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.
- Korea
- 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!)