Fears & Failures

Ended up not doing a whole lot of art this quarter! I spent most of my time planning for next year and hanging out with friends and family.

Academic

• Visited Seattle for a work retreat! We visited the Bloedel Reserve, which was a lovely, quiet place to take a nature walk.
• Flew down to Austin, TX for CSCW 2020! A lot of the papers were about how machine learning and people (can) work together. Some interesting presentations/papers I saw:
  • Opening Keynote: Participatory Machine Learning
  • Deconstructing Creativity: Non-Linear Processes and Fluid Roles in Contemporary Music and Dance
  • Discrimination through optimization: How Facebook’s ad delivery can lead to biased outcomes
  • The Principles and Limits of Algorithm-in-the-Loop Decision Making
• Did some reviewing for CHI 2020.
• It feels like the previous year’s winners of the Adobe Women-in-Technology Scholarship and Fellowship just got announced, but it’s already time to review applications for this year, so I did a bunch of that!

Art

• Finished Inktober! Sort of! I started late because of some work travel, and ended up not doing the first week of drawings. But anyway, here are some of my favorites: Frail, Misfit, Tread, Ancient, Dizzy, Coat, Ride, Catch
• Here’s the piece I contributed to the Gokigen na Chou Digimon Adventure zine!
• I finally put up my FFXIV name tags in my Etsy store! Why did it take me a whole month to list it? Because I convinced myself I was going to take nicer photos… and then I didn’t 😛
• My Etsy store did well this year: I had 42% more orders than last year (!!!). That is wild.

Personal

• Went on a big trip to Korea and Japan with my fiance and his family! Some notable stuff we did:
  • Korea
    • ALTDIF Tea Bar — we had a mixed tea drink tasting course that was amazing! Each of the drinks was themed after a contemporary Korean literature book that the mixers liked.
    • Leesle — totally by chance, I happened to see a shop that sold modern hanbok clothes meant for everyday wear and I went and bought a few pieces! I had been following the brand on Instagram for a while, but hadn’t realized they had a shop near where we were sightseeing!
    • Korean Folk Village — we were there off-season and so it was awkwardly empty, but we had a lot of fun watching the various performances and walking around the village.
    • Hongdae Free Market — it’s like an outdoor artist alley with local artists selling handmade crafts and artwork!
  • Japan
    • Kanazawa — we took the Shinkansen down to a quiet, pretty city called Kanazawa and stayed in this lovely hotel that had its own bathhouse and provided massage chairs in the rooms! Like, what? This was also where I had the best curry I have ever, ever eaten.
    • Visited the new Pokemon Cafe in Ginza!
    • Team Lab Planets — I’m not even sure how to describe this place; maybe an immersive, interactive art museum? The first stop in the museum is a locker room where you can borrow shorts if you’re wearing clothes that make it hard to wade through water! Definitely worth a visit, though I think it’s a temporary museum.
    • Nintendo Store – visited the new store in Shibuya PARCO, and somehow managed to avoid the 5+ hour line to get in by getting up early to nab a ticket that guaranteed that we would enter the store at a specific time! I bought… a lot.
• My fiance and I are starting wedding planning! It’s… a lot. How can something be so exciting and so frustrating at the same time? 😅
• Visited my family in Seattle for Christmas! My nephew informed my mother than Santa isn’t real. We also went to the Nutcracker altogether — it was my niece and nephew’s first time going to a live theatre performance and they had a great time 😊
• Anime: Evangelion (my friend and I marathoned the whole series in one day because neither of us had watched it, and our brains melted), Dr. Stone (weird story, but kinda charming! I’ll watch the second season when it comes out.)
• Games: Link’s Awakening (a sweet, cute game), Pokemon Shield (enjoyed the spectacle of the battles and the characters!), FFXIV (slowly leveling my RDM, it’s at 75 now. The new NieR raids are very exciting!), FFVIII (finally finished it — after all these years, I was very surprised at how much I didn’t know about the story)
  • Board games: Moon Base, which we picked up in Japan! It’s a little like 3D checkers?
• Books: Persepolis (I read it because I was able to get my book club at work to read it :D)
• Podcasts: The Adventure Zone: Graduation (really loving it so far — Travis has improved so much as a DM!)

Academic

• Finished up intern projects for the summer and submitted a few papers to CHI 2020.
• I served as a guest judge for the final showcase for a design class at Berkeley! Super fun.
• Attended the awards ceremony for the Adobe Research Fellowship and Adobe Women-in-Technology Scholarship! Congrats to all the winners!
• A thing I worked on finally launched! Behance now has user livestreaming, and on some people’s streams, you can see an automatically generated set of chapters to help you navigate super-long stream video recordings!

Art

• Tabled at the artist alley at Anime Expo! Like last year, I didn’t do any commissions, but I did do some original ink drawings and put them up for sale over the course of the convention! I also did a little art trade with my table neighbors.
  • Managed to buy a table for 2020, so I’ll be at AX next year too! Woohoo!
• A Rune Factory 4 print is in the works!
• I made FFXIV character nametags! I’m so pleased with how they turned out.
• Much too late, but I finally got my Inktober 2018 book put together and printed!
• Made a little watercolor gift of my boyfriend’s FFXIV character.
• Haven’t been keeping up with weekly comics that well because the summer is so busy at work, but here’s a few comics I did that I’m proud of (and weirdly got a lot of social media traction):
  • This FFXIV comic based on this tweet
  • My boyfriend and I arguing about which side of a floppy disk is the top

Personal

• I got engaged!
  • As part of our engagement date, we went The Game Parlour in SF and had fun trying a bunch of board games in their library! We ended up buying Dice Forge (you say it’s a crafting-based board game? Yes, please!)
• As a small move to improve my mental health, I’m trying to reduce the amount of news I encounter through social media. Deleting Twitter isn’t super realistic because it’s a primary way I keep up with a lot of my art friends, so I went through an unfollowed a lot of accounts I know talk about news-related stuff. I need to build a new habit of reading the news regularly on purpose rather than just kind of encountering it throughout my day. We’ll see how this works out!
• Had fun watching SGDQ 2019!
• Visited Seattle at the end of September to hang out with family! I took my niece and nephew to the Living Computer Museum and the Seattle Art Museum. I highly recommend looking at art with young children (my niece had some A+ commentary).
• Games: FFXIV Shadowbringers (SO GOOD. My fiance finally finished it a whole 2.5 months later, during which I was dying because I couldn’t chat about the story with him), Rune Factory 4 (finally beat it! Though I still haven’t managed to marry anyone in it because of the random event system :P), Earthbound (beat it! A wholesome story), Kingdom Hearts 3 (I’m still not sure what the story is, but I feel like I’ve fulfilled my promise to my 14 year old self to see this game series through at least this far), Untitled Goose Game (super fun, very mischievous)
  • FFXIV: Finished leveling my crafters to 80, finished leveling my Bard, and am nearly finished leveling my Astrologian! (Gotta get those optional role quests done for the extra story info!) I’m not sure how I feel about healing. I think I’ll stick with being a tank.
  • Heard that there is going to be a Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town remake for the Switch! I really hope it’s good!
  • Mobages: So much for trying to quit! Pokemon Masters came out (I found the gameplay a little boring though, so I might drop it for now and check again on it next year), and I’ve also been playing Ragnarok M like a madman. Dragalia Lost and Granblue Fantasy had updates to their story quests, so I caught up on those too.
• Anime: Fruits Basket (remake)
• Books: I… haven’t read any books these few months because I’ve been playing video games… 😛
• Podcasts: Hello From the Magic Tavern (finally caught up!), The Adventure Zone: Amnesty

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

• I had an artist alley table at Sakura-Con! It was my first time going and I had so much fun (especially because I had the opportunity to do a bunch of commissions!). I hope I get to go again. The highlight was definitely this puppy wearing one of my Pokemon trainer nametags.
• I also was in the artist alley at Fanime. I had a lovely time as always and got to do more commissions!
• I applied for and got accepted to participate in this Digimon Adventure zine! Digimon Adventure is one of my favorites anime series ever and I’m so excited to add another Adventure piece to my print lineup (and to see all the other artists’ works!). Here’s a little preview of my piece for the zine.
• I worked on a few mini-prints — a Ragnarok Online print (because I’ve been playing a lot of Ragnarok M), and a Granblue print featuring the angel boys because of the recent side story featuring them 😛
• Wrote up an artist alley tips post for the first time in a very long time about how I fly to conventions with all my artist alley stuff!
• Got back to keeping up with my weekly comics! I’m particularly proud of these:
  • This comic about how scientists thing dinosaur lungs worked, because, science
  • This comic about my niece because I did something ~*artsy*~ and incorporated a photo into one of the panels
  • This comic about what it’s like driving with my parents in the car because I think it’s the funniest of the comics I’ve done in a while. See this Twitter thread for my mom’s reactions to the comic :’)
• Now that I’m prepping for Anime Expo, I’m realizing that my book of Inktober 2018 sketches is… non-existent. I need to get it put together and printed soon!

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

Academic

• Attended my company’s big internal technical conference (Tech Summit) in February! I even gave a talk on how cool crowdsourcing is! (Since, you know, that’s my area of expertise.) It was a good chance to learn about what engineers in the company are up to.
• I’m one of the posters & demos chairs for Creativity & Cognition 2019 this year! This involves a lot of, well, organizing and (real talk here) floundering because this is my first time organizing ANYTHING for a conference! But it’s a lot of fun — I hope I can help make the conference a good experience for everyone!

Art

• I got into the artist alley for Sakuracon and for Fanime! Hope to see you there!
• Finished up an illustration of my boyfriend’s FFXIV character as a Valentine’s gift!
• Some Granblue Fantasy fanart sketches! I should make some proper illustrations featuring these characters.
• I launched some new items in my Etsy store! Some cute witchy/magical-themed memopads, Nintendo-themed birthday cards, and Cardcaptor Sakura Dream Key charms!
  • I hired a photographer to do product photos for the first time! I couldn’t do the birthday cards justice on my own, so I hired Ash Snap’em Photography to take photos for me and am SO pleased with how they came out.
• Put together a speedpaint video of another Harvest Moon print!
• Participated in Hourly Comics Day again this year! I wish I had planned better and actually planned something interesting to make comics about that day besides just… working from home.
• Started a new cross-stitching project whaaaat! Hopefully I’ll actually stick with it and have something to show a few months from now.
• Herogirl Comics turned 9 years old this January T_T
• I launched my Patreon (very quietly because I don’t know what I’m doing)!

Personal

• Had a great time watching AGDQ 2019!
  • I really enjoyed the Rayman 2 run (really great commentary); watching Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight made me want to play it; and of course, enjoyed the TASBot block.
• Killed my first succulent 🙁 But I got another one! I now know to keep them away from humidifiers and closer to sunny windows.
• I went to a cat show near me on a whim! It was really interesting and fun! I have no idea how the judging works, but it was neat seeing all the pretty cats and the judges’ commentary on them.
• I got really into tarot in the past couple months! (The deck I bought was the Kawaii Tarot.) I’ve always been a bit of a interest in folklore, superstition, and religion, and am super fascinated about how these have developed over time and how different cultures and times have related to it. It seems like a fun brainstorming tool — I’ve seen a couple of blog posts around on how people use tarot to write stories or develop characters. I’m going to have to try it out!
• Kept up with my regular DMing sessions and also played in a friend’s one-shot Mage game where I was a cranky goddess disguised as a village elder! I enjoyed being a cranky old lady.
• As one of my New Year’s resolutions, I’m trying to be more eco-friendly! I’m focusing on recycling things I didn’t before (cough take-out containers and boba cups) and now have a compost bag in our house for organic waste. I also bought a reusable boba cup and straw that I’ve already made good use out of because I drink way too much boba!
• Games: FFXIV patch 4.5 (leveled all my gatherers to 60+ too!), Celeste (fun, challenging, easy to pick up anytime kind of game!), The Return of the Obra Dinn (spooky and difficult, very rewarding), Granblue Fantasy (What Makes the Sky Blue III), Let’s Go Pikachu, Doki Doki Literature Club (why. why did I play this.)
  • Still playing through Kingdom Hearts 3 and Smash Ultimate. Started up Rune Factory 4 again, too! (Hopefully I’ll finally get through the third story arc so I can finish the game!)
  • Boardgames: Wingspan (cute, easy game), 2-player Betrayal at the House on the Hill (works surprisingly well!)
• Anime: She-Ra (cute), That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (positive and fun fantasy shenanigans), SSSS Gridman (I was really into this, but the ending kinda got away), Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind (fun so far, not sure how I feel about Giorno!), Kaguya-sama: Love is War (REALLY FUN. I think my favorite anime of the season!), Hinamatsuri (funny, great animation, really sweet), Gintama, Skull Face Bookseller Honda-san (ok funny, good background show), Neo Yokio (So. SO. SO BAD. SO BAD IT’S GOOD? What did I watch??)
  • Tried: Zombieland Saga, Saint Seiya Saintia Sho
  • Not anime, but I finished watching all of Friends on Netflix, so I guess I’m officially caught up on pop culture now.
• Books: Way of the House Husband, The Creative Tarot, Enchantments, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Light Magic for Dark Times, Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun Vol. 8, My Solo Exchange Diary, The Power of Myth, Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes
  • I’m so proud of myself for reading more this year!