Written September 30th, 2026
2026 End of Year Update
Mini-Update
I may be many things, but stable is not one of them. Despite my intellectual love of order (through science, mathematics, etc…), my own being is rather centered around chaos, whether it is my discipline, my approach to learning, my motivation, my mental health, my interests, etc… (Even my room tends to be messy).
Accordingly, this blog, like most of my projects, has been a roller-coaster of attendance. I once again must apologize for yet another extended absence. Still, during this absence, I’ve been progressing on a few different fronts. In particular, my drawing has been improving significantly, and my Chinese/Mandarin has also continued to progress.
Now, I’m once again planning to launch myself into another project, and I figured I’d post about it here. As stated above, for the past year, my main focus has been learning to draw (I know, I know, I still haven’t posted anything about it anywhere. I’m planning to, but it’s quite the undertaking at this point.) For example, I spent a good chunk of this summer drawing by hand (on a digital tablet) 10 movie posters (using the original as a reference) as a birthday gift for a friend. Most of them were in different styles, and I simultaneously learned a lot through this experience. Why am I sharing this? Because an important lesson I’ve learned here is that I’m best motivated through external pressures, even when it comes to learning and improvements. The deadline and the stakes served as motivators to push myself, but in terms of having a time limit forcing me to make more judicious choices and work more consistently, but also to push myself to a certain standard. Accordingly, I want to emulate this experience once more, and the next best thing I found was to participate in a contest (which I found completely by accident).
Announcement
Accordingly, here is my announcement: I’m planning to participate in a Manga drawing contest, the Silent Manga Audition.
While the deadline is in January, I still need to get started and kick things off right away. Originally, I was planning to spend October doing another “Inktober Challenge”: One Halloween-related drawing per day for 31 days. I was even planning to compare them to the ones I made last year. However, with the contest looming over, I figured I should instead focus on the manga right away. Accordingly, I’m planning to spend every day drawing at least one panel, a full page if possible. This way, I could make good progress and ideally have my first draft complete by the end of October, leaving me two months to share it, get feedback, and prepare for the next iterations.
One potential challenge with this: I’m not that great at drawing from imagination (not yet at least). This has two potential solutions:
- Use photographs as the basis for my drawings
- Just in time learning
I already have an idea of what I’ll be drawing be drawing (although I don’t have a storyboard yet). Unfortunately, I am not ready to share it yet, especially since it might change a bit as I go along.
Other Thoughts
Otherwise, I also have a few projects I’d like to approach late, but for which I’m finding neither time nor energy/motivation (Especially since on top of work and drawing, I’m also still spending time on improving my Chinese/Mandarin). Here they are in order of (current) importance:
- Completing the first draft of a story I’ve been writing (It’s about 3/4 of the way through now. I expect it to be a Novella.)
- Reviewing a few of the short stories I wrote last year and creating a “best of compilation”
- Start streaming video games in Chinese, while speaking in Chinese (as practice)
- Reviving my Youtube channel and making a few videos. Some about my projects, some about my travels.
- Revamping this website, coding it from scratch
- Working on a few programming projects I’ve got in the back of my mind
- Another photography challenge, in part to help me learn composition.
Another thing I would like to focus on is distancing myself from technological habits that seem to affect me negatively, in particular push-notifications and suggestion rabbit-holes. Honestly, when it comes to “instant-messaging”, I would be tempted to create an app that would work like old-school snail-mail: You receive updates at most once a day. Unfortunately, I get obsessed enough with messages and responding to them that it constantly distracts me, and I often find myself waiting for people to read my messages and respond, and stressing over it. Over time, it’s becoming more and more damaging to both my focus and anxiety, and thus, I need to find ways to circumvent that. For now, I plan to keep my phone on “do-not-disturb”, at least disabling push-notifications. Unfortunately, one imperfection here is that, if I suddenly decide to write to someone, I will be faced with all the messages I’ve since received, instead of being restricted to the conversation at hand. Ideally, the “sending” functionality would be decoupled from the “inbox”, allowing me to send one person a message without dealing with my entire contact list. I realize this might come across as a willpower issue, but I’ve also found that the best tool for me to handle such issues is to simply not have them come up. If you remove temptation, you won’t have to fight again it.
Conclusion
Hopefully, I’ll have enough of a drive to post updates on these projects and you’ll be able to see the progress…but I do know I don’t have the best of track-records, which I apologize for.
Hope you’re all having fun with your own projects, and continuously finding ways to learn new and fun things.
Have a nice one everyone!