A small island, squeezed between two big powers, has only a very narrow path to navigate, and requires high political skills to do so.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/184406335/UnicycleTWCNUS
2023-11-12
2023-11-07
Stuck in traffic
I tried to take bus 281 from Palo Alto transit center to SJC18 and the bus got stuck in traffic on university avenue near highway-101 for more than an hour. (It took me about 40 minutes to walk the same trip.) I got a chance to draw a painful facial expression of one of the passengers.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/159829079/FingerPortraits/modules/1040399645
2023-11-05
Restless dreams
When waking up around 5:36 am this morning, my Fitbit tracker gave me a sleep score of 49 (out of 100) which is much lower than the usual 70+ scores I received.
My brain felt fine despite a bit “dry” (not moving as fluidly as it used to which I attributed to the time switch), but the tracker might have a point given that I could recall having a lot of vivid dreams from earlier this morning.
In the dreams I first encountered a bunch of intruders in my home. I told them that I am going to “incapacitate” them one by one, but before any excitement could happen my dream switched to the realization that I have a bunch of unfinished blog posts (which I guess is a metaphor of all these pending tasks awaiting me) about a city monk, altruism and selfishness, personal finance, french fries and mussels, which I plan to expand into real blog posts later.
Later in the night I created a visualization of my dreams by Adobe Fresco and Photoshop, iterating between manual drawings and generative fill so that I can have some control of the content without having to draw everything by hand.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/183897605/DreamsNov52023
2023-11-04
Restaurant tricks
Ever since the end of the pandemic, I have been avoiding eating in or ordering from restaurants due to the increased cost-to-quality ratios, which could turn off other customers as some restaurants might have realized and thus started to pull off different tricks.
One is to offer reasonable prices on the menu, but during ordering the waiters would recommend higher margin add-on items when the customers are less likely to check the prices.
A recent example I saw is a large bowl of steamed mussels (22 USD) with a “recommended” set of french fries that turned out to cost 9 USD.
A frivolous drawing of a serious topic
[The title of this post is suggested by GitHub co-pilot, and I decided to keep it for fun. A more suitable title would be “spot the difference, by generative fill”.]
Seeing the original photo under https://www.famsf.org/stories/whos-that-lady-tudor-portrait gave me ideas about changing some of the objects for fun, and later I realized that this can be an exercise of applying Photoshop generative fill to create a “spotting the difference” game.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/183818983/SpotTheDifferenceByGenerativeFill
The file is under https://photoshop.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:d22a5ee5-42b8-49dd-8af7-110256990e77 in case you want to see the detailed editing prompts and region masks.
2023-10-29
Spider web 3D drawing
Spiders are fascinating creatures that can weave intricate webs much bigger than themselves.
https://youtu.be/FnZuASFz-0c
2023-10-25
He either reads fast enough or pees slow enough
Seeing some people peeking into their phones while doing other stuff, I always wonder if the small screen is really more interesting than the big world around us?
How to deal with “failed” experiments
If you feel frustrated with experiments that did not turn out as expected, you are not alone.
History is full of innovators going through repetitive failures before major breakthroughs.
The notion of failure is relative; each experiment likely contains some sort of success or lessons that can be learned.
Documenting these (in your paper draft or experiment log) can add a sense of what you have achieved so far, and how to plan future tasks.
If you are really exhausted, switch to do something else (e.g., another project) or just take a break, and see if that could bring a fresh perspective into your work.
2023-10-24
Sketching with finger instead of stylus
The ease with finger sketching over a smart phone made me realize maybe I should try to do this on a tablet as well; maybe my hands are inherently not all that stable holding a stylus.