Wow has it been a while since I last wrote a post. Aside from being lazy and neglectful, the main reason I haven’t been writing is because I’ve wanted to focus on other projects, especially art-related ones. The huge project I undertook was Inktober last month. For those of you who don’t know what Inktober is, it’s a challenge focused on inspiring artists to draw with Ink every day during the month of October, with the focus of improving inking skills as well as building good drawing habits (You can read more about it here). I had seen other artists participate in Inktober before, but I had never found the motivation to stick to it. Well I decided that this would be a great year to join so I went for it.

It’s been a while since I last posted! I haven’t really posted a tutorial yet, so today’s post will be just that - a how-to on my method of doodling stars! Five-pointed stars are my aesthetic, so several years ago I doodled them all over my (and my friends’) arms and got pretty decent at it. They look something like this:

So I graduated from college last Saturday, which is kind of crazy. I mean it felt like just yesterday that I stepped into my first lecture of freshman year, or finished a summer of LT at New Life, or moved into my room in Nagoya. But here I am, a Michigan engineering alum, ready to take on the world. So what now? What do I want to do with myself now that I’m not bogged down by group projects and bugs in my code? Well it’s summer now and I haven’t started working yet, which means I finally have the time to pursue all the side hobbies I’ve been wanting to do.

Time flies like an arrow. It’s cliché but it’s true. It feels like I just moved in yesterday, but here I am, sitting in my grandma’s apartment in Taiwan since I left Japan yesterday. A lot has happened this semester, so I thought I’d sit back and reflect on some of the goals I set for myself, both inside and outside the classroom, as well as what I ended up learning.

It’s always the little things that make something really great, and for Japan that’s efficiency in every aspect of daily life. Something I’ve noticed here which is vastly different from the us is that the japanese pay attention to details, and optimize different aspects of life. The main one I notice is the bathrooms at school.