atelier assay #02

May 2025

May’s Merriment

May was kind to me, though maybe a lot of it was due to spring rolling out a spectacle of blooms to enter the last act of the show with a bang. I started this month off with a flurry of productivity (a personal project release! two jam organisations finalised! a reorganisation of some irl spaces! tons of renovation on this site!), which has been satisfying. Summer tends to infect me with restlessness. For now, I’m eating some bak jian to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival and mindfully doing little else.

The Magical Language of Others

The Rose of Versailles

027 Les Nymphéas: Les Nuages

music

  • “The Phoenix”, SIAMÉS
    Electropop rock.
    • Beautiful animation in the visualiser. I love the variety of visual and sonic textures.
    • Somehow reminds me of Massive Attack's "Voodoo In My Blood", would make a really good queue together.
  • Naked Byrd Two, Armonico Consort
    Resonant choral collection, beautifully mixed. The trebles float over rich, layered melodies passed seamlessly between voices.
    • Favourite track: 6. “Spiritus Sanctus Vivificans” (shoutout to good ol’ Hildegard von Bingen and her antiphons)
  • Melancholia, SOPHIA
    Moody, velvety Portuguese pop. Rainy day harpischords and plucked strings.
    • Favourite track: “Melancholia”
  • "Twist in My Sobriety", Tanita Tikaram
    Old favourite getting a lot of playtime this month. Smooth, steady vocals and dry poetics. Vetiver in aural form.
  • “Tiempos Violentos”, St. Vincent (feat. Mon Laferte)
    Indie rock, kicker distortion on buzzing guitars and fibrous vocals.
    • The original English release of this was already one of my faves and I really like the way the toothy guitars vibe with the Spanish translation.

Reads

object experiences

  • 027 Les Nymphéas: Les Nuages, Dominant Industry
    • Pale blue ink with lavender/copper shimmer and heavy shading. A very delicate kind of beautiful, and dry as hell. The other shimmer ink I have from this brand was astonishingly well-behaved and wet, but this one clogged my broadest pen almost immediately. I chalk it up to how light and desaturated it is plus the heavy shading effect, but man. When it cooperates, this ink is stunning.
  • Daily Delight Porotta Layered Wheat Bread
    • Genuinely a lifechanger. So good so fast so convenient i made a giant pot of coconut chicken curry and have eaten roti canai at will this past month. love is real and life is good

watches

  • Versailles no Bara (ベルサイユのばら, 2025)
    In an age of revolution, Marie Antoinette and her protector Oscar François de Jarjayes face tough choices as women growing into their distinct roles.
    • Watched this with a friend who’s a devoted fan of the manga, and it was very fun to compare this movie to the anime to the manga. We were both quite surprised at the changes in framing Oscar’s gender, and greatly enjoyed trying to predict when the plot might reveal itself through musical interlude.
  • Taskmaster. So much Taskmaster. I couldn’t even tell you why, but it’s been a good time.

Web Experiences

Jinx Things ✨

  • Released Leonora Twine Template
    • Learned a lot of JS for this one! I really enjoyed having a more structured/cleaned-up workflow and trying new things.
    • The writing for this was a lot of fun, and has ended up being (almost) the heftiest thing I’ve worked on this year. The template is named for a character I really enjoy digging into: Leonora is a woman whose unfaltering pride is a direct result and continuation of the system that defines her, to the point that she is both genuinely happy with her life and in deep denial. She has been so consistently rewarded for exceeding expectations and doing things “properly” that when failure finds her purely by chance, she is set utterly adrift.
  • Updated this website’s layout and backend structure to be a lot more streamlined, plus added in a fun page to collect digital trinkets: bibelots!
  • Anti-Romance Jam 2025
    • The third annual Anti-Romance Jam! The organisation crept up on me a bit this year, but I’m glad to see interest in the event so far. Anti-romance is one of my favourite concepts to dig into: what makes a love story not a love story? What makes love monstrous or its own opposite—or in the absence of romance, what kind of love sets root in that space? Delicious things to while away the day thinking of.
  • Neo-Twiny 2025
    • Another jam I’m really stoked to see returning (and even more so to have a hand in!) I was feeling a little blocked for inspiration early this month after having been so focused on writing for Leonora, but I’m feeling quite happy with my current outline for (hopefully) a tiny trilogy of submissions. I always seem to return to exploring the human (haha) condition via vampires for Neo-Twiny…
April 2025
June 2025