https://twitter.com/liyiwei/status/1471304341172539396
December 15, 2021
Alice Neel
Artists without formal academic training can sometimes create very unique and interesting styles.
I learned about Alice Neel from this podcast.
December 14, 2021
How to draw a f****** owl
This LinkedIn post reminded me of the talk I gave in SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 about how to make a SIGGRAPH paper.
That owl image came from here, resonating with my earlier phase of learning how to draw around that time, in addition for being a funny point of analogy for writing research papers.
Retrospect can sometimes feel like a time travel to reconnect with my past self.
My passion for SIGGRAPH peaked around 2011 to 2014, and I have been looking beyond that for interesting or important problems to work on.
December 13, 2021
The little cookie girl
The original story of the little match girl is sad, so here is a happier variation.
On a freezing New Year’s Eve a happy young girl, warm and well clothed, tries to sell cookies in the street. Afraid to go home because her father is pre-diabetic and will eat all the cookies that still remain at the end of the day, she huddles in the alley between two houses and eats cookies, one by one, to keep herself occupied.
In the sweetness of the cookies she sees a series of comforting visions: the warm iron stove, the lovely roast goose, the great glorious Christmas tree. Each vision disappears as a cookie was eaten. In the horizon she sees a shooting ambulance, which her late grandmother had told her means someone is on their way to hospital for heart attack. In munching the next cookie she sees her grandmother, the only person that also made cookies with her. To keep the vision of her grandmother alive as long as possible, the girl consumes the entire pack of cookies.
When the cookies are gone the girl is full to the throat, and she takes Uber to carry her home. The next morning, the father finds the girl sleeping on her bed with a smile on her face, and expresses joy. He does not know about the wonderful visions she had seen, or how happy she is with all the cookies in her belly.
Featured on the Fresco gallery
Today I received a notification about my fifth and my first motion graphics featured on the Fresco gallery (the top left one at this moment). I am not sure how they picked these and that is not my favorite one but I guess that is how things work in the world (like paper reviews don’t tend to match my predictions).
Later, I asked Oscar the head curator who referred me to this medium post and this Behance blog about their curation process.
December 8, 2021
Happy gardening
The mood of this motion graphics was inspired by this even though I decided not add the sound track in the end.
December 5, 2021
GitHub server maintenance
While chasing down a mysterious bug on a Sunday morning I realized that our “GitHub Enterprise administrators are performing scheduled maintenance”, so I went out later in the day feeling better work-life balance.
Thank you Todd! 🙂
December 4, 2021
Manhole
I have seen a few cases that when the weather was cold in San Francisco, street folks stationed their bodies on top of manhole covers for warmth.
December 1, 2021
Sinkhole tasks
Certain activities tend to drag me in and hard to get out, such as debugging and prototyping. To avoid crowding out other tasks, I try to schedule these sinkholes later in the day and start with these that I might skip over.
This is an orthogonal dimension with respect to the importance x urgency matrix.