Chronicles: 2019 Spring

Academic

  • Submitted papers to CSCW and UIST 2019!
  • I attended Creativity & Cognition 2019 in beautiful San Diego, CA! I participated as a Graduate Symposium mentor and as the chair for posters and demos this year. Thankfully, everything went great (super thanks to the hotel staff and local arrangements chairs for all their help)!
    • Thanks to a couple of colleagues, I got to go out on a sailboat for the first time! :O
  • I also attended CHI 2019 over in Glasgow, Scotland, UK!
  • Participated as a industry career panelist for an annual Women in Computer Science event at Berkeley.

Art

Personal

  • Celebrated 6 years together with my boyfriend!
  • Attended The Adventure Zone and My Brother, My Brother, and Me shows in San Jose with friends!
  • I have a new lucky bamboo pal that I got free from work and that also survived a plane ride. We also got a new plant for our bathroom (her name is Freya and she’s a dieffenbachia!). And, after a lot of Youtube video-watching and a lot of anxiety, I tried cutting down Beatrix because she was getting kinda tall. Hopefully she keeps growing!
  • My New Year’s resolution to be more eco-friendly is going well! This is just an eyeball estimate, but the amount of trash we throw away now per day is probably about 5 – 10% of what we used to throw away. It’s nuts. And it really doesn’t take that much longer to separate out organic waste from recyclable containers and rinse ’em out before throwing them into the recycling bin instead of the trash can. Another thing I want to start doing is ordering less stuff online (coughAmazoncough), or at least order things in big chunks instead of one or two items at a time. If all goes well I might even get rid of my Prime subscription 😛
  • Spent a few days in London (following my trip to CHI in Glasgow)!
    • Got my first Tarot reading at Treadwell’s Books! It was extremely confusing because I didn’t know what to ask about, but it was interesting.
    • Had fancy tea time at Fortnum & Mason! The store itself is huge and full of cute tea accessories. I bought a tea tray and some tea (Chamomile & Bee Pollen, and Ginger and Sicilian Lemon, yum!)
    • Visited the British Museum. I was surprised there was a manga exhibit? Unfortunately it wasn’t open at the time I was there!
    • Grabbed some nice dessert at Cakes & Bubbles!
  • I learned about the Jewish concept of Lashon Hara from this twitter thread that I found really good. (Basically, the idea is that, before you say something about someone, decide whether to say it based on whether it’s useful to say, rather than whether it’s true or not.) I do find I sometimes have to catch myself before saying something potentially harmful (sometimes because my anxiety gets the better of me and I’m scrambling to fill silence in a conversation, and other times because I still don’t have a good sense of the line between teasing someone and just being mean).
  • Games: FFXIV (leveled all my gatherers and crafters to 70, and I’m starting to level my first healer, AST!), Granblue Fantasy (I know, I know, I’ve been trying to quit mobages, but the summer event was wild), Cadence of Hyrule (it’s super hard), Atelier Rorona (my first Atelier game! It’s super cute and addicting)
    • E3 announcements: the FFXIV Shadowbringers trailer teased some crazy lore bombs, I’m definitely getting Collection of Mana, Animal Crossing was delayed (but that’s OK!), and holy moly there’s going to be a Breath of the Wild 2!
    • We got the FFXIV Cactpot board game on a whim, heh! It’s actually pretty fun.
    • We also an Oculus Quest! The only thing I do on it is play Beat Saber though. I wonder what else I can do with it?
  • Anime: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind (didn’t like it as much as Stardust Crusaders, but still fun, and Bruno really stole the show for me), Mob Psycho 100 II (so, so, so good),
    • Not quite anime, but the Detective Pikachu movie was fun!
  • Books: Daily Painting, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Circe, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Gender Queer, Why We Sleep

 

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