_ ____ ___ ____ ____ (_) __ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _ __ _ _|___ \ / _ \___ \| ___| + | |/ _` | '_ \| | | |/ _` | '__| | | | __) | | | |__) |___ \ | | (_| | | | | |_| | (_| | | | |_| |/ __/| |_| / __/ ___) | * _/ |\__,_|_| |_|\__,_|\__,_|_| \__, |_____|\___/_____|____/ + * . |__/ |___/Blessed to have spent the end of the year and the beginning of the current one, for the first time in many, with my very best friend kiapou, pictured here dancing drunk in our kitchen approximately three and a half lifetimes ago. we spent the first day of the new year sitting on various tables and chairs throughout the county freshly forgetting at each new location that most things were closed due to the holiday and hangovers. She hit the road early the next morning, needing to make it to (place) the next state over before nightfall. i bid her farewell and sent her off with a huge stack of my magazines for her to flip through
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state is on fire // /// * // * /
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+ :+ | o o o o o | | | o| | +// :+ +:: |/
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a few days later, multiple fires would erupt across LA county, leading to this exchange in our family group text. Later that day my brother, his wife, and their cone-headed dog would pile into their Rivian named RiRi and come to shelter ahead of evacuation warnings. ngl it was fun having them in town for a week since usually their stays are limited to dinner or a single overnight at most. A not insignificant amount of time was spent eating ice cream, going to the mall and going to the mall to eat ice cream. The mall happened to have a kiosk selling blind boxes these naked baby figurines 弟妹 collects, kfc mini brands for me and Japanese strawberry ube soft serve for all. We also spent some time at the arcade so jen could play some iteration of DDR and I could prove to myself that the claw machines there were a rip off.Beyond crafting and painting, I spent a large part of my downtime perfecting my cyber experience, tweaking system settings and downloading increasingly obscure utility apps.
idk some other shit happened but putting the above page together really drained my batteries. there was a fire? i got myself back into painting and so that was cool, nothing big, mostly sketchbook stuff. broke in my hibino (this year's hobonichi alternative), whipped up a little animation i ought not to share, obsessed over that avatar rig i did in december, saw a racoon, caught the planetary procession which was pretty nifty, put together a few non-official Temu lego sets... oh! 新年快樂! bing bong.
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I’d say the month was robust. Had a creative burst at the top of the hour and cranked out 4 cricut cuts of varying intricacy I’ve uploaded the cut files here (Click here to see them in use.)*
Started a reading style where I round robin between short stories from anthologies and essays I have saved on my BOOX Color Go 7. Samanta Schweblin was a strong standout. She has this way of writing that seems simultaneously for and in spite of the reader. What i mean is, her stories are built so that everything comes together at the very end and everything is tense and terrible til then. Discomfort content. yeah.
Acquired tons of new art supplies and made it a priority to use my old ones. Massive overhaul on my main mega watercolor palette, It was a month of swatching and minimal proper painting. The last thing in my sketchbook is an ode to old internets. hint:
When Hell is full,
the dead will walk the earth
PURE EVIL SINCE 1996
Flush please
* Artist credit for image background: Ying Wu
This month in color:
Huge breakthrough on
pigments and how they
behave. Considering
developing my abandoned
watercolor site into a
blog for material notes.
Currently Reading:
The Vegetarian
by Han Kang
Projects:
Officer Big Mac tee
Leather pen roll
Washi stickers
Hey. Heres something you may not know about me I am fucking obsessed with pens and inks and over the course of the past year have been building up a decent fountain pen collection. Here's a showcase of what came in the mail this month (the pouch is from Daiso and the xxxl zipper pull doubles as a phone stand!)
NotesLike most months, i spent most of it working diligently at a job I enjoy, this month even more so because I opted out of a trip to Taiwan and Japan to stay behind and keep up with my moneys. I was treated to several facetime calls from overseas stationery shops where I got to do some remote shopping. I got my BOOX ereader back when I thought I was going to be taking a pair of 14 hour flights, but its served me well regardless. One of my favorite online activities is going fucko on z-lib and downloading as many interesting books as I can. The one thing I can't stand is a boring cover, or none at all, and I'll often make my own to pretty up my digital shelves. Many had to be redone to remind me of what the books is actually about*, with the requirement of remaining legible at 125px-ish. Here's some I made:
| My Version | Original | Description |
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Jacques Derrida writes "The Madness of the Day is a story whose title runs wild and drives the reader mad, la folie du jour, the madness of today, which leads to the madness that comes from the day, is born of it, as well as the madness of the day itself, itself mad." Blanchot was a contemporary of Derrida and their prose often published together |
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big book of aphorisms from western philosophy's angriest mustache |
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Novel about being a wife, mother, and artist who wakes up one day to the fact that the idyllic life she sold herself on is bullshit. When she married him, she thought her and her husband wanted the same things, a creative life filled with joy and children. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. |
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A story about a woman obsessed with her glamorous neighbor living in the brownstone next door. Recommended in reading books about obsession |
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Essay by C. Thi Nguyen recommended by CJtheX, Canadian freak and video essayist savant. |
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Perspectives on Digital Humanism, or, The Internet is Dead! Long Live the Internet! |
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"Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings." Whatever that means. |
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A collection of essays that explore the concept of decay in various sociopolitical contexts. The book delves into the mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities of decay, providing readers with a nuanced and rigorous understanding of the topic. |
As far as what I actually read.. I finished The Vegetarian by Han Kang, which was weird, fucked up and the ending was abrupt. I liked it. but it was weird. Found it on this list of 10 Kafkaesque Novels to Mess with Your Mind while searching for the book cover of another novel. Granted the article title is a little corny, but what's cornier is the author of the article self inserts her own book on the list. That being said there's a few good titles and most of the lists I've found in the Literature section of her site are perfectly fine, like 10 Transgressive Books by Weird Women where she is notably absent. Is she not weird or her book not transgressive?
Between chapters of the Vegetarian I read the real book version of Baby Blue by Bim Erikkson which was a delightful lesbian romp about fighting fascists in a sci fi future set in Sweden.
Read another graphic novel during the last days of April that I had heard a lot of good things about, Grant Morisson's Nameless. Psychedelic gore core, Event Horizon meets Inception with an Irish accent. Loved it. I'd put it next to Hard-Boiled (or just below).
monthly miscellany
Ps. Here's a pic of Molly pretending to be the same size as Chola.
Another fun, fat and funky, fruitful month for humantooth. First off thank you all for 500k page views, I still cant believe that they all aren't just me checking to see if my edits took. In a world where tiktok videos break 1m views in 24hrs, I dont take the slow climb to half of that in a few years for granted. Looking at my dumb little website is a genuine conscious effort as neocities doesn't have an algorithm or a to-go menu. To celebrate I got myself a new url, which I actually forgot about until flipping through my Hibino trying to remind myself what I did this month.
Got a visit from my very best friend Katrina, who drove out from New Mexico, so that was a delight. In preparation for her visit, and to meet the minimum for free shipping on Jet Pens, I ordered her a Masuya Monokaki, which I would come to find has a long and sordid history. Ok just a long history.
I knew the cover was sourced from an Edo period washi maker, and wanted to make note of the name studio because she likes that kind of stuff (i.e. paper-making; she's a bookbinder). Trying to find that name led me to many open tabs, google-translations and a whole entry in my stationery specific blog, stationeryspecific.substack.com.
As for her visit, it was quick, since I caught her on the tail end of a lower-state regional road trip, but we got to exchange gifts (she made me some LOVELY boxes to keep my magazines in using her bookbinding skills), chit and chat and do some tables and chairs business at whole foods like we did as kids, except this time we have money to pay for everything we ate.
There's this realtor in the neighborhood I live in who mails us these fliers and calendars to keep her present in our minds should any of us that own homes ever wish to sell, and often they will include a cartoon illustration of the neighborhood with the caption THIS IS NESBITT COUNTRY. So its become a bizarre running joke that we are all citizens of Nesbitt Country and she is our queen.
Every year the citizens of Nesbitt Country participate in a massive multi-family neighborhood garage sale (an MMFNG, if you will) and she drives around on her little golf cart bequeathing her subjects with Krispy Kreme donuts. It's hell.
These garage sales are pure mania. They start at seven (in the actual morning) and the second the garage comes up you dont get a chance to set up because immediately folks are walking up and asking how much this is? And the tide doesn't stop until about 10 or 11 but by that time it feels like three days have past and I can only liken it to time spent on shrooms or LSD.
This being our third year, and the previous year giving me PTSD where I was shouting out prices in my dreams, I was in the right mind to make the executive decision to not begin until 8am. While we did sell less, we made up for it in reducing stress. It was actually kind of fun. And I was able to offload art supplies and minis to 14 and 12 year old girls respectively that were thrilled beyond measure. So that felt good.
A couple weeks later I would learn how truly boring my house is when the power was shut off for scheduled something or other. It started before I could make coffee -which is when I learned that actually, my stove does need electricity to boil water- and was slated to end at 2:30pm but went past that until 4:00pm. I think I painted? and swatched some new inks? I certainly didn't read since I was able to make a mobile hot spot from my phone to stream true crime nonsense on my ipad.
Ive been struggling with reading lately, not like with putting together words into letters, but the act. Its a guilt I feel because I have so many freaking books and have added more since comiccon.
We have also upgraded our hardware at HumanTooth farms. well, not sure if "upgraded" is the right word but I got a new tech thing. A stinking cute pink laptop I found on Amazon for $180USD. Took me awhile but I was able to turn it into a halfway decent machine once I terminated all these inane update processes that were constantly running and skull-fucking the CPU. I mostly got it to do L33t HaX0R shit with my M5 Cardputer and finally play HYLICS, neither of which I was able to do as a macOS girlie. Come to find that since the last time I made a foray into Michaelsoft Binbows, they've drummed up some decent ways to customize that awful awful interface.
and in Boone news, because I know none of y'all care, this month was absolutely BLESSED. For over a year now we have been looking forward to Boone v Boone, where Sarah would maker her argument for why she believed she was still entitled to $1,000 per month alimony payments while SEVRVING LIFE IN PRISON.
Since interest in the case has dwindled to loonies like me and it was pretty clear that media wasn't going to be there to record the way they did for her criminal case. A couple youtubers made their way down to florida to witness it in person and report back the exact degree how far off the rails she went. I, however, realized I had access to the feed since I had requested it back in May for the pretrial conference, and the links and dial-in details appeared to be used throughout the year (not on a case-by-case basis). I kept this to myself, figured out how to do screen recordings with audio on my computato, figured out how to record calls on my phone as back up (Thanks, Gemini!) and set my alarm on the morning of the trial and logged in through both. It. was. glorious. Not only was Sarah operating at peak craziness, her ex, once accommodating and kind, did a magical girl transformation into Sailor Grey Rock, delivering biting one-liners during cross examination. I was a bit nervous on getting it all since the trial was earmarked for three hours and ran closer to four, so you can imagine, these were MASSIVE files. After leaking the recordings to a few youtubers and getting shout-outs in turn, I went through and digitally glued them all together, removing any PII and name of the minor child and to the joy of the r/SarahBooneContinued subreddit, finally uploaded the whole kit and caboodle to the Internet Archive. Link below via the archive.org logo, along with links to my first ever font and a painting I did during the blackout.
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The first week of October was spent horizontally, in that I was bed bound and.. sick? I'm still not sure what happened there; American health care means I've conditioned myself to not visit the doctor under any circumstances. Luckily, I hardly fall ill, so it was an almost-amusing experience to observe. My head hurt too much to look at a screen and every time I stood up it was like peeling myself off the road after taking a semi-truck like that awful child in Pet Semetary. I'm just hoping I'll be good by the 10 th because my brother, his wife and I had been looking forward to a semi-hinged stationery-centric weekend in LA. Not just any ole trip either- that weekend was slated for the first annual Bungu LA Expo aka BunguFest (not a sex thing). We had been wanting to go to the SF Pen Show to celebrate our mutual obsession, but life happened and circumstances wouldn't allow, so we were pretty stoked to see that there was going to be stationery expo geared towards Japanese brands in their backyard.
Mind you, online tickets for the first day had sold out, but we were hopeful we'd still be able to get in, since the site said they had still reserved a whole bunch of tickets for the door. Then, some fuck at the LA Times newspaper wrote a long ass piece about the event and the people planning it, bringing it way too much attention and now I understand why sometimes politicians execute target journalists. just kidding. We coulda gotten tickets for the second day but my con-going experience has taught me the coolest shit sells out day one- a real and present danger amplified by the fact that there would be many first-time vendors.
Board the Amtrak and catch a train to Glendale, Friday before BunguFest. Bungufest Eve, you might not say. We discuss our game plan. I'm thinking getting there a bit later in the day might be better, since by that time, the folks that showed up in the morning will be filtering out and damn if people in LA don't love lines (see: Pink's Hot Dogs). Jen volunteers to get up early and hold us a spot in line, but all of us are up bright and early the next morning anyway, so we decide to roll up when it opens. The expo is being held at beautiful Union Station (in that big side room at the entrance, for anyone who has ever been). The line felt infinite, wrapping around the station. We settled in and used the time to catch up, plot a menacing letter on adorable stationery to the aforementioned LA Times journo, and mentally drown in the ocean of keychain creatures clipped to all manner of totes, purses and bags.
We finally get in TWO AND A HALF HOURS later, and promptly treated to- more lines. The place was clearly at max capacity and certain sections, booths and features had built up their own queues. Didn't know when I walked in but I needed a lot of wooden stamps. An obscene amount of wooden stamps. Did you know that stamps can be combined to form entire scenes? I didn't, but after a stamping demonstration that felt like a magician's sleight of hand, I was sold. Without the supervision of people who wouldn't understand, I was allowed to purchase four notebooks I may never fill to join the other notebook I've never started**. One purchase I got on a whim, and turned out to be real pleased with, was a photo essay in the form of a book, exploring mom and pop stationery shops across Japan, compiled by one Mr. Allister Lee. It was lovely reading for the train ride home.
On the way out I spotted my friend Kevin (not the Hayes), which was cool. We were leaving at the same time, I asked him how long he had to wait to get in and he said ten minutes. Spotted him again when we pulled up to the second location, PaperPlant Co. The owners of the shop put the event on and here another line had formed. I couldn't, none of us could, so we strolled through LA's weird ass Chinatown and finally went home to flatten out. We ended up getting pizza and watching Lower Decks til we all got sleepy.
The next day was a tour of LA stationery stores. I felt like a delegate being shown the finest wares in the kingdom. Got some more things with a little more discretion. Caught a pen crush at Top Drawer. Wandered around a warehouse filled with decades of meticulous sculptures, tasteful hoarding and assemblages. Still not sure what that place was called but its next to a marionette theater and within walking distance to Shorthand.
The next week my neighbor's family, which has as many members as most people's extended families, came into town to reunite with their brother facing terminal illness. His place (my neighbor's) is a sty so when I heard he was going to be housing two grown adults in his already cramped one-bedroom, I offered my guest room immediately and without thought. I declined most of their offers to join them for outings, but the day before they left I finally did accept their offer to go to SDZINEFEST, where one can see what America's most mediocre city has to offer. I was still a bit high off the Bungu Expo and felt the need to spend big on small potatoes. Got a handful of things, which I haven't bothered to give a second look, but to be fair, the same can be said of most (if not all) of my most recent comiccon haul.
Lastly, and hopefully leastly, I had to bring my sweet Chola to the vet for a bump in her tummy tissue that kinda looks like a new boob- she was born with an asymmetrical amount of nipples, so she doesn't need another. Cost a pretty penny to run a gamut of tests and we have a surgery scheduled for the week of Thanksgiving. Luckily, she's as spry and sassy as ever, so it isn't bothering her in the meantime, and despite her getting on in years, I know her vim and vigor will pull her through. The last time she had surgery, for a minute there I didn't know just how we were going to afford it, but this time it feels good to be in a place where I can cover anything she needs.
She had a blast on Halloween, sitting outside on an outdoor blanket, handing out barks to trick-or-treaters and airplanes.
sorry but if you don't love this calendar, then idk what to tell you. At the top of the month I noticed that the pomegranate tree in the backyard was ripe and ready for the picking, but it wasn't until I found a pomegranate juicer at Marshalls for $7.99 that i would act, snip-snipping at the tree's branches with a big black pair of shears like an artschool dropout trying to give herself bangs. Spent a full day harvesting until sundown, lugging away dozens and dozens of strange red fruit. Pomegranates are weird, like god and evolution chasing after each other, and I cant think of another way to explain it. Learned pretty quickly why the fuck pomegranate juice is so expensive. Juicing them is hella labor intensive. One fruit might take 20 minutes and yield about an inch of juice. My kitchen looked like a crime scene with dark red drops and castoff from the ceiling to floors, or perhaps more aptly, from the windows to the walls. satisfying process though.
had a big scare with my little lady after chola's tumor became infected. Within the span of a day it grew to twice the size and meanwhile she became unresponsive, not able to eat or drink, shaking intermittently throughout the day. It was heartbreaking and at one point I completely lost my composure, sobbing into my hands, overwhelmed with thoughts of the worst that could happen. It was the most emotion I've ejected in years, certainly out of my face. Luckily she pulled through that first day the infection took over and we were able to get her on a schedule of antibiotics and move her surgery day up, though she would have to be coned up in her dunce cap until then.
The day of the surgery came and she took it like a champ, bounding back almost immediately, though what weight she had lost was quickly put back on, since her round the clock medication meant untold amounts of ricotta to airplane it in. All told, across a single month I spend $3300 in medical bills and she gained a full kilo in medicinal cheese. ricotta stuffed pooch. every second i am smothering her with affection.
Because the surgery was rescheduled, I was able to attend Thanksgiving, resuming our new tradition of going to my brothers house in redacted. New this year was kevin hayes and his mom lili of pancake pie fame.
The next day, the next day, we went to TopDrawer where I would negotiate between every variation of the Kolo Tino in Limited Super Special Edition DUNE and ended up taking home the in-store demonstration model, not caring that it had been handled as it was the one I first fell in love with. You ever see that Disney Cartoon with the hats that fall in love? Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet? There's something about that store that reminds me of the texture of that cartoon.
I had nowhere to put this, but I ordered a McRib and it was missing the bottom bread of the sandwich. So I had to eat it upside-down and open faced. It's unfortunate that the nature of my memory means i will probably remember this long after the other memories of this month's events have faded.
How to tell if a pomegranate is ready to pick:
Is there funky stuff in the bottom thingy? half the time thats fine, after you split the fruit you'll usually find that the funky stuff doesnt make it into the fruit because the bottom part's all thicc
what i like to do is get a sharp knife and cut out that flowery bit deep into the meaty part thusly:
How to get rid of pomegranate stains from light colored clothing: you dont.
Fast Fact: Those little red corn kernel guys are called 'arils'
The end of the year was fine. There's not many specific events that leap to mind, but I remember enjoying myself. Went to the airport a half dozen times, picking folks up and dropping them off. Didn't go anywhere myself. Getting on in my older years I've become pretty self satisfied in a way that might seem alarming to my younger self. Every now and then I wonder if I should feel guilty about how content I am, but that feels like a silly thing to probe. I don't go out much is what I'm trying to say but it's very much by choice. Even when I do try to make plans, it feels delightful to break them and give in to doing what I really want. I think what I used to believe is that for a life well lived you needed to be able to count a lot of things, exciting memories and experiences. well I have those and turns out you dont need to endlessly add to that list, or at least not feel compelled to force new items. That's what I learned this year? Maybe?
One of my many airport trips was to bring my neighbor/ex/doggy-baby-daddy to say goodbye to and then attend services for his brother, who was rapidly deteriorating from and eventually died of pancreatic cancer. Rough stuff. When he got back the first time, after his brother had passed, he showed me a picture of his mom hands, cradling the hand of her oldest son during his last moment on the planet. He wanted me to paint it for her as a Christmas present. It was a bit tricky, trying to capture the likeness of hands. Drawing hands are hard enough but getting them to resemble known hands is a lot tougher. I didn't get a picture of it once it was all done, set and framed, but I do have a pic I sent when I was at the horizon of good enough to give up and stay safe, or keep going and potentially ruin it. From what I remember I didn't do too much after this. Of course she loved it and cried, so thats what matters most.
I also did a set of paintings for my immediate family for Xmas. Once we were done with presents, I pulled out five tiny gift bags, each containing a tiny 2.5" square painting of one of my family members. I had everyone pick a bag at random and then open them at the same time. They were pretty jazzed and the fun of it all trumped the necessity of accuracy or the paintings being that good. Despite how small they were, or precisely so, I bit off more than I could chew by trying to make tiny accurate paintings in watercolor on tiny novelty low-quality canvasses, although grounding them first a few times did help. I didn t get pics of the whole set, but here's the one I pulled of my pops.
May was marked with new acquisitions, soft work and partial dedication. Meaning i bought a lot of shit online and did my job. You may have noticed that im in the habit of collecting colors this year. Idk if thats the right phrasing. it's what im wasting my money on. ink and paint. club. This month's standouts were shade-splitting handmade watercolors from 
I painted per 
box-sizing attribute? Anyway, I'm running away with myself. My point was supposed to be: I put together a page with the whole year in chronological order. This year I made it all at once (today) whereas usually I add to while the year is on-going, see 2023.html, 2024.html in my Archive, along with other neat stuff I've forgotten about.
