What I've Been Up to In September 2024
Heat is... still on...
Temperature above 90 degrees (F) in the San Francisco Bay Area? In September?Global warming, or climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is now indisputable. Yet, everyday I drove my car out and joined the thousands and thousands of other cars out there to… wait for it… literally… wait in the long traffic queue to get to our destinations. All the while we further generate more and more carbon dioxide, and our rubbery tires spew out more microplastics.
One warm September day I found myself starting an interesting conversation with a AI chatbot (my current favorite is Perplexity, but this one I was trying Claude), started with this prompt:
“What are some ideas from sci-fi novels for humans to shift from personal transportation to mass transportation?”
I highly recommend everyone to try this out - I mean, for the sake of our earth, and for our future generations, we ought to try to start somewhere, right?
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
finally I am getting back into the ‘game’ (of game dev) and making a new concept with GDevelop.
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
Next month is the Inktober month, so everything will be paused for the one-drawing a day challenge!
Weekly comics - my 3-panel (or… we started to have 6-panels too) 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 two pieces! (but probably nothing for next month due to Inktober)
Writing
Book#2 project -“100 Drawings of Tang Dynasty Poems” (唐詩一百畫) - after getting a proof copy I went in and applied another big edit to improve the flow. Now it looks like
The pre-released drafts of this book will continue to be published/shared with my Patreon members every week!
Almost every week I write a new short story to my substack “Echo of the Worlds”, subscribe and enjoy! (I said “almost” again, but happy to say this month I am switching the creative gears to a better speed)
The Web
No updates this month again…
Consuming Stuffs
Reading - Continue on Game of Thrones book 4 “A Feast for Crows”, Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan; Started reading 妖刀與天劍 by 上官鼎 - sorry I can’t find a formal translated title so let’s just say it’s a Chinese novel nicely intertwining historical events and characters with myths and kung-fu, it’s a fun read so far; Finished Fair Play by Eve Rodsky (lots of good nuggets, but there are fundamental issues in some marriages that makes this system impossible to help - e.g. different perception of 'quality standards' or very different belief in how to balance healthy diet vs life happiness );
Gaming - Continued on A Plague Tale: Requiem, Alien: Isolation, God of War; done with Katana Zero (finished but just minimum. coming back to replay more later).
TV/Movies - Full Circle (it’s sooo good!); Civil War (it's a great journey, but the ending comes a bit too abruptly leaving more to be desired); Prey (nicely scripted sci-fi + horror + action movie!); Bullet Train (omg this one is soooo... funny!!!) Little Women (Recommended! 8 out of 10)
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).