Familiarity brings comfort, including holiday meals.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/185309443/JoyRestaurantNov232023
November 24, 2023
Thanksgiving dinner sketch
November 19, 2023
Closed streets
Due to the APEC summit, the streets around SoMA were closed and it was quite interesting to see all these empty streets that were usually full of cars and people.
Later I heard that Xi Jinping was living in St Regis even though I did not walk towards that direction.
I wonder where leaders from other nations stayed and how the arrangements were decided.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/yxkC4LHXfTDEU9Va6
https://photos.app.goo.gl/L9MK5YFjjPncmjZe7
November 7, 2023
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
November 5, 2023
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
November 4, 2023
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.
October 25, 2023
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?
October 9, 2023
Katalin Kariko on perseverance
Very inspirational story on how to deal with setbacks (focus on what is next and do not hold grudge).
Comparatively I have had a much easier career.
October 8, 2023
Squashes
Inspired by some squash arrangements I saw in a company cafeteria, I realized that I could draw a few individual squashes and rearrange them later for different compositions.
Cafe Zoe
Visited this local cafe for a photography exhibition and drew some patrons sitting outside afterwards.