Now @ 2024-06

It’s already past 50% of 2024. Crazy.

It’s been last month of notice period, here in Airasia — my last day here is 19th July. But because of the 3-months notice period, work has been quite business-as-usual haha. But I’ve just had two close colleagues have their last day last Friday, so I’m getting a pre-taste.

I’m particularly grateful for all the advice that colleagues have given me during this switching-job transition process. And all the people calling us to go out for final meals. “In their last moments, people show you who they really are” — so quoted from a person of questionable morals. But yeah, really evaluating all of our working relationship, everyone on such good terms, even through my mistakes and shortcomings. It’s cool and humbling.

Also a month of processing personal things. Using darker marker shades to define the contours of messy pencil sketches. It’s not the highest of months. But I’m confident and happy because this journey is good for me, even if I’m just at this stage now.

In the story realm, I’ve started playing around with Tahoma2D - Free 2D & stop motion animation software. I have this song I really liked (musically and narratively) that I found vividly dramatic in imagery, and I wanted to externalise this really cool and effective story. The vamp had a weird choice of words at first, but when it all clicked, I thought, I needed to get this onto an easel.

I’ve realised long essays and full screenplays/beat-sheets are easy to author, but difficult to consume. I could write a thousand long pieces, but the barrier of entry and commitment is too high for casual viewers. 3-minute sketches with pre-existing/simple audio was definitely doable. But for full stories that are much longer, I can’t sketch everything. Still want to point them to the complete story, because as good as your favourite scene is, it’s 10x more meaningful in the greater context of the whole story.

I don’t know how to draw. Send help. I’ve been watching tutorials lol. I’ve been watching animatics, that use creative angles and composition. I don’t think I’ll ever go fully into drawing, but just basic sketching, storyboarding — even just thumbnailing bridges a huge gap. I think this would really expand my toolbox and improve my craft.

And obviously, this page is new! I’ve re-designed a (new) system to export my Obsidian notes (as tracked by git + GitHub), filter and extract out the notes marked as “public”, and then consume them prettily on this page. I’ve written out a brief overview in the README of the repo at chuangcaleb.com#obsidian-notes · GitHub. This was to fully lean into Astro’s Content Collections, and all the weird inter-operatability quirks. Went through multiple revisions.

But now I’ve got a Digital Garden | Chuang Caleb! I long wanted to migrate my long-form writings from the old whatsthestoryabout Jekyll page. Now I can confidently sunset that page (3.5 years old and not representative of my current skills — really, Bootstrap and dark mode flickers?) and point people to chuangcaleb.com!

I’m looking forward to July. I’ll be starting a new job! Gotta figure out travel and new daily routines and new people. Scary, only because unknown. Otherwise, quite exciting. And then also wrapping up my chapter here in Airasia.

I’ll be busy working on a filter-group system on chuangcaleb/powerkids-telegram-bot · GitHub. I’ll be quite tied up with getting into new job/life routine.

One of my best friends is coming back from a 6-months long mission trip! I’ve also got a lot of friends meetups, planned and not-yet-initiated. Lots of changes!

I’ll probably limit the next months’ logs to 3 paragraphs. Hard word limit. Rough highlights only. I can yap so much lol.

🎵 My song on repeat for the past month: Light Leaks - Beach Chapel