what's jingyi doing on sabbatical • vol 1

June 3, 2026

How things are

When my students ask me how I ended up as their professor the story usually starts with “in high school I wanted to be an artist, but in college I was forced to be an engineer.” I’m treating sabbatical as the opportunity to finally realize this high school dream. I talk with my brother (recent media studies master’s grad, looking for work) about how most art is made by “nepo babies” who have the privilege of pursuing self-expression without worrying about how the market will receive the fruits of their time. I talk with my friends about our immigrant generational duty to work so you can retire your parents and sponsor your kids’ art careers. But now I have a salary, a reasonable expectation from my employer about what kinds of “research” will be accomplished in a year without teaching, and the most time not pre-delegated to labor since I became an adult. More than just academically blurring the bounds of a “Computer Science Research Agenda” with a “Personal Artistic Practice,” I want to make silly comics and have fun. How lucky am I to have this stability to make art?! So, thanks parents, for forcing me to be an engineer even though I had no idea what that meant, and thanks Neopets/Geocities/Lissa, for making me believe the HTML markup language was “computer science” so the field seemed accessible.

I’m writing this in a Vietnamese coffee shop in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto. A little less than a month ago, I taught my last class pre-sabbatical. A week and a half ago, I moved out of Claremont. I'm actually surprisingly sad about this. Also, welcome to the hover annotations. If you click, they will stay. Four days ago, I attended the wedding of one my oldest friends whom I met online drawing Pokémon fan art when I was 10. When I first started this job, one of my biggest worries was returning to a Southern California suburb (the backdrop of much middle- and high-school distress). Actually, now, I’ll really miss my sunny LA life! It’s OK that Claremont is a panopticon and all my friends are my colleagues because I would rather have community and solidarity in the workplace than to brush up against those in power who mainly care about status and image. Whenever someone inevitably asks me about AI (I have considered buying this shirt A shirt that says DO NOT TALK TO ME ABOUT AI I WILL KILL MYSELF several times), I have begun to say that AI has ruined my life. But how lucky am I to be in a computer science department in which a majority view it with skepticism? That bought a book about how OpenAI is a modern day colonizer for our department library? Going from the belly of Silicon Valley to a liberal arts college was what I needed to heal. I’m not even extremely disillusioned with research anymore! I have so much academic freedom and support, I feel recognized for my efforts in and out of the classroom, and I am so proud of my students! What a treat it is to have, largely, a healthy workplace. And what a treat is it to step away.

At one of the various end-of-semester receptions I attended before commencement, I started to talk about my pro-Claremont opinions. This turned the heads of the people around me because we all love to gossip about and judge place, potentially from a fear of becoming irrelevant in the suburbs. As my friend Jordan has said, when you consider “Claremont” to be a 20 minute driving radius, your world really expands (and obviously leagues more with an hour radius by car or Metro—which I can now bike to in 10 minutes now!). Because I don’t gate keep, some of my favorites experiences include eating 李家面’s 豆腐脑 For our non-Chinese readers, a soft and savory tofu dish at Seasons Cafe in Diamond Bar, found by my dad on XHS. weekends before noon, sitting under the big tree in Glendora, scrambling up the short but steep trail at Mountain Ave Jordan also told me about this, which is a much better alternative to Claremont Hills Wilderness Park. to see the hills at golden hour, and eating any taco at or under $2. Such as Sundays at Tacolandia, which is in the parking lot of the Pomona Swap Meet, introduced to me by Char and Nikhil. Even though I was deeply disappointed by our recent poll results that showed how far Californians have to go in their fight against neoliberalism, big corporations, and real estate, I still love and believe in the state and the people in it who make it so special. If we have failed to achieve a progressive future that matches our state’s natural beauty it means we need to organize harder. As the late David Lynch said, the sun shines brighter in LA. When every day is backdropped by beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way, Listening to David Lynch's daily weather report on KCRW during the COVID-19 lockdown really helped me. I can’t help but to be an optimist...

How things can be

Since the start of my sabbatical (which I’ll pin to 2.5 weeks ago) I’ve been sleeping a lot. My friends like to say that I am very bad at sitting still and doing nothing. To make progress towards my non-academic creative projects, and to figure out what “life as an artist” even means on a material and concrete level, I try to follow these three daily goals:

move body intentionally

create no matter how bad

engage with existing creative work

Nowadays, #1 looks like jogging or taking 10k steps, #2 looks drawing or writing, and #3 looks like reading. I welcome any reader stories or advice for developing their creative routines. When I was in a slump in grad school during the height of the COVID pandemic, one of my mentors Christina gave me a book her friend wrote about creative project management. This got me to think that working on creative projects and doing HCI research were kind of a similar meta-process, so I’ve been just riding on my existing academic skills.

Hot takes

For all my dissent against values of efficiency and automation, I do believe that when you read something, there should be a takeaway. Something that delights or surprises or changes in the most minute way. Beyond the above report of my mundane life, here are a few thoughts and opinions I have had based on recent life happenings:

The conflation of ice cream and beauty products should be studied. Recently, I was in an ice cream shop called AWAN which, with its cavernous stucco interior, my friend Eunice described to look like a make up store. They had a sold out lychee flavor in collaboration with some influencer to promote her new lychee scented skin care products. This made me think of the kinetic sand texture consumers have to scoop away, like ice cream, to unbox the new Miu Miu mango sticky rice perfume I thought about linking a video to this, but I could only find them from influencers, and given the next hot take, I didn't want to be dishonest to myself and give them any more traffic. You can use your mind's eye. Or search it yourself. hidden underneath.

The Internet doesn’t feel the same as it did a decade ago because influencers have killed fandom (in addition to big tech algorithm dominated social media, obviously). Just because fandom (as a whole) lacks commercial interests doesn't mean it shouldn't be valued. This thought is because I recently watched the SiivaGunner Magfest performance and the part where Noelle (Deltarune) dresses up in the Peanut Butter Jelly Time costume made me shed a tear (not metaphorically) for the old Internet. There was an elegant anonymity and slowness of 2000s YouTube that I feel like is whatever the opposite is currently happening on Twitch.

More of the unattainable past: I hate talking about AI, yet it is all I seem to do (especially in academic spaces). Last semester, my class talked a lot about abstractions and the managerial half of the professional managerial class (derogatory). Abstractions are one way the managerial class (including myself, now) consolidate power and legitimacy while avoiding difficult, messy, slow, hands-on work. Often work in the latter category is called “craft.” I get it that not everything should be craft and sometimes we don’t care and we just want the results as quickly as possible. But as more and more students/SWEs vibe code, they lose the craft of understanding their systems, because LLMs enact an additional layer of abstraction and turn them into managers (derogatory). Those at the top of the financial pyramid like LLMs because of the promise of efficiency and thus performance gains. Those at the bottom use LLMs to free up their attention to “something else”—but that something else is usually just sleeping, relaxing, As Hua Hsu says in his New Yorker article, "The End of the Essay." scrolling social media, or doing actual “craft.” What’s spit out of this cycle is slop that no one wants to understand. We can’t return to a pre-LLM era, but maybe LLMs can accelerate us to the collapse of our current material conditions.

While the dominant discourse is that “attention is our most powerful resource,” I actually think imagination is “the most radical power we humans have.” As does Susan Buck-Morss write in Commonist Ethics. Sorry for using so many -isms in this post, Susan... I’ve always been drawn to magical realism/absurdist humor as a genre, and after watching I Love Boosters, I think the real power of the genre is to help us imagine alternatives that seem impossible without massive structural change. Imagining a new future is scary. But we must! Otherwise we lose! And Audre Lorde would say that the erotic is the most powerful fuel of the imagination. From Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.

This leads me to my final hot take. Every once in a while discourse about the Japanese author Haruki Murakami appears on my feed rightfully critiquing his writing of female characters—specifically, that he cannot introduce a woman without also describing the bouncing of her breasts. I actually think this fixation is not because he is a misogynist, but because he is an autogynophile. (non-derogatory) Maybe my hotter take is that there’s nothing wrong with being AGP.

Advice column & logistics

My friend Olivia suggested it might be fun to include an advice column. Why not!? Submit your questions at any time here and I will answer them in the next post as appropriate.

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I am looking for furnished housing in east bay (preferably Berkeley or North Oakland) from mid August to mid December. I’m a great housemate. If you have any leads, please let me know!

I wrote most of this post (up to the first hot take) on June 3rd, and I have finished it exactly a month later in my undergraduate self's favorite Berkeley spot (Asha Tea House). It took a month because I spent three weeks in Taiwan, Singapore, and Korea in between. A partial trip report will be the subject of the next post, as well as more takes on “images,” as I’ve been reading and enjoying this book I randomly picked up at the LA Art Book Fair.

Until next time,
Jingyi