Fears & Failures

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