Why do I write these blog posts so late? Anyway, here are some blurbs about what I did from April to June this year.
Academic
- Organized talks for the students and colleagues at Adobe who were going to have CHI papers appear this year! We’re going to be making the talk recordings public on the research website, so stay tuned!
- Intern season started at Adobe! Through the hard work of the intern program team, we managed to be able to host remote internships rather than cancelling it. I’m pleased to be hosting Tricia Ngoon again this summer.
- Did some reviewing for UIST 2020.
- Submitted our paper to CSCW 2020 again (June submissions)!
Art
- I drew matching phone backgrounds for me and partner for his birthday featuring our FFXIV characters!
- A whole month late, but finished my submission for the #SixFanarts challenge that was going around in April! I took this chance to try and challenge myself to color on one layer (rather than splitting up different sections of the character into different layers like usual) and, wow, my painting speed increased by a lot.
- Does designing my Animal Crossing island count as doing art?
- The anime conventions I would have been going to this month were cancelled. Definitely glad they were cancelled, but still bummed I can’t hang out with artist and convention pals, probably for the rest of this year at least.
- I’ve been falling behind on drawing my weekly comics at Herogirl. Part of it is because I’m tired (thanks, COVID-19 and other awful things happening out in the world) and part of it is because I feel bad trying to be funny when I could be putting my energy into making the world a better place more directly? Hmm.
Personal
- I played a virtual/remote escape room with friends! We played Escape from the Werewolf Village by Real Escape Game/SCRAP and it was really fun and satisfying! The way it worked was that we had a proxy team member in the physical escape room (located in Japan) that we could give commands to to help us explore the room and physically interact with the puzzles. We progressed through the game by receiving keywords through puzzle solving which we could type to a Facebook Messenger bot that would give us information for the next puzzle! I was a bit nervous about giving commands to a stranger, but the staff were really nice and the game was smoothly organized. It was a lot of fun!
- Enjoyed watching Corona Relief Done Quick! It’s really interesting to watch how they set up the runs so that speedrunners could participate from all sorts of places from their homes! There were a few technical difficulties but for the most part it was pretty true to the pre-COVID-19 experience! I wonder if the tech team did a write-up of how they set everything up somewhere?
- Games: Pokemon Cafe Mix (cute and relaxing puzzle game!), Trials of Mana demo (lovely music, I hadn’t played the original, but the remake’s controls are a bit janky so I decided to hold off on getting the full game), Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu (I completed my Pokedex!), Final Fantasy 7 Remake (perfect combo of nostalgia and new content, I can’t wait for the next part!), Animal Crossing: New Horizons (got my island to 5-stars!)
- Anime: My Hero Academia, Haikyuu, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (a fun show with a good ending!)