Lark Space (#community)

My theme for 2026: Year of Collaboration

2026-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Every new year, I designate a theme for the coming calendar year. Different from a resolution--rather than prescribe specific goals--it provides a framework to influence the decisions I make over the course of the coming year.

My theme for 2025 was "Get involved". The goals was to connect more with my communities, attend more events, and do more community-building and activist work. It took until the tail end of the year for me to really start delivering on this goal, but I'd say it was a success!

Here are some of the accomplishments I made this year:

I started attending more local meetups.</li>
I started attending more protests and political actions.</li>
I did a lot of networking around Ace Archive. I feel like "networking" as a concept is poisoned by the corporate world; what I really mean is I went out of my way to meet folks, build connections, and tell them about my work. And good things came of it! I've given interviews, given talks, recruited volunteers, and started to build a community around the project.</li>
I got involved with my local makerspace, connecting with folks there are hosting events.</li>
I went to my first LARP, which was a ton of fun.</li>
I started attending a monthly furry meetup in my city and building connections with the folks there. I really pushed through the anxiety to make sure I attended very month and went out of my way to talk to new people. The first few months were rough at times; I felt like an outsider in a space where it felt like everyone had known each other for years. But now I feel like a part of that community, and I've started to build some real friendships.</li> </ul>
My theme for 2026 is my "year of collaboration". I've got a lot of projects I'm working on, but for the most part they've been solo endeavors. I want to start collaborating with folks on some of the work I do--not just for the benefit of the projects, but also to build community, because building community is the antidote to despair I need right now. I've already been doing a lot of that with Ace Archive, and I'm going to need to start doing that with FanJam if I want to reach people who would benefit from it.
If you're reading this, leave a comment letting me know what your theme for 2026 is! I love this tradition and I've managed to get several of my friends on board with it.

FanJam: A free event planning app for small cons

2025-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

A friend approached me with the idea back in the Spring. They were frustrated because the small con they had recently attended didn't have a good way of viewing the event schedule. All they had was a public link to a spreadsheet on Google Docs. This friend had been playing around with Airtable and similar apps, and decided to copy the con schedule into NocoDB</a> so they could have something more readable.

The pitch was, "What if you built a mobile app for attendees that was just a frontend for NocoDB"? That would save a ton of work over trying to build out a dashboard-like app for organizers. We'd just have to build the mobile app.

It turned out to be a lot of work anyways.

FanJam</a></li>
GitHub</a></li> </ul>
The mobile app turned out to be the easy part! The hardest part was figuring out how to make this app free for small cons. If I was planning on eating the hosting costs, I would need it to be cheap to host. Like, real cheap. My goal was a dozen cons and a couple thousand concurrent users for less than $40 USD per month. Yikes.
There are a couple factors that make this more reasonable than you might think:

Cons generally only last a few days, and generally don't all happen the same weekend, so traffic is pretty evenly distributed, and resources can be scaled up to accommodate burst traffic without exceeding the budget.</li>
Planning the schedule for a given con isn't generally a 24/7/365 affair, so I can automatically suspend those servers when they're not being used to save money.</li>
The data set is tiny, which means I can keep a full local copy on the user's device. This means no loading time in the app and less frequent requests to the server.</li> </ul>
But there were some challenges to overcome as well, namely that NocoDB is quite slow. There's no way I can rely on it to absorb significant traffic, which means I needed to build a caching layer in front of it.
I might share more of the technical details in future log entries. There's documentation on the architecture of the app in the GitHub repo, including diagrams.
When I show people FanJam, they'll often pull out their phone and show me the app from a con they've attended, usually to complain about it. It turns out there are a lot of bad apps out there trying to do what FanJam does. If I can build something that does it better and cheaper, I think there might actually be a market out there for me.
I'm really excited about this project. I have a long backlog of new features and enhancements I still want to implement, but in the coming weeks I'm going to start soliciting feedback from more than just a few friends, and maybe even start approaching some cons.
I imagine the hardest part will be convincing them it's not a scam lol.

Ace Archive is an amateur project, and that's okay

2025-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Last weekend I visited a queer archive library</a> in Providence, RI, and it gave me a lot to think about. I read a zine by Paul Soulellis called Survival by Sharing</a>, which is about archival work and makes a case for archives that are small, disorganized, private, and personal.
When I started Ace Archive, I felt a need to frame it as a big professional project and pretend it wasn't just one queer with no training working out of its bedroom. Maybe I thought I needed to justify its existence. As folks have started to discover the project (through no help of my own; I'm terrible at self-promoting), I think the justification has started to become evident. People are contributing with research and advice. The site gets a good amount of traffic. One person even curated an in-person ace history and art exhibit</a> using Ace Archive as a resource. And most importantly, I'm starting to gain the confidence that maybe all the work I've put in actually means something.
That queer library we visited could hardly be called a library; it was a few unorganized bookshelves and a few bins full of zines sharing space with a print studio. It was beautiful. Putting queer history in queer hands and sharing it around feels so much more profound than locking it away in a neoclassical marble vault.
Maybe Ace Archive is allowed to be amateur. Maybe that's even the point.
I've also been thinking about this article</a> on how to position yourself to customers as a startup. It advises founders to lean into the benefits of being a small company with small customers, rather than trying to pretend to be something they're not. I hesitate to equate this to Ace Archive--this is not a business and my values and goals do not align with startup culture or capitalist motives--but I think some of the advice is applicable. As I start to look for collaborators, I want to find people who value Ace Archive for what it is.
An idea I've had for the project for a long time is to curate content in the archive into "collections", so that people can browse and discover ace history more easily--make Ace Archive an educational resource rather than just a repository. I've dismissed the idea in the past because I was afraid it wouldn't "scale". But maybe it doesn't need to. Maybe I should be more realistic about how large this archive is actually likely to get and take advantage of the fact that I can personally browse and curate everything in it.
So I've done exactly that</a>! I've already curated a handful of collections, and I'll likely do more as I have time and as new material comes in.
As always, if this project interests you, get in touch</a>. Every person who contributes with research, advice, or even just a friendly hello warms my gay little heart.

Not Without Help: Accessibility in activism

2025-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

After attending a protest with a friend, we started talking about accessibility in the context of activism. In particular, thinking about how attending public actions isn't an option for everyone; it's difficult enough for me and my friend due to sensory issues. But there are other ways to get involved; I did some web development work for the group organizing the protest, for example.
The problem is, a lot of folks are turned off the idea of getting involved because they have a limited view of what activism looks like. We started thinking about how you can find roles for people in activist groups they might not otherwise think they have a role in. We were inspired by this infographic</a> by Devon Price, which introduces the concept of activist "character classes"--examples of roles folks can take in activist group that go beyond attending protests.
I decided to build a website called Not Without Help</a>, with the goal of connecting activist groups with people who want to get involved. It's an inbox for organizers to collect contact information from folks who are interested, and where volunteers can share information about what kinds of help they can offer. I used Devon Price's activist character classes as a template for respondents to check off which roles they're interested in.
It's intended to be a replacement for tools like Google Forms, albeit with a much more limited feature set. I implemented end-to-end encryption for responses, so only the organizers can see the information people submit. I also implemented a system for access control, so that organizers can control who they authorize to view the responses, and revoke that access if necessary.
Right now, the tool is pretty simple and the feature set is fairly limited. I have some ideas for what comes next, but I need to give more thought to exactly what problems I'm trying to solve, and probably get feedback from activist groups to understand what their needs are. Some ideas I've had so far:

Building it out into a more generic form builder, or at least allowing organizers to define their own roles not on the preset list.</li>
Implementing a sort of job board where organizers can opt to list their group in a central directory, and volunteers can browse groups looking for help.</li> </ul>
I'm happy with the progress I've made so far, and I'm excited to move forward with the project and see what comes next.

My theme for 2025: Get Involved

2024-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Every new year, I designate a theme for the coming calendar year. Different from a resolution--rather than prescribe specific goals--it provides a framework to influence the decisions I make over the course of the coming year.
My theme for 2024 was "Say yes to things". The goal was to get myself out of my comfort zone and try things I might not otherwise try, even if my anxiety would typically steer me away from them.
Someone invited me to a concert last-minute? Or on a trip with few concrete details? Or to an event I don't know if I'll enjoy? Or to a party where I don't know anyone? Or to a new social situation I don't have a script for? My anxiety would typically steer me away from saying yes to these kinds of invitations, but since it's my Year of Saying Yes to Things, I guess I'll go anyways.
This year's theme was a huge success. Most of the things I said yes to (and might otherwise have said no to) turned out to be good experiences, and many of them even cherished memories. I got to have a lot of experiences I might not have had otherwise, and I think this experiment has been good for me in lasting ways; navigating new and unfamiliar situations helps me build up a library of scripts for those situations, which reduces my anxiety considerably the next time I find myself in a similar one.
My theme for 2025 is "Getting involved". Taking the success of 2024 a step further, I want to push myself to get more involved in the communities that I'm a part of. Whether that's getting more involved with activist groups, helping to build a furry art space in Somerville</a>, contributing to more open-source projects, civic engagement, or something else I haven't thought of yet, I'm tired of being siloed in the work that I do. I want to be part of something larger than the solo projects I usually occupy myself with. I want to make a difference.
If you're reading this, leave a comment letting me know what your theme for 2025 is. This isn't YouTube--I'm not getting points for engagement--I genuinely want to know!

Building a furry art and maker space

2024-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Update: The project has a website</a>.
After some folks in my local furry community were struggling to find a venue to organize a meetup, someone floated an idea: what if furries in my city had their own venue? A space where they could host events, workshops, and classes, socialize, and collaborate on projects? An art and maker space where folks would have access to equipment and storage for their projects.
The crazy thing is that I think it might actually happen.
I'm excited by the idea of having a "third place</a>"--someplace I can escape to to get out of the house, meet new people, work on projects, and feel a sense of community. I think that's something I've been lacking: a broader sense of community beyond just my extended friend network. I get some of that in kink, but I'm not actually particularly active in the local scene these days. The kink community is a context that frames most of my relationships and social interactions, but it's not necessarily something I feel like I'm "part of" beyond the people I am personally or transitively acquainted with.
I think having this third space will be particularly impactful for me because I work from home, and so don't really have a "second place" either. I spend most of my time either in my home or those of my friends; I don't spend much time out in the world unless there's a specific activity attached, and there aren't really any communal spaces I frequent.
The part of the process of planning and creating this space that has just absolutely blown me away is how well-connected these folks are, along with the range of impressive accomplishments they each personally bring to the table.
Within a few days they've assembled a team of local furries with experience in leadership positions, community organizing, running art studios and maker spaces, fundraising and applying for grants, and even an CPA accountant. They've self-organized into working groups, established a membership model, and collected pledges for membership fees totaling a few thousands dollars a month.
And this is all just from word of mouth over the span of about a week. I am amazed by how much talent is concentrated in this community and how quickly they've been able to mobilize to make this dream a reality.
The timeline is long; they're not expecting to be ready to move in until Spring 2026 at the earliest.
Still, I'm excited to see what happens.

Oh wait I can make zines too

2024-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

We're all trying to figure out how to move forward after the election 1</a>.
I want to get more involved in my local community, and I'm hoping that involvement can be an antidote to the powerlessness I've been feeling.
Over the weekend I helped a friend who was making a zine on how to make activism accessible. They live in a fairly rural area, so I offered to help them circulate it. We printed a few dozen copies and I took a stack home to distribute in my city. There are a lot of Little Free Libraries</a> in my area--I was able to hit 10 or so within just a mile radius of my apartment--so the plan was to drop a copy in each one.
It's such a tiny act of resistance, but it felt good to do something. Even just as a distraction.
Since doing this, I've been reflecting on how powerful and relevant zines feel as a medium, even as I type this for my web log. There's something deeply intimate about printing 20 zines and reaching 20 people in your local community, as opposed to publishing to this log and reaching an unknown number of people not bound by geography.
And I realized that I can do it too; I can make my own zines and circulate them in my community. It feels silly that this comes as such a shocking revelation for me--that I can print and fold paper instead of building complex web apps with a global reach--but I'm excited by the possibilities. Maybe I can put my typewriter</a> to use for it, even.
One friend joked I should make a zine to proselytize about Linux. That would actually be very silly and on-brand of me; maybe I should.

If you're reading this in the future or from outside the US, I'm specifically referring to the 2024 US presidential election. Depending on how the next four years go, future readers may not need this disambiguated. ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section>