Life

What an interesting week. A couple weeks ago, when I knew of this upcomnig vacation time, I had contemplated going somewhere else for vacation. I’m glad that did not pan out in the end, because the first half of the week had me down with a variety of sicknesses that flattened me for a couple of days.

It went something like this:

Saturday, Aug 09 – Annoying, persistant headache.
Sunday, Aug 10 – The lumpy beginnings of a sore throat.
Monday, Aug 11 – Chills, fatigue when out of bed, misery when in bed, coughing and some sniffling by the evening
Tuesday, Aug 12 – Mostly recovered, mood blah, still coughing, partially blocked nose, couldn’t sleep due to drowning sensation.
Wednesday, Aug 13 – Significantly better, though still a cough.
Thursday, Aug 14 – Had a brief call with my boss at work, he asked why I sounded so terrible. Oops.
Friday onwards – Only a minor, occasional cough (and weird-sounding voice) left now.

I went out on Sunday for quite a long walk, partly to clear the remainder of the headache, but I don’t know if that aggravated the budding sickness or if I picked it up on my journey. I had not become fully sick with the rest of my ailments at that point yet though, and felt perfectly fine except for the ache in my throat that I woke up with that morning, and the sins that I bear with me daily. That journey was worth it in the end though, for reasons I’ll explain a little further down, it just wasn’t conducive for being able to go anywhere to do anything of note for the next few days.

There’s a couple of silver linings here though. The first is that thanks to this vacation, I wasn’t streaming anyway so I didn’t lose out on the ability to stream. It’s really nice of Satinel to schedule the game jams that she participates in on top of days that she knows that I’m going to be sick on! That’s why she’s a muse of mine. The second is that I didn’t lose my sense of taste or my appetite throughout the whole thing. Saltine biscuits suck. Thirdly, despite my boss’s slander, I didn’t actually lose my voice either, nor did I pick up that stupid dry, persistent cough that lasts for weeks and weeks even after everything recovers. I hate those, and you should too. I do still have a little bit of a persistent cough as I’m typing this, but it’s depreciated code that triggers very infrequently and should be gone in a couple days. And lastly, as mentioned, I didn’t have to contend with being sick on vacation. Again.

Another understated thing that I did was that I talked to my boss and took the first two scheduled days of the vacation, Monday and Tuesday, off as sick days instead of vacation days. I had marked the entire vacation down as tentative anyway because as late as Friday I still hadn’t been sure what I was going to do, so we were going to play it by ear. And I still had 7 of my 10 use-it-or-lose-it vacation days left for this calendar year. And it’s already mid-August. Well, now I have 5 left.

I then took Wednesday as an actual work day, which was something I had agreed on with my boss because I was still doing a bit of work every day (usually at night) and there were a bunch of long emails that I had to write and send off during the day during the week as well. It ran about an hour a day and I had said prior to the actual vacation that I was going to do this over the course of the vacation and take one of the days as work days anyway. This was okayed by my boss.

So the end result of all this is that Mon and Tue became sick days, Wed became a regular work day, and only Thu and Fri got marked off as actual vacation time. I had also tentatively also taken next Mon and Tue off as vacation time as well, and I had completely forgotten about this, so we agreed that I might as well take those two days, too.

Despite the rampant plague affecting everyone in my apartment, it was still a very relaxing week — with no work from morning till 4 pm, no daily group watch anime/AMQ from 4-6 pm, no streaming from 6-9 pm, and then one of my two night-time streamers (Nomakk) taking the entire week off from streaming due to childbirth, I had a huge chunk of free time and really enjoyed that freedom to just do stuff. To go out if I wanted to, eat an early dinner if I wanted to, randomly pursue new hobbies if I wanted to, and so on. I think I could get used to this sort of life!

But there’s a saying in the corporate office drone workspace — meetings will expand to fill up every available spot on your calendar. It’s basically a variation of Parkinson’s Law, but I know that version better than the actual law on Wikipedia. But as that law basically states, if I have free time, I’ll find a way to fill it up with new stuff. That’s the way I work, and so I found something new to do — art.

This is yet another creative hobbyist thing that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but have always put off due to a lack of time and a lack of belief in oneself. Well, here I was at the start of a long week with lots of extra time to do things, and there were several hobbies that I could have attacked — art was one, certainly, music was another, and there were a few technological-related hobbies that I could have spent the week examining as well. In the end, though, after watching a few videos and reading a few tutorials and success videos and such to hype myself up, I decided on this one, even before I got sick and lost my voice (which would have made me really disappointed if I had picked music instead).

Now, I know myself and my strengths and weaknesses, and I’m no stranger to the fact that I, like every other fallible semi-intelligent humanoid out there, go through what they call the Emotional Cycle of Change (local) — I don’t know that there’s a “best link” for that search result so I just plucked one of the top ones that wasn’t gated by stupid paywalls — anyway people basically go through a cycle when they start something new, through Uninformed Optimism, to Informed Pessimism, to a 3rd stage that varies between either Hopeful Realism or the Valley of Despair depending on which version you read, to Informed Optimism, and then to a Completion/Success stage. This applies to hobbies too, and one of the LEARN TO DRAW!!!!!111eleven videos that I saw this week directly calls on the graph on that page as well to showcase the fact that many people who start the journey never finish it.

And this might happen to me along this journey too. But you know what? That’s fine if it does! I still keep the skill points that I pick up along the way, so I don’t think it’s wrong to try. And while this has definitely happened to me in various life projects, I also do have several successes under my belt as well, my biggest one being my gender transition, which took seven years from the start of my journey of change to the final surgery that I did, not counting the ten years I suffered in silence before that, knowing but unable to do anything.

There’s also my blog-writing, which is actually now about seven years in as well, even though My Diary #001 is only from 4.5 years ago — you can see the original date of my pinned Navigation/Welcome post is from 6 years ago, and there were a bunch of old anime review posts from Oct/Nov 2018 that I’ve long since archived and deleted. And there’s the goal of going abroad to study, which I started in November 2020 and partially completed in Jun 2023, before pivoting away from it in late 2023 after Mom‘s stroke. Even though that one was technically incomplete, I still did go abroad to study in Kyoto for 5 weeks, where I met Zian, and it also inadvertently got entwined with another goal of cleaning up my Singapore history and entry status so that I could go back into the country and meet my friends there without getting arrested at the border. Again.

All those were positive fruits of labour that came out of my efforts to get as far as I could along that route, and ended up enriching my life experiences greatly, even if I didn’t quite reach the end goal in the end. It’s why when I said back in My Diary #157 in Sep 2024 that oh, I hope to become a famous VTuber and join hololive someday, I also added that I was not under any illusion that I’d actually succeed in this goal in that exact manner, but that I was looking forwards to the things that I’d learn, the places I’d visit, and the treasure chest rewards that I’d discover along the way. Those are equally important and arguably MORE important than the actual end goal, which is just a lighthouse in the distance with a circling pie at the very top of the tower, because the act of “VTubing”, even more so than generic live streaming, is an amalgamation of a LOT of different skills, both artistic and technical, both online and offline, that I would like to try my hand at. That in the end is what I am chasing when I say that I am pursuing being a VTuber.

And one year later, I’m now regularly streaming (well, not this week, but still), I’ve managed to get myself affiliate status on Twitch even though no one really stops by (that’s the Informed Pessimism part of me speaking though so I mostly ignore it), I’m looking into voice training classes again at some point if I find the right one, and arguably this attempt at art is an offshoot of this too, of wanting to cultivate a marketable skill that could be useful in a variety of ways in the future, for streaming or VTubing or other things-ing, and that could itself branch out into acquiring other skills in the future. Plus hey, one of the videos or tutorials I watched also mentioned putting yourself out there and sharing your art early too, and lo- I have a blog here from another of my life goals where I can do something like that. Nothing like a bit of public humiliation, but also postponed pride down the road to look forward to, to act as catalysts for success.

Anyway, this sounds like a whole lot of chest-beating or self-cheerleading, and maybe it is, but the point is that I’ve tried a lot of things, and have had some things already succeed and some other things not succeed for now, and I know the sort of extended timelines needed for this kind of life goal to work out. I don’t know for sure that I’ll even hang on to this once the unbridled optimism part of the honeymoon is over, but I do know that I probably can do it if I try hard enough to push my way through the forest. I’m extremely organised and already have big life successes under my belt. And even if I eventually decide that another forest in the distance seems greener instead, or that I have to cut back on something else due to lack of time or something, well then that’s fine too, and I’ll forgive myself for pursuing that instead. My own struggles as I head toward my life goals is also itself partly what makes life so beautiful and precious to me, I think. Just give me 6 more years and watch me grow.

Now, we’re like 17 paragraphs or something into this blog post already, so maybe it’s time to talk about what actually happened this week besides being sick. With all that preface, I can now finally say with context that Sunday, the day that I could feel the onset of my initial sore throat and the day prior to me being deathly ill, was Community Day in Pikmin Bloom. What, you say, how is THAT important in any way? Well, to get a special badge on Community Day weekend, you have to walk 10,000 steps in that 24-hour period. Quintopia is to blame for this, he PMed me on Discord on Sunday and we had an exchange that went exactly like this:

I had started perusing art threads and videos the night prior to that, on Saturday, and in particular had seen a post mentioning the existence of Drawabox (local), an interesting site with lots of free videos and exercises to teach you the fundamentals of drawing, with an additonal paid component if you want your exercise work to be officially reviewed and critiqued. Paid or not, their course involves putting fine-liner pen to paper, regardless of what medium you want to learn in the end, and I didn’t actually have any fine-liner pens. I also didn’t have any sketching paper books (that is one category of book stationery that I have not been collecting at all thus far), but wanted at least one as well to doodle on outside of lessons, so I had to go get some.

So, I looked up some good local art supply stores on Reddit, saw people suggesting (local) two shops called The Paint Spot and Colours to support, and decided to try the former as it was by Whyte Avenue in our city, about an hour and 10 minutes walk away from my apartment near Southgate. I knew from experience that I tend to walk a little slower than Google Map’s estimated time, and that that “hour and 10 minutes” walk would probably equate to between 9,000 to 10,000 steps after my inevitable detours, which would be perfect since I could then take a bus home and get the rest of the steps along the way. The weather was overcast but I liked it that way, as it meant that the weather was cool, and a bit of rain never hurt anyone — zao gia, as I say. So off I went.

I went east along 51st Avenue to Calgary Trail, and then walked north along that road, about four times as far as I’ve ever walked northwards along it before. Along the way, I stopped for lunch at a place called iPho & Grill:

Because of my sore throat, I wanted a soup dish, but I still opted for one of the spicier dishes because I seldom actually feel spice at all, and this time was no different. I ordered the Pho sate Soup, which was capitalized exactly that way, and it looked like this:

This was actually really good! I was surprised at how savoury it was. I thought the service was kind of odd, everyone was nice and all but I had to go up to the counter to actually make my order because no one came by to my table, the restaurant felt a little too warm, and the meal itself took a while to arrive, but the actual meal more than made up for it.

After the meal, I continued upon my way and was surprised to find myself walking right past the *other* artist supplies store that was recommended in that thread above, Colours. I had not actually looked up its location and so was walking by it by complete dumb happenstance.

It was fate, I decided. Why not just step ins-

Oh.

Well then.

Walking onwards, I saw another point of interest, another of those deadly distractions that make a one hour jaunt turn into a four hour marathon. This building was called the Old Strathcona Antique Mall, and I had heard good things about it and thus it had been on my list to visit sometime soon. But I also didn’t expect to conveniently run into this today while exploring and wandering around. It started to drizzle as I approached the place though, which I took as a sign to get my rear end into the place and take shelter until the rain hopefully subsided.

I had to leave my bag with the security guard at the front door, and he locked it into a locker and then gave me a luggage tag to carry around with me, which was fine and secure, although a little weird because when I was on my way out later, I had to reclaim my bag and then walk around the front part of the store to get to the exit doors anyway. But whatever works!

I had thought that this mall was a literal mall, with individual stalls featuring stall owners selling old antiques much like other farmers’ markets or flea markets, but I was actually wrong there. While the building was indeed roughly laid out similarly to a flea market with many little stalls to explore, there were no stall owners waiting at most of them, and instead there was a communal cashier area up front, which I thought was interesting. I did not end up buying anything, but I did browse through random boxes of CDs, admire a number of interesting toys and trinkets, and almost did pounce on a couple of gamebooks that I found. (It was an incomplete set though, so I said no in the end.)

After walking through both levels of the mall and querying myself on whether I’m considered an antique or not, I peeked out the building’s main doors and saw that the drizzle had stopped. I collected my bag and left, completing the last leg of the needlessly long walk to The Paint Spot.

Pretty store, but I didn’t actually take any pictures of the inside of the store, so I’ll instead put down some pictures of some cool murals in the vicinity of the store. There were a bunch of them in little alleys on both sides of the store along the street, as well as behind the store — it was obviously a neighbourhood (or road) with an artistic flair to it.

Oh oops, maybe one of them was not like the others. I did like the area though, but on the other hand the street and surrounding buildings also felt a bit old and rundown.

Inside the shop were shelves of paper, pens, paint, and various other drawing mediums and related products. I bought a Staedtler fineliner pen, a nice Mono mechanical pencil, a set of colour pencils, and a Paint Spot 40th anniversary sketch book that was on sale, and then ambled my way home to get sick on the following day.

On the way home, I also passed a little craft sale going on in the middle of Southgate Mall, so I chronicled that as well. This was called Creative Market YEG.

Over the rest of the week, I poked at various art tutorials and draw many lines and planes and a few circles. I’m still terrible at them. Both that Drawabox tutorial, which I don’t intend to fully complete as there are other courses like Ctrl+Paint (local) that I’d like to try too, as well as other videos and things online talk about trying out different types of drawings though, and in particular freestyle drawing, to train the imagination and various skills and to have a sort of baseline that you can use to find your way forward. So I tried a few different things.

First, I tried doing a observation drawing using Tigey as a reference. I think this one came out fairly ok, considering I’ve never drawn anything before. This was like the sort of classical art class assignment of drawing an apple in a bowl, except there’s no bowl here. And no, I’m not adding this to my bag of Tigey drawings. Those are reserved for sketches or caricatures from real artists. But, one day!

Then I tried copying a digital anime art piece. Not tracing, but rather having the thing up on screen and then trying to replicate it on paper. References, again. I’m not sure if this is considered observational or not though. And I only did one of the squares for now.

(Original credit: here)

And then I spent a couple hours in the evening trying freestyle drawing to have a future comparable baseline for that too.

Ugh. I can’t do perspectives and angles and shading. Nor draw circles. So then I quit drawing.

For most of the week, I was on the verge of spending either $500 or $700 on a nicely discounted digital drawing tablet from XPPen (local) too. When I first looked at their site, due to reading really good reviews on their stuff from multiple people on Reddit, they were having a sale with 5 days left on the clock, and I had noticed that a couple people also said that the website held frequent sales. But I was nowhere near going into digital art yet when I didn’t have the fundamentals, so eventually I decided with a heavy heart to let the sale expire.

Well, lucky me! The nice company refused to let me down, because the moment one sale ended, they so kindly started up another near-identical sale (that 20th anniversary one in the archived screenshot above) with pretty much the exact same products discounted by the exact same percentage! So, oh. They’re one of those companies that has their stuff semi-permanently on sale. Well that’s good to know when I am ready to delve into digital art. I actually did dig out an old Wacom tablet that I bought back in 2018 but never used, so I can try digital art if I wanted to anyway, it just doesn’t have a screen to it as it’s a pen tablet and not a pen display (local). I do want a pen display once I get into the digital art segment of my budding new career though.

Anyway there’s plenty of adventures ahead of me if I stick with this, I’m sure. And I’ll be sure to share it with the blog every now and again.

Through the rest of the week, I picked up a couple other minor things from the dollar store, like a pen-shaped eraser with a couple of refills, and a couple of cheap $1 fineliners because that $3.85 Staedtler one already started dying at the end of the week due to how many circles and lines I drew with it, and that felt like a sub-optimal price to pay. Hopefully these cheap ones take the brunt of my abuse for equally long before dying, while being far cheaper overall.

I also ended up buying a couple of things off of Temu for the first time ever, and apparently for first-time buyers they offer a discount gift on an item for you. The things I was buying were cheap, and didn’t even hit the minimum free shipping amount overall, so I applied that discount gift onto a set of building blocks instead and ended up adding that and another building block set to my order as well. And then found a 30% coupon that stacked with everything on top of that. Both building block sets together ended up costing under $20, which was the minimum order amount on my cart, though it went to $30 after adding the other items that I wanted.

From what I’ve read their building blocks, the “offbrand Lego” stuff, is of pretty good quality, and I think these ones in particular are supposedly from the Loz brand, which I have other sets from. Not 100% sure though, we’ll see when they arrive. But I do like collecting builds of Asian food-related restaurants, stalls, shops, food carts, and things like that, and there are tons of different building block sets in that niche, so I’ll never be short of things to add to the cart to pad it over a minimum spend amount. Once I get a new house, I’ll have a couple of shelves dedicated to these builds.

Talking about a new house, another house reared its head on Friday evening, and I made an appointment with my realtor, who just turned 40 (happy birthday!), to go see the house on Saturday. Dad turned up for this too, despite ongoing problems with his eyesight, and we liked the house, and the price, with our only concern currently being that the roof shingles are 19 years old (and several of them are visibly slightly warped). Either way our realtor reached out to theirs with a couple of questions that we had, and as of Saturday evening I’ll probably try to make some sort of offer on the property sometime this weekend.

I usually do not take pictures of the house, but when we went to visit the house, we found that the occupants still lived in it. And although they were not home, their cat was! Hello Meow! (Meow is probably not the cat’s real name, but it’s what I christened it anyway. I wonder if the kitty comes with the house?)

I’m not sure if the cat was unhappy that we were there, or unhappy that we were leaving. I went with Dad to the nearby mall after this, and we hung out and went shopping at Safeway, then at Winners, then at London Drugs, and then sat around a bit and chatted before he had to leave to go catch a train and a bus home. The joys of not having afternoon/evening obligations!

I burnt some rice this week in such a way that it left black stains at the bottom of the saucepan pot that I use the most. I was not happy about this. Even after arduous scrubbing, hot water soaking, vinegar, Bounce sheets, and whatever other trick I could find online, all the rice came off but some rice-shaped black marks at the bottom of the pot did not. I’m only leaving this note here so I know which day I committed this sin on, which left my pot carrying these marks of shame. Monday, Aug 11.

One last thing that I did do a bit of this week is upload more Edmonton ephemera to my archive.org page as well. Nothing major, but the problem with this was that I hadn’t uploaded any in so long that I was not only unsure how to do it any longer, but the archivist’s guilt was really starting to weigh on me as well. I banished all that this week by doing a few, just to get the ball rolling again and walk through the steps needed to upload things, thus refreshing my memory and re-unlocking it as an option that I can now again do on some quiet nights if I wish.

And finally, here’s a pretty horizon sky cloud insert more keywords here picture from Thurs Aug 14 at 9:30 pm. The way all the cloud tails point in one direction reminded me of the art practices that I was doing on paper.