Depicting the (often very vivid) dreams I have is one way to hone creative processes and measure the advances of related technologies.
This is a dream that I had on May 2 2025 during which I saw my baby niece happily and agilely climbing the kitchen cabinet to get some snacks.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DJhZH91PWwB/
While waiting for the train I saw some workers painting an area of the platform with bright green color, which looked fresh, vibrant, and cheerful.
Unlike more complicated paintings that we might be self-conscious about quality, a simple rectangular region provides less room for worries.
I came back to the same spot 2 days later and found the painted areas marking spots for bike boarding, which should be helpful to let the passengers know where the bike trains will stop.
A few days ago I noticed a dead rodent flattened on the driveway, so decomposed that it is hard to tell whether it is a rat, a mouse, a gopher, a mole, a vole, or something else.
I transferred the dead body to the compost bin via a pair of tree branches.
Today, after the garbage was collected, I found the dead body still stuck to the bottom of the bin. So I picked it up (via the same pair of tree branches), stuffed it inside a gopher hole nearby, and covered the hole with the surrounding soil.
Instead of driving, I experimented with taking MUNI bus 28 to the de Young Museum from the Daly City BART station. The stop was right north of the Golden Gate Park entrance, and I can walk through the Rose Garden on the way to the museum. The bus has a pretty frequent service (every 12 to 15 minutes, not too bad relative to the bay area public transport standards), wasn’t much slower than driving by my own along the (usually jammed) 19th avenue, and I could take time sighting the street and observing the fellow passengers. The bus was quite bumpy though, but fortunately I was well conditioned from riding the mini-buses in Hong Kong.
There is another MUNI line 44 that can lead directly to the museum, which I plan to try next time.
My dad likes to make witful observations about international relations (one of his college majors). He made another one during our conversation this afternoon, which formed a very concrete picture in my mind.
I would like to visualize it with high quality and low latency, so I found a drawing that fits my mental structure with a quick web search, generatively expanded it via Photoshop, used it as reference for Adobe Firefly text-to-image generation, generatively replaced the top of the well in Photoshop, and finally added a decal over the frog’s back via Adobe Fresco.
This whole process took a significantly shorter amount of time than if I were to manually draw the whole thing.
I guess one distinction between a communicator and an artist (or a communicator mode versus an artist mode that could be switched within every individual depending on the needs and situations) is that the former has a pretty precise goal in mind and aims to complete the task as efficiently as possible, while the latter often starts without a clear goal and then gradually reaches the outcome via an iterative exploration process.
Reviewing/handling 20 papers plus attending an intense multi-day program committee meeting is probably a lot of work for some people, but nowadays it is almost like a break to me – reading papers in topics that I might not usually pay attention to, participating in a gathering of about 100 people (like a small conference) to catch up with old friends and get to know new faces, consuming more sweets in 3 days than I would normally do in a year, and temporarily stepping away from my usual product/leadership responsibilities.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/222673301/Your-SIN-is-required-to-claim-any-tax-refund-?
This imagined story came to my mind while looking at a house-like structure built over an ocean in this exhibition on March 16 2025.
The following is the imagined story, accompanied by visuals generated from Reve, a new AI-powered image generation tool built by two former Adobe colleagues.
When I woke up I found myself in this dwelling.
There is nothing inside, and from the two open ends I could see endless blue sky and ocean.
A voice came out asking if I need anything.
I replied that I am thirsty and hungry.
I asked where I am and how I got here, but got no reply.
The food and drink came out of nowhere, and I slowly consumed them while contemplating my situation.
Eventually, I realized that my consumption came from the sacrifice of my loved one(s), who were drained slowly to death.
I haven’t figured out how to control the spread and mixing of watercolor painting (physically or digitally), and thus conducted this experiment to use clipping masks for regional control using a mushroom that I spotted in the neighborhood.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Vs3G2c5770I
Monday the 17th is a holiday and I was pondering whether I should start a work task that I aimed to finish by the end of the week or spend time on more exploratory research. I decided to go for the latter as I realized that during my usual workdays I often feel enough obligation towards my collaborators for the former and I am the only one who can push myself for the latter.
My decision turned out to be correct for this particular one, as on Monday I had some fun tinkering with \href{https://glicol.org/}{computer music language} (that I have zero background with) and on Tuesday I immediately hit on issues that required responses from my colleagues upon starting the work task.
And I also spent some time doing some silly doodling:
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