The past few months have been wild, y’all.
Academic
- Visited Seattle for a team retreat! We did an escape room as a team and we escaped! It was my first time ever beating an escape room! We did The Vanishing Room by Locurio.
- While in Seattle, I met with some students and faculty at the University of Washington (with one of my Adobe colleagues, Valentina)! It was quite nostalgic visiting — I think it was the first time since I had graduated from UW that I had been back during an actual school day. Students were around going about their daily lives and trying not to slip on the icy sidewalks.
- I got promoted at work! (Whatever that means! I guess I’m doing a good job at my job!)
- Presented a bit about my current research at the Stanford HCI Group‘s weekly meeting.
- CHI 2020 got cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns. But I was a co-author on three papers that was going to appear there! Awesome work by the students and collaborators I worked with.
- Decipher: An Interactive Visualization Tool for Interpreting Unstructured Design Feedback from Multiple Providers (first author: Grace Yen)
- Temporal Segmentation of Creative Live Streams (first author: Ailie Fraser)
- Generating Audio-Visual Slideshows from Text Articles Using Word Concreteness (first author: Mackenzie Leake)
- The CSCW 2020 paper I had been working on didn’t get in — oh well! It’s a good research idea. I’ll keep working on it!
Art
- Finished this crochet chocobo project I started a whole 5 years ago.
- Finished this cute moon phases cross-stitch project I started late last year! Cross-stitching is maybe my favorite craft in terms of how the finished products look, but man is it slow.
- Did an Hourly Comic Day comic!
- The only thing I’ve had time to draw this year other than comics was this diagram of a cat teapot’s skeleton.
- Wrote a Tumblr mini-post about the approximate budget needed to get started artist alley-ing.
- Got accepted Fanime 2020’s Artist Alley! (Although it’s likely not happening.)
Personal
- COVID-19!
- My partner and I have been working from home since the start of March or so. My company decided to close down our Bay Area offices, but I managed to go in to save my office plant before that happened.
- Donated some N95 masks to hospitals through #GetUsPPE!
- Wrote a blog post on Tumblr about how geeks can help fight COVID-19!
- Voted in CA primaries!
- Watched AGDQ 2020 and donated where I can! (They read one of my donations on stream, just after the FFVIII run!)
- Probably my favorite run was this Clone Hero run!
- Got tickets to see BTS in Los Angeles! (But the show’s been postponed.)
- My favorite Map of the Soul track: Black Swan.
- D&D
- I ran a short Pokemon D&D session for a few friends!
- FFXIV D&D continues with our small group!
- Anime: The Rising of the Shield Hero (surprised me), My Hero Academia (continuing), Haikyuu (continuing), Gintama (Jirocho Arc)
- Games: FFXIV Patch 5.2 (also I finished all the role quests and the little extra story bit they reward with is wild), FFVII Remake demo (it looks so good, I’m so excited), Kentucky Route Zero (beautiful and clever, also I suggested as our “book” for the next work book club meeting heh), Bravely Default II Demo (a little disappointing — UI is hard to look at), Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team DX (so cute!), War of the Visions: Bravely Default (I can’t play any more mobile games… but there’s a FFXIV event…), Animal Crossing: New Horizons (this is it. This is the only video game I’m going to play for the rest of my life.)
- Pokemon HOME came out! I spent some time transferring Pokemon from my old 3DS games. It is awesome being able to wonder trade on my phone!
- Board games: Everdell (really cute and chill)
- Books: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (really charming and bittersweet), Delicious Dungeon Vol 1 – 5 (funny! the art is detailed)
- Podcasts: I got to see Hello From the Magic Tavern live shows in SF and SEA!