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Lynn, QC, PH.

I edit and proofread academic papers and books. I write here and elsewhere. I also talk way too much about P-pop and beauty pageants over at Pop and Pageantry.

Get in touch if there’s a project you think we can work on together.

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  • milin woolfelt is stop-motion felting magic

    milin woolfelt is stop-motion felting magic

    Mrs. Apple is living the cozy cottage life we all aspire to.

    The Youtube algorithm somehow thought I needed something cute and inspiring to watch and gifted me with milin woolfelt.

    milin woolfelt features a show called Brambly Hedge, with a bunch of stop-motion animation shorts and starring Mrs. Apple and Mr. Apple. The creator is based in Taiwan, and their channel description says everything is 100% handmade, no AI involved. Which is such an incredible relief. It’s hard to enjoy anything cute nowadays because you always have to stop and scrutinize each video and image and creator bio to check if it’s actually AI.

    Anyway, Mrs. Apple and Mr. Apple live in a lovely little cottage, where Mrs. Apple does a lot of baking. Each short runs less than two minutes because I can imagine that felting, doing the animation, and shooting and maybe reshooting scenes take a lot of effort. Still, there are a lot of details to take in. I’ve gone back to one part of a video several times just to watch the wool felt moving like flames on a stove.

    If this channel has a lesson to teach, it’s probably for the viewer to slow down, appreciate what’s there, and learn to take a closer look at details. I’ve seen a few comments hoping for more videos with a longer runtime, and I feel the same because everything is just unbearably cute and heartwarming and I want more of it. But the creator seems to be producing the videos by themselves, so while I’d love to see more of Mrs. Apple and Mr. Apple’s life together, these tiny glimpses into their world would have to do for now.

  • I renamed my Youtube channel to “Pop and Pageantry”

    A couple of months after I posted about my Youtube channel, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration and renamed it Pop and Pageantry, which is pretty clever of me, I think. Lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on P-Pop or Pinoy pop, with the occasional video on pageantry, so the name only seemed natural.

    Since I last blogged here, I gained quite a lot of followers thanks to a commentary video I made about how poorly trained P-Pop groups shouldn’t be made to debut before they’re ready. I have a related video stewing, this time about the explosion in the number of P-Pop groups, though that might take a while to come out because I have other videos lined up. I’ve been trying to post every week and doing a decent job so far. I’m not doing anything too complicated by way of video editing, but it’s been nice to do what I AM able to do with Davinci Resolve, and these videos have been a good reason for me to write.

  • A tribute to one of my all-time favorite tools

    A tribute to one of my all-time favorite tools

    Journalist Taylor Lorenz tweeted about the difficulty of figuring out a hex code for a color using GenAI, and people are rightly roasting her for it.

    Some people have suggested using an image editing software—even something as simple as MS Paint—and using the eyedropper tool to pinpoint the color of your choice and the software will simply indicate the hex code. Basically, people are suggesting that she use ANY available tool instead of GenAI to figure it out.

    Me, my favorite resource for this purpose has always been Colour Swatches by Lindsay Marshall, Professor of Educational Practice in Computer Science at Newcastle University. I never can remember how I found this page all those years ago, but trust that it continues to be my go-to page for color hex codes. It’s surprising and also endearing to see that it hasn’t changed one bit since I started learning HTML.

    So yeah. My point is, other tools are out there if you need them. You don’t HAVE to immediately turn to GenAI for what you’re looking for.

  • A little bit about my Youtube channel “late-night chips”

    A little bit about my Youtube channel “late-night chips”

    I wasn’t always big on watching Youtube, but during the pandemic lockdown, it became one of the things I enjoyed doing, along with making candles and miniature houses. I don’t remember what I first really started watching, but I do know that having my nth viewing of J. Lo and Shakira’s Superbowl halftime show interrupted by an ad was what made me decide to get Youtube Premium. Super worth it.

    I wandered into the video essay and commentary space somehow, watching the works of Contrapoints, Jessie Gender, Princess Weekes, and Alice Cappelle, among others, eventually adding Swell Entertainment and münecat to my subscriptions. I also became heavily into drama channels and could recount in exhaustive detail what happened between Gabbie Hanna and Jessi Smiles, and Colleen Ballinger and Adam McIntyre. I was there when Hbomberguy eviscerated plagiarists, and I witnessed the rise and fall of iilluminaughtii. I also watched the Try Guys drama unfold. I’d known about them for years, but tuning into the drama made me a regular Try Guys viewer and now a 2nd Try subscriber.

    As I got deeper into Youtube, I started entertaining the thought of having my own channel containing video essays on various topics. I’d joke about it every time Miss Universe season came around. I’m very interested in beauty pageants and a few years ago, I felt like I had plenty to say about it from a feminist and sociological perspective.

    Then in January 2023, I just decided I was gonna go for it.

    I’m terrible at naming stuff, but I ended up going with “late-night chips” to refer to my habit of late-night snacking. And maybe as a nod to chewing on a memory, an idea late into the night.

    My first video was about the movie The First Slam Dunk, which I wrote, recorded, and edited in a hurry the moment I got home from the movie theater. Afterwards, I made videos about probably quite niche topics, like the long-gone Manang’s Chicken, the 1980s young adult horror book series Twilight: Where Darkness Begins, and the 1990s movie Baby Love. My most popular video is the one about the Miss Universe 1994 semifinalists and what happened to them after the pageant. It has more than 52,200 views so far, which should tell me that I found a potentially popular niche to work with, but I absolutely insist on posting about other things 😀

    I’ve written a bunch of stuff I want to make videos about, but I’ve unfortunately not gotten around to recording them. I do everything for my channel: research, writing, narrating and recording, and video editing. It’s a lot of work, but I get a lot of satisfaction doing it.

    Have I achieved Youtube fame and made tons of money from my channel? Heck no. I need 1,000 subscribers and I’m not even halfway there, and thousands of watch hours, which I definitely do not have.

    Recently, I started making videos about SB19, a group I love and admire. None of the videos have cracked 1,000 views, but it’s all good; the channel has been idle for months, and even having a few hundred people watch my work and listen to me talk is already huge. It’s been fun because it’s testing my ability to write quickly and produce a video mere hours after a bit of SB19 news came out. And it’s bringing my channel back to life. I’ve even gotten started writing something I’ve put off for half a year.

    This project is pretty big for me because I’m painfully averse to being perceived, but perhaps there’s a part of me that’s not because I’m perfectly willing to put my writing out there and use my actual voice.

    I have to admit that my ultimate goal here is to have a modest following and to earn a bit of money too. For now, though, I’ll settle for having 100 views per video.

  • Reposting some old posts because in retrospect, they were pretty good

    Nothing more to it than what the title says. I’m looking at my old blog via The Wayback Machine and I realized I wrote some pretty good stuff back in the day. I think some of them still deserve to be read, so I’m putting them here as well. Enjoy.