August went by quickly. The weather heard my complaint from last month, and did warm up a bit for 2 days, and then it was all nice and chilly again. I think that’s it for the summer. Dixie fire is still going, only 55% contained at this moment, and now there’s Caldor fire that triggered an evacuation for South Lake Tahoe… It is difficult to imagine the frequency of extreme weather and intensity of these wildfires will be for the next generations…
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 – I made some progress and started to make things move… and pushed the very first (non-functional) game binary onto itch.io! (try to launch it and then press any of ‘a, s, w, d’ keys to move the character…) I am embarrassed by how slowly I am learning and progressing on this, but will continue to improve.
- Weekly Drawings – I continue to develop my skill and style
- Writing – Aside from my blog and Medium publication, I continue to develop the illustration storybook I had in mind. Very very slowly, so nothing to share, yet.
- Fun art projects – again, I’ve only managed to participate in the monthly challenge in the pixel arts community I’m part of: This month’s challenge is to create an emoji… so I created this and called it “Eat my ninja dart!”
- Merch Store – yeah… no update here, but please do check it out!
Learning Stuffs
- Full-stack Javascript course – Finally completed! I am happy to say that I’ve learned how to create web apps and APIs with Node.js, express framework; frontend routing and backend coding; how to use additional services like MongoDB, Heroku and Postman; how to protect the web app against CSRF attacks etc. Does this make me a web developer? No, and that wasn’t really the goal. The goal was to learn this so I understand what the web dev role involves (so it’s easier for me to work with one). Obviously to become a web dev, one would need to seriously grind through a few projects to really get good with this stuff 🙂
Consuming Stuffs
- Reading: Finished ‘The End of Oz’ (‘Dorothy Must Die’ Book #4), One Story #276, and continue on ‘A Promised Land‘ – I happened to be reading the part of the book on Afghanistan as the US ground through the chaotic withdrawal from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan… It was quite a thrilling experience!
- Gaming:
- Started Hades and it is quite entertaining so far, even with all the dying 😉
- Continue with ‘Metro: Last Light Redux‘
- TV: watched ‘The Suicide Squad’ (the 2nd one by James Gunn) it is surprisingly good and entertaining!
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!