learning updates - Feb

hey guys - thanks for reading, subscribing, and giving me continuous feedback. I have a couple of cool updates to share on what I’ve been doing and what I’ll be working on in the near future - including something you can buy if you’d like (no, I won’t make any money on it) - let’s get into it!

speaking with some friends & Pao, I think the next post will be on energy literacy. with some more literacy, I think we can understand and be more conscious about things we use and how much energy day to day activities actually use, so you don’t get fooled by tiktok psyops - I’ll try to explain these in an easily digestible way. what I mean is:

what is a kilowatt? what is a kilowatt hour? how much energy is a kilowatt hour? what can that power? does my chatGPT usage actually ruin the environment? what are some easy things that can drastically reduce energy usage? let’s slow down though - life update first!

learning updates

with the masters out of the way, and going back to my first blog post, these were some of the 2025 goals I had:

make my blog (done)
shoot and post more (first post of the year - done)
read more books (more on that below)
catch-up on my creative backlog (see parenthesis above and section below)
paella and arepas (latter - done)

Books: I took some of the comments to heart (thanks Pao & Trinh) and changed my translation of the Odyssey to Emily Wilson’s version; it’s been great so far and so, so good. I find it interesting how long the author’s note in the beginning is. It’s ~15-20% of the length according to my Kindle and that’s not what I expected, but it did give a useful introduction and made me understand deeper connotations of the text. Odysseus seems to be a bit of a dick, not going to lie. I just met him at Calypso’s island, let’s see how that goes. Leonardo’s life is so, so, SO interesting. The guy was actually insane. Brother completed every side quest for fun. Architecture, theater, painting, biology, you name it. His curiousity is next level, but what shook me was how available all of his work was. How did so much of it survive? Especially his notes? For those of us who haven’t read the biography, a higher percentage of Leonardo’s notebooks survived than Steve Jobs’ emails (Walter Isaacson wrote both biographies). Leonardo lived almost 600 years ago, while Steve Jobs died less than 15 years ago.

Arepas: they were a lot easier than I thought! probably the easiest thing I’ve ever made, at least the venezuelan type video that I saw on youtube. little peep of the masa and then the mini arepas I made for Pao to taste test below:

arepas

really, it was just cornmeal, water, time, and then grilling it. isn’t bad at all. I’m going to make the reina pepiada filling next, but Pao isn’t the biggest fan of it, so that’s a bit on the back burner. as I’m still reeling from the loss of arepa lady, I will gradually move to add cheese into the mix so I can try and replicate that god-tier arepa. I’ll let you know when I’ve made something close to it. after that, my next culinary attempt will be ceviche (new obsession after coming back from Colombia) and Paella (I’ve reached out to learn some things from my dad’s friend, Felipe) - if you have any recommended youtube videos or recipes for these, let me know please!

Secret Item: another thing that I actually didn’t include is… dancing! in Barranquilla, Danny and I took some classes and I can now defend myself in Merengue and Salsa, which is pretty satisfying to be honest. I have to be decent especially because Pao is from Cali (chatGPT Cali and dancing). We’ll put that to the test soon… I hope Pao will be happy with some of my progress! No, I won’t share my dance class video here. Sorry guys.

creative backlog update

since most of my time was spent getting carried by Gabo in video games, scraping by Machine Learning classes, or trying to catch-up on my film watch-list mostly curated by Canada (shameless plug for my letterboxd, follow me), I’ve had limited capacity to edit, color, scan, take pictures and express myself. Now that I’m just waiting for that upscale piece of paper in the mail, I’ve been firing on full cylinders creatively. I decided to tackle some items that had been gathering digital dust - my Egypt and Jordan videos.

I put together my Egypt/Jordan video and it’s up on youtube; i recorded on f-log and messed up some of the exposure so the colors aren’t that great, but it’s a decent effort for my first video in a couple of years. hopefully the hong kong video is a little better… let me know what you think about this one. watch it on youtube over instagram; the colors look a bit better.

Next: a similar video but for Hong Kong, editing the photos and videos I have from Cartagena, and then ultimately, work on the best project I have yet: my first Zine.

I’ve taken so many pictures over the years, and as always, I have some favorites that I’ve wanted to have in a physical medium. why not a zine (a mini book)? it’ll be something like this. looking into it, it’ll be relatively small, personal, with some writing inside to give some context on the pictures. I’ll post a link on the blog once it’s up with a video / pictures of the zine once I’ve printed it, to see if you’re interested. if you want to buy, it should be pretty simple; i’ll print a certain amount of copies and then ship it to you. this is a passion project, and I won’t make any money on it, I’ll just sell it at cost. not sure if anyone will even want one, but even if 1 person buys it and likes it, that’s enough for me. I hope this first one is decent and i’ll look back at it fondly, with some more zines to come!