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I’m Afraid To Let Go
I’m Afraid To Let Go
One day you will see
How you were so focused
On self-soothing
On finding your comfort alone
You forget that you ignored
A man who loved you
For a game
So trivial
You may lose interest in the next month
For you, it’s a question of winning
Of being right or wrong
But for me
It’s a question of love
I wonder
If I have so little self-respect
To spend so much time
Money
Effort
To cheer you up
Just for you to go back to the game
And put me second
Or perhaps this is what love is
And I should keep believing
That you just need
More time
To see
That you can let yourself
Need me
Sova Fanart 1: Class Unit 1 Day 1
UNIT ONE: Sova Model Studies | Day 1 – Portrait
Since this unit was all about model studies, I went into a custom game and used the model as a reference for drawing sova portraits.

I started with this side view of Sova.

Then I did colors:

New rough sketch of Sova:

Followed by a more refined outline:

Then by a painting attempt:

Something wasn’t clicking. I still didn’t like the painting job. I decided to try again and learn from another tutorial on shading.
I tried to color again.

This time I felt something clicked with using large soft brushes and the lasso tool. I used the soft brushes to create nice gradients and the lasso tool for the clean edges. Looking closely at the painter I see that he also uses the smudge tool a lot.
New Coaching Instagram Page
I had a really rough day today. I woke up at 4:30 AM in order to get to the airport and fly to Houston. Coming back I hit so much traffic, my uber took almost 2 hours and I was late for my flight by 2 minutes. Luckily, there was no one in line for security, I blazed through, ran to the gate and somehow they hadn’t departed yet.
While I was in the car for 2 hours seeing the time tick down and knowing that I was probably going to miss my flight, probably get on the next one, be stuck in the airport for another two hours, and get home at around 10 PM, I tried to make the best of my bad situation. I thought about my Instagram page for coaching, specifically posts and videos.
I had some ideas for the posts, having a dark gray background with a simple serif font. Also, I was thinking about doing some digital painting for my posts.
The videos were a little bit harder.
I stopped making the reminder videos because I felt so stuck and frustrated with them and I wanted to use connection theory to come up with some solutions.
I think there are a bunch of steps in the video-making process: shooting, editing, and final polish. Each has its own challenges and solutions that came to me.
Shooting
This is hard because I felt a lot of anxiety and overthinking about saying the right thing, and coming off as clear and interesting. Using connection theory, I felt that what I needed is to focus less on the words that I am saying and focus more on evoking feelings through my delivery (my voice and my expressions). They say when someone is talking, verbal queues (literally what they are saying) is only 10% of communication and non-verbals (your tone of voice, inflection, facial expressions) account for 90%. I want to really focus next time not on what I say, but how I say it. Also, I want to try spending something feeling into the reminder and shooting broll that evokes it in a non-verbal way. In general, I want to focus on non-verbals more.
Editing
This is hard because there is a lot of overwhelming decisions that I face at this stage. I am conflicted with staying true to what I originally shot vs any new visions on how to convey my thoughts. I feel often that I avoid emotions or lose touch of emotions just looking at the transcript without hearing the delivery and when I hear the delivery I am conflicted on what to cut out or change. I often feel the original work is no longer recognizable afterwards. I feeling into connection theory, I felt that fear dominated my ability to think, feel, and be creative and I’m thinking about using the law of contradictory intentions by “trying” to be unclear, trying to make no sense.
Final Polish
I didn’t think about this too much because it isn’t really a challenge except for maybe logistically (takes a long time). i was thinking about using the syllabus method, or batch a bunch of videos for the weekend to finalize and publish.
A quick silly example of what this might look like:
- Reminder: Today’s reminder is to eat chocolate
- Shooting: Focus on how to deliver the words. “Chocolate…mmmm. We want to crunch it!” Shoot broll of breaking chocolate. Of inhaling the chocolate smell.
- Editing: Try to make it a bad video.
- Editing: Try to find a song that doesn’t fit.
- Polish: Add it to a queue with instructions on what needs to be done to finish it off.
Workpost 35: Naps
I feel tired.
My body buzzing with pain in my stomach.
My eyes are sluggish.
Last night, I went to bed at 11, but fell asleep after 1AM.
I feel totally drained.
Maybe its time to go back to bed for a little.
So I wrote that at 8 in the morning. I just took a nap after cooking for the entire morning with delicious tea eggs and soup. Then I spent a few hours napping and now I feel much better.
I really think my productivity is so much worse when my health is worse.
More napping, meditation, and exercise in the future! Napping if I’m sleep deprived, meditation and exercise if I’m not.
Today, the aim I want to focus on is content creation. I want to finish my post, and workout and meditate for the rest of the day.
Fitness Challenge 4: The Evolution of the Challenge
It’s been officially four months since I posted about this challenge, so I think it is safe to say that this challenge is over…well not over per se, but evolved.
So what happened? First, I got very sick on the tail end of the fitness challenge. It was the sickest I’ve been in years and I lost a lot of weight.
Second, I have split this challenge into about 3 other challenges, two that I am tracking and one that I didn’t track but sort of is successfully completed.
Those challenges are:
- The posture challenge. I literally came up with my own posture exercises inspired by some of the most common and popular posture exercises and I’ve literally done it. My posture is much much better than it was before and I continue to improve it every day. What is the best part? I now can tell and feel uncomfortable when in a bad posture. I didn’t document anything and may never do so.
- The bedtime challenge. This is a version of a sleep challenge. My latest attempt involves ignoring the whole sleep side of it. Ignoring falling asleep, ignoring getting enough hours, or even habits of turning off electronics. I’m going to make it simple for myself. In the next 66 days (Dec 12, 2023) I will go to bed by 11 pm every night.
- The jiujitsu challenge. This challenge was a couple of things but I haven’t completely formed my goals around it so clearly yet. The main ideas I have right now are: getting comfortable and confident in moving and utilizing my body to defend myself, getting stronger and more fit, and mastering a lot of jiujitsu techniques.
So, it is a bye for now on this challenge, but there might be some future retrospective posts analyzing some of the biometric data I gleaned from this challenge.