coffee shops

2022 End of Year Review

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Despite having a relatively quiet and breezy second week of winter break, I’ve been putting off my traditional end of year reflection until the morning of New Year’s Eve. The aftermath of Christmas always offers lots of chances to think about how the year has gone and what I want to aim for during the next trip around the sun. This year has been a mostly good one for me. I started a new job, which I’m still very happy with four months later; I’ve made some excellent memories with friends; and my artwork has improved a lot since the beginning of the year. The national elections at the beginning of November went way better than expected, so the constant dread that things will suddenly get worse again has been mitigated for at least another year or so. There’s little for me to complain about.

The irony of being in such a contented place is that I have to hold loosely in my mind the understanding that it’s subject to change for the worse at any time. I was discussing this paradox with my barber the other day as we were pondering human nature and our impulses to fight against change. Being happy and human, I think, requires letting go of the idea of the eternal high. Satisfaction with accomplishments eventually wears off, and good luck streaks, like bad ones, eventually break. The fact of the future is never set in stone, and remembering this reality helps me to stay more grounded in my present. I am happy now, and that is enough because it’s all I get. It has to be.

Anyway, let’s break down the things I want to remember about this year.

Art

I started this year with the relatively simple idea that I would maintain a weekly Twitter thread where I would post my finished artwork as a record of my artistic progress in my fourth year of serious practice. It acted as a sort of weekly anchor in place of my old blogging schedule; here’s where I’m putting down a stamp about what the last week was like for me as an artist. Overall I think I was pretty consistent with this practice, although there were definitely periods during the year where my actual art production slowed down considerably. Even so, marking a week by saying that I didn’t have anything to show feels just as valuable in retrospect. I think I might continue this practice next year, although I’m also looking at scaling back my use fo Twitter given the state of the service since its new owner took over at the beginning of November. Below is a link to my final post on the thread for the year, and you can scroll back up to see how my art’s evolved since last January.

If you read over my last tweet, I mention there that my last piece of the year is intended as the start of a series of stickers I’d like to design and possibly sell in 2023. There are a lot of unknowns I have to work out, not the least of which is “What are the legal risks of selling merchandise that features copyrighted characters.” It’s a murky area that’s actually not helped by the abundance of fan artists that I see doing exactly this thing. Still, it’s good to have goals for the new year.

Writing

At the close of 2021 I was feeling a bit of sadness that I’d fallen out of the habit of writing regular updates on my blog, and I resolved to try to correct that as I went into 2022. I think I did a decent job with weekly entries up until the summer, but then all the free time made it much harder to do something that resembled work. With my new job starting in the fall, I saw my weekend schedule pick up a new wrinkle with the need to do regular grading. That became my couple hours of weekend brain work, which left me with little energy or interest in also checking here as well. I don’t know if the regular updates will be a goal I continue with for 2023, but I do still like these periodic big check ins.

Media

My yearly spreadsheet of new-to-me media has the numbers for things I encountered for the first time this year.

In 2022 I:

  • read 35 collected trade paperbacks of comics
  • read 7 books
  • finished 25 video games
  • watched 59 seasons of television
  • saw 39 movies

Because I only record what’s new to me, these numbers don’t include any of the stuff I revisited this year. I also don’t track comics that I’m reading on a monthly basis because then I’d be writing down as many as 6 new entries a week. Suffice it to say that I’m up to date on most of the X-Men titles and a smattering of assorted creator-owned books that my local comic shop sends me.

Twitter

It’s a mess, and the more I think about it the more I think I want to wind down my engagement with the platform. I was reading Kieron Gillen’s final newsletter for the year earlier this week, and he was discussing his own disengagement with a meditation on the nature of Twitter as a revenue source for a bllionaire where the product is the attention our posts garner for the sake of selling advertising. It’s an idea I’ve understood more or less for a while, but to see it put in such stark terms at the annual moment of reevaluation has been kind of galvanizing. I’ve set up over at Mastodon, and while the experience is slower paced and not quite as absurd as my Twitter feed at its best, it’s overall been much more pleasant and less anxiety producing. I expect that letting go of Twitter will be a long, slow, painful process, but I find myself in a better place of acceptance now than I was even a few weeks ago. Everything changes, especially when we don’t want it to.

Work

I love my new job. There’s so much about it that is new and exciting compared with the work I’d been doing before. I have a full daily schedule that leaves little time for boredom, and the kids I work with are so much less jaded than high schoolers. It’s great.

Coffee Shops

A couple weeks before winter break started, we had a freak power outage in our neighborhood. Rachael and I decided that it would be nice to go do something instead of huddling in the dark in our house on a Saturday night, so we went to a coffee shop and sipped hot chocolate. We wore our masks inside and just slipped them off when we wanted to take a drink, and it was remarkably pleasant. I hope that 2023 will be about more moments like that one, with tentative steps towards finding a way to accept necessary changes while still loving what’s good about the world.

Weekly Upload 07/09/22

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The first full week of summer break that we’ve spent at home has been remarkably busy. We’ve done all the social things, hanging out with people we don’t normally get to see during the school year because schedules don’t line up and (since that whole pesky pandemic thing) we’re relatively high risk people to hang out with given our day jobs. We did a mini-cookout over Independence Day weekend with some close friends that we haven’t really gotten to see since Christmas, and then there was another friend we haven’t seen in literal years who happened to be visiting Portland for a few weeks, and then tonight we’re going to hang out with yet another couple of friends. I am unsure at this point if the “a few friends at a time over the course of the week” social strategy is more or less exhausting than coordinating a giant party where everyone comes over at once.

That was a joke; giant parties are not a good idea these days, and we’d never host one in the first place.

Besides the burgeoning social calendar, Rachael and I have also gotten to work on our annual summer do-or-die chores. I spent far more time this week than I’d like sitting in waiting rooms for car related business, and we’ve begun the kind of sort-out-your-life chores that take a lot of time and just feel too overwhelming to do when you have a regular 8-to-4 job during the year. Throw in the summer reset with establishing a more consistent exercise schedule and the reality of having access to the TV and video games at any time of the day, and it’s been a very full week.

Art

I did no new art this week, which has me pretty bummed, to be honest. I’m noodling around with an idea for a new piece as of last night, but I haven’t even started sketching yet, so we’ll see if it comes together in the next week.

Comics

I read Saga #60 last night, and I had to explain to Rachael that I was fine when she noticed me tearing up. The issue’s a good gut punch, which I think is pretty much fifty percent of the reason anyone reads Saga. Also, it’s going on hiatus again for the rest of the year, which I won’t begrudge anyone on the creative team, but a six month gap between story arcs is an awfully long time when you’re reading monthly.

I’ve been working on continuing my reading series on Vita Ayala’s run of New Mutants as well in the last couple days, and I think it’s important to take some time to acknowledge how much work goes into critically reading a single issue of a comic book, even in the casual way that I’m going about it, and that it really enriches the experience of the book. I love it, and I should honestly re-read more comics.

Books

My ELA co-teacher of the last four years gave me a book at the end of the school year called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. We’re not going to be working together next year for reasons, and the unspoken message of the gift was “here is a book that might contain a way to express how sad we are that things will be changing.” The book apparently originated as a blog, which I think has very vaguely penetrated my awareness. The volume itself is a beautiful little hardcover that fits comfortably in one’s hands. Because I’ve spent a lot of time in waiting rooms this week, I’ve read through the whole thing, and it has some lovely bits of creative meditation on human nature and our experience of the universe. The whole premise is obviously a bit twee in execution, but I like the general playfulness of the entries, which are all built around taking a few disparate words and cobbling together some kind of portmanteau or pun or simple sight gag that mashes their meanings together in order to evoke a complex feeling. I will undoubtedly try to mine it for lesson planning material in the future.

Television

Rachael and I watched two pieces of reality television this week, and one of them was very boring, and the other was very good with some necessary qualifiers. The boring series was Pirate Gold of Adak Island, a docuseries on Netflix that follows a team of treasure hunters who are trying to find gold on this remote island in the Alaska archipelago. The elements of this series are all really strong and intriguing: there’s a lot of history with the island because it was used as an American military base during World War II, the guy who hid the gold caches there was part of an illegal seal clubbing ring back in the late nineteenth century, there’s a small town of people still living on the island who would like discovery of the gold to reinvigorate their community, and the treasure hunters use some legitimately interesting techniques to survey areas where they think gold might have been hidden. The problem is that the producers of the show seem to have no talent for crafting narrative. All the scenes where the treasure hunters discuss next steps when they hit a roadblock are obviously staged, and none of them besides the geologist seems to be that interested in spending any time with the weird artifacts they find littering the island that tie back to its history. In one episode they find a human finger bone that must have belonged to a seal clubber who would have had to amputate it because it had gotten infected, and everyone just says, “welp, it’s not gold coins, so whatever!” There’s a really good educational docuseries buried in all this junk, but the producers did not do a good job of bringing it out. The series ends with the treasure hunters finding two whole gold coins and this promise of another season, but I don’t know how likely that is to happen given the quality of the first one.

The other series we watched this week was Season 8 of Alone, which is obviously a much more polished reality TV product. The premise of this show is that a group of people with extensive survival skills are dropped off in a remote location with only a few basic tools and tasked with seeing who can last the longest in the wilderness with no outside resources or social contact. A season of the show is always really fun at the start, because you get to see these folks who know what they’re doing establish systems for finding food, building long term shelters, and just entertaining themselves in the middle of nowhere. The end of the season is always really emotionally grueling because the last few players inevitably end up literally starving as they try to hang on until everyone else either quits or gets pulled because the medical team declares it unsafe for them to continue. It’s a competition show, so there’s always a big cash prize for the winner. I have very mixed feelings about this show in general because I recognize this pattern in the way it plays out, and Rachael and I typically watch an entire season over the course of a couple days because it’s so compelling. A couple summers ago when we first discovered it, we watched one season then went through four earlier seasons in rapid succession, which might not have been the best decision in retrospect. A lot of our reality TV consumption gets driven by the question of which shows are produced ethically, and while we generally agree that Alone‘s premise and presentation makes it one of the more ethical competition shows being produced, it’s still deeply uncomfortable to be confronted with the suffering the players put themselves through for our entertainment on the hope that they might get the big payout at the end. Alone doesn’t romanticize the reality of what it’s asking people to do; they show the effects of long term starvation and constantly remind the audience of how dangerous it is for the players to be on their own like this. Unfortunately it’s still a piece of entertainment, and I always walk away from a season feeling like I just watched something kind of perverse. Most of the folks who audition for this show would see massive benefits from the prize money, and it’s hard not to feel complicit in their exploitation, especially when so many of the players who make it close to the end are desperate to keep going when it’s obvious their health is at risk.

Video Games

I’m still playing around with Street Fighter V, which is a fun, low commitment pastime. I persuaded a friend of mine to play with me online recently despite the fact he knows nothing about Street Fighter, and he’s been a good sport about it. Casual matched with other people are generally rewarding, although they’re a total crapshoot as to whether I’ll pair up with someone who’s way too good for me to have any fun or someone who’s a fair match that I enjoy playing against. I did encounter my first rage quit from another player the other day which was honestly kind of delightful. Like, I hope they’re okay and they don’t take their stats on a fighting game too seriously, but it was a small moral victory: “Yes, I beat you badly enough that you quit instead of just taking the loss.” The irony, of course, was that my first match with this player was absolutely great! We were pretty well paired on skill level, and it was completely up in the air all the way to the end of the third round which of us was going to win.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week, although I did have brunch at an outdoor cafe the other day, which was lovely. There’s also been the regular patronage of our preferred boba place.

Weekly Upload 06/13/22

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I didn’t write my usual update over the weekend because I worked graduation on Friday night, and it apparently wiped me out for two days. It was a lot of fun, but the ceremony happened outside and it rained the whole time, which you can imagine was less than pleasant for everyone who had to sit on the field the whole time (guess where I was assigned). After all that, I decided that I was going to give myself some grace on the blog, as I’ve learned over time that if I find myself doing a thing out of a sense of obligation when it was supposed to be fun or creatively satisfying, then that means I need to let myself not do the thing until I feel like it. None of my creative pursuits make me any money, and they don’t need to make me money, so I have to remember that the point is of doing them is pleasure.

Anyway, I had a very restful weekend, and the last week of the school year starts today, so I have a bit of time to get this quick update together before I start my workday.

Art

I did one piece this week, as is my recent “oh God, when will the school year just end already?” pattern. Like with my last few pieces it ties into a scene from the New Mutants run that I’m re-reading. Because this scene involves both a horse and a rabbit, I looked up some photo reference for those animals and did worked from there. All told, it was pretty fun to incorporate the reference, especially since there was so much transformative work going into the composition separate from what I got from the photos. If I ever get into attempting more photorealistic figures, I’ll definitely keep this experience in mind.

Besides reference, I also determined that I wanted to desaturate this piece significantly in comparison to the usual palettes that I use for my work. I think it works pretty well overall, especially in contrast with the extremely saturated highlights I used on the finishes.

Comics

At this point this is mostly just a placeholder while I scrape some brain cells together to write intelligently about anything. I’m enjoying Legion of X still!

Video Games

I’ve hit my five year cycle of wanting to play a fighting game, which means I am now about a week into the project of playing Street Fighter V. I’ve done most of the characters’ story modes, and now I’m noodling around with the various arcade and survival modes. It is a wild fictional universe that is incredibly earnest and embarrassingly cheesy at times, but I enjoy it. I’m grateful that there are a wide variety of costumes for all the characters, including two whole outfits where Cammy gets to wear pants. It’s awkward as a man in my late 30s to use the woman who wears a one piece swimsuit to all occasions as my main fighter. Like, all the character designs are kind of absurd after a point, but it’s nice to see Capcom have finally considered the players who don’t want to look like horndogs because of their fighter choices. I’m sure I’ll be back in another five years to meditate on the final form of Street Fighter VI.

Media

We’ve been watching a series of survival TV shows about British people being abandoned on a desert island to try to last for six weeks, and that’s fun. It’s sometimes harrowing, but I think the fact that it’s always a group who have to figure out community while they’re doing all this other hard stuff makes it more compelling and less emotionally fraught than other shows like Alone.

Rachael and I also watched The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and it was good. It’s actually a very sincere buddy movie that also happens to be a meta-joke about Nicolas Cage’s acting career. I feel like it lifts some beats from Adaptation, but Rachael insists that the two movies are significantly different. It’s been a minute since I watched Adaptation, so I could be forgetting some stuff.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week.

Weekly Upload 06/13/22

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I didn’t write my usual update over the weekend because I worked graduation on Friday night, and it apparently wiped me out for two days. It was a lot of fun, but the ceremony happened outside and it rained the whole time, which you can imagine was less than pleasant for everyone who had to sit on the field the whole time (guess where I was assigned). After all that, I decided that I was going to give myself some grace on the blog, as I’ve learned over time that if I find myself doing a thing out of a sense of obligation when it was supposed to be fun or creatively satisfying, then that means I need to let myself not do the thing until I feel like it. None of my creative pursuits make me any money, and they don’t need to make me money, so I have to remember that the point is of doing them is pleasure.

Anyway, I had a very restful weekend, and the last week of the school year starts today, so I have a bit of time to get this quick update together before I start my workday.

Art

I did one piece this week, as is my recent “oh God, when will the school year just end already?” pattern. Like with my last few pieces it ties into a scene from the New Mutants run that I’m re-reading. Because this scene involves both a horse and a rabbit, I looked up some photo reference for those animals and did worked from there. All told, it was pretty fun to incorporate the reference, especially since there was so much transformative work going into the composition separate from what I got from the photos. If I ever get into attempting more photorealistic figures, I’ll definitely keep this experience in mind.

Besides reference, I also determined that I wanted to desaturate this piece significantly in comparison to the usual palettes that I use for my work. I think it works pretty well overall, especially in contrast with the extremely saturated highlights I used on the finishes.

Comics

At this point this is mostly just a placeholder while I scrape some brain cells together to write intelligently about anything. I’m enjoying Legion of X still!

Video Games

I’ve hit my five year cycle of wanting to play a fighting game, which means I am now about a week into the project of playing Street Fighter V. I’ve done most of the characters’ story modes, and now I’m noodling around with the various arcade and survival modes. It is a wild fictional universe that is incredibly earnest and embarrassingly cheesy at times, but I enjoy it. I’m grateful that there are a wide variety of costumes for all the characters, including two whole outfits where Cammy gets to wear pants. It’s awkward as a man in my late 30s to use the woman who wears a one piece swimsuit to all occasions as my main fighter. Like, all the character designs are kind of absurd after a point, but it’s nice to see Capcom have finally considered the players who don’t want to look like horndogs because of their fighter choices. I’m sure I’ll be back in another five years to meditate on the final form of Street Fighter VI.

Media

We’ve been watching a series of survival TV shows about British people being abandoned on a desert island to try to last for six weeks, and that’s fun. It’s sometimes harrowing, but I think the fact that it’s always a group who have to figure out community while they’re doing all this other hard stuff makes it more compelling and less emotionally fraught than other shows like Alone.

Rachael and I also watched The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and it was good. It’s actually a very sincere buddy movie that also happens to be a meta-joke about Nicolas Cage’s acting career. I feel like it lifts some beats from Adaptation, but Rachael insists that the two movies are significantly different. It’s been a minute since I watched Adaptation, so I could be forgetting some stuff.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week.

Weekly Upload 06/04/22

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I learned yesterday that my language arts co-teacher of four years is getting reassigned to a new class next year, so I’ll be starting with a new co-teacher in the fall. It’s still pretty fresh news, and I’m honestly really upset about it, but I’m trying to take the weekend to process things and end the last two weeks of the school year with some sense of personal pride in my work. I’m mostly angry that this decision was made without even consulting me; if I’d been included in the conversation I think I’d have been pretty understanding about the scheduling needs next year, but because I’m not a member of the ELA department, I found out about all this after the fact only because my co-teacher felt the need to tell me about what was happening. I’ve tried to cultivate an attitude of acceptance about being in special education because these sorts of things happened to me all the time in the first few years of my career, but I’m feeling particularly overlooked in this case. It’s pretty normal for special education to be an afterthought in decision making, and I gripe about that a lot with my colleagues in the department, but this time hurts because it affects me specifically rather than everyone in my department. Anyway, onward to other stuff.

Art

I only did one piece this work, and I freely admit there’s a lot about it that I don’t love. Between the two figures, one is supposed to have realistic proportions while the other’s are deliberately exaggerated, but this difference in physiology created some awkwardness with the posing. It’s hidden behind the giant head, but the arm on Cosmar’s shoulder feels far too long, and the faces feel a little off to me. Crying’s a hard expression that I don’t go to very often, so I think it’s likely just a lack of experience on my part with how to draw it. I guess I need to draw more sad people (eyeroll). For the sake of not just criticizing my own work, I do think I got some nice texture in Rahne’s hair when I was painting. I also tried some new things to make the texture on her arm fur feel more integrated with her skin. I don’t think it totally works, but experimentation is always fun.

Comics

The last issue of Step By Bloody Step came out this week, and it was a very solid ending to a very solid silent miniseries. I think it might be one of those series that I’d like to own in trade. I also enjoyed the second issue of Knights of X quite a bit. It’s been fun to work on re-reading Vita Ayala’s run on New Mutants and remember that the whole war with Merlin thing was being telegraphed a while before Excalibur concluded.

Video Games

I finished both BugSnax and Spider-Man: Miles Morales last weekend, so I’ve moved on to take a very thorough brain break with some fighting games. I have never been good at fighting games, but I have a soft spot for the Street Fighter series, so I picked up a couple titles for cheap when they were on sale recently. My current distraction is Marvel Vs Capcom: Infinite, which I can honestly say is not a great game, but it does offer some fun button mashing. If I’m still itching to punch things, I picked up some version of Street Fighter V, which should be fun for a few days. Summer’s coming, and it’s about time for me to start thinking about what big games I’d like to focus on. Maybe I’ll go back to finish Persona 5 Royal.

Media

We haven’t finished watching the new episodes of Stranger Things yet, but Rachael and I are generally enjoying the vibe of this season. There are some jarring things, like being asked to believe that there’s only been a six month gap since the last season when the actors clearly all look much more like high school seniors than 9th graders, but it’s forgiveable what with the pandemic and all.

The movie of the week was Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, which is remarkably progressive for a 2004 stoner comedy in some ways and extremely of its time in many others. Neal Patrick Harris plays a straight parody of himself that’s pretty fun in hindsight, although it only serves to highlight the extreme, pervasive, and casual homophobia of the movie.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffe shop this week. I did, however, buy a milkshake from the Starbucks stand at the grocery store next to my workplace one day when I was on my prep period. I’d just spent an hour standing outside with kids doing a lab on solar power, and I really, really wanted a cold drink.

Weekly Upload 05/28/22

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Back at the height of my blogging dedication, I would have taken some time to write up thoughts about the latest highly visible school shooting. Now I’m just tired. I’ve cried about it, fretted over the safety of my own students, been breathtakingly angry about the deliberate apathy of politicians who won’t do anything besides make excuses for lax gun control laws and try to blame mental illness for violent crimes. That’s all been squeezed in around the demands of the day job and the moments I take for nurturing my creative life. There’s nothing left to say. If you care about this stuff, go inconvenience some policy makers; I’m going to be trying to get to the end of the school year with some shred of my sense of humanity since everyone who doesn’t work in education seems bound and determined not to let teachers have that anymore.

Art

I did one two pieces this week, one of a group of teen characters from the current New Mutants series watching some kind of lightshow with joy and wonder (the other was finished on Monday before the week went south, and so in my head was briefly forgotten). They’re small figures with awkward bodies and too little experience to fully understand why the world is what it is. They’re being children, which is what children deserve to be.

Speaking in terms of craft, the two pieces I did this week included some experimentation with making textures using a couple of different color layers and creative use of digital brushes as erasers. I quite like the effect I got on Shark Girl’s skin and in Rain Boy’s body, so that’s a thing I’ll be adding to my coloring toolbox. I’m always fascinated by the way skill increases through incremental steps that are usually not noticeable in the moment, so it’s fun to document a concrete development in the way I use my rendering tools for deliberate effects.

Blogging

It’s very meta to have a section labeled “Blogging” on my weekly update blog, but I started a new critical reading project, and since those go up in this space, it seemed like the best way to make note of it.

Because someone on the internet was wrong, and I’m trying to be less combative and more constructive, I got to thinking about how incredibly good Vita Ayala’s current run on New Mutants has been, and I realized I wanted to unpack why that is. Consequently, I’m doing a new Reading series here where I’ll be taking a close look at each issue in the run to date starting with issue #14. It’s my usual mundane rumination, but if anyone wants to follow along, the first post can be found here. New entries will come along as I feel like working on them, but my summer is only three weeks away, so I expect I’ll be picking up the pace in late June.

Comics

Legion of X #1 is good, and I’m thrilled that ForgetMeNot has a first name (It’s Xabi in case you don’t remember). I also speculated about the plot arc of the book on Twitter, although I fully expect to be wrong. I’m sitting on Saga #59, unread, because my heart was too full for potential fictional tragedy this week. I also have Captain Carter #3 on my to-read list along with my monthly grab bag of floppies that my local comic shop sends me. There’s also the smattering of stuff I picked up for Free Comic Book Day a couple weeks ago that I haven’t flipped through yet. It’s just one of those periods where my reading habits slow down a little bit, I guess.

Video Games

Rachael asked me last week to start a playthrough of BugSnax so we could see the free expansion that dropped last month, and I’ve been enjoying it. I watched Rachael play through it when it first released a couple years ago, so it’s been a nice casual game to revisit. It’s the breeziest horror game you’ll ever play. Spider-Man: Miles Morales is still going strong as well, though I think I’ve accepted that I’m not going to gold star every challenge in the game; I was obsessive about the first Marvel’s Spider-Man because I played it while Rachael was on a two week writing retreat and I needed some way to pass the time.

Media

In the bubblegum department, The Circle Season 4 was delightful almost all the way through. While I’ve been pretty neutral about the series’s previous seasons, The Great Pottery Throw Down Season 5 was pretty much perfect from beginning to end.

For movies, we wanted to finish the week with something soft and light, so we picked Pokemon Detective Pikachu, which turned out to be way less soft and light than we had anticipated. I’ll say that for a video game movie, it ranks up there with the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie in terms of quality. The premise is utterly baffling though. How did this specific idea get approved? Who was it that pushed through the vision of “just like the real world, but with CG cartoon animals all over the place”? I have questions.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week, but I did take Wednesday off to hang out with some friends who were visiting from out of town, and we had lunch at the outdoor food pods near our house, so that was pleasant.

Weekly Upload 05/22/22

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I missed updating yesterday because we had some friends over for an evening hangout (been a while since we did that), and the day just sort of slipped away in all the prep that we had to do ahead of time. It was a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to the end of the school year because we’ll feel a lot better about doing in-person visits with people once we’re in our off season and much less higher risk to be around in terms of potential COVID exposure.

Art

I don’t have anything new to show off this week because I spent my drawing time working on a new page for my fan comic Krakoan Counseling. I’m up to five completed pages now, which is pretty cool given my goal at the start of the year was to finish, like, one. I’m currently two pages into a story, and I’d really rather keep them to myself until I have the whole arc finished, which might take some time given I literally took two months off from comics creating between this page and the last one. I hope I don’t take so long before I get to the next page since the shift in art is pretty noticable, but there’s not much I can do about that short of redrawing the first page of the story, and that seems like a very silly idea given this is a project I’m doing to amuse myself. On the art front, I do have an idea for a piece for Mermay, a drawing event that I typically skip because I don’t really care about drawing merpeople, but this one tickles me, and it will probably only take like a day to execute.

Comics

There were a lot of good X-Men comics out this week, and I honestly felt a little exhausted scrambling to read all of them on Wednesday. It’s a thing that I’ve been thinking about lately with the shipping delays that have been happening in general, but what started out a couple years ago as a thing that was fun and breezy reading on a weekly basis with two or three titles a week has turned into this real feast or famine situation where there will be weeks with pretty much nothing new coming out that I care to read and others where I have a stack of nearly ten books to catch up on. I know that it’s largely about my own relationship wtih the hobby, and I don’t actually have to read everything the day it publishes, but participating in X-Twitter creates a lot of pressure to be up on stuff so that I can just use social media casually during my work day. On the other hand, I tend to stay away from Twitter if I’m not caught up on comics, so maybe that’s a plus? I don’t know. Everyone’s relationship with social media in general is a little screwed up, so who can say?

Setting all that metacommentary aside, the books this week were really good with the standout for me being New Mutants #25. I’ve been looking forward to a Magik-centered story for a couple years now, and I think the one that Vita Ayala and Rod Reis are putting together is going to be really good. I honestly want to re-read the issue and put together some longer thoughts on it outside the context of an update, because I feel like it’s doing some really smart things as a direct sequel to the Magik miniseries and the original Inferno event.

Video Games

I gave up on replaying Arkham Asylum and decided to instead play Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I’m about halfway through the game right now, and it’s a really fun follow up to the first Spider-Man game from Insomniac. All in all I’d say it’s very much more of the same, but the first game was so polished that I really don’t mind that.

Media

Rachael and I got into the Amazon Prime series The Wilds this week, and we’re nearly finished watching the two seasons that are out. It’s remarkably good for a mid-budget streaming drama.

Pandemic

At work this week I recieved an email from my school district saying that the COVID risk level for our county has been upgraded to medium, which means that masks are recommended but not required indoors. I’m hoping there will be an uptick in masking behavior at school, but I’m doubtful. It’s weird seeing stuff like that and realizing that I never really relaxed in the first place.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week.

Weekly Upload 05/14/22

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I’ve been sitting at my computer for like five minutes trying to figure out how to start this week’s post, and I’m kind of coming up a blank. It was a pretty busy week at work, and there was some really sad stuff to deal with towards the end of the week (what a surprise, our children are on fire) that it all feels like a very blurry period of time. I wish I could sum it up in a more articulate way, but mostly it’s just bits of things that happened and news I received. There were also chaos donuts at one point.

Art

Because of the general chaos of the week, I only finished one piece. I generally like the way it turned out, though I spent most of the week trying to fine tune the pose to work. This was one of those pieces where I started from a thing that I saw (a person at the grocery store standing in line in a pose similar to the one I did with this week’s piece), then got caught up in figuring out more details as I went. I really liked the result from the Idie piece I did last week, so I wanted to play around more with streetwear looks. I think the contrasts between really baggy or chunky clothing over a sleek figure are a fun visual concept. Also, I think I’m starting to develop a solid understanding of how to add folds and other kinds of interest to loose fabric, and it’s just fun to do more elaborate clothing these days. To be more esoteric about craft, I think I’ve hit on a pretty good process for coloring outlines that doesn’t leave the definition of the finished piece washed out. I remember I did a piece a few months ago where I couldn’t decide if I liked the black outlines or the colored outlines better, and it’s nice to settle on a process that balances the visual characteristics of each approach.

Comics

I definitely read some comics this week (heck, last week was Free Comic Book Day), but most of them have not left a strong impression on me at the moment. I do know I read Stjepan Sejic’s Harleen miniseries and generally enjoyed it. I wouldn’t say that I think Sejic’s writing is especially compelling, but elements of his art have a lot in common with Fiona Staples, so I tend to enjoy looking at his work even when I don’t fully vibe with the actual plot of what’s going on. I’m saying this generally though; Harleen felt like a relatively strong piece of fiction in comparison to his creator-owned work, and I wonder if he had a strong editorial team helping him out with the plotting.

Video Games

I finished The Outer Worlds this week, and it was a pretty satisfying accomplishment. The ending sequence was a little challenging because I found that I hadn’t quite specced out my character right to do a complete dialog resolution. At first I was fine with doing the boss fight, but then I realized that I was way underpowered since I had built a character who was focused on talking his way out of problems. I did some thinking, reloaded to an earlier save, and used the respeccing machine to hit the skills that I needed to clear the ending mission the way that I wanted to. It worked wonders.

Now I’m trying to figure out what game to hop to next. I started a replay of Batman: Arkham Asylum this week, but I’m not sure yet if I actually feel like playing it. I’m playing the PS4 remastered version, but the upgraded textures don’t really do much to overcome the fact that the character models (from 2009!) are just incredibly ugly. I think I had in my head that it would be fun to go back to Arkham Asylum because it was a really good exploration game, and it predates the weird escalation in violence that later entries in the series engaged in. Batman still beats up the enemies handily, but there are no suggestions that he’s breaking bones or doing permanent damage to anyone. Nonetheless, still not sure if it’s what I’m looking for in a game right now.

Media

The Circle is dumb, trashy reality TV about social media influencers doing Machiavellian group texts, but I really enjoy it when a new season is running. I love that this season has embraced just doing absurd twists for the joy of it. The players are all obviously in on the weird stuff, but they definitely commit to the bit.

I watched The Batman last weekend, and I enjoyed it, but I’m going to add to the general consensus that three hours is too long, and it would have been stronger if the third act had been considerably trimmed down. I did adore all the unintentionally hilarious moments where Batman is standing around being a huge dork in his costume. Robert Pattinson really brings that lonely weirdo energy to the role.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week.

Weekly Upload 05/07/22

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I feel like I tend to start my check ins by saying that it was a fast week. I don’t know if that’s generally the case, but it seems like the thing to say about a period of time that was relatively uneventful. I did have an in-service day at work, so that tends to shorten the experience of the week, but this was also the first in-service we’ve had all year that required our presence in the building despite there not being any specific purpose planned for the day. It was fine, but I didn’t really need the extra prep day at this point in the year, and the realization that I went pretty much the whole work day without encountering anyone else left me feeling like the mandatory time in building was some major hooey.

Art

This week, instead of doing one piece with three figures, I didn’t three pieces with one figure each, so I think the output was probably roughly the same? Single figure drawings are always way less work than anything with multiple figures, especially if those figures are physically interacting. Overall I like the output I had this week; it was certainly boosted by having a lull in my to-do list at work, and I think the pieces I put together are for the most part interesting and well executed. The portrait feels a little wonky, and I’ve been puzzling over what shifts in my design when I’m just drawing a head versus a whole figure. I think there’s something about the change in scale that messes with how I draw and place the eyes, although I don’t know for sure if that’s the case. I’ve been trying to develop a more consistent process for drawing eyes anyway the last couple weeks, so it might be general growing pains. Either way, it’s something for me to focus on as I move on to the next piece.

Setting aside my own inner critic, I like the drawing of Oya that I did this week most of all. She’s a great character, and I’m looking forward to finding out more about why she ended up in the pit in the current comics. Designing her streetwear look was a fun challenge. It was satisfying to spend some time researching current fashion trends and then putting together an outfit for a character.

Comics

I went to my local comic shop for Free Comic Book Day this morning, which was fun. I picked up the trades for House of X / Powers of X and X of Swords, so I’m looking forward to spending some time re-reading that stuff. I also got in my monthly order of store recommended stuff (including a copy of Knights of X #1), which continues to be fun. A lot of the series I’d really been enjoying have finished, so there are some new things in the mix that I’m still making up my mind about.

Video Games

I’m getting back into Outer Worlds, which I started playing a couple years ago and then abruptly stopped in March of 2020. I’m sure at the time I just got distracted by some other small game that I wanted to check out and then never came back to it, but it does feel a little on the nose that the pandemic started and I gave up on a AAA game that will probably take over a hundred hours to finish. I think now’s a better time for me to get back to it. The game really is a lot of fun.

Media

Rachael and I powered through a new game show on Netflix called Bullsh*t, which is built on the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire quiz show formula with the added twist of letting contestants advance as long as they can persuade at least one of three challengers that their answer was actually correct. It’s a breezy sort of show that’s good for casual watching. More importantly, the latest season of The Circle has begun airing, and Rachael and I are thrilled. We really love this trashy show about wannabe influencers trying to trick each other through text messages.

For our typical weekend movie viewing, we caught My Octopus Teacher on Netflix, which is a documentary about a guy who spends nearly a year documenting the life of an octopus he finds in the kelp forest off the shore of his home in South Africa. It’s a really beautiful documentary. We also ended up catching Bubble, a feature length anime that came out recently. I enjoyed it primarily for its strong and vibrant visuals (parkour! in the ruins of Tokyo! with gravity weirdness!), though the story was a relatively straightforward retelling of “The Little Mermaid.”

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week. We did learn that we can order boba for delivery from our favorite shop, so that’s pretty cool.

Weekly Upload 04/30/22

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It was a deeply weird week, so I suppose it’s probably best to just go in chronological order. Also, today’s my dad’s birthday, so I’m trying to get this done and posted early so I can call him to chat later.

Okay, here’s the rundown for the week:

  • Elon Musk is apparently buying Twitter. Everyone feels some ways about it. I don’t like the man, and after only a week of people talking about this I am tired of constantly hearing about his tomfoolery. I blocked him on Twitter, and now I find myself getting irritated when other folks discuss or quote tweet him. My most salient observation about the whole thing right now is that he’s doing what Donald Trump did up until he was kicked off Twitter following the January 6 coup attempt: sucking all the air out of the room and doing his level best to make us only pay attention to him. I lived through that once already, and I’m done with fawning over the mouth droppings of an internet troll with a literally obscene amount of wealth. I’ll spend more time fretting over what’s going to happen to Twitter when the buyout actually happens and we get official policy announcements from the platform.
  • One of my coworkers got COVID this week, and I had a mini-panic over it because my spring allergies are kicking into high gear for the season. I spent a couple days home from work while I waited to get the results of a test back to make sure I hadn’t also caught it. Losing days at work is always annoying, but at least I was able to kick back and enjoy some leisure time while reminding myself that the responsible thing to do if you think you’re getting sick is to stay home. I definitely had an abundance of manic energy on Thursday when I got my negative test result back from the clinic.
  • It took me most of the week, but I finished the piece I started last weekend, and I think it’s pretty good. I’m sure I would have been more productive if I’d not been afraid I was getting sick, but productivity is overrated, especially in a society where a person’s value is predicated on their ability to create wealth.

Art

I have spent the last few weeks pushing myself to economize my workflow in Procreate to see just how complex an image I can make on my print-ready canvas settings. If I had any independent business sense I might start thinking about what I could make that would look good as a print, but I don’t really, and it’s always nice to do art for the fun of it. My piece this week involved three figures with multiple points of contact and overlap, and just because I haven’t done it in a while, a return to the colored outlining I played around with a few months ago. I actually really like the way this week’s work has turned out, although I suspect I’m going to retreat to some simpler compositions for a little bit. I find that any piece I do which takes more than about 8 hours of work tends to leave me pretty drained before I’m ready to tackle something else. Maybe it’s time I actually finish drafting the next couple pages of my fan comic.

The most annoying this about the process on this piece is that my autocorrect typed “Bridgestone” instead of “Bridgerton” in the above tweet, like I ever discuss tires at all. More seriously, I think my favorite parts of this work are the distinctly different textures I managed to make for Kate and Illyana’s dresses. I didn’t want it to feel like their skirts were made out of the same material, and I think I did a pretty good job making the gray fabric look much stiffer than the blue fabric. While I’m bragging, I’m also proud of the design on Rachel’s coat and vest that evokes the Phoenix logo.

Comics

I know that comics came out this week and that some of them were reportedly very good, but with the COVID scare, I haven’t had the bandwidth to sit down and catch up on my reading. Maybe I’ll get to it this weekend.

Video Games

Seeing as I’ve had extra time at home this week, I played a lot of the metroidvania Blasphemous. This morning I finished getting to the two standard endings then confirmed that I’d need to do a complete replay to get the third ending that was added with the DLC expansion, so I’m calling myself done with this game for now. These kinds of games really scratch a very particular itch for me, so I’m sure I will eventually go back and do another playthrough. Having finished the game, I still can’t tell you very much of what it’s about, although I do get that it’s a world where there’s this vicious cycle of heretics trying to overthrow the fictional Pope only to find themselves being made into the next Pope when they succeed. It’s all very Catholic without being explicitly Catholic, but the important thing is that there are a bunch of rad boss fights and map exploration.

I’m now contemplating whether I should go back to Persona 5 Royal, which has lain abandoned for a couple months, or if I should look at playing something else in my backlog. It’s a tricky decision, because I can easily sink thirty hours into a game if I’m into it enough, but knowing it might be a time investment of over a hundred hours upfront always makes me feel a bit uneasy. The days of joyful over investment in games have passed, and now I have to think about how much free time I want to commit to an experience.

Media

I feel like we’ve finished a few things in the last week, though most of them don’t leave a really strong impression. Russian Doll Season 2 was quite good but suffers by comparison to the first season, which is such an extraordinary piece of TV all by itself. I’m curious to see where the show would go with Nadia in a third season, since she’s such a compelling and complex character even separate from the absurdity of the spacetime shenanigans that happen in the series. We’ve also begun watching Our Flag Means Death, and it’s simply delightful. I can see its value as a comedy series that consists primarily of textually queer characters just going about their lives. The love it’s getting from its fandom is well deserved, and I hope the show continues.

Rachael and I also watched Turning Red the other night, and it was a really charming Pixar movie. I don’t have any really deep thoughts about it right now other than to quietly groan that the early 2000s are now far enough in the past that we can do nostalgic stories about that time period. I did love the animation though, particularly the way the characters’ eyes are rendered so that they really pop against everything else that’s on screen.

Pandemic

Like I said at the top, I had a COVID scare this week because of an ill coworker coinciding with the return of allergy season for me. It all worked out (for me, anyway) in the end, but this was definitely a week filled with thoughts about the pandemic and the failures of public health policy to get more people on board with taking precautions against infection. I wear an N95 mask at work at all times except when I’m completely by myself in a room with a closed door, and it was maddening to be worrying that I might be sick and an infection vector while most folks around me were going about their days without any masks at all. I think taking some time off work to sit at home away from everyone else, even though I ended up not being sick, was good for my mental health.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week.