Hi everyone! I hope your year has started well!
The first quarter of 2023 has reached its midpoint, so it’s time for a new post – although this time, it’s with a minor announcement: namely, the fact that I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and rename these updates from Currently on art to Currently on my art. A bit wordier but I figured that a bit more specificity would probably be nice.
With that aside, what has been up? Well, kind of not much. My hopefully final semester has started and the process for my Master’s thesis is finally getting some speed after a bit of a late start. I’m currently writing up a plan for how I’m going to conduct my research for it. In other news, against my expectations, two happenstances have occurred this month: I took part in the Global Game Jam via Finnish Game Jam (the resulting game is functional despite setbacks like one of the team’s programmer’s laptops not being able to run Unity properly but so blursed I’m not planning on adding it to my portfolio) and, more recently, I became the technical mentor for the software project course I took part in last spring semester. How did either of those happen? Well, the FGJ got advertised to me through a game course that was still in progress from last July as something that could be used to get a credit for the course, so I jumped at the chance to do it. As for the job, there was still need for a mentor and I was the best candidate available despite my rusted skills at the technologies used in the project that was missing a mentor thanks to the skills and knowledge I’d gotten from the course. Since it’s just a few hours a week and I have very little left as far as courses go (in addition to my thesis, of course), I thought to myself that I’d be stupid to decline, so I said yes. Am I nervous about it all? Yes. Have I been overthinking things? Yes. Am I going to do my best to refresh my skills and be of assistance? Also yes.
As for seeking out programming jobs, there hasn’t been any success yet due to massive competition. I’m not planning on letting the accumulating rejections discourage me, though. If anything, I’m starting to feel something like more stubborn about my searches. If that feeling had a tagline, it would be, “I will get a job from someplace at some point, dammit!” So, no giving up. If worst comes to worst and I don’t have a job by the time I graduate, I’ll just have to improve my portfolio and keep searching.
What about my projects? Well, their progress has ranged from weak to excellent; Navigator’s Glove is continuing at a rapid speed while my other projects have been slower; Greenfield in particular has reached another rough spot, so editing it has been left on the backburner. I’m considering limiting/allocating working on it to one day a week like I do with The Fate’s Way with hopes that it’d allow me to keep a steadier pace with it.
Now that that’s done with, let’s see how things are going with my projects, as per my project widget:
- The Fate’s Way: Chapter 76 is in editing. I still need to redraw the regular Alyssa and also Alyssa’s friends and family and the other important people, like Matti, someday. I revised one chapter and more revisions should be coming soon.
- Off-DA projects: Nothing notable here.
- Greenfield: Editing has been stop-go, but it’s progressing. I’m currently working on editing chapter 5. Read more about the project here.
- Lyokostar: The second part of story 7 is waiting for betareading. This story is in need of massive reworking, so it’s going to take a long time to finish. References need to be done.
- A Wandering Aura: I haven’t done anything for this in ages. With how badly I’ve fallen off the Pokémon bandwagon, I’m considering just pulling the trigger and putting it on a hiatus.
- Navigator’s Glove: I’m working on what’s nominally chapter 54 but is probably chapter 56. Once I’m done with the ongoing (very turbulent) story arc, I’ll look through the “chapter 54” and see how many pieces I should split it into. It could be something like 5 or 6 or it could be 11 or something in between. We’ll see. Anyways, over 75k new words have been written during this quarter.
- Gaming: Habitica, Pokémon GO and Pokémon Masters EX keep on going, although Pokémon Go only rarely nowadays. I also played Persona 5 Royal at the beginning of the year and completed Persona 5 Strikers. I’ve also gotten back to Dr Kawashima’s Devilish Brain Training.
- Other stuff: I’ve worked on my FFM 2022 collection somewhat. I haven’t read much else than a book for one of my last courses and fanfics. I still haven’t gotten started with IDW’s Transformers comics and at this point I might just postpone them to tackle some other stuff I want to read since the ones that I’m missing are no longer available digitally as far as I can see.
- Personal life: It’s been part uneventful and part eventful, what with coursework being steady, my master’s thesis getting started, a game jam and suddenly getting a part-time job at the university.
That’s all for this short update. Thanks for reading and take care!
WindySilver 