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🎙️ Anh, designer and artist

Watches movies; plays video games; and reads art books and comics

To start out, can you tell us a little about yourself and where people can follow your work?

I'm Anh, a designer and artist on the internet! My personal website, anhvn.com, is my main playground, where I blog, keep a diary of my media consumption, and throw incomplete notes. Day to day, I post—perhaps, too much—on Mastodon.

Your media pages—annual recaps, media diary, and individual pages for games, music, film & tv, and books—are truly unmatched on the web, indie or otherwise so let's start there...

This is less of a question, but I'd love if you could tell us more about these: what's the inspiration, process, etc. for them and how do you view them in relation to your blog and garden?

My first instance of media tracking on my website was my Games 2020 blog post, where I wrote about every game I played that year. This was when I was just getting into video games and everything was new and exciting to me. I went on to maintain a games blog post for 2021, which I would update throughout the year, and then I realized this was a weird and unfitting thing to do to a blog post, which is meant to be published once and left alone. (This was also before I started keeping a digital garden.) The first type of media I started tracking was movies/tv, which was later joined by music, games, and books.

The best part of manually tracking my media is I can structure it and design it to look however I want. The worst part, of course, is I do all that manually and inefficiently. But it's mine!

I made my 2024 media recap with the intention of being overkill with it. My first recap in 2022 was a regular blog post; my 2023 recap featured a custom post design. Escalating the level of drama seemed only natural. I knew I wanted to do a bunch of artwork in addition to a custom post design. I started by picking out all the works I thought I might want to draw, doing a lot of messy sketches, and pushing pixels around in Figma. Gradually, I pared down my ambitions to something feasible: a hero illustration for each category.

Given you have this wonderful site, do you use other apps like Trakt, Letterboxd, Goodreads, etc. to track or share as well?

Somewhat! Services like Letterboxd and Goodreads are excellent databases, particularly for discovery and reviews; it's the tracking part that I like to do on my on website.

However, my site definitely lacks the social aspect. When I made my media diary, I had two friends on Letterboxd, so I just didn't feel compelled to track my watch history on a site where no one would see it. (Versus, you know, tracking it on my own website where also no one would see it, but at least it was mine.)

Now, things are different. I have a lot more friends on the internet. I love maintaining my own little corner, but I do sometimes think about how it might be fun to share things on an actual social network, where you can reply to people and have a conversation. But also, it can be very freeing to write and rate things where no one will see it, so no one will try to argue with you. Hmm!

What got you into manga/comics? And more specifically, what pulled you into Batman comics, as that seems like a recent go-to for you? (My dog's name is Bruce Wayne so I'm a bit obsessed myself…)

I've been reading manga since I was ten—Naruto was my personal gateway, and I was one of those kids drawing anime eyes on their homework in school. My high school years were spent reading popular shounen manga and cute shoujo manga.

Getting into Batman in the year 2025 feels silly, but maybe not that surprising. I've watched a lot of different DC things over the years—the animated shows of the 90s/2000s as a kid, and later the live action CW shows in the 2010s—and I was previously swept up in the heyday of the MCU.

My gateway into Batman was with the webtoon Wayne Family Adventures. I've seen Batman the character plenty of times before, but never in a slice-of-life story. It's fun and cute! I think I'm just a sucker for found family dynamics. Since then, I'm slowly making my way through the infinite number of Batfam-related comics.

Given your interest in manga and comics along with your beautiful art and epic Hourly Comic Days, have you ever considered making your own comics outside of what you occasionally dabble with for your blog?

Yes! Making a comic is perhaps my ultimate creative aspiration. It is, however, quite a nebulous one—I don't have concrete ideas, just vibes of what I want to do, which is really not enough to accomplish anything. I realize the solution here is that I need to get over myself and simply draw and write more, through which I will figure out what I want to create.

[Editors note: at this point in time, I feel it's appropriate to ask you all to go bully Anh into doing a webcomic with foofaraw... And now we can return to our regularly scheduled programming.]

I noticed you recently saw Mickey 17 and Captain America: Brave New World… what's your relationship with theaters these days?

I like going to theatres! I just wish it wasn't so expensive these days—if I feel lukewarm about something, I'll probably wait for streaming. I usually do enjoy the theatre experience though. I saw Across the Spider-Verse six times in theatres, and each time was life-changing. I'm still chasing that high.

Six times is a ton! I'm guessing the art style was a big reason for your love? Are there any other movies you've seen that many times in theaters?

Yes, the art is absolutely the highlight, along with the music. It's amazing to experience on a big screen. I've seen a couple of other Marvel movies in theatres more than once—Black Panther and Infinity War—but that's it.

And speaking of streaming, what are your thoughts on all the streaming services and do you find yourself bouncing around, sticking with a few, or just subscribing to everything?

I tend to stick with a few: Netflix, Disney+, and HBO (via Crave, in Canada)—though I'm in the fortunate position of mooching off other people's subscriptions rather than paying myself. I also have Nebula, since I work there. The only streaming service I actually pay for is YouTube, since the ads are completely insufferable. I don't love how many services there are and how annoying it is to figure out where to watch something.

What consoles are you gaming on these days?

I play mostly on PC! I have a Switch but it's been collecting dust for a long while now. A friend of mine has also just lent me their VR headset, so I'm looking forward to trying Beat Saber and whatever other VR games there are. (But mostly Beat Saber.)

I love the idea of both Destiny 2 and Stardew Valley, but am worried they could both easily take over my life. How do you view those as a pair that you always have in rotation while also find time to squeeze in other games?

Destiny has fortunately stopped being a 'second job' type thing. These days, I rarely play it solo—the social aspect is now the most fun part of it for me. I am officially retired from the grind. If my friends invite me, then I'll hop on to play, but I no longer feel compelled to farm stuff with randos for hours. This, combined with the fact my friends have also dropped off of it to varying degrees means that my work-life-Destiny balance is much better.

Stardew Valley is consuming in a different way. I can get sucked into it for hours, but it's also easy to put down and come back to later since you can play at your own pace. At this point, I've done most things in the game, so it's much more leisurely than it was when I was fixated on completing new tasks.

This means that I have time and energy to play other things! I always find it hard to start new games, because learning new mechanics is hard, so it's nice to have a couple of games I'm comfortable with to fall back onto.

Was Destiny your first foray into the MMORPG genre or have you dipped your toes into that space before?

MapleStory was actually my first MMO! I started playing it in 2005—geez, that was twenty years ago—though I didn't get very far, because it was very grindy. But some of my fondest memories of it include doing party quests, exploring, and chatting with strangers. I also played zOMG on Gaia Online in the early 2010s.

(I actually wouldn't classify Destiny as an MMO, since you're never in the same map as more than probably twelve people at a time. The MMO part is something I sometimes crave—Final Fantasy XIV is probably the way to go for that now, but I sadly never got into it enough.)

Lastly, can you share some of your recent favorite movies, games, and comics?

• Movies: Sadly, I haven't been watching anything new lately! I really gotta get back to it, I've got such a long list of movies I want to see.
• Games: I've been enjoying playing Blue Prince. I played it very intently for a couple of weeks and recently reached Room 46. I'm also replaying Control, in preparation for the release of FBC: Firebreak this month.
• Comics: I really enjoyed the Nightwing run by Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo (issues #78–118), particularly the artwork! I'm also quite intrigued by the first couple of issues of Absolute Batman.

Any last words about your media consumption or the state of entertainment?

COMICS ARE AWESOME!