January felt like a short month. My family went for two 3-days ski trips at Dodge Ridge and Mt. Rose and each trip rewarded us with a unique experience (e.g. even if you made a last minute decision to go and it’s tough to book lodging, NEVER book a 2-star motel over the New Years Eve for a family trip :D).
Yet this winter feels like a long one. North Cal experienced a harsh storm but it was over by the new year’s day. The cold temperature persists still to this day. So has COVID-19, which seems to be going from epidemic to endemic status, while most people are now used to the masking and testing routine. As parents with kids going to school in-person, we are also used to the occasional ‘COVID exposure’ notification from school and the protocols. Definitely grateful that we have relatively easy access to test kits for these situations, and the vaccines are holding up for us so far.
On a personal level, it has been a month of refresh, restart, and hope. The holidays had a forcing function and gave me the opportunity to really pause, think, and reflect on my prioritization. I made some decisions (to be shared below) and re-tuned my ‘productivity schedule’ to align with this year’s goals.
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 – made a lot of great progress this month, and it starts to play more like a game now. I’ve posted the latest update to itch.io and started a devlog 🙂 Also moved my project plans from Docs + Trello to Notion. A bit more on Notion later 🙂
- Drawings – I continue to develop my skill and style, for both drawing and calligraphy.
- Writing (or the lack of) – as I shared in the last entry, I’ve re-assessed my priorities and decided to stop the weekly newsletter altogether. (I am continuing my usual ‘Nostalgic Game Review’ monthly column, if you are into old PC games)
- Notion.so – yes, I know there’s plenty of similar products like this out there(e.g. coda.io) but somehow stars aligned for me to really spend time exploring Notion recently! I’ve heard of the tool long ago but never really tried it, and just before the holidays I tried it for work purposes and I found myself liking it more and more. I learned a ton during work hours, built a cool OKR/tasks tracker and utilized its docs/wiki capability. I also considered using it for my personal productivity tracking but decided to stick to Trello, Google Keep and Docs (since I already had a good system built…) I still found myself wondering about moving everything to Notion from time to time, and for sure will do that in case-to-case basis (e.g. already moved my game development project to it :D)
- Merch Store – yeah… no update here, but please do check it out!
Consuming Stuffs
- Reading – finished ‘Secret of Lost Stone‘ (I gave it a 7.5/10), 帝國前夕: 東周列國志. This month I read a lot of self-help articles on Medium as I went through self-reflection.
- Gaming – Mad Max (decided that this is yet another open-world game I don’t want to invest more time on, but the driving and combat system is pretty enjoyable), Control (I think I got this for free on Epic game store…), also ‘The House of Da Vinci‘ on mobile.
- TV/Movies – The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Last Duel (I love the 3 perspective storytelling! I was unsure about Afleck and Damon in medieval setting, but they are decent in this!); re-watched Moulin Rouge (I ‘love’ this movie and a lot of its songs); ‘The Book of Boba Fett‘, ‘Doom Patrol‘
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).