projects

projects

past and present

<notes from celestia> was initially a way for me to showcase quotes from my blog that I felt were noteworthy. Although it is still just that, an expansion is in the works.

KTMA, which stands for keep the magic alive, is I think the hardest one to explain. It’s an ideology or philosophy of sorts, and while the KTMA proclamation sounds like I tried to create a cult, it’s nothing more than a call to action:

Nothing too crazy with this one lol. I like designing stuff; this brand, aeternitatis design studio, I made to house some things that I make. The figure in the center is a manta ray, cause I think they’re cool :)

The dismantlize initiative, also known as Dismantlize, DZE, dze, was called Generation Zenith or @generationzenith in its early weeks. I created it in 2019 with the goal of combating disinformation with easy to digest information. During the height of the 2019-2021 era, instagram pages with infographics exploded, as did online zines. Many of these sensationalized current events and often lost sight of larger goals of justice and equity. Hence, dismantlize was formed as a platform that took into account both current and historical events and amplified clear calls to action. In addition to eye-catching infographics, it also included written articles published on medium for stories needing more context. I created 4 routes: education, expression, support, and awareness. The initiative is disbanded, but was platformed primarily on medium and instagram, where archives still exist:

our celestia, which once was @ourcelestia on instagram, was a passion project more than anything. It was another offshoot of dismantlize, and was enjoyable albeit not very fruitful. It followed a similar pattern to the posts of @dismantlize but had a strong focus on the final frontier: anything that was happening beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Basically was a page that talked about space travel, interstellar happenings, new discoveries, cool images from space, etc. The page is down and a public archive is not set up, but the posts are available in the cloud.

Gen Z Poets was the first offshoot of dismantlize. In the quadrifecta of “education, expression, support, awareness,” I noticed that “expression” was the least touched upon. This inspired me to create genzpoets. People from all corners of the internet were able to submit poems to a daily contest, where the best ones were selected to be published. They were guided to inspiration from current happenings in the world, as well as expressing truths about themselves. Since I seldom had more than one submission per day, the vast majority were published. While the page is no longer active, a good portion of the submissions were recovered in the genzpoets archive.

legion_18 or Legion18, at one point stylized Leg18n, was the most private branch of Dismantlize. It was created with the intention of physical support, and aiding grassroots organizations on the frontlines. It expanded on the “support” element in the quadrifecta, where prior to Legion_18, all of the support work was digital and delocalized. Legion18 provided space for local, offline, work. Much of the work was done either to fund charities, as well as national and abroad coalitions working to achieve justice in their respective regions. A small amount of work was done internally in the legion, such as promotion of walkability in the Houston, TX area, organization of a school walkout for gun control policy, and pressuring and achieving the resignation of 1 middle school teacher for pedophilia, the suspension of a high school professor and high school student for racism, and the expulsion of 2 medical students for racism and ableism. The other work was done locally alongside chapters of public organizations like MarchForOurLives as well as private orgs like 👁sOf35.

AZN ZINE was an online and print zine that I was a foundational writer for. I did a fair amount of copy-editing for the zine and published a few articles as well, notably my spread where I wrote about beauty standards across asian countries and cultures in Issue 03. The zine was disbanded due to low readership and the oversaturated zine market at the time.

@DrVesalius started off as a school project for my AP European History class, mostly for extra credit. As time passed, I ended up putting more effort into it, and had fun playing the character. One of the highlights of this project was being followed and rt’d multiple times by historian and educator Tom Richey on twitter. The archive is still live at twitter.com/drvesalius

Lifeskills was a schoolwide initiative that a friend and I founded, a club dedicated to bridging the gap between what was taught in school and what was necessary to know in life post-graduation. The curriculum was pretty bare-bones but encompassed the following 3 units. Unit 1: Finance: How to do your taxes, How to balance a checkbook, Live on minimum wage, Budgeting. Unit 2: Personal: Jumpstart a car, Build a fire, How to raise a houseplant, How to say "no" respectfully, Asking for help, CPR, Self-defense. Finally, Unit 3: Business: How to conduct a job interview, How to give a presentation, Time management, Public speaking, Negotiation