Initially this started as a way to get rid of photos due to my lack of storage in my phone, but I got inspired on making my own zine. It was the perfect time to start with this Japan trip because it’s the first big trip I’ve had in a while and I just wanted to make it more memorable. In this digital age, I’ve also felt the need to go back to print as another form of keepsake. This challenged me to creatively capture and layout these photographs.

The zine was inspired by the iconic 1990 photograph by Voyager 1, "pale blue dot". In an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s book by the same name, he noted:

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

This passage perfectly encapsulates my view of our world and my hopes for this zine—how we are floating in a tiny speck of dust in a vast cosmic space and yet it's the only home we've ever known. This zine serves as a reminder to appreciate more the beauty, rawness, and complexity of our home—this pale blue dot we live in.