This past March seems to have gone by quickly and rather peacefully. I was able to read more than usual, while struggling to attend to kids’ through an awful staph infection. I looked back last year’s March notes and realized that the world has also changed quite a bit - last year the world was all up and ready gear up and fight climate change - this past few months we are seeing news in quite the opposite tunes: people getting tired of EVs, car companies walking back on their EV strategies and going more on hybrid, natural gas and crude oil production continue to go without reduction, and we seems to be getting numb for the frequent reporting on all the warning signs on our warming planet. More attention on the hype cycle of AI, craze of nVidia’s stock price, rebounding of cryptocurrencies due to approval of its ETF. We seem to have forgotten that, both AI and cryptocurrencies are still technologies with questionable value-add, yet with detrimental environmental impact issues that’s very much not resolved. AI can help improve efficiencies to whoever can afford them, but at the cost of high use of energy, and lots of space and water cooling to run the servers. And sustainable energy sources are not enough to run them…
Here are the things that kept me busy this past month, aside from the day-to-day ‘job’ related stuff…
Creating and hacking stuffs
Game Dev
Continue trying but not much progress on making Game#2… Sometimes I wonder if this is the type of game that’s not for me to create, maybe I should try to get back to the action/RPG type game… sometimes I comfort myself with the thoughts that, perhaps this will be a masterpiece and therefore the resistance will be huge… weird philosophies time.
Feel free to play my game#1 Qin (early access release)! Available on Google Play store (Android phones and Chromebooks), Itch.io & gd.games (web)
Drawing
Weekly project drawing (comics) - here is a taste of the comics I’ve done this month - full 3-panel versions are on most of my social feeds, Artstation, and of course, my (paid) Patreon page.
Study drawings (#inktober52 ) - can you guess what is the prompt word for each of these?
#FanArt (always fun to do!)
Writing
Book#2 project -“100 Drawings of Tang Dynasty Poems” (唐詩一百畫) - continuing with editing - from the feedback I’ve received so far, I’ve been slowly working through a rewrite / re-edit process…
The pre-released drafts of this book will continue to be published/shared with my Patreon members every week!
The Web
Updates on Heta Studio:
Freelancing: I’ve set up a freelancing service on Contra! It’s a humble beginning therefore the rates are currently set very low~ Please help spread the words and contact me directly if there are any illustration needs :)
Slightly updated: LinkTree page (new freelancing profile linked); Website; Patreon; Merch Store + etsy store (with the newer POD partner)
I stumbled upon some Youtube videos about AI/LLM and played with Google Colab Notebook + foocus and made a ‘private cloud’ version of Stable Fusion. I’m impressed by how simple things are made to be able to run this now. It’s slow, but highly customizable, and free! It’s scary to see its capabilities to create and modify various images from photo realistic models to hand drawn style models… It reassert that the artists of the future can only succeed by developing their unique art style - since the AI will probably take away all the low hanging fruit jobs
Consuming Stuffs
Reading - Read Game of Thrones Book 3 "A Storm of Swords" up to a bit after the event of “Red Wedding" and the death of Joffrey. Started “Three-body Problem” by Cixin Liu; finished “Feather Coat” by Yoshimoto Banana (羽衣 by 吉本芭娜娜 - 7 out of 10 pretty good read); “The Daunting Route into the Region of Shu” by Zhang Cao (蜀道難 by 張草 - 5 out of 10, meh)
Gaming - continuing Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince + Remnant: From the Ashes
TV/Movies - True Detective S1 (McConaughey + Harrelson are amazing!); started Game of Thrones S4 up to E5 as I progress through the book; Tales From Earthsea; Interstellar (2nd watch I enjoy this movie a lot more!)
Learn Guitar: this month I actually started to invest a bit of time every weekday to learn/practice guitar!
That’s it for this issue of my newsletter! If you really finished reading the above, I thank you, and wish that my sharing would either entertain you, or inspire you (if you’ve been thinking about your own creative projects).