When the River team blogged about River, I also blogged about River.

When the River team made a zine, I also made a zine.

When the River team makes stickers—come on, you know we're making stickers.

---

This is actually the reason I use River.

This has been a pattern of behavior elsewhere on the internet. I learned html because of MySpace and Neopets. I started learning Rust because of Bluesky. I wrote a personal manifesto because I happened across this stinker (don't buy it) on my Amazon recommendation carousel.

Being conscientious about where I spend my digital time has huge implications for someone like me—unfortunately motivated by spite and peer pressure. So it turns out getting repeated reminders to go and do and make is quite good actually. I just fear that one day soon I will need to start making clothes or tables or whatever the fuck else you all do on this site.

Making stickers has been the most difficult yet as I am LEGITIMATELY ASS at design. It took me hours to cobble together the very basic cover for AMAG:

After spending 43 hours on Instagram and 6 hours on Are.na in the last month (creative research 🙄), I'm realizing being ass is not necessarily a dealbreaker. Being intentionally a little ass is very much a current design trend.

How to go from ass ass to ass on purpose? I would just need to iteratively address those issues that reveal my lack of skill and leave the rest as a mark of indelible taste. Very doable.

I was not about to shell out $250+ dollars for any Adobe subscription. Making this little ahole guy was my first time using Inkscape's Bezier tool which felt like the right level of polish for someone who can sort of draw but who has shaky hands and needs to redraw one line 10-20+ times before it stops looking like a seismograph. Without getting overly explanatory: I found a workflow where I draw on an eink notepad, convert a phone pic of the drawing into nodes using "Trace Bitmap" in Inkscape, and do the final editing in GIMP.

Anything I post on River has to somehow relate to River. So:

River is _____.

Digital!

Cheeky! Vaguely corporate!

Surprisingly Asian!

Again, very doable.

I happen to be in a very Asian period of my life atm (since birth).

Some stickers:

( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)

New Year's Resolution 2026 -> sticker pack

When the River team blogged about River, I also blogged about River.

When the River team made a zine, I also made a zine.

When the River team makes stickers—come on, you know we're making stickers.

---

This is actually the reason I use River.

This has been a pattern of behavior elsewhere on the internet. I learned html because of MySpace and Neopets. I started learning Rust because of Bluesky. I wrote a personal manifesto because I happened across this stinker (don't buy it) on my Amazon recommendation carousel.

Being conscientious about where I spend my digital time has huge implications for someone like me—unfortunately motivated by spite and peer pressure. So it turns out getting repeated reminders to go and do and make is quite good actually. I just fear that one day soon I will need to start making clothes or tables or whatever the fuck else you all do on this site.

Making stickers has been the most difficult yet as I am LEGITIMATELY ASS at design. It took me hours to cobble together the very basic cover for AMAG:

After spending 43 hours on Instagram and 6 hours on Are.na in the last month (creative research 🙄), I'm realizing being ass is not necessarily a dealbreaker. Being intentionally a little ass is very much a current design trend.

How to go from ass ass to ass on purpose? I would just need to iteratively address those issues that reveal my lack of skill and leave the rest as a mark of indelible taste. Very doable.

I was not about to shell out $250+ dollars for any Adobe subscription. Making this little ahole guy was my first time using Inkscape's Bezier tool which felt like the right level of polish for someone who can sort of draw but who has shaky hands and needs to redraw one line 10-20+ times before it stops looking like a seismograph. Without getting overly explanatory: I found a workflow where I draw on an eink notepad, convert a phone pic of the drawing into nodes using "Trace Bitmap" in Inkscape, and do the final editing in GIMP.

Anything I post on River has to somehow relate to River. So:

River is _____.

Digital!

Cheeky! Vaguely corporate!

Surprisingly Asian!

Again, very doable.

I happen to be in a very Asian period of my life atm (since birth).

Some stickers:

( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)

New Year's Resolution 2026 -> sticker pack