates
Busy month offline finishing out the semester, and two of my best friends came to visit me at the end of the month! We spent a lot of time in nature and trying new foods, which is the ideal way to spend a vacation. Since they are from the Midwest we made sure to get good time in at the Atlantic coast despite the heat wave here.
Also, it was my birthday recently! I am 27 now. Honestly, I like that number more than 26. I don't really feel any different, but I do have a really cool new gray hair in my bangs that popped up recently. Happy Gemini season everyone.
I had a delicious birthday meal of pad thai, jian dui (sesame ball), and mochi flour taiyaki with my friends, brought to you by loadbearing rice flour since I still can't eat gluten. Which has been hard for my preferred "family style" food sharing with friends, that darned stuff is in everything.
For half of June, I will be out of the country for a conference. Mostly for a work trip, but my partner will be coming to visit in the last portion of the trip so we'll get lots of fun touristy time in. Location reveal next month...
Creative Updates
The primary, large project I was able to get done was launching my personal website! From now on, newsletters will be mirrored on this site as well. You can find this month's newsletter here. Full resolution photography on the site will be dithered to reduce the file size (and I just like how it looks), because file sizes of images fresh off the phone camera are huge nowadays. Original versions will remain on here. (And if anything in the CSS seems weird or broken, try hard refreshing with CTRL + F5 on PC!)
So far, it is mostly just the newsletter archive and a rudimentary about page. I'd like to start uploading a backlog of my art in a gallery, but I am coding this myself so I am still deciding how I want something like that formatted. I think I said in last month's newsletter I didn't have the energy to work on making a site from scratch, but I think writing creatively again and wanting a home for all of my links (it was agitating me that there was no centralized location) finally got me to give this another shot. I made that Carrd page last month, thought "this would probably be easy to code myself", and here we are.
I swing between liking pixel-heavy, maximalist layouts (a la Neopets petpages) and accessible, minimalist layouts as someone who is prone to headaches and eye strain. This layout, at present, is intentionally very minimalist so I did not overwhelm myself and to make it easy to read newsletters. I am very proud of the integrated light/dark mode (should pick up your system preferences), but you can also toggle it yourself from the layout selector at the bottom. I hope to add more fun color palettes. There is also now a site button and a guestbook!
Things on my mind in lieu of any physical art... I miss having a cool canine fursona, but I don't connect as much with my older sona these days design-wise. I want to incorporate more muted, earthy colors and cool clothing, but probably keep some of those "dragon" aspects I enjoy like the horns and talons. I keep pecking away at the old design and haven't come up with any designs I like though. I am kind of thinking of going for a "ptarmigan molting into a different seasonal plumage" type energy, but I've not been able to capture this.
Maybe it'd be better if I just started from scratch? I feel most represented these days by plain, earth toned animals that look great in a t-shirt and cargo pants. I connect more with non-mammals, but everyone simply needs a cool wolf. You understand.
Creatures of the month are these just-hatched piping plovers I got a picture of, who were taking shelter in the shade beneath a seaside goldenrod. I love a cotton ball with legs.
Hope you enjoyed. Always feels a bit strange talking about myself and my life and interests, but that's the purpose of these newsletters, to connect with people and let them know I haven't vanished into the void again in a more "long-form", social media-less way. I have been thinking about how the culture of commenting has shifted online to wordlessly liking/reposting, especially with art. I sometimes feel weird leaving comments here on Patreon to artists I follow, or elsewhere... even though kind comments make me (and probably others) happy! Always feel free to drop a note here :+)