Welcome to the Sketchbook Confessional for March 2020!
It’s the future and we live in the time of COVID-19, let’s live heroically, let’s live in style. #jewell2020
Art:
This month I was whipped around by COVID-19 measures, but not so whipped as to not join Folding@home. Marc and I pointed 40 cores of our household computing power at COVID-19 research. Our electricity bill for March may be very high, but that doesn’t matter as much as getting work done for these projects.
While stuck at home to avoid Coronavirus/COVID-19, I ended up doing a lot of livestreaming on Instagram, where I made the two images above on two 1 hour livestreams.
March was kind of a lost month for me since I was sick in the first part of March, and then life changed with Coronavirus measures near the end of the month.
While working on comics and illustrations and nursing the weird cold I had in early March, I set up Instagram so that it would post old work from my trip to San Francisco in 2016. This is a nice way to go back through old work and not feel the pressure to post.
Strange as Post Pressure may sound, I do like to entertain my followers and make a lot of good, interesting posts, in addition to livestreams. The Later app helps me out with post scheduling. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how I slam out 600 word missives on Instagram on a phone … well, I don’t. I use Later to type it all out on a computer, and get those posts scheduled for weeks ahead of time.
Here is what my Later user interface looks like, where I have posts scheduled out across four social profiles for weeks on end.
It’s been really awesome to use Later. I’d recommend it to anyone who balances multiple social profiles for multiple projects or personal work.
Travel:
In March this month, given COVID-19 worries, I cancelled a trip that I had planned to Leadville. I was almost heartbroken, but it would have been more heartbreaking to travel and possibly soak up and transmit illness to those around me.
So.. March has been a month of being at home for me. It’s surreal.
Now, I am not sure when I will go back to the office. Four more weeks? Six? I’ve been at home for so many weeks that now, it will be a surreal day when things get back to normal.
The tough thing about my life in this COVID-19 world is that I’m actually a borderline extrovert. I love being around people, but they have to be the right kind of people for me.
If we make it through this COVID-19 thing and kick it to the curb properly, there should be a national holiday made.
Reading:
In March I stayed indoors quite a bit and finished reading several books.
I finished Miyazaki’s Starting Point, a collection of interviews, speeches, and articles where Miyazaki discusses his work at length. It’s dense reading, but not laborious - fun to read, just big. I’d started reading in February before my trip to the Bahamas. My only regret with this book is that I wish I had run into it earlier in life - but maybe then I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it. There’s moments where Miyazaki describes how his animation teams would hand-paint 50,000 cells to make a single movie, and other incredible facts which will lend to anyone’s appreciation of animation - even if that appreciation is already high.
Accomplishing art at any cost seemed to be the norm for not just Miyazaki, but also for his peers, role models, and workers. He also takes questions very seriously and answers questions from his interviewers in ways that I did not expect. Now to move on to Turning Point.
I finished The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemesin, wow, what an incredible sci-fi story. I loved the richness and lore of these books. They’re definitely a bit more allegorical and post-apocalyptic than high escapism fantasy. I dug the hell out of these books.
I finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear on March 7th, in the middle of a sinus infection that had me checking and rechecking websites about Coronavirus symptoms. I thought this book laid out a lot of interesting strategies on how to reinforce good habits and move bad habits towards extinction.
In late February and March, I started posting about Books I Didn’t Finish - Proust and Melville made the list, and there are a few others that I need to talk about in the future. I’m a recovering over-achiever and have a Master’s Degree in English Literature, and think it’s all right to talk about books that we don’t make it through as readers.
I started Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I started reading it in the midst of COVID-19 panic and feared some of the principles may not ever apply in life-under-crisis, or it would take years to recover as an economy for the leadership ideas in the book to apply, but I think they will apply at least at a high level.
I started reading Book of the New Sun on suggestion from a few different folks - So far I think this book is absolutely wild. I’m not quite sure what to make of it just yet. I also started reading Cradle: Foundation by Will Wright.
Fitness:
This month I didn’t make it to the gym for COVID-19 reasons, and it broke my heart. I wish I could have said goodbye to my personal trainer. I never thought my personal training journey would end due to a pandemic.
That said I did get outside for some jogging and found myself feeling strong and fast. Maryland is outrageously pretty in spring.
Without a treadmill I don’t really measure my speed or time or miles, I just run until I feel like I’ve done a good job.
Maryland went onto Stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders yesterday, March 30th 2020 - for now it is a beautiful place to be stuck. I run around, dodging people like in a tag game in school, and take photos like these:
At the end of March I started to do Daily Posts on this blog. I realized I write a ton on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, so I might as well transmute some of it and post it onto this blog.
Until next time!
Related Blogs:
Sketchbook Confessional: February 2020
