2018 in Review

Firstly, I'd like to make a small announcement. My blog used to be hosted on a different site (Live Journal), but over the course of this year I've been transferring all of the posts over to this site. You can now see my entire blog right from the beginning, in one spot! Just go to the 'Archives' section in the right-hand sidebar. There are over 700 posts going back to 2004, so it's quite an achievement. And yes, here is the obligatory link to the first post, though I doubt it will make any sense to anyone!

Now, on to my review of 2018!

There were a few firsts -- and seconds -- this year. I finished my first magazine-style zine, Intensely Introverted #1, and took it to the Festival of the Photocopier Zine Fair.

I've written zines before, but this was the first one that I want to turn into a series, like a magazine. Work has started on Intensely Introverted #2, but you know what, I'm not sure that I'll return to the zine fair. The amount of anxiety and stress I experienced before and during the Fair wasn't really worth it. I just can't be in a room that full of people for that long. Or perhaps I'll skip a year and only do it every second year.


I went in three (!) art exhibitions, all at NOIR Darkroom: their first anniversary exhibition, Stay Safe, and A Very NOIR Christmas. I feel incredibly lucky to have had these opportunities, and I hope I'll have more in 2019!

(Mine is the one at the top.)Also at NOIR Darkroom, I did two workshops: Painting with Bob Ross and Screenprinting. Both are highly recommended! Since then, Husband and I have started watching Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting on Netflix when we want to relax. Though we now know that creating those paintings isn't quite as easy as he makes it seem!

Early in the year, Husband and I became re-acquainted with a foodie friend, and we decided to have a monthly lunch date together. I've been to many places that I wouldn't have gone to otherwise, and had a chance to dress up (Or even just get dressed at all quite frankly. Leaving the house voluntarily isn't really my thing!)

In June, I finished my first 101 Things in 1,001 Days cycle and started my second one. I did NaNoWriMo, went to the Melbourne Planner Market, and spent much more time outside.

Last but not least, in April I got to wear the Birthday Hat:

Now for the customary stats (last year's stat in brackets):

Books finished:
full-length: 19 (19) . . . . It's not a typo, they're the same!
short & manga: 16 (13)
currently reading as of today: 10 (14)

Blog posts: 46 (57)
Instagram posts: 285 (284) . . . . There may be more this evening!

Craft items started: 2 (2) . . . . (It seems like I never do any craft, but I've been working on my blanket a lot!)
Craft items finished: 4 (4)
Craft projects in progress as of today: 42 (42)

Zines started: 0 (1)
Zines finished: 2 (1) . . . . (if mini zines count! harhar)
Zines in progress as of today: 1 (1)

I hope everyone had a good 2018 and will have an even better 2019! I'll be back soon with my plans for the coming year!

Instagram "Best Nine" for 2018 and What's Important

This is the second year that I've participated in the Instagram "Best Nine" phenomenon. By plugging your Instagram name into this website, you can retrieve the 9 photos with the most 'likes' for the year, packaged up into a handy mosaic. While it seems vacuous, I found last year's exercise to be thought-provoking and even a little inspiring.

Here is this year's result, with thoughts below:

I'm pleasantly surprised to see that my art features in my most-liked photos. Middle-left was an entry for Tara Leaver's 21 Days in My Art World challenge (which I'm pleased to see will be happening again in 2019), so that explains its popularity. Top-left was done for the Art Maker Circle challenge by Nicole Piar. Unfortunately I never finished that challenge.

I have to scratch my head as to why a barely-started painting (bottom-centre) was so popular, though.

I posted very few photos of myself this year, but two managed to make it into the top. I'd like to explore my style more in the future, so this result is encouraging.

And as for the food ... I really don't know! Perhaps there was something about the composition or the filtering that was appealing to people? I'll probably never know. Social media is, in the end, a mystery.

The thing that strikes me about this year's collage is that it's basically a summary of what I'd like to do more of in my life. What's good for my soul. Making art, having meals and spending time with friends, and expressing myself through fashion and (admittedly overly-filtered!) selfies. May there be more of the merry stuff in 2019!

Happy Festive Season!

I hope you receive everything you wish for!

I didn't quite reach my goal of blogging twice a week this year, but I have lots of plans and hopefully now that I'm on holidays I can bring some of them to life. Here's a sneak peek of a few topics coming up soon:

❄️ My new art project
❄️ Growing potatoes in a bag
❄️ Sewing adventures
❄️ Podcasts I'm loving
❄️ My planner sticker collection
❄️ Cooking fun

Have a happy and safe holidays (if you're on holidays!).

My November, including End of NaNoWriMo 2018

November this year seemed to have a bittersweet taste. As Spring moved into Summer, everything heated up. Yet there were also quite a few thunderstorms, which I always enjoy. I've been busier as the holiday season is getting nearer, but my job is finishing just before Christmas, so I have some quiet time to look forward to. It's been hard to motivate myself to do anything that doesn't have a deadline -- anything just for myself. Maybe that's something I need to rediscover.


What I've been writing ...
My NaNoWriMo story was mostly finished before the 30th November deadline. That's a nice way of saying that I didn't finish it! I won't say that I failed though, because I'm close enough to see the finish line, and I think I'm able to and want to get it made. So I'm setting myself a deadline of end of December to finish the story, edit it, create a cover image and publish it. I haven't decided where I'll publish it yet, but iBooks and Smashwords look most promising. I'll be sure to post links to it when I do!

What I've been painting ...
I created a painting for NOIR gallery's Kris Kringle party exhibition, but I forgot to take a photo of it at any point before I handed it in for the exhibition yesterday, oops! I'll be back there in 2 weeks for the closing party and artwork swap, so you'll have to wait until then to see it on the blog. Or, if you're in Melbourne, I hope you'll check out the exhibition at NOIR Darkroom in Coburg.


What I've been dreaming of ...
A few months ago I posted about how my garden is a mess. Well, we're getting that sorted out! Below is a 'Before and After' of the passageway behind the house. The 'After' looks very barren right now, I admit, but we're planning on building some raised garden beds and hopefully growing some nice, lush things.

What I've been playing ...
Happy World Ocarina Day! I've taken up my ocarina practice again this month. Seeing other people online becoming enthusiastic about learning and playing live instruments has been inspiring. Plus, I enjoy learning Christmas carols because the tunes are so familiar, and this is the time of year for it!

Melbourne Planner Market and Sticker Haul

The weekend before last, I went to Melbourne Planner Market. This is the third year the market has been run, and my first year attending. It wasn't held in the city itself, but in the inner suburb of Kensington. It wasn't that close to me -- about 40 minutes' drive each way -- but I bribed Husband to drive me there with the promise of dumplings for lunch afterwards.

The above photo is from the Melbourne Planner Market website.It was quite a small market with about 25 stallholders, but I found the range was good and I saw some interesting things. Only a couple of stalls were selling actual planners, most were selling planner stickers, washi tapes, charms and other accessories for your planner. I concentrated mainly on stickers (my biggest obsession this year!).

Here are some photos of my haul:

I'm also always on the lookout for stickers for my Hobonichi art diary, which I like to do in a more subdued, elegant style, whereas my planner is very over-the-top cute. In a way they parallel my interests in fashion, which are very diverse too.

A pack of washi tapes, sticky notes and bulldog clips. Until recently you could only order interesting and/or decorative bulldog clips and sticky notes from overseas. It's strange what we do and don't have access to in Australia!

I'm looking forward to attending the Melbourne Planner Market again next year ... if I'm still interested in stickers. A lot can change in a year!

NaNoWriMo : The Halfway Point

(Technically it's the three-quarter-way point now, but that doesn't fit so well into the title!)

A few posts ago, I told how I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year, but with a twist. I'm writing a 5,000 word story instead of the usual 50,000 word novel. That works out to 167 words per day. For someone like me, with a lot of different projects happening at once, it's a more realistic goal. So how am I doing, halfway through?

I'm pleased to say that I've gotten further than I did in my last NaNoWriMo attempt. That is, I've actually started to write a story! For the first week or so, I was winning -- thanks to the three-quarters of a page I wrote before the month even started, I was ahead of the word count.

However, this turned out to be a bit of a double-edged sword. On a day when I was feeling tired, I felt like I could take a break. I was feeling a bit depressed due to some unrelated issues, and one day turned into five, until I was behind again. Strangely, this turned out to be a motivating factor for me to start writing again. I needed to get back to that place I was before. I needed to believe that I can do it. The voices in my head were still telling me it's a terrible story, but I thought to myself, a terrible story is better than no story!

In the beginning, I was reading through what I'd already written and noting down changes before I started writing anything new. As the story grew to a page and more, I realised this wasn't going to be feasible. It was taking too long and distracting me. Editing can wait until later! If there are any words or phrases I'm not completely happy with, I use the highlight function in Microsoft Word (or just circle them if I'm writing by hand) to mark them, and just keep on going.

In fact, after having listened to lots of podcasts and read even more articles, the best advice I've heard is just that. Just keep going! It's been presented in many forms by many people, but what it boils down to is: just keep writing! It doesn't matter how bad you think it is. You can always fix it later.

I also decided to write an outline, which helped me to get the story straight in my mind. It made me realise there are actually two intertwined plots, and that helped, though I'm still not sure in which order things are going to happen. Hopefully that will come together at some point.

And hopefully I'll have good news (i.e. a finished story) in a couple of weeks!

Movie Review: Outlaw King

Outlaw King is a 2018 Netflix movie set in the early 1300s, telling the true story of Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine), a Scottish nobleman. Scotland is a weary and poverty-stricken nation after eight years of fighting the English, whose king Edward I took advantage of a leadership dispute to invade the country and tax them heavily.

After the death of William Wallace (whom you may remember from the movie Braveheart), the people are stirred by anger, and Robert takes advantage of this wave of outrage to gather soldiers together to fight the English invasion. A rash and impulsive decision threatens to undo everything he has done, and leads him to quickly seek to have himself crowned King of Scotland. The English retaliation against this is swift and brutal. Led by the king's son, sadistic Prince Edward, the English forces move to crush any opposition and punish Robert by capturing his family. The rest of the plot will be known by students of history, and for anyone else, I want to avoid spoiling the ending.

The casting of Chris Pine (best known for his portrayal of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek reboots) was an interesting choice in my opinion. Pine has been made up with greying hair and a beard, making him look much older than he is, and is almost unrecognisable. At the start of the movie's events, Robert the Bruce was only 30 years old, so possibly looked younger than his movie counterpart. Perhaps this was done to make him seem more authoritative? Then there's the accent. American actors are often put in roles playing non-American characters and the accent can sometimes be an issue, but I think Pine's Scottish accent was very well done.

The movie isn't shy in showing the brutal realities of mediaeval life: the mud, how peasants are treated, people being hung, drawn and quartered, and horses being impaled in battle. If you don't want to see any of this, then this isn't the movie for you! If you want to see a no-holds-barred account of history, Outlaw King does this well.

It's true, critics have pointed out several historical inaccuracies in the movie. No historical movie is one-hundred percent accurate (if there are any, let me know!) and stories need to be appealing to their audience. Robert and his wife had already been married for two years before the events of the movie, but we wouldn't have felt so much empathy for them if we hadn't seen how they met. Fire arrows weren't used in Europe at that time, but we wouldn't have been able to see normal arrows in the dark during the night time battle and, I have to admit, they looked pretty awesome!
(More historical inaccuracies are listed on the Wikipedia page for the movie.)

At times there were visual metaphors more suited to an arthouse movie -- an upturned apple cart, a rainbow. These were jarring and made me wonder if the movie was trying to be something other than what it is. Then it swung the other way with 'that' scene. I have no problem with nudity in movies if it's warranted, but these days it seems almost expected for Chris Pine to be nude at some point in every movie that he's in. If people aren't talking about the movie for the blood and guts, or the accents, they're talking about it for that.

Overall though, I thought it was a decent movie, with gorgeous highland landscapes contrasted with the not-so-gorgeous narrative of Scottish mediaeval society.

Would I watch it again? Yes!