annie blog

2025 intentions

i've been reading jenn schiffer's blog recently, after ty shared a post where she wrote some nice words about boshi's, and it was the final bit of inspiration that got me wanting to blog this year. it's been a latent thought for maybe a year now, as i've been continually inspired by various blogs from friends and strangers alike, so… here i am…

i liked jenn's post about her 2025 intentions. "intentions" feels like a better word to me than "goals" or "resolutions", maybe because it's less of a commitment and more of a statement of one's current state of mind. so, i wanted to write something similar. i know it's april already but uhhh y'know, it's never too late!

i jotted down a list of intentions on the subway last week. the list was haphazard but when i read it back, i saw that most of the intentions fit into a set of categories, and those categories helped clarify what things i really value in my life right now! so i'm going to talk a bit about each of those categories.

there are many big things that this list leaves out, notably my actual job (that i'm starting next week) and being part of boshi's, but since those are areas with their own built-in external accountability and because they'll be big parts of my life this year no matter what, i feel less of a need to set direct intentions for them here. i see these intentions as things that i want to consciously carve out time and space to do, outside of the regular hum of everyday life.

gym bro intentions

i've been in a gym bro period of life recently. i became obsessed with climbing in the past couple years, got really into running last year (though that has since faded), and got back into lifting at the start of this year. i love the feeling of having pushed my body to its absolute limits. it's easy to see how going to the gym could become someone's whole personality.

both of these goals are pretty lofty. i climbed a couple v5s last year but my gym started grading a bit harder (i swear…!) and now i'm back to projecting v4s. but i think if i can stick to a 2x week climbing schedule and start doing more focused training (overhangs and crimps, mostly), and the right v6 pops up at the right time… it might just be possible.

and right now i'm squatting 75 lbs, but i haven't been working on squats with any kind of regularity, so i am optimistic about improving swiftly! that's another addicting thing about lifting, the way that in the beginning you can improve so quickly and so numerically.

artist intentions

ever since childhood, when i was making little ratty manga drawings on scrap paper, i've struggled with what one might call "artistic output". i love making art but my motivation ebbs and flows and i can quickly fall into a state where i'm guilting myself about not making enough art and then the very thought of making stuff starts filling me with dread.

as with a lot of problems in my life, i think i simply need to think less. i've probably spent more cumulative time thinking about making stuff than actually making it.

for better or worse, one thing that brings me out of this thinking cycle is a deadline. mut's indiosyncratic game devs class last year was a great reminder of that. we made little prototypes every other week and i made more games in the span of 8 weeks than i had made in the past two years before that. deadlines are powerful! but i'm also wary of how they can make fun work feel like work work, as well as my personal penchant for setting overly aggressive deadlines that i'm ultimately not able to meet.

so, i'm gonna try out a somewhat casual goal of making one game – and perhaps i'll define that as one game that i feel that i've "finished" – every season, aka every three months. if one were corporate-brained, one might call this cadence "quarterly", but corporate-brainism is not welcome in this intentions list.

another thing i'm thinking about is my ability to talk about my own work. i've found recently that when i'm in a position to talk about something i've made, i feel incredibly sheepish and default towards talking about little minutiae about how i made the thing, or what i don't like about the final result, and then afterwards feel a sharp regret because i actually had more interesting things to say about my work and my process and i didn't articulate any of them. one dimension of this is just being more prepared in these situations; i'm not good at winging it in situations where i feel uncomfortable (and at least for now, i'm always uncomfortable when talking about my own art), so it'd likely be helpful for me to gather my thoughts beforehand and have a plan for what to say.

and related to that, i'm realizing that i haven't reflected much on my own artistic intentions or goals. most of the time i make stuff on a vibes-based level, which is cool and valid, but i think it's important to me to strive for more depth and meaning. i really admire artists from all disciplines who can speaky clearly and strongly about what their work is about and why they made it. so perhaps a major part of getting comfortable talking about my art is also developing my own sense of what my art means and what i'm striving towards.

craftsperson intentions

i'm trying to articulate the differences between "artist" and "craftsperson". both involve creativity and in fact i think a single discipline (knitting, for example) can be practiced in either an artistic way or a craftsperson-y way. maybe the distinction for me personally is that my artistic practice is about expressing myself and venturing into new territory, while my crafts practice is more about learning and honing specific skills. but actually… both of those things could easily apply to the other… so idk, the lines are blurry. maybe it's just that right now art = games for me, and crafts = all other creative practices.

anyway!

writing was my very first love and i hope blogging will be a way for me to reconnect with that practice. most of my writing in the past decade has been sporadic journaling or writing tech designs and pull request descriptions for work (my inclination here is to say "ew" but tbh i am proud of some of the technical writing i've done at work over the past few years!). working at observable made me a better writer, because some of my coworkers were such excellent writers (shoutout toph), but i still have a lot to improve on. i can feel it as i write this now, how unused i am to writing something longform and personal that is also coherent and reads decently.

the thing that sparked my current period of feeling inspired to write again was reading "gratitude" by oliver sacks for a book club last year. it's a collection of short essays he wrote in the years and days leading up to his death from cancer in 2015. in it, he writes candidly about his life, his childhood, his love of his work. i couldn't stop thinking about what a gift it was that he could express himself so clearly and truthfully, and speak so honestly about his feelings about the momentous event before him, his own death. it made me reflect on how writing – both the process of it, for the writer, and the artifact it creates, for the reader – is one of the most powerful methods of better understanding human life and experience, and thereby getting closer to some truth about what it is to live.

something i've also been reflecting on is that i often feel like i can express myself more fully through writing than i can through speaking, because i have more time to think and formulate what i have to say. in conversation, and especially in any format where i'm speaking in front of people (eep), i feel like i'm too aware of my audience, too self-conscious, too likely to veer into performativity, to be able to have what comes out of my mouth match what i am thinking in my head. it's so so much easier to do that in writing. i do aspire to get better at saying exactly what i mean irl but in the meantime… i shall write it instead.

i've also been cooking a lot recently! i love cooking and eating at home and providing food for people! it's been a joy especially to try out more chinese cooking lately and to slowly get better at it. i think i've come to a place now where i'm somewhat decent at cooking, but i still end up making more improvised just-okay struggle meals than i'd like. so my main goal this year is to improve the average tastiness and quality of what i cook, through continuing to try new recipes and also through practicing the same recipes enough times that i can start cooking them by heart and they get folded into my overall cooking intuition.

and laaastly, this one is a bit of a tacked-on goal, but i want to start knitting! i attended an incredible workshop on darning and mending from repair shop with fiona & pratishta last year, and it solidified a lot of thoughts i've been having about waste and minimalism and taking good care of the things that i own. i still have yet to successfully darn something, so that's kind of part of this goal, but i also really want to start knitting, so i can start making my own clothes and making gifts for people.

chinese-american intentions

this last one is something that's been on my mind for a long time but haven't acted on until very recently. though i have a good number of chinese-american friends, i wouldn't say that i have much in the way of chinese community. i feel very connected to my chinese-ness when i'm with family, but i'm sometimes struck with the dark sad thought that when my parents and my uncle are gone, i won't have much of a connection with my chineseness anymore. there's no one else in my life who i speak mandarin with, and i'm not in contact with my extended family in china. so what to do?

well, for one, i live in sunset park, aka the chinatown of brooklyn. i'm surrounded by more chinese people than i ever have been, probably, but i'm not at all involved in the community! recently i met a few friends of friends who do community work, teaching ESL and organizing, in the neighborhood, and i plan to get involved. i feel really connected to this neighborhood and i want to become an active participant in it.

another new thing is that my friend kevin started hosting chinese practice parties. there's only been one so far but it was honestly so invigorating and inspiring, and they're trying to make it a monthly thing!! there are so many american-born chinese people my age who are SO much better at mandarin than me; going into it, i honestly thought i was pretty good, but i was very quickly humbled. it was just so cool to speak mandarin with people my age, though. that's an experience i've almost never had, and it gave me hope for the future, and finding ways that i can stay connected to my chineseness throughout my life.

the party gave me a fresh wave of motivation for improving my mandarin, so i've been (1) speaking more mandarin with my mom on the phone, (2) listening to a mandarin learning podcast 听故事学中文, (3) studying HSK1 flashcards (yeah i'm that bad at reading…), and (4) watching old episodes of 家有儿女 on youtube. i used to watch endless episodes of 家有儿女 whenever i went back to beijing as a kid, and watching them again 15-20 years (!!) later is really wacking me with nostalgia. it's so comforting! it's so cute! everyone talks at a speed and with enough enunciation that i can pretty much always understand them! truly a perfect show for my language learning.