Mupdate

Mupdate = a portmanteau of “me” and “update.” Mupdates!

Welp, I’m late haha.

But I have good excuses this time!

First was a work trip I took to Texas where I was busy from 7:30am for breakfast, then meetings from 8am until 6pm, then dinner with coworkers from 7pm to 9pm.

The best part was all the free food, but there was no time for me to do anything besides catch some sleep. I’ve been calling it Company Con because it was basically a convention for the company. We even had panels with customers rather than like… presenters. That was interesting.

But I came back with microbes. Company Con gave me a horrendous cold (not COVID! I tested negative). Which manifested slowly over the course of the last two weeks.

It brewed inside as I went directly into hurricane prep for Milton after getting off the plane (I came home Oct. 4th). I’ve also been getting my bathrooms redone with the help of a plumber my dad put me in touch with. So, I was balancing bathroom things along with hurricane prep.

Pictures of the bathrooms will be forthcoming in next month’s newsletter!

But yeah… The rain before the hurricane dug a trench in my backyard.

I started to worry about everything washing away, since the trench was already pretty deep and the hurricane hadn’t even started yet. So, I did what I could to get the trench ready for flooding rain. Basically, I just filled it with 13 bags of rocks and tried to redirect the water flow. My roommate assisted by helping me pour the rocks into the hole.

7 bags of river stones and 8 bags of compost is a lot of weight and my poor car was sitting real low!

First layer of rocks and squishing down the edges.

Then another layer and attempts to redirect the water when the first method had issues.

And here’s how it looked after the storm passed.

It sucked trying to get supplies for it while everyone descended upon Home Depot and Lowe’s like vultures. Topsoil and sandbags were gone by the time my plane landed back from Company Con, so I was completely out of luck when I went prep-shopping on Oct. 7th. People were kind at least. Lots of people helped me lift bags of compost and rocks when they saw me struggling, haha.

I was also worried about my office flooding since it’s the only part of my house not above a crawlspace. There is a ditch in my back yard that got really full. Having just seen videos of the floods from the Carolinas, I was not willing to take any chances. So I made a flood barrier on the back door using bags of compost and a tarp.

My roommate put boards up on the house while I worked (my job is based in NY so we didn’t have hurricane prep or anything). By then I was pretty much out for the count. The hurricane hit on Oct. 9th.

The illness from Company Con crashed into me and I was miserable for like 4 days. Best time to suffer is when a hurricane flies over your house. There’s not much else you can do but sleep.

We weren’t badly affected thankfully. Didn’t even lose power. We had a bunch of branches blow down and lots of rain. My makeshift drain prep helped prevent more erosion I think, though now the issue with the back corner eroding is more serious than before. So that’s something to fix…

The ditch never overflowed crazily, though it got up to my fence line, which was scary! But that was the highest it rose.

Company Con happened the last week of September, and I didn’t write this before leaving. So… that’s why this newsletter is late!

But… back to September! I decided in the beginning of September to finally redo the bathrooms in my house. I’ve been working so much, and after losing all my files, I kind of needed something else to focus on.

Last year, I got a home equity loan that I squirreled away for emergencies (like my roof blowing off). All the stuff I’ve been reading has been making me feel like the world is on fire, and I thought “If I have to live through an apocalypse, I want to do it with decent bathrooms.”

Here are some plans and measurements I made…

So I talked to my dad (who is a plumber) who put me in touch with someone who was willing to help me redo both my upstairs guest and master bathrooms. His name is Louis, and he’s incredibly resourceful and such a hard worker, and young. He comes from Cuba and knows the plumbing trade well. Along with electricians and tile salespeople and more.

He’s been doing most everything. I picked the tile and the colors and design stuff with his suggestions (he knows what’s trendy and isn’t afraid to tell me if my ideas are old-fashioned lol).

I tried to help him with something once, and I couldn’t hold the thing still while he was trying to unscrew it. I said “Is it because I’m weak?” and he said, “….. yeah….”

At least he was honest!

But yes… that is still in progress. The hurricane set plans back a lot. So expect updates on that project next newsletter!

Focus Time!

Apsu’s Children Novella

Once more, no progress on this specifically. But I am doing some more research!

vTubing

Slowly coming back to this. I’ve started to poke some more at the outline for Season 1, and I’m working on an animated opener. I researched anime eye catches for inspiration, so I’m doing something similar. Super short and sweet!

I also started to edit some of the footage I’ve gathered. I’m putting together a video based on the bathroom redos, since I think it’s really interesting to see it come together. I didn’t do any of the construction work, but… I did match colors and styles!

I also really think that trades—like construction and plumbing and tile work and such—are more aligned with art than most people realize. Lots of modern art involves construction techniques. And I feel like people talk so much about architects, but not enough about the skilled people who build the things. There’s something awesome about a tradesperson who’s had 20+ years of skill in their work and can do it so quickly and efficiently.

But anyway… more to come on this!

Fundamentals of Lighting Schoolism Class

Started a new class this month!

Did my first assignment, which was basically a study of different digital painting and lighting processes. This was interesting to me because I’ve not thought much about my “process.” I just kinda take what I learned in my traditional art classes and apply it digitally. Which may not be efficient, but it works for the most part!

I’ve always thought that you can learn traditional art and whatever you learn will transfer into digital art. But not the other way around. Techniques learned in digital art are not nearly as transferable.

There’s something about the physical movements you practice in traditional art—how to control a pen for instance, vary line widths by using your muscles, or how to mix colors—that you just don’t get from doing purely digital art.

Traditional art also teaches you observational methods that may not be obvious if you only do digital art and use photo references.

So yeah… Here is my first assignment (I did not draw these, I just colored them):

Preoccupations

Mythology! Yaaay.

I saw that Audible had World Mythologies from the Great Courses available for free with the Audible subscription and so of course I grabbed it and listened to it. I’m not finished yet, but I was super interested in how mythology connects with all the stuff I talked about in my last preoccupation.

Like, myths are the earliest form of storytelling. From myth came science and philosophy and religion. Humans are hardwired to love stories, which is super interesting to me. It kinda means that storytelling is in our genes?

Like how a beaver knows instinctively how to build a dam, humans instinctively gravitate toward stories. And it can just be day-to-day stories, like how I bought this pair of shoes, or a funny thing my dog did.

Listening to a survey of world mythologies has been insightful. Some things have come out of it for me too:

• Writing can be used to eradicate unwanted oral traditions by twisting stories to match a (state/culture/moral) ‘approved’ narrative. Or only accepting certain stories and ignoring other ones.

• In cultures that do not have a history of formal writing (like Native American and African cultures), myths share common characters and themes, but shift to represent the people who tell the myth. The shifting nature of these stories is natural.

What was really interesting to me in particular was the idea that Chinese myth, because it has been written down by the scholarly elite for so long, has been essentially distilled. The fact that China does not have the kind of creation myths you see in other cultures (ancient ones, I mean, while there are ‘modern’ ones from, like, the 1500s) suggests that writing played a large role in the country. When you wrote things down in ancient cultures, it became permanent, and that permanence… well. Permeated.

Another interesting thing to me is that, the more myths are written down, the more male-centered they are, until you get to the more oral traditions of Africa and the Native Americans. Again, because writing is more permanent, and men had the ability to codify their myths far more easily than women, you see a lot of myths about conquering, ruling, winning wars, heroes, and less about more mundane things, like resolving conflicts, raising babies, or coexisting.

I’d be curious to research women-led mythologies to see how they compare to male-led myths. More stuff for the future!

Faretheewell

My newsletter has an archive! Yaaay! Like a little blog. So, if you liked any past issues, you can go back and check them out again.

And thus we come to the end of yet another scribbling.

See you end of October! Which is… sooner rather than later haha!