I’ve been a heavy Twitter user since 2006. I registered my account right at the beginning when updates were sent via SMS or instant messaging. Back at that time, and for a few years, the community was close, supporting, and good-vibing. In 2010 we pretty much live-twittered the birth of our first child, and all we found was an incredible support network.

Today, Twitter is very angry. You stand by a corner for a minute, just observing, and a bunch of opinions, almost always uninformed and unnecessarily aggressive, are shoved down your throat.

Of course, the people from that support network is still there, a big bunch of people I keep close to my heart. But there’s also a lot of noise. It seems like every tweet is motivated by either plain hate or humor (the latter often sprinkled with hate, too). So, to keep a fresh timeline you need to make a huge amount of curation and filtering.

I can’t speak of Facebook, since I stopped using it a couple of years ago, but I can talk about Instagram, its adopted child.

Instagram is, while shallow, very fun. I keep up with my close circle right there, but the app makes it more difficult every time. Ads are everywhere, the chronological timeline is long gone, and even the posts from your network are hidden behind a link now, replaced by strangers, some kind of in-your-face discover section.

So, with all these annoyances, I thought it would be nice to have a breath and start doing all of my posting in this private space. It’s not social, but I keep control of my content and I keep it on the open web (something I strongly believe in).

I built this in WordPress over a weekend. if you’re on the same boat and want something similar, let me know, and I’ll happily help you set it up.

After six and a half weeks in lockdown, I’m not anxious anymore. I don’t crave going out, and video calls have replaced face-to-face meetings very well: they no longer feel fake. I don’t perceive the screen anymore, but the person on the other side.

Habits are changing. I can’t go out to the supermarket when I’m bored (yes, I do that, or used to, anyways) or call a friend to meet at the neighborhood bar, but I took on Animal Crossing New Horizons, and as a distraction it’s a lifesaver. I’m making more music, I’m drawing more, and I play with my kids a lot more than before the pandemic.

An actress doing a character. An audio engineer setting up equipment. The fact that a product sees the light thanks to each of their individual efforts is the most badass thing. We should all do our work with pride and intent. 

There’s this photo from Ales Nesetril I’ve always liked, but the colors were not always right for my designs, so I decided to make it a PSD mockup with both the screen and the projected light editable via smart objects.

At the start of the month, I decided to keep a media log with all the TV series and movies I watch. Here’s the report for March, 2020, including a small comment for every entry, which by the way, may contain spoilers.

This month I started making some music on my computer. I started with samples, but then I jumped into Cubase (I had a licence lying around, courtesy of my Zoom recorder) and started playing with midi and software instruments.

I’m still very self-conscious about it, but I decided I will share everything I create from now on, so I uploaded everything to SoundCloud.

When I was a kid, I was always drawing. Mainly cartoon characters from Woody Woodpecker, The Flintstones, Looney Tunes, He-Man, Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (I know, some of those are from my parents era, but in Mexico we get re-runs forever).

Somewhere down the path to adulthood I stopped drawing. I did some caricatures and satire comics in High School, but those were more for comedy than art. Then I got into design and I quit altogether.