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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
daydreamer's footnotes 