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Tidings #2: May 2025

I wonder what would happen if Lagos and New York met.

Besides the oppressive smell, the similarities between both cities are sparse but strong. In particular, they share an unapologetic authenticity: we won’t cater to you, but you’re welcome to make your own way.

Having grown up in different environments over the years, no one place feels entirely like home. Instead, I experience home as a connection of spaces and people across time who have held and shaped me. Home is where I’m loved; a place in the world I’m familiar with; a community, however distributed.

And yet, all of this must co-exist with a connection to the land and kinship with the people I share a system with. Otherwise, it doesn’t feel like home.

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🚧

It’s been six months of officially running the studio as a duo 👸🏽🫅🏾 and, try as I may, this journal doesn’t tell the complete story.

The goal is not to make sense of what we’re doing anyway, but to be creatively accountable. We share what we’re learning to reduce the cost for others.

This journal is also an avenue for constructive feedback. Comments will be open henceforth, and I’m hoping that we invite critical and thoughtful conversations. Praise is good, but not very useful when premature.

That said, an update on ongoing projects.

Main Squeeze
Compression socks

• 🚀 Our TikTok has taken off with 250+ followers, and one educational post in particular getting 72k views (and counting). We’re also starting to see authentic engagement in the comments, which is very good.

• 🍌 Our yellow socks have finally been delivered. It took way longer than expected - say no to sea freight - and in that time, US tariffs have shot up dramatically.

• ✈️ Our marketing automation is all set up! I’ll go into detail in a future post, but we’re focusing the brand positioning on travel as we start to test ads.

Fable
AI podcasts (Hello World)

• 🚀 Fable is live on the App Store! I’ve used it a few times to “read” a long document, e.g. The African Fashion Sector - Unesco (60m)

• ⏳ We’re in the early user acquisition phase: experimenting with low-cost content on TikTok to drive awareness, planning launch campaigns for product boards, and working on establishing a marketing funnel.

E Dey Happen
Animation (Independent Arts)

Episode 2

• 🚀 We’ve recorded dialogue for EDH episode 3 and completed storyboards — an impressive 249 hand-drawn frames.

• ⏳ Work has started on the next production phases: character designs, followed by backgrounds and then animation.

• 🎙️ The team interviewed Yimika Owoaje, a creative writer and the voice actor for Beju for their latest podcast. It’s a refreshing half-hour conversation.

5 | Improvising Through Life

We’re also wrapping up our first major consulting gig and we’ve learnt a lot of lessons from that experience. Maybe Princess will share in the next one. 👀

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🔎

“How do you curate the links?”

I got this question last month, and the answer is: randomly.

When I find an interesting link, I usually bookmark or share with the studio. Last time, I just browsed through Slack and Raindrop and picked a handful that fit some kind of theme in my head. ChatGPT helped with the articulation.

This time, it’s more random. I dragged a bunch of links into a folder and filtered for these ones. I suppose the goal is to share an excerpt of something I found interesting. My way of saying: here’s a tasty slice of the internet.

All images are clickable. Enjoy!

“When you asked me about the past, present, future, I think about a conversation that I had with Wangechi. And y’all are going to be so tired of how much I’m mentioning Cancers, but I really am in a season of understanding myself better. The thing about astrology is, whether you believe it or not, there definitely are patterns that align. You have a choice if you want to speak to those patterns, live up to them, or if you want to be aware of the not-so-positive ones and say, ‘How can I evolve past some of these things that might be innately set in the path for me?’ I was just in conversation with a friend of mine about Octavia Butler, and thinking about Wangechi’s work I was like, ‘You know, the Cancer spirit is one of a futurist.’"

“It had long been unclear how Klimt actually met the West African prince but in 2007, art historian, photographer and museum manager Alfred Weidinger published a catalogue of Klimt's paintings that documented the fact that the director of the Vienna Zoo had invited representatives of the West African Osu tribe to visit Austria in 1897. The nephew of the Osu king, Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, was sent to Vienna as leader of the group.”

“Striving for balance, Ardalan has offset the red and coral terracotta hues with shades of nature and flashes of mirror-polished steel, pale cotton window treatments and tropical planting beyond. The curved walls, meanwhile, are counterbalanced by oblong doors, elongated portholes and sleek metal plinths. Almost every element of the villa was designed by Ardalan and manufactured locally; from the triple-glazed windows to the stainless-steel gutters and indigenous dimb-wood furniture, nothing has been imported. Bookcases, seating, coffee tables and wall lights were all created by local craftsmen and built mostly on-site.”

“When contacting, please behave within the boundaries of a professional relationship, and understand that time isn’t real but pummels us all into submission whether we like it or not. Due to the time pummeling, and various elements of social awkwardness and piles of work in a huge stack, responses may be sent out at random times or may be forgotten entirely.”

“Have you ever wondered how a touch screen knows you are touching it? Well, it has these layers of transparent metal electrodes embedded in the display. When your finger gets close to the screen it causes a disturbance in the magnetic field that the electrodes sense. Because the electrodes are laid out on a grid, they can report back the x and y co-ordinates of the disturbance to the operating system.”

“When Rema slipped into his performer-skin at the London O2 Arena that night, he felt the surreality his work conjures in a way he never had before. Roaming the stage on a dark horse in a nod to Queen Idia, who raised an army and returned home with victory in her hands, a charged and surrendered Rema wore a reworked mask of her face. As he addressed his audience of 20,000 from behind it, the arena fizzed with chilling, quiet gasps. “That night, I felt like a host,” he tells me. “[It was] the first time a person from Benin had performed at the O2; there was no way I was going to perform on that stage without honouring our people. I was in an avatar state. I had to bring the art, the culture, the fears. For the mask, we chose the materials including the stones and their placements so that energy could pass through me from head to toe. Every stone selected was there to activate a different… chakra.” Rema brought both a clear and encrypted message with him that night about the place in which he was born, a place that reveals itself in portions, a storied empire still alive.”

“It is true that the most irritating factions of A24’s fanbase, who pick fights online and resort to hyperbolic praise of their projects wherever possible, receive an inordinate amount of attention. More interesting is the wider assumption of a zealous cadre as cohesive and streamlined as A24’s branding, a feedback loop where the fan, whether pejorative or complimentary, leads the conversation back to the product and vice versa. Ken Fox, the Stripes founder and investor, compared A24 to Disney because Disney has become the lodestar of a brand loyalty that inspires its most ardent fans—let’s call them A24 Adults—to preemptively attach meaning and value to anything the company produces.”

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☕️

If you send 10 USD to EUR today using the SWIFT network — currently the largest global interbank messaging system, it can take anywhere from one to five business days to settle. This is because SWIFT itself doesn't move money; it sends payment instructions between banks to complete the transfer.

At my new job, we build financial systems for companies and institutions using stablecoins (fiat-backed cryptocurrencies). And a very popular use case is to reduce the time and cost of international payments.

Using our product, that same 10 USD transfer happens in minutes, not days. The money moves on blockchain rails - public ledgers that operate 24/7 across all time zones. Programmable money that flows like data.

My role is to design interfaces for using our system. I build the Dashboard for customers to onboard their clients, initiate transfers, and manage information. It’s a very familiar job, and yet it feels very new because I’m learning a lot: new jurisdictions, new concepts, new technology, new culture.

There’s a lot of competition in the space and every decision matters. Naturally, I like the challenge. I also really like the team, and that I get to work on global financial rails from a New York perspective.

These first two months have been very chaotic with all the moving around, and I’ve really only been able to focus on the job. But I’ve made a lot of initial progress, and I can now settle into some kind of rhythm.

Until next time.

🪖