What I've Been Up to In November 2024

thanks for all the fish

November went through like a whirlwind. We started with a shocking result of a new (and also old…) US President-Elect, and the weather changed swiftly from dry and warm autumn to drenched and cold early-winter.

All in all, it’s been a month that’s pretty peaceful for us - which I am thankful for. Out there, the battle between Russia and Ukraine, conflicts in the Gaza stripe, continues. And climate changes continue to worsen, yet there seems to be very little improvement the so-called global leadership is able to collaborate on, let alone improving the situation.

Thanks for all the fish!

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

• Not much progress on this again - still in the blocked state.

• 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 comics - I only managed to work on the unfinished comics from September (before the daily Inktober event) - comic strips are posted on all major social feeds, but of course, the best place to access this would be my (paid) Patreon page

  

• Study drawings (#inktober52 ) - can you guess what is the prompt word for each of these?

  

  

• #FanArt (always fun to do!) I continued to make illustrations for each of the 14 ‘wuxia’ (or Martial art…) novels by the legendary Jin Yong. This month ended up with 3 pieces! (but probably nothing for next month due to Inktober)

  

Writing

• NaNoWriMo month - I tried to participate in this, even wrote an outline for the story arcs - and then it stopped there. Couldn’t settle down to really write out the story.

• This month not much happened on my substack “Echo of the Worlds”

• “100 Drawings of Tang Dynasty Poems” (唐詩一百畫) - book 1: available as a hardcover on Amazon.

  • The pre-released drafts of this book are all available on my Patreon

The Web

• No updates this month again…

Consuming Stuffs

• Reading - Done with Game of Thrones Book 4 “A Feast for Crows”, onward to Book 5 “A Dance with Dragons”

• Gaming - Continued on God of War, and A Plague Tale: Requiem (while the game is even more beautiful to look at than the first game, the story seems intentionally dragged too long); Alien: Isolation left me traumatized and frustrated so I’ve quit for now (if you must know, it’s the medical bay level that did it for me); Also started playing Bioshock 2 (I played 1 and 3 and now back to the city of Rapture) and this little gem DarQ.

• TV/Movies - The Penguin S.1 finished - it’s so good that made me rewatched The Batman; A Quiet Place: Day One (it’s… not as good. I actually had to skip to the end… 5/10 - Too bad the actors were really good in their other work (Us, Stranger Things S.4); Trap (it’s actually very entertaining!!! I give it 8/10. Don’t listen to the haters online!); Deadpool & Wolverine (entertaining enough, 7/10); rewatched Infernal Affairs (無間道) (this is so good that the story was re-used and made into The Departed); Alien: Romulus (!!! it's soooo good!!! and it’s very interesting to see the emotions between Rain and her droid ‘brother’ Andy - it’s a future we are headed towards quickly)

• Learning: not yet gotten back to learning Procreate Dreams but this month I looked into some drawing techniques…

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).