Week 8

This week was entirely consumed by the fact that I opened an online store to sell generative “art” prints. Art is in quotations here because I have a deeply unhealthy relationship with calling anything I do art, or myself an artist, but we don’t have time to for a therapy session right now.

It went really great. I sold out of 2 kinds of prints! People who weren’t just my friends put it orders! My first customer ever was Mariko, which is absurd because she should’ve gotten a free print without even asking based on the kilograms of gacha she’s brought me from Japan, but of course she was also the first one to see the tweet about the store because that’s just the kind of friend she is.

(this paragraph is really niche and boring, skip it). Every once in a while I use a software that blows my fucking mind. E-commerce is generally NOT this experience btw, because it’s all integrations that are 90% magic and 10% wonky af. Like, my store is a BigCartel store (big fan!), but the site itself is a bit flaky so sometimes Things Will Happen™ (like pages won’t redirect, the theme editor will just panic, javascript is a prison). Stripe was like 95% magic and 5% “the oauth flow didn’t redirect well For Reasons™ so I had to do it twice”. I don’t even know who was at fault there. Anyway, PirateShip is a thing that prints USPS labels and it was 120% magic. People wrote their addresses in their orders in my store; I clicked a single button on the PirateShip site, which imported those addresses, made shipping labels, made customs forms for the international orders, formatted all the labels for my label printer to print AND emailed all the customers their tracking numbers. And charged me 0 extra dollars. PirateShip, I don’t know how you make your money but you are an absolute gem and I love you. The post office gentleman even commented on how together my shit was.

Frances and I had a FitBit active minutes challenge and I WON by like 32 minutes (aka extremely close). Zach was also in some Apple Fitness challenge with a friend, so we had several “can we walk to the dog park, I need the points” moments. The dog had the best week.

I am trying to get as good at painting on my iPad as I am in real life (which honestly, is not bad. I am a good technical artist, I’m just basic and derivative, ya know?). I took some skillshare classes, and I installed a paperfeel screen protector thing that really helped. The shinyness is so offputting for drawing.

I finished “Dept. of Speculation” by Jenny Offill. I really enjoyed it. I write book reviews on my goodreads if you’re looking for a book to read.

I’m watching a lot of Below Deck (like, all the past seasons). I don’t know what this will do to my personality, but given that it’s been almost a year of hanging out with pretty much just my pets and Zach, it probably won’t be an improvement.

Spotted: a very fuzzy bee smelling the flowers (mostly Nasturtiums it turns out) from the bee-friendly seeds I planted last year. You know you love me, xoxo garden girl.