August 2026

2026 August 30

You can find the original newsletter here.

Life Updates

Kind of a strange, busy, month, so I will be starting this newsletter off in a different way: with a cool bug!

Usually, I begin these with some sort of beautiful scenery picture for the thumbnail, but it's been such a busy month I actually don't have any of those for once. What I do have is this picture of a monarch caterpillar from my mom's garden though. She's planted milkweed for many years because they're great for pollinators, but this is the first year we've gotten the "archetypal" monarchs visiting and using the plants.

I've been getting daily caterpillar updates from my mom since we found these guys which is very wholesome. She named them Eric and Carl (after the very hungry caterpillar author).

Anyways, not much to report on this month and the caterpillars were definitely the highlight. I did go to one more (locally-located) conference to round out my Hot Conference Summer (never doing this again), but man. Definitely a solid 4/10, they moved the venue last minute to the basement of a windowless concrete building that was constantly over capacity (organizer told me it was over by about 350 people), and had us stay in college dorms. Which inflicted me and the people I was with with some sort of miasma, the beds were rock solid, and coming home from a long day and having to shower in SHOWER SHOES was wild. I'm grateful for the opportunity to go because of funding provided by the society (and the opportunity to present my research again), but it was definitely an experience. Done for the foreseeable future, though! 😮‍💨

I suppose in other news, I am trying to cook more again (schedule disruption has led to me just wanting to eat granola all meals of the day... officially partaking in No Granola September because this must be remedied). I've started a "kitchen" page on my personal site to archive my recent bowlslops.

Creative Updates

Mostly, due to being away from my art tablet, the big updates this month are my site! You may be reading this on there now, if you are not on my Patreon newsletter. It has a completely new layout.

First of all, there is a new domain name! https://pelagic.zone/ 🌊 I thought it'd be a fun top level domain to use an oceanic zone. I also completely redid the layout...

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It's hard balancing my love for crunchy, pixelly aesthetics with minimalist, responsive design but I think this is a nice blend of the two. I love the dithered sidebar (my own photography, mostly) giving it a little personality without being overwhelming. Up until now, I've always frankensteined people's codes together without much understanding for what each component does, but this time I created the layout almost from scratch. Many elements still carry over, especially in the text CSS (shoutout to Kalechips Classless CSS) but the actual structure of the site is my own. There is now a mobile layout with a nice link dropdown menu as well. It's a really nice feeling being able to understand the CSS now, and not just poking things to see what they do.

The other addition this month was adding a new "journal" navigation page, and a gallery for my pictures from Ireland. I think next up, I'll finally be tackling adding an art gallery... I like to work on my site when I don't have the energy for art, it's a nice change of pace.

If you've ever considered making a site, let this be your sign. Start small (mine started with the thought of "my Carrd page for links is pretty simple, I bet I could host it myself"), and I am under no illusions it will replace social media, but it's a really enriching creative side project that's easy to share with others and let them see a bit of your personality. Plus, you get full control over the display. As BlueSky has been down several times throughout the month, I thought about how the lead engineer put his phone in the pool to cool down, and how that is the same guy responsible for the functioning of one of the only social media sites I still check to see how my friends are doing. Like the site could fully just be down tomorrow forever, but hey, at least I have my own site...?

I'm interested in hosting some of my own comics here in the far future--Rarebit seems great for this purpose. Linking it here for you guys, since one of my friends was interested in hosting a comic on their own site but wasn't sure where to start/hadn't heard of this setup! Maybe it will find the right person reading this.

Speaking of art, I didn't have access to my tablet until the latter half of the month, and when I go a bit without drawing it's harder to get back in the saddle. I did draw a few interesting things though...

I am slowly watching a playthrough of Deltarune (just finished Chapter 3) about like, 7? 8? years late. But I'm enjoying it! This is a 1hr speedpaint I drew of a quote from the very beginning of the game that really stuck with me. I haven't done any lineless art in a while, and I'm quite happy with it.

I also did a sketch of my own character, Elaine, for the first time in... MONTHS? Oh girl I missed you so much. I truly think my muse is drawing disheveled sad Elaine with her unshaved legs so there will be more of this until morale improves. In the background I've been working on the story she's in though, so maybe more on that in the future... I mostly just want to share with other people the world she is a part of, because it's pretty cool. It just lives in my head and in DMs with friends though right now sadly.

And if you read this far, here's another cool creature feature of the month, a lacewing from the school's pollinator garden! I am making an effort to go down there with my camera when I have free time and just document whatever insects I'm able to get pictures of.

The next time this updates we'll be getting into autumn, which is wild!

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