What I've Been Up to In October 2022

busy month and thoughts about social media...

This month was filled with family events involving multiple travels, and I also spent a good week at Seattle for work - the events and the ‘Inktober’ daily drawing are plenty enough so I had to pause the regular project drawing and some usual programming for the last 2 weeks of the month.

With Twitter and Elon Musk’s recent takeover drama I thought more about the line of ‘if it’s free, you are the product’ - it’s one of those lines where at first I thought ‘ah-ha, it makes sense’ but the more I thought about it, I think it’s more of a marketing ‘hook’ to incite people’s emotion.  One would argue that even before the advent of social media, the practice of collecting people’s contacts as sales leads or collecting usage pattern for marketing analytic were already there - while it is certainly bad the way platforms nowadays tends to create echo chambers for the purpose of prolonging user’s attention and engagement (so to increase revenue), I wonder if it is really that implausible for a free social media platform to be vibrant townsquare without tying the users down into echo chambers and rabbit holes.

What’s missing is NOT a paywall just to help attest user identity yet creating a class divide.  What’s missing is a true identity attestation so every involved party can really be authentic (either for the virtue or for the fear of being perceived negatively - as in an actual in-person townsquare). And one would argue that’s how social platforms can really get rid of bots, fake accounts, or even accounts where kids falsely report their age to access inappropriate contents…

If social media platforms all require identity attestation/verification, it would definitely be less fun, but that’s just the balancing act of a maturing medium, I guess? Also Google Plus probably had some lesson learned in this area :p

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

• Continuing my long term effort to make an action game, ‘Qin’, based on Chinese history… this month I’ve been working on boss-fights. Each boss would have a different style of movement and unique special attack, so I am taking my time to go from designing to creating assets to implementing the actual codes. More updates in November!

Drawing

• Tang poem 唐詩 drawing - I continue to develop my skill and style, also getting into longer poem… The first drawing this month had 191 words, so it started to feel like I was being penalized in grade school :D) I realized that a decision is needed: to continue doing calligraphy, separate from drawing, or just focus on drawing without calligraphy. I’ve decided that my strength is not in calligraphy (actually it’s my weakness :D) nor do I want to further improve it… so I will be just doing drawing from now on, unless the poems are shorter.

  

  

  

• This month got very busy with the daily drawing of ‘Inktober’ (up next), so I only did one weekly study drawing in early October (I rather fancy this one myself):

  

• Inktober 2022 - I did it! One prompt for one drawing a day for the whole month - it is quite a challenge, with family and work travels. But I’m happy to report that I enjoyed the process and the result!

  

Writing

• Skipped my usual programming (唐詩一百畫 and new book project) this month so the time can be used for Inktober! (Sorry to my Patreon members)

Web, Merch Store

• social posts - I’ve continued to regularly post across various channels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, Artstation, Youtube, Tiktok - (please subscribe/follow!) Oh, and did I mention all these are linked off my LinkTree page

  

• Merch Store – yeah… no update here, but please do check it out…

Consuming Stuffs

• Reading - Continued on volume 2 of the epic historical novel of the Eastern Zhou dynasty (“帝國曙光”) - I really hope to complete this in November, want to get back to reading English novel/fictions :p

• TV/ Movies - finished She-hulk (I don’t know, it’s getting odder and harder to take towards the end); Andor (it’s still getting better! the story is now filled with civil unrest, revolution, and prison break!), 2nd and 3rd Hobbit movies (they are pretty great, keeping the great tradition for big birds to save the day, oops *spoiler alert*), and a bit of Euphoria… (because it’s starting to feel like an addiction :p)

• Gaming -Batman Arkham Knight @ 69%;Tomb Raider (2013) @ 74%

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).