daydreamer's footnotes

lilioart's scatter-minded journal

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Mar 2026
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  • Sparks along the Career Path

    While navigating career options during my sabbatical period, I like to reflect on what brought me to where I am.

    Spark 1: When my high school computer-savvy study partner showed me the Wacom tablet and what it was capable to do on the computer.

    This was during the time of the phone dial-up internet and before I got my own computer, or private access to a computer for that matter. This spark came belatedly, almost 4 years later when I was totally lost about my future during my university study. At the time, I was working toward a bachelor degree leading to unemployment. During my 4th year university, I got really sick, probably from extreme stress, with a suspected diagnosis of pneumonia. The 3 weeks of illness during the time of midterm was enough to make me fall so far behind I wasn’t able to continue my study that semester. So I took the rest of the semester off to recovery and resumed my study in the summer. While I pondered about my future during my time off, my mind kept going back to the architectural drawing I saw while working part-time at the Faculty of Architecture. So I spent my entire earning from the part-time job to purchase a student version of the Maya software to play with during my recovery from the illness.

    The undergrad study gained me zero usable practical skill for a job market that was saturated with manual labour on the surface, while intellectual jobs are well kept under covered behind a thick curtain, and you really have to somehow network your way to a VIP pass before you are told where the entrance was. I was very fortunate to make one very supportive friend during university and lucky enough to be given such a pass and secure myself a full-time survival job before I graduated from university.

    Spark 2: When I took a course in inorganic chemistry and learned about electron states at quantum level, something ignite in me that kept my curiosity alive throughout university, just enough to graduate from it.

    The topic of light in optics, light in its application in various form of science researches such as MRI, fiber optics, techniques in imaging development…etc, are all very fascinating to read about. I think it was about that time that I started to find interest in making computer graphic images.

    Spark 3: While working on my own to navigate around my two years old 3D software toy after graduated from university, I picked up a mathematics book on Daylighting. It introduced me to various calculations in architectural science. It sparked my interest in deeper understanding of architectural lighting design, so I enrolled in a program just for fun, in hope that gaining that piece of knowledge will make me a better artist. The program, while didn’t teach about the math that I read about, opened up a new horizon for me as it was an industry I did not know it exist alone. I was very fortunate to get a contract job in this field at a building engineering firm while I was still studying the program.

    It was a highly stressful job. Many overtimes hours for months under tight deadlines on multiple projects at once. I went home at 3AM every night for nearly the entire two months. After the first project, this overtime routine continued onto the next project, and the next one after that. Although I perform well on the job under pressure and at time felt a kind of satisfaction I never encountered before, it was the interpersonal aspect of the job that got me to rethink a long career in the field. I was really good at using a new software tool that the company wanted to make it a pipeline in their workflow, so the company created a company-wide training sessions to those involved in design to attend the training. I was initial invited to join the training, however, my immediate boss removed me from the training invitation saying I already know the software. What she failed to understand was that, while I do know how to use that piece of software really well (because I know other 3D software and the knowledge are transferrable), I have no idea about how the company wanted to implement such software in their pipeline. And in order to become a fully functioning employee to an organisation of that size, I do need to be present in the training. At the end, my boss said no. I was disappointed at my boss. She failed to see me as a team player and only see me as a useful person knowing the tools to get the immediate work done. When it came time for contract renewal, the HR sent me a renewal as it, without offering for renegotiation of my role, because what I was doing over the year was way beyond the original job description. I declined the offer without giving a reason and left the company as my contract expired.

    This work experience was valuable in my career journey because I learnt something about myself and learnt a lot about the real-world. Yes, I have skills to offer to the world and I am a productive being. However, I need to be working with the right team and in the right environment to really bring out my potential in order to enjoy my career. Thankfully, I made a few industry-friends along the way and we still keep in touch to this day.

    Spark 4: When I saw how lighting is applied in film and film post-production. I wanted to get my hands on doing that to fulfill my curiosity.

    Luckily, before I quit my job at the engineering firm, I have secured a contract with a post-production studio that gave me the opportunity to practice exactly what I had in mind. At first I only wanted to try it for a couple of years and maybe going back to do architectural lighting once I fulfilled my curiosity. One project after the next, the projects continue to be interesting and challenging and there were a lot to learn in the computer graphics world. I stayed on in the same industry for the next 10 years development my skills and vision, and continue to be curious about the science behind computer graphics as an artist. When I fulfilled my initial curiosity of post-production film making, I thought about my early-career dream and then seriously thought about career longevity and sustainability.

    As I continue to search for my next project in the field, I can’t help but wondered: Now what?

    Until recently, there was a shift in AI development that might/would render many skills people spent their life-time developing obsolete. From what I gathered on how some companies are incorporating AI in their pipeline, I can appreciate some companies are using AI responsibly. Using only proprietary data to sort their work and streamline their workflow only within the company’s context. That kind of AI usage, I have no problem with and would encourage as it increases productivity at company’s level.

    Then there are a couple of GenAI training sessions I listened in, which seriously made me angry and made me question about humanity. It was a very disappointed piece of technology. The presenters, without addressing any IP issues, showed the audience AI generating images using image data from the wilderness of the internet. The uncontrolled, irresponsible kind of AI that even some design company wanted to use in their workflow. This piece of technology made critical thinking irrelevant, drawing skills obsolete, plagiarism the norm of the new generation.

    For a while I thought my career objective was to draw amazing pictures. To me, a drawing holds a lot of information in communicating idea. A single image conveys a design intend replacing an essay of words no one has the time to read in a fast pace working world. I still thought that was the goal until very recently, when I had a job interview for a job I thought I really wanted. After the interview, I realised something that haven’t crossed my mind before: My career objective has changed. That job I interviewed for may have been my obsession 10 years ago, but today, that job, while still got me excited when I read the job description, is not aligning to my core values. At the end, I didn’t get the job and it was the right decision on the company’s part for not choosing me. I haven’t quite figured out what the new career objective is yet, I am still navigating my options and gathering information, but something that would still require critical thinking skills and a career that wouldn’t make me feel more stupid after I retired from it are my top criteria.

    Onwards to a productive week. Happy Monday!

  • What I Learned from Learning to Knit Patterns 2

    Learning to knit cable patterns takes a lot of mental concentration and requires you to meticulous check your work every few stitches so you can correct mistakes at your earliest without undoing all the work you spend hours to knit. The mental focus it requires is astonishing, and at time overwhelming to someone who mind tends to drift off somewhere really quickly. It’s a kind of mental exercise that helps to counter the mildly attention deficiency syndrome.

    While I am working on this knitting pattern, my mind suddenly blanked out somewhere in the middle a few times, and it took me over 10 minutes to reorient myself and figure out where I have left off before I blanked out every time. There were times when I have to undo the whole row and recount to my last good row. It’s quite a challenge but this exercise is really helpful to train the mind and body to focus, so I can take on other tasks that require such concentration.

    Onwards to the next exercise.

  • What I learned from learning to Knit Patterns

    As an ultra beginner at knitting who only skills in that were to do knit and purl stitches, I spent the week trying to learn to do a cable pattern. I am still learning it as I am writing this, and I think I am getting nowhere. I followed the pattern chart religiously and still can’t see the cable pattern at all. Maybe I have to repeat some more rolls before the pattern show itself… or I have been doing the whole thing wrong. I even tried to follow some (not very good edited) YouTube video on how to do it, but nope, I am not getting what the content creator was able to achieve.

    Perhaps this is just a big learning curve I have to keep experimenting and a big hurdle to overcome. Keep failing and find the flaw in the workflow and fix so you can achieve more later after a very slow start. Perhaps the week wasted failing is not at all a waste of time. Perhaps this period of failing is what it takes to do better art in the near future.

    I keep trying different art form to find my own workflow and visual language. It’s like trying to learn a new foreign language in the hope to communicate with people in their native tongue. However, I, myself, am not native to their languages, so I added my twist, flaws in the grammars, and pure guesses and interpretation on how I should say a sentence in a language I tried to learn.

    It’s the same for art. Through evolution and learning development, a new workflow is form. People coming up with better ways to do things more efficiently. Productivity over true knowledge. No one is a true master on anything, one just have to be a productive worker on doing something. to survive in the capitalist society.

    However, there are times when I feel I need to dig deep into the fundamentals, understand the logic behind each building blocks, before I can dive into learning the shortcuts. The real learning only comes when one goes through the brain exercises of failing and achieving at every steps. Without it, one is simply follow a manual or instructions. One is only exercising the mechanical part of the human body without taking advantage of the cognitive part of our body that truly differentiate us for being human.

    Without flexing our neuroplasticity in the brain, we are not truly living as a full fledge human being. So in a way, an artist is a working master of the living. We go through all the trouble of learning a chosen craft that is deflated in value in the capitalist society because we value true knowledge – the fundamental building blocks that created the society in the first place.

  • Off Balanced

    On a normal morning, after getting ready for the day, I went to the kitchen to make breakfast. Only that breakfast pretty much ruined my entire day. I made soup and spilled the soup, twice. Then I made tea, and spilled the water while pouring it into a mug.

    Migraine suddenly kicked in on the right side of the head after the spilling accident. While trying hard to do something productive for the day, nothing seem to be right. I got increasingly frustrated at myself for having such a clumsy, unproductive day. I tried doing jigsaw puzzles to calm my mind, only to increase my the stress I am having in my head.

    Let’s call off the day early today. Be kind to yourself. It’s just not your day today to do anything. Leave everything and rest. Try to do some light exercise if you must do something. Healing is the best way to prepare for a productive day tomorrow.

  • There Is an Answer for It All!

    Always getting lost, even following the map at familiar places – Yes
    Start something (or a lot of things) but never finish it quickly enough – Yes
    Heard a sequence of numbers and wrote all the digits down, just not in the same order – Yes
    Have the number in mind but wrote down the digit wrong – Yes
    Difficult to focus on anything uninterested – Yes
    Super focus on things that I am interested – Yes

    I found out today all the above traits has a name: It is called ADD / ADHD

    Reading Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté

    Above image is a 5 minutes watercolour brush exercise to wake up my brain one morning

  • Toward a Customer Serviceless Society

    Nowadays, it is very hard to get quality customer service with real qualify human at any physical location. It is even harder to get to talk to a qualify human when trying to get service on the phone.

    Everywhere I tried to get information, it always says, “check it out online.”
    Well, I am only calling the customer service hotline exactly because I couldn’t locate the answer to my specific question online. Then I am given many options on the phone to choose from and none of those options seem right.
    Okay, off to visit the physical location. Surely at the bureau they will have people that can answer my specific question, right?
    Nope! I braved the extreme cold weather to get to the bureau. Asked the representative on site the question I needed to ask, but immediately hit a stone wall. The nice lady who serviced me didn’t have the answer, and she can only direct me back to the number I previously called trying to get the answer to resolve the question to my problem.

    I called again, now I was finally able to talk to an agent only to get transfer twice to different agents, the last transfer got me to an automatic message that said they are too busy, and the called disconnected … without even giving the option to wait in line or leave a message to call back. Just a seemingly rude and abruptly hang up.

    Surely customer services a decade ago was not so difficult, right? Normally you wouldn’t be hitting so many walls trying to resolve an outstanding issue with the respected organization. 10 years ago, it may be slow and have to wait a few hours at time in order to get to the service, but at least you were able to get to a knowledgeable person to help you with your problem. Nowadays, physical location at the bureau has no knowledgeable person on location, and calling the hotline can take you days before you get to talk to a qualifying person to actually help you resolve a problem.

    I feel this experience is a prime example how automation and AI generated customer services failed miserably in the society. People paying the taxes and not getting the services they need efficiently. The government invest your tax money on such automations instead of hiring real people, only to fail the citizens even more. Everywhere with automation in their customer services, services are getting worse by the day as if physical, real verbal human interactions no longer matter anymore. Yes, the technologies are there to help moving the world forward. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t know how to implement the technology correctly to calibrate their services to the human needs: a non-human-centric design of the automation service technology.

    What a depressing world we are heading toward! We are pretty much doomed if those organizations don’t hurry up and revamp their automation system to a more human-centric design rather than solely relying the technology driving the service.

  • Lighting as Felt Experience

    In my self-taught artistic career, I always love life drawings. I find to be able to convey the felt experience onto a canvas is one of the ultimate goals in a successful drawing. With my own personal artworks, I tended to create lighting scene exactly as how it was felt. Especially when creating landscape scene with deep cultural heritage, lighting shouldn’t force its way to become the protagonist of the story. The landscape should always be the focal point, and lighting is there to guide the viewers into their stories, through the contrast of light and shadows, shades and reflections. To me, it is my way to pay respect to the landscape, the history and its heritage.

    For this reason, I strive for photorealism in my 3D artwork, because, for one thing, software these days are so well developed they can calculate fairly accurately how light behave through different mediums when parameters for given objects are set, giving each a physical property. When I looked into the mathematics behind, say the amount of sunlight bouncing into a room through the reflection and refraction of the windows, a giant scary looking monster of matrices calculation can easily fill a few pages of paper, just to work out the calculation, and that’s only the calculation for one dot on the drawing. Not to mention the amount of time it will take an average human brain to process such calculation with margin of error – very high. The ability of software to do those kind of calculations on a wimp and then able to translate the calculation into colour pixels through the giant calculator we called render engine, opened up a lot of possibilities to dreamers to create and relive the experience they felt in CG drawings. That is not to say we can swiftly ignore learning the math. Understand the basis of the math is still important to a technical artist, for troubleshooting, and perhaps, leading to new discovery.

    Life drawing artists make a lot of detail observations that can be explained in science and math. We don’t always first think about the mathematical formula when making observation to various natural phenomena, nor do we think about the physics behind how each phenomenon works. We simply document the observations with our tools, in pencils and in colours,

    Then we put on our technical CG artist hat. Once we made the observations, we dig deeper into the science and the math, in computer softwares to make sense of our observations. That is what I meant by lighting as felt experience. The goal was to document our most honest felt experience when trying to recreate a landscape that we may or may not have been there, or have been there but not at the right moment of time. To be able to draw similar experience from elsewhere and merge it onto a scenery we yearned for and wished we were there at the right time.

    Above image is my last drawing in 2025. Can be viewed here:
    https://portfolio.lilioart.com/travel-cg-photography-schwangau-germany

  • Spirit Animal

    Have you ever wondered why one particular animal stood out to you compare to the rest the animal kingdom, especially during your childhood? It was as if the animal instantly connecting to the psyche without having to encounter a real one before it became your guidance animal.

    Bunny rabbit became my spirit animal since I was six years old. After winning a local recital competition, my coach, who was also my grade one teacher, gifted me a rabbit plush, I called it Totou. Since then, I held it to sleep well into my 20s,

    After many years of tear soaking and machine washing, the fabric on the bunny plush aged and I can no longer repair it by sewing. Recently, I decided to make the bunny plush a new outfit after acquiring the absolute basic skill in doing crochet and knitting.

    It was not until I was in my 30s when I first touched a real rabbit. Through various encounters and how the events played out, I ended up living with the very first rabbit I touched. It was not until I have a bunny housemate that I began to understand why bunny rabbit is my spirit Animal.

    I adopted my bunny housemate from a work colleague when there was a change in her life and she can no longer keep this bunny. I first met this bunny when he was just a few months old. I created a bond with this bunny when I looked after him for a month, twice, the following 2 years when my colleague went on vacations. One day, when bunny nearly 4 years old, my colleague asked if I can adopt her bunny. Without thinking that would mean to become a pet owner, I agreed. I started calling him BunBunSet after he came to live with me.

    I see a part of my reflection in my housemate bunny. We shared a lot of similarity in character traits At the beginning when he officially came to live with me, I had a bit of trouble getting used to him. His distance yet quiet way of love, his hostile way of responding to your request at the beginning, his need for his own space to be himself… etc. Then I looked into his cute little face and realised that I am just like him.

    There are so many fun and deeply philosophical observations in a house bunny way of life. Although BunBunSet left the world at 8.5 years old. I wish to continue sharing some of his philosophy over time here in my journal to honour his memories whenever I think of him.

  • The Internet PTSD – Pre-Social Media

    I am always reserved on sharing anything in a blog or anywhere on the internet. Not that I expect anyone reading it, but because once it is out in the opening, you are vulnerable. You are also responsible for what you are saying, regardless if you are expecting an audience or not. The fact you have published to the internet, you are ultimately responsible for the space you allowed public access.

    I do not get to access the internet until maybe late high school, back in the days when we were still using dial-up to connect to the internet. Most of the time back then, I only use the computer to type my essays and homework when the school required it. I didn’t have ‘online’ time in a household that shared a single giant white box computer between the whole family.

    When ICQ was a new cool thing amongst my schoolmates, I paid no attention to it. One of my friends who tried to rope me into the trend even opened an account for me. I never used it nor ever logged onto the ICQ platform. Chatting online was just weird to me with my very traditional way of communication. To be fair, I didn’t really care about online chatting. I preferred one-to-one personal interactions, I still do to this very day. When MSN messenger took over, and I somehow ‘had to’ use it to talk online with ‘friends’, as they called it on MSN. I have a sense that some of my chatmates there took it as a replacement of things they cannot verbally communicate to the intended person, so typing it makes it less of a burden… . I didn’t end up being friends with anyone of them in real life, and if they are still considered friends, then they are some really distance friends from a brief moment of time in my life.

    Before I learned any online etiquette in the late 90s early 2000s, I defriended almost every one of my classmates after we were no longer in the same classes, because, well, I didn’t feel there was a need to keep them on the list. To be honest, I didn’t think we will be crossing path again after school was over, and to this day, we didn’t. I was brutally honest with my feeling and type exactly how I feel and what I have to say, even if that meant I would hurt the recipient’s feeling. Now thinking in reflection, I guess it was not necessary to defriend people, I could have just closed the account for good without doing anything. Ah well, what did I know about the internet back then?

    For someone who seems to be misunderstood every time I open my mouth, I became very quiet for a period after the MSN trauma. For months I didn’t talk, even now I feel like I have lost something in my speech. I probably have developed a mild form of PTSD from those experiences. That was a period between my high-school and university years, and it was just about 20 years ago.

  • Moving In

    The joy of moving into a new space is the opportunity to start things fresh.
    A new empty space that will eventually filled with one’s own personality, interest, and love.
    A personal space is the sanctuary for self-exploration.
    A place to reflect when one is lost.
    A place to rediscovery the self when the path ahead is blocked.

    Perhaps this is going to be a place of therapy for myself. Perhaps this will be a place to share my many hobbies, short stories and arts. Perhaps the stories I will be sharing are actually very common in the drama of everyday life. I hope to fill up my new empty room with new adventures and discoveries, while decluttering the old and unnecessary thought and feelings.

    I drew the above image in 3ds max and rendered in V-ray. All done by hand in the computer without the aid of GenAI.

    As an artist, I have a lot to say about GenAI, and I am absolutely against it when it comes to drawing pictures, but that’s the topic for another time.

  • New Journal. 2026

    Testing Testing.
    This is probably my 5th attempt at keeping an online journal in the last 25 years. I didn’t keep any of the previous blogs alive with all the platform changes and different php versions. Let’s clear the slate and start anew again this year!

    Still setting up this new home… So next post will probably be the official moved in entry. The above image was done in 2010 for the journal back then.

    Happy New Year!