Corbie Cof · Captain's log

Push the button

Launch week, the presentation designer’s curse, and the kinetic energy of being about to begin.

This is this week’s Captain’s Log, the first of four posts from one interview. Claude read 11 Computer’s Log entries from October 27 to November 1, then interviewed me one question at a time. My spoken answers were trimmed and edited, with nothing added.

What was the real highlight, and is the site live?

The site is not actually live yet. I could probably click a button - I think that’s how Cloudflare works. But it’s not tied to the domain yet, and that’s probably because I’m partially just scared of it.

The highlight of the past week is feeling like I have something that is not terribly humiliating to say is live. It’s starting to look a lot like me. Maybe it doesn’t sound quite like me yet, because the copy is still very much AI generated from what I’ve given it, and copy isn’t my strength.

But there’s a lot on the site that feels like me. Having Aesop be an actual moving character is insane. That happened in the span of about two days. A few years ago, that would have taken eons of work, rework, and struggling and failing and redoing it in Adobe. Instead, I gave subtle art direction, and it was working within about 24 hours - even though I was jumping around doing a bunch of other things at the same time.

That’s probably why Friday and Saturday felt so chaotic. I literally had my laptop on the kitchen counter while getting ready for Halloween and helping with the kids. Halloween is really big in my neighborhood. This year it felt smaller, even though we went through six or seven big Costco bags of candy and over a thousand stickers.

But the big yay for me was feeling like Corbie is an actual site, and Aesop is an actual character. I’m literally staring at him in the corner of my screen right now, and it’s making me giddy. I freaking love it so much.

So what’s scary about connecting the domain?

I’m still not sure how the copy presents me, and there are little things that don’t feel quite right. But I think I just need to rip off the Band-Aid. If I don’t, I’ll just keep agonizing in my head.

It’s kind of like these Substacks. There’s that initial terror of putting something out there, and then the realization that it wasn’t so bad. There are a lot worse things on the internet. Why wouldn’t my ramblings be okay?

I think it’s a holdover from being a presentation designer for so long. Once you deliver something back to whoever requested it, it’s final. Any edit after that feels embarrassing - “Oh, I made a QC mistake, sorry, I updated it.” A website can be iterated on over and over. Posting one version doesn’t make it the end-all be-all. I just need to get over it.

So you know what? I’m going to do it. Today, whether I like it or not - or tomorrow, if there’s some hidden thing that keeps me from connecting the domain. I’m going to do it. I think I’m going to do it. I can do it.

Anything the log missed?

The log makes it look like a really good week, and toward the end, it was. The beginning was really difficult. I had moments of massive self-doubt.

When I was working full-time, we had someone who came every Thursday to clean and do laundry. Now we’re basically on one income, so we let her go, and I’m the one doing it. Juggling prompts and keeping the house livable is really hard.

Early in the week I was feeling low, and I pointedly rallied and went to the ACOTAR midnight release party with a friend at Bibliobar, an independent bookstore run by a woman - which is very much my vibe.

The next night I went to see Emei at The Echo Lounge with other friends, with Madelline opening. I am not a concert-on-a-Tuesday kind of girl, but it was fun and rejuvenating, and I needed to sing and dance and be forcibly away from my computer.

Wednesday I woke up exhausted, because I’m old and don’t like to go out very much. But I also realized I haven’t had a day where I don’t think about Corbie. It’s genuinely because I’m excited. It feels like being in college and working on a collection of art. In the back of my mind I’m always thinking about creative possibilities, even at the concert. The show had moments that were very funny, moments that were raw and real, and moments that were just poppy. Younger artists are so open about their mental health, their physical health, and how they pour everything into their music and the people who come to see them.

I’ve always been scared to put myself out there. Growing up there was always a better artist, a better illustrator, someone who did what I did but better. With lower self-esteem, that meant I rarely put myself out there.

Even when I made something big, I kept it in the back of the room. In high school, my art teacher let me eat lunch in the art room and work on a giant 8-foot painting in the back of the class - with an eyeball in it, and why not? It wasn’t even part of the curriculum. She’d basically say, “You know what? You go off. Go do your thing.” But I never entered that painting in a competition, and I never built a portfolio for art school. My mom told me I wouldn’t have a choice in where I went to college, and that I shouldn’t major in art.

As I got older and more in my head, and moved into digital and out of that small art room at a Catholic school in Austin, I built a homogenized version of my art. I’m starting to see myself break out of that and feel more confident with my ideas. I don’t know if it’s going to work. I’m hopeful there are other people who won’t think I’m weird.

As someone who was eliminated from my role and from running my team, and who tried so hard to be pulled into other parts of that business, throwing myself and my idea out into the universe is hard. I don’t want to get rejected. I don’t want to fail. I want to carry this anticipation - the kinetic energy of being about to begin - and I don’t want it slashed into disappointment again.

But I won’t know until I try. That’s kind of the whole point of all of this. There are all these tools out there, but you have to push the button. You have to have a point of view. And you have to try, or you’ll never know if you’ll succeed.

Listen to the full, unscripted interview: The kinetic energy of being about to begin. First published on Substack as Push the button.

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