In this SundayLeonieUpdate:

• Animal Crossing newbie ramble
• Toning down on the rambling about huge topics where I can
• Patron-only sketchbook thoughts
• Personal update & Interesting Finds
• Kirby photos!

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The isolated hermit artist plays her first Animal Crossing game! 🏖️🏝️

Mutual friends, please play with me sometime!

*Let me know who you are* and add me! If you are a mutual friend, ask, let me know if you’re adding my Switch code and how I should best privately message you (probably twitter, email or discord/slack because I don’t do messenger/facebook) for AC multiplayer friend coordination with this game and to help each other out with stuff. Yes let me know even if we’re switch friends already so I know if it’s okay if we play and talk about it 💙

Also if I don’t add you back and I don’t know you comfortably well, please don’t be offended or pressure me to! Maybe another time! Thanks for understanding and have fun with the game all the same!

I only have a few friends who are keen but I don’t want to heavily depend and annoy them. So I’m not expecting too much but it doesn’t hurt to ask! Almost all of my friends have closer friends and loved ones more than myself too. I’m probably going to play most things solo because I’m going to be super nitpicky with my own island, at least during the initial stages ;D I have been educated by buddies that it’s not absolutely necessary to play with others. It’s nice to trade rare things though :0

So if all else fails, I’ll just have digital Animal Crossing characters as my friends. And see if I can do multiplayer things with my brother and if I’m lucky, a few other buddies?? That’s what this game seems to be for, to escape from some of the sad, lonely feelings and enjoy a relaxing, cute game :’) Especially since I’m a super hermit for most of my life.

Yes I agree that Animal Crossing is not a therapist. It does not serve to solve people’s mental health problems so I do get concerned when people believe that this game will solve all their real life problems, depression, anxiety and trauma. But what do I know, I haven’t played AC before so I don’t really have any strong emotional attachments or obsession, at least not yet.

I might avoid my twitter feed more so I can minimise too many gameplay spoilers since I’m coming into this blind. Especially with all the depressing things going on :<

Keen to play to finally see for myself what’s the hubbub!

I was trying to finish Picross Season 3 before Animal Crossing comes out but I give up; I won’t stress myself to finish it. I got Murder By Numbers too but I’ll wait until Picross is done since they’re both Picross games <3

Also stressing out a bit with what to call my own island 🙁 Limited to 10 characters too! I’m stumped on names! 😭 Then I came across this cool Island name generator by gravesounds!! Support their work and share it among your friends!

Thanks to this generator, it jogged my creative brain. I don’t like any of the names enough to use them though. And then I came up with my sappy island name that meant more to me. But I’ll tell you another time after I’ve named it for sure ;D

Anyhoo, I’m looking forward to playing and hiding away from the world more ;D

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Personal Update time! Toning down on rambling about huge topics!

So I’ve decided to focus as much as I can with art and tone down on the reflective, time consuming rambles where I can help myself. I’ll make dot point updates. Step back and not talk and dwell on my doubts and insecurities and embrace the present for now. I need to stop getting carried away writing out long personal essays, especially when I’m out of huge topics to talk about! Sometimes life doesn’t have anything special or thought provoking going on too.

When I have things to ramble about, I’ll do so! I won’t pressure myself to come up with topics every week when I’m already trying to put out art regularly and building habit and momentum. I’m just giving myself permission here to not juggle with too many things and making my standards so high with each post I make :’) I don’t want perfectionism creeping upon me in these blog posts, making them too time consuming to do!

I need to focus on getting better at doing art. Less essay writing about topics. All the same I’ll keep posting here and reflecting of course!

As for the patron-only sketchbook posts

I’ve been throwing around ideas in the past month as I mentioned last week. I was been thinking of doing an audio or basic video version but after thinking about it for a while, maybe I’ll do it when it feels more worthwhile for my time and energy. It’s a patron-only monthly update about what I’ve studied so far, nothing substantial to actually make an audio video about it. It doesn’t seem worth it or interesting to me as I look at my draft post.

If I’m making videos and/or podcasts again *and* do them properly, I feel I will burn out from juggling everything :< Videos are best for art, teaching and vlogging but I’m not keen on spending hours on video editing and sound editing on a regular basis anymore. At best I can do short video timelapses if I feel like it? Still I don’t feel ready nor the demand to do this right now.

Podcasting is more of a relationship building tool (not really for money) but most people are drawn to them if there’s educational interviews or entertaining content involved – not life updates! And you have to do the work to get new people to listen. I’ll have to make it public too if I’m putting it on iTunes/etc. I even set up an account to do a podcast but I couldn’t go through with it and I noticed I kept procrastinating from talking on the mic. Even though I’m probably reading my blog posts aloud, it’s still a form of performing, I don’t really have the quiet environment to record without stress and it makes me nervous D: Maybe I’m making excuses right now, who knows. Maybe I’ll appear in someone else’s podcast since it’ll be a 1 to 1 conversation when I get invited instead ;P

For both formats, you have to do the work to draw people to listen to them, after consistently doing 40-100 episodes or something like that. It’s a commitment to build and carve your own community and to match production standards with others’ content. To put yourself out there that’s not just art. And the thing is, I want to focus more on art right now. I don’t think I’ll enjoy making videos and podcasts in the long run, seeing that I’ve done both. Oof :’)

I don’t feel like I’m at the stage where I can help others and others would be drawn to be helped by me (with art). As a failed former high school teacher, I’m not educator material :’) I’m more interested in learning to be better and expressing things through art.

After much deliberation, art and life updates are best for social media and/or blogging ;D I can see myself doing this as long as I can ;D I’ll consider doing random, rare videos or streams in the future one day? Gosh thanks for bearing with me as I think about all this! I do take a long while to consider options and figure out what’s best for me :’)

Update & Interesting Finds!

• Stumbled across a lot of Jo Koy’s comedy bits
  • here’s one of many I enjoyed about how to tell Asians apart. I went into a binge with his other videos :’)
• How to avoid Autism Burnout video
  • making lists and doing accounting with what drains your energy and what restores it! :0
  • I think sleep, watching videos/streams, eating, reading are things that restores my energy. Everything else varies in how they drain my energy :<
• Ori and the Will of the Wisps
  • watched all of the gameplay for this sequel and it’s pretty! I don’t get emotional from it though like the start of the first game *hides away*
  • It’s a pretty good game but it gets buggy here and there with a mechanic for a specific section and when the SFX suddenly gets silenced after many game overs :0. Maybe they’ll update the game to fix these.
  • also don’t play it if you don’t want to be emotionally manipulated with sad, depressing story bits like the first game
• I had to quit reading one of the original beautiful WebToons because I got turned off by the dark tragic themes in the story and I didn’t want to read about a vulnerable, tragic 19 year old girl romance story. I just lost interest :<
• I am keeping tabs on three other webcomics!
  • as a WebToons newbie, I was left confused and reread a section of a chapter/episode 3 times over because they used the fade as a flashback and proceeded into and out of the flashback like that. It doesn’t read that way for me! I was so confused with who these characters were and the flashbacks both had the same backgrounds and same characters :/ Nope not intuitive! Don’t do that!
• I’m so tired of seeing a lot of the few rare art job positions I see, and they ask for graphic design, animation, UI/GUI design, printing experience and the list keeps going. That’s not what illustrators do! 🙁
• Game industry crunch news continues:
  • first is CD Projekt Red crunching on doing Cyberpunk and how they’ll do a Witcher sequel right after
  • Then how Naughty Dog crunches, burning people out from this Kotaku article and also based from people who used to work there on Twitter. “Amazing creative environment but you can’t go home” and many other concerning signs of an unhealthy toxic culture.
  • You really need to make sure your work culture doesn’t mandate crunching, enabling workaholics and putting high standards above health. Stop glorifying suffering for art through crunch 🙁 Paid overtime or make up all the overtime work please if everyone’s over working, striving for quality and are ambitious!!
  • As someone who’s burned herself out many times because of my own perfectionist and workaholic nature plus the emotional drain/toll from an open office and social working environment, I’m just feeling so done. It was a hard lesson that I still need to be reminded that it’s not worth sacrificing your health for work crunch and standards. A crunch working environment would definitely make me go back to bad work habits.
• LEGO Super Mario – it looks okay; very blocky Mario!
  • They took 4 years to develop this. I hoped they actually develop the full Mario cast. Someone suggested Mario Kart but I don’t know if they’d do that.
• As a hermit, I wonder if I’ve been suffering from cabin fever all this time but I don’t know it and am mostly enjoying it aside from the occasional loneliness :’)
  • Where did “social distancing” come from? That’s new to me! I guess that’s a new way to describe what I do most of my life ;P I feel “physical distancing” is more apt.
  • Welcome to my world, people who aren’t introverts! ;D I’ve been a hermit most of my life and it’s helped by routine, habits and planned unscheduled time :’)
  • Take care those who aren’t used to it! It’s definitely not for everybody.

Fuzzy Sleepy Kirby and pals set!

My brother gifted me his duplicates so I ended up with this full set! It’s super fuzzy though and pale and I don’t know if it’s okay :0 This is sleepy me during the morning on autopilot :’)

Another pair, Kirby and Waddle Dee!

I love parasol Kirby and Waddle Dee 😀 Due to packaging, the spear is bent. I don’t have the full set but I’m happy with these gifts (: Cute!!

Take care and stay safe!

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