My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
These are the inks of the last two panels on page 4 of my manga book. That’s the set-up of the story – the rest is basically an exploration of the painting and it’s subject. Stay tuned – it’s quite fascinating!
These are the inks of the first two panels on the fourth page of my comic book. At the scripting stage, I had most fun around this point in the storyline. By this time, I already had a pretty good idea of what the characters would look like and how they would talk, but I didn’t yet get into the thick of the fluids and the math, which are the proverbial vegetables hidden in the smoothie of a detective story. So stay tuned for more updates – hopefully they will be somewhat educational, as well as entertaining.
These are the last three panels of the third page in my comic book. This is the inking stage, and I am planning to add colours eventually.
As you can see, it’s a crime story. But it is related to fluid mechanics – the connection will be revealed later.
This is the ink of the last panel on page 2. It’s the first time all four characters appear in the same frame. I thought it would be a good time to use a kind of “the knights of the round table” perspective to show them as a group.
These are the rest of the supporting characters in my short fluids-related crime story. I enjoyed developing them and making concept drawings early on. However, simplifying those for this inking stage, so that the characters would hopefully be recognizable and easy enough to draw multiple times from various angles was not trivial. In fact, I had to come back to these panels and tweak them quite a bit as I progressed further into the book.
Here is the ink of the first panel on the second page of my fluids comic book. The second page was easier to conceptualize than the first one, since it was a straightforward introduction of the supporting characters. Among them, I had a clearest vision of this one, Trevis, and as a consequence, he changed the least from the initial character design stage.
This is the ink of the last two panels on the first page of my fluids comic book. The first closeup of one of the main characters required quite a bit of thinking through in order to simplify the original character design. Professionals like Victoria Ying say that by the end of the inking process one becomes very good at drawing the main characters, because they appear so often. I am certainly looking forward to that, but in the meantime, I was quite glad to simply finish the first page.
Here is the ink of the third panel of my fluids comic book. When I was laying out this panel, I made a decision to use a 3D model for the backgrounds, and now that I am several pages into inking, I am certainly glad that I did so. Considering that the story takes place in the same room full of small details, maintaining consistency of the set without the ability to simply re-position the camera would have been impossible.
Fiction:
I’ve been postponing reading Asimov’s books, and this one demonstrated that I was wrong. It is a classic for a reason. Amazing prose and very cool characters.
Non-fiction:
It’s interesting to listen to a personal opinion on the nature and meaning of life of a historian and philosopher written at the end of his long life, spent documenting experiences of other people. It is also curios that the manuscript of this book was actually lost and published only after Durant’s death. Also amazing how demonstrably misled even such educated and academically-minded person could be about topics that are only marginally beyond his field of study. I suppose, it’s an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
I liked the idea of interconnectedness of the psychological balance and physical wellness. One example that I particularly liked was on the undeniable effectiveness of placebo (as well as its opposite, the nocebo) in various medical trials. This book has about the maximum amount of woo-woo that I can tolerate without immediately becoming too skeptical to continue listening. What also helps is that the author has a traditional scientific background, which add certain structure to the presentation of the ideas.
I was a bit skeptical about this book because of a somewhat cheesy title, but I was pleasantly surprised. It is largely about the nature of self-sabotage and ways of avoiding it. One message that resonated particularly well was the necessity to normalize the new psychological state, e.g., feeling happy, in order to shift the baseline towards it. I will certainly consider Weist’s follow-up books as future reads.
I came across referenced to this book before, but this is the first time I listened to the entire thing. It was reviewed in the “Perpetual Chess” podcast that I sometimes listen to while walking the dog. It’s a very structured, for a popular science book, overview of study and teaching methodologies. The main takeaways for me were that Spacing and interleaving of practice constitute desirable difficulties. Also, tat generative self-quizzing is more effective than multiple-choice type or re-reading of the material.
I heard about this autobiography any time in the podcasts that I follow, most notably “The Tim Ferris Show”, but finally I decided to listen to it. It’s an excellent book indeed. Very entertaining, insightful and inspiring. It is also another example of the benefit of the audio format, where the author and the reader is the same person. It also helps that he is a good actor.
Some thoughts about the conventional concept of a career, and how outdate it is in the modern world. There is an attempt to hammer in this point with some statistics, but the rigor of the statistical analysis is a bit suspect, and I think the point is clear enough without all the surrounding fuss. The stories are entertaining, but there author is trying a bit too hard to deliver the point that diversity is paramount when considering the variety of jobs and occupations in the modern world.
Well, Brianna Weist has certainly been the author of the year for me. I re-listened to “The Mountain is You” and liked this book too. It is clearly a compilation of blog posts, which is actually quite inspiring.
My app shows that finished listening to this book to the end, but at the time of this writing, I have no recollection of what I learned from it. I should definitely be more diligent with taking notes, but it probably says something about the book too.
This is excellent. I found this summary of thoughts about the creative process very relatable, despite the author’s background in music production, which is quite foreign to me.
I remember that I enjoyed it, although struggle to recall what specifically I learned.
That was a very nice read (listen). I enjoyed the overview of the author’s personal journey to “amateur buddhism”. It inspired me to read a couple more books on Buddhism immediately afterwards.
The author was featured i “10% Happier” as Dan Harris’ mentor/teacher, so I decided to take a look (listen) at his work. It was quite nice. My favourite part is the anecdote about locking the keys in the car immediately after a mindfullness retreat and being Ok with it.
This is another reference from “10% Happier”. For what it worth, my app shows that I abandoned it at 52%.
A cool concept, but the author’s tangents about how amazing and non-conformist he is detracts from the experience quite a bit. If anything, it indirectly confirms the idea of the inherent value of formal education.
A biography of Napoleon. One of my favourite books this year.
I’ve been listening to an audiobook called “Make It Stick” by Peter C. Brown et al. In the past, I’ve come across to references to this work on educational methodologies and underlying psychological principles in my work as a university professor. I even recorded a video note to my students on the so-called curve of forgetting (see below). This time, I stumbled upon a review of this book in the “Perpetual Chess” podcast and decided to listen to the entire thing. It certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of the academic soundness of the presented ideas and a good mix of psychological principles and practical takeaways. As I listen to it, I am constantly tempted to ask my daughter to listen to some parts that relate to study skills in the hopes that she would be able to use these techniques for herself. I actually did so the other day and, in the spirit of what is argued in the book, even asked her to summarize what she learned in her own words. I probably used up quite a bit of my parenting credit with her, as she obliged. I am not sure if that was in any way productive, but for what it’s worth, here is my own summary of that part (advice for students) that we listened to together:
One thing I noticed as a result of this exercise is that my “spaced repetition” video needs a footnote that it is not re-reading of the material that is beneficial, but self-quizzing of it.