Fears & Failures

I did so much travelling at the end of 2018, and the holidays were super busy! As a result, I think most of my notes are going to be in the Personal section (sorry, job and hobbies…)

Academic

• Went on a bunch of work trips! I visited our Seattle office twice and visited the New York office once! It’s always great to see people in person.
• Finished a bunch of reviews for CHI 2019.
• I cannot believe it’s intern recruiting season again! I feel like I barely just finished with the summer. Time to think about projects for next year.

Art

• Finished my entry for the FFXIV NA Fan Fest art contest! I did a bit of real-time panic on Twitter, so you can see how I progressed. I did make it as a finalist, which made me really happy.
• I did Inktober this year again! It’s so exhausting but I love love love doing Inktober, and I always feel so accomplished at the end of the month. I feel like I wasn’t as adventurous with compositions this year, but I think I did a better job telling stories with my illustrations.
• I tabled at the Geek Girl Con artist alley, which was my first convention in Seattle! It’s small, but well-organized and the vibe of the convention was really positive and relaxed. I’m definitely going to look into attending again next year.
• I got my first wholesale order! A number of the phone charms I designed will be sold at a REAL, PHYSICAL store (the Mox Boarding House in Seattle) in the next month or so, which is nuts! I wish I could go see it on display in person!
• I leveled-up my knitting skills! I made some mini-stockings (learned how to knit fair-isle!) and some stuffed animals (learned how to knit in the round!) as Christmas presents.
• Right at the end of the year, started working on some new illustrations for Nintendo-themed birthday cards! I managed to finish this Animal Crossing birthday illustration just before the new year.

Personal

• I participated in VoterCon! No, really. I’m going to do my best to be more vocal about civic participation and I am sure as heck going to be on top of voting!
• Conventions! I went to Blizzcon for the first time, survived the lines, and spent pretty much the whole time at the Starcraft 2 stage and watched a non-Korean player win the world championship for the first time in Starcraft’s 20 year history. I also went to FFXIV Fan Fest in Las Vegas and (despite being a little sick) had a lot of fun with friends, hearing about new game updates, and of course, enjoying the Primals concert!
• My boyfriend’s family visited from Singapore and Australia! They hung out in California while I was visiting my parents in Seattle, then they came up to the Pacific Northwest and we had fun looking around Seattle and Portland.
• More D&D! I didn’t do as much DMing since my players and I were all travelling a lot these few months, but I kept up with the campaign that I’m a player in. I also ended up running a mini-session of Mines of Phandelver for my boyfriend and his sister while we were traveling together, by printing out some premade characters in our hotel lobby!
• Some new things I tried:
  • Went to a golf driving range for the first time over Thanksgiving because my mom has been learning golf and wanted to go.
  • Bought a few little succulents for the home and office! I’m really enjoying having them with me.
• Games:  Deltarune: Chapter 1 (really enjoyable! great music, art, characters so far), FFXIV (mostly crafting and botanist leveling), FFXV (I finally finished it! I understand now while people are crying over it all the time, ahh)
  • I tried out quitting mobages (Dragalia and Granblue mostly) and it’s amazing how much more free time I feel like I have! Definitely going to stick with it as much as I can.
  • Started playing Earthbound, Let’s Go: Pikachu, Smash Ultimate! So many games to play…
  • Board games: Tea Dragon Society (very very cute art, but not very strategically deep), Fog of Love (interesting, feels a little too real sometimes), Azul (ideal hangout game), Unstable Unicorn (fun, feels like a shorter, less intense Munchkin), Tokyo Highway (really tactile and fun!). I also got my first tarot deck on a whim, which has been fun to play with!
• Anime: Revue Starlight (it was really good! Recommended if you like magical realism), Little Witch Academia (finished! Very cute, and the story was more solid than I expected), Gintama, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind (enjoyable so far!), Voltron S7 (it’s… finally over? It’s a nice background show, I feel pretty neutral about the overall story), Aggretsuko: We Wish You a Metal Christmas (cute! cute!!!)
  • Tried: Sword Art Online Aliciziation (why do I keep trying to watch Sword Art), SSSS Gridman, Tsurune, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
  • I also went to see the SF Symphony perform The Nightmare Before Christmas! This was actually my first time watching the film, though I was familiar with the music. I actually found it a little scary… how did little kids watch this? 😛

Academic

• Finished serving on the CSCW 2018 program committee! It was my first time in a PC meeting and seeing the paper acceptance process behind-the-scenes… I didn’t have any papers that I needed to particularly champion, so a lot of it was me observing how more experienced folks talked about the value of different kinds of research work. I think I learned a lot.
• I served on the Scholarship committee at work! It was a pretty intense process of reading applications, meeting with the other committee members, and holding interviews… but it’s definitely a rewarding process, especially because you get to interact with so many great students.
• Finished up my summer internships! All my interns started on papers for CHI, but we decided not to submit and work on fleshing them out a bit more for a future conference deadline. I’ll be continuing to work on these projects with my interns!
• Accepted a few roles for Creativity & Cognition 2019, which will be in San Diego! I’ll be serving as a mentor for the Graduate Symposium and as one of the Posters & Demos Chairs.
• Spent some spare time learning React and Node! I think one of my goals for the rest of this year (or next year?) will be to use these as much as possible to try and get a good understanding of it.
• My company decided to write a Researcher Spotlight article about me and my research :O

Art

• Tabled at Anime Expo‘s Artist Alley! IT WAS. SO. HOT. OUTSIDE. Fortunately the temperature in the artist alley was totally fine! I feel like they made a lot of improvements this year — they included this reserved rest area for artists and artist helpers which was a great place to take a break from the crowds and eat some food away from all my precious merch! I hope they bring it back next year.
  • I usually don’t take commissions at AX because traffic is so crazy, but I did end up taking one commission for a repeat customer that was fun to work on!
• I also tabled at Crunchyroll Expo‘s Artist Alley! I had a couple of new pieces a merch, including a sketchbook of my Inktober drawings from 2017 and a small Nier Automata fanart print (that I had to get rush printed because I finished the game and drew some fanart last minute!). I also did a bunch of commissions, including probably my favorite drawing I’ve ever done for someone.
• Got into Geek Girl Con‘s Artist Alley! I’m excited because this will be my first Seattle convention and I’ll be meeting lots of artists and attendees I’ve never met before!
• Added all the new merch I’ve made so far this year to the Etsy store!
• I have been bad about doing my weekly comics. 😐 I think I let all this convention prep get the better of me…

Personal

• Highlight of the quarter: I MET YASUHIRO WADA (the creator of Harvest Moon) AT AX AND GAVE HIM MY HARVEST MOON FANART AND I THINK HE LIKED THEM! I also got to get his autograph (and made some friends in the autograph line — so nice to chat with other Harvest Moon fans!)
• Got my tickets to FFXIV Fan Fest! I actually missed out on tickets, but it turned out that an FC member was able to snag a couple. See you all in Las Vegas!
• Attended the Distant Worlds concert with some friends!
• My boyfriend and I babysat a friend’s kittens for a few weeks and had a lovely time! Eevee is a super sweet, smart Abyssinian and Bansky the Bombay is a little terror that wants to hunt everything in sight (but is still very cute).
• Tried a bunch of stuff to try and get more healthy. Started playing tennis on the weekends, and also started seeing a chiropractor and dietician for some other issues, though I’m not sure if I’ll keep doing it in the long term. We’ll see how it goes!
• I’m learning how to knit! I’m teaming up with someone at work to create a knitted Welcome Blanket that will go to refugees entering the U.S.
• Anime:
  • Hanebado (was really excited for this, but I can’t get into the characters), Hinamatsuri (surprisingly funny and sweet), Cells at Work! (feels a bit too edutainment-y), BNHA (of course), Chuunibyou movie (super fluffy and romantic!), Asobi Asobase (I very reluctantly find this show hilarious), Harukana Receive (wanted girl’s sports anime, got fanservice… boo), Chio’s School Road (just ok), Gintama (I am never going to catch up), Voltron Season 6 (I mean, I’m just in too deep now)
• Games:
  • Went on a mobage downloading frenzy (FF Dissidia Opera Omnia, Grow Stone, Digimon Links, Dragon Village M, Idle Poring, and got back into Tiny Farm and Pokemon Go a little, please, someone help), Little Dragons Cafe (very cute but it’s laggy loading times makes it kinda hard to play), Rune Factory 4 (I still haven’t unlocked the third story arc but I finally managed to start dating some of the characters!), Story of Season: Trio of Towns (really addicting and cute!), and caught up on FFXIV patch 4.3 and 4.4.
  • I finished Nier Automata, and oh my god, what a crazy game. It defied all my expectations, to the point where I can’t decide if I even like the game or not.
  • Watching a lot of Starcraft recently! I only played the game a bit when I was younger, but I found that I enjoy spectating!
• Lots of D&D this month!
  • My players and I managed to keep to a monthly schedule, and I think I really grew as a DM — I had the epiphany that I should be rewarding players for their own actions, even if I have to hastily improv something a little sloppy/dumb, rather than rewarding them for being able to read the preconceived scenarios that I have in my mind. That seems to work out way better (at least for my players). We also had a fun session where one of my friends joined us as a temporary guest player where he died at the end, and that was all very exciting and the scenario actually managed to bring a little emotion to the table. Success!
  • I also joined a separate D&D campaign as a player, this time with some grad school friends! It feels so good to not have to prep for sessions 🙂

Another blog post that’s a little late! I feel like I’ve traveled a lot the past few months (for both work and art).

Academic

• A few friends teaching a social computing class invited me to give a guest lecture! I basically just gave my dissertation defense, but I think the students found it useful? I got to stick around and learn about their class projects and give some feedback, which was fun. Giving that lecture, and knowing the students were looking at me as an ~*~*industry person*~*~, I remember thinking, “Wow, I’m definitely not a student anymore.”
• I’m serving on the CSCW program committee! Lots of reviewing and reviewer assignments these past couple months as submissions have come in.
• Visited the Seattle Adobe office for about a week! It was nice to meet up with colleagues in person. I also got to visit my parents over the weekend and go hiking with them while I was there.
• Then, the week after, I went to CHI in Montreal! It was my first time there and found the city lovely and very walkable. A couple of favorite papers:
  • Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time
  • Let’s Talk About Race: Identity, Chatbots, and AI
  • A Data-Driven Analysis of Workers’ Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk
  • Interactive Guidance Techniques for Improving Creative Feedback
• A few weeks after that, Adobe had their annual research retreat, held at the Seascape Resort! Gave a talk on an early thoughts on a framework for designing (machine learning and crowd-powered) creativity tools and got a lot of positive responses and feedback.
• I also went to HCIC 2018. I gave a talk with my colleague (and manager) Mira Dontcheva on the same idea I presented at a research retreat and got some good feedback there too. Social validation, yay!
• A bunch of my friends defended this year! Congrats to Ethan, Will, and Niloufar!
• Intern season at Adobe started! I am working with Grace Yen (UCIC), Eureka Foong (Northwestern), and Mackenzie Leake (Stanford) this summer.

Art

• Wrote up a new tutorial, this time on how I cut small prints!
• Finished a new Harvest Moon print, featuring the More Friends of Mineral Town cast!
• Attended the artist alley at A-Kon! I had a great time meeting people and doing commissions, but I was a little disappointed by a lack of communication from the artist alley that resulted in a lot of artists (including myself) arriving one day earlier than they needed to — it turned out the artist alley was not open the first day of the convention! I used my extra day in Texas to hole up in my hotel room and do paper reviews for CSCW 😛 Also, I ended up getting stuck at the airport overnight while trying to come home :’D
• The Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary Fanbook I participated in was able to raise $1000 for Doctors Without Borders!
• Got into Crunchyroll Expo‘s Artist Alley! I’ll be there from September 1 – 3 later this year.
• I drew another Neat Things comic about how weird penguin skeletons are.
• I did an interview with Sevengamer’s FFXIV Wiki about my artwork and life on FFXIV!

Personal

• My dog died at my parent’s home earlier this year. I’ll miss you, Lucky.
• I need to get back into exercising! Travel, combined with being sick and mildly spraining my ankle, made it so I haven’t been running or doing yoga for a few months.
• Anime: Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card Arc (still very cute!), Boku no Hero Academia (still my go-to shounen anime fix), Kino’s Journey (finished it! I liked the last two episodes a lot, but somehow it felt less serious and philosophical than the original series), Pokemon Sun and Moon (still super cute, funny, and well-written), RWBY Volume 5
• Games:
  • Rune Factory 4 (finished Arc 1 and 2, just waiting for Arc 3 to trigger while doing town events and dating events with NPCs), Persona 5 (finally finished it! The ending was pretty crazy but I enjoyed it overall), Breath of the Wild (finished it as well, I loved the beautiful world and I really like scholar/researcher Zelda in this iteration of the series), Granblue Fantasy, FF Record Keeper
  • I started Nier Automata! FFXV is also on deck to play soon, but after Persona I felt like I wanted a break from a long JRPG.
  • I’m super behind on FFXIV! I haven’t played through 4.3 yet.
• Podcasts:
  • I got to go to the MBMBAM and The Adventure Zone live shows in San Francisco and had so much fun! It was awesome seeing some of my favorite podcasters live.
• D&D continues!
  • Our group tried Roll20 for the first time since I was sick during our scheduled game session, and it went well! It was super nice being able to quickly pull together a map that players could move their own characters around. I tried forgoing battles completely for this session and doing a more roleplaying/social challenge using initiative order, which I think helped make sure all players stayed engaged.
  • I also tried a World of Darkness tabletop roleplaying game with some friends as a one-time player character! It was interesting playing with a new group. They were a bit more physically active in their roleplaying (e.g., having conversations in parallel in different rooms rather than everyone paying attention to everything) which was very new to me and hard to get used to, but they made me feel very comfortable despite how awkward and shy I was being (thanks guys!).

This blog post is about a month-and-a-half overdue, but here we go!

Academic

• Work continues to be hard but fun and interesting! My current struggle: figuring out how to reduce meetings and increase available time for research work. I’ve been asking some more experienced folks for advice and was relieved to hear that it’s perfectly reasonable I’ve been more meeting-heavy since I’m trying to get to know people and figure out what projects to work on. I got some good pointers and encouragement on how to make sure I’m spending my time on the things I find most interesting. (Side note: my work colleagues are super nice and thoughtful people and I’m so glad I work with them!)
• Worked with a few folks to submit a talk proposal to HCIC 2018! Will it get in? I hope so! (But then that means I have to prepare a presentation, so…)
• I interviewed potential hires for the first time! It’s super weird being on the other side of the table. I think I already knew this, but actually conducting interviews and participating in meetings about hires really cemented for me how difficult and human (?) the whole process is.

Art

• Participated in Hourly Comic Day!
• Got into A-Kon‘s artist alley! I’ll be there from June 7 – 10 this year. It’ll also be my first anime convention of 2018, which makes me a little nervous. It’s been a while since I’ve done commissions and travelled for a con!
• Finished my first illustration this year: a portrait of Alphinaud and Alisaie from FFXIV!
• Also did a few ink sketch portraits of my D&D players’ characters! A whole year ago I had done a few for two players for their birthdays and realized I had never given birthday presents to the rest of them… Better late than never?
• Spent some time putting together some speedpaint videos of newer illustrations for my YouTube channel! I actually really enjoy putting these together… it’s relaxing to see the end result and it’s fun finding and working with music artists and featuring their remixes and songs.
• Tried a stab at a new type of comic for Herogirl that I’m calling “Neat Things”, where I illustrate a fact or real-world story that I find neat! My first one was about the history of citrus fruits.
• I put together my Inktober 2017 artbook and sent it off to print (finally)! I’ll hopefully have it up in my Etsy store soon.
• Completed another full Hobonichi and started a new one! I’m so glad to have discovered journaling and I hope I can keep it up for many more years.

Personal

• I made self-care a 2018 resolution for myself! So far, I’ve:
  • Started getting monthly massages. This is the one thing I’ve been looking forward to trying to do now that I have more disposable income.
  • Started running twice a week! By “running”, I mean jogging lightly on a treadmill for like 15 minutes. My knees were not liking this, so at a friend’s suggestion, I got myself some new super-cushioned running shoes.
  • Committed to doing yoga twice a week! I’ve been doing it on and off for the past year, but now I’m making it a part of my weekly schedule. I just do it at home by following along with Youtube videos.
  • Made time for meditation. Now that I regularly take the train to work, I’ve found it’s provided me a way to get a 10-minute meditation session in my day. I am still terrible at it, but hopefully this will help me do it more regularly.
  • Worked on better sleep hygiene. I’m trying a couple of different things to help me fall asleep in a reasonable amount of time (like, falling asleep in less than an hour would be really nice), like not eating and exercising at night and not looking at my phone in bed. I also started wearing an eyemask — I used to think I was pretty good at sleeping with lights on, but the eyemask has been probably one of the most helpful things I’ve tried so far.
  • Tried out a daily “worry time”. I worry about everything, all the time, for any reason, so I thought I would try taking 20 minutes or so each day to worry as much as I want! My thought was that this would help me worry less the rest of the day, but so far I’m finding it just makes me more anxious than before. Go figure.
• Anime: Girl’s Last Tour (my favorite anime I’ve seen in a while! Very cute and mysterious), Pop Team Epic (I can’t tell if I liked it or not, but it was… engaging?), Yuru Camp (the animation quality and characters were nothing to write home about, but it was a relaxing show and very good at making you want to go camping), Gintama (still good, still working through the archives), Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card Arc (enjoying it so far! It’s pretty true to the original anime, which I love)
  • Tried: Osomatsu S2 (I’m not sure why, but the humor just didn’t hold my attention this season), Love Live Sunshine S2 (the plots for each episode started getting repetitive), Darling in the FRANXX (no), Idolish7 (why did I try this), A Place Further than the Universe (looks great, but the story seems a bit heavy! I’ll have to come back to this), Violet Evergarden (same), Mitsuboshi Colors (animation quality is great, but I couldn’t get into the humor)
• Games: FFXIV Patch 4.2 (finished Coil of Bahamut with some friends finally, cleared Byakko Ex, leveled some of my crafters to 70, and I changed my main class to PLD!), Dai Gyakuten Saiban (finished watching a let’s play of this, enjoyed the fun story!), Persona 5 (still working through it, still good, but it’s so long), Granblue Fantasy, FF Record Keeper
• Podcasts: The Adventure Zone: Amnesty, Wonderful, The Polygon Show, Acquisitions Incorporated
  • I nabbed tickets to see MBMBAM and The Adventure Zone live in June! Woohoo!
• D&D:
  • Had my first session with my D&D group since October!
  • Because we’ve been having some trouble role-playing, I set up individual character brainstorming sessions with each player and I think that actually went pretty well! I’m also starting to see how a story can come together based on how characters’ individual backstories connect…
  • Built a campaign wiki to help me keep in-game and DM knowledge separate and to have a place where I can keep session notes 😛