July was supposed to be summer, yet our weather is so out of whack now, even within the Bay Area we see this strange pattern where the area near the coast stays comfortably chill (high 60s and low 70s F) while the inland area gets extremely warm (90s and over 100s F). It’s bad enough to also have triggered several wildfires, including the Dixie fire that’s been burning for 2 weeks and still only 21% contained. My sincere prayer (I am not religious, yet I found myself praying in bad circumstances that are out of our control…) to those families affected, and hope the situation improves soon. Same goes for the situation with COVID19 and the new wave driven by Delta variant in the US…
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 Development – while I didn’t make much progress this month, I did learn two things about myself: trying to do game development at 6am does NOT work for me; Game development is tough, and I am probably at the toughest step right now – putting the ideas into functional codes.
- Weekly Drawings – I continue to develop my skill and style
- Writing – Aside from my blog and Medium publication, the story I have been developing took two 180 degrees turns this month. Long story short, I didn’t go anywhere with the story itself 🙁
- Fun art projects – also did very little on this – but I did manage to participate in a fun monthly challenge. To take in a sound, and come up with a pixel art animation that syncs with it. Below is the result. I didn’t spend enough time to perfect the syncing and add additional effect (recoil, more dramatic emitting beams…etc).
- Merch Store – yeah… no update here, but please do check it out!
Learning Stuffs
- Full-stack Javascript course – I am going to have to eat my words from last time… I expected to finish the course this month, but did not factor in that the last mile is the toughest. There was a higher chance for a tiny typo to break my codes and higher complexity to debug/fix the codes so… I am hopeful I can finish the course in August, but I am keeping my own pace 🙂
Consuming Stuffs
- Reading: still on ‘The End of Oz’ (‘Dorothy Must Die’ Book #4), and ‘A Promised Land‘
- Gaming:
- finished ‘Ori and Blind Forest‘! What a beautiful and fun game. I typically enjoy a bit less action, and a bit more puzzle type of platform (such as Trine 2) but this game got the right balance to keep me engaged throughout.
- Continue with ‘Metro: Last Light Redux‘
- TV: watched ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer’ (I heard the book is good, but this movie is NOT. I give it 4 out of 10), 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later; Doctor Sleep (it’s… decent enough. 6.5 out of 10); Also started a few episodes on Berserk (anime series… now I want to go read the manga. RIP Kentaro Miura.
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). Until next month!