Learning Something Every Day of 2016: September Report

I made some art and not much else.

spreadsheet screenshot, things learned by date

The things I learned in September.

Previously:

Hopefully a quick update this month since I’m packing and getting ready to go to Japan!

Visuals

In the name of moving forward on game visuals I focused on art this month, with some success. Went through some drawing tutorials and practices, did some modeling in Blender. And most productively, tried out the pipeline for getting blender animations into Unity, trying to get a feel for how materials, animation clips, etc. work between the two programs. I still need to spend more time on the Unity side to better understand animation controllers and how all that works.

Peak

At the recommendation of my friend I started reading Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Since he reads interesting things I basically just read anything he mentions.

The main takeaway is that, hey guess what, you need to practice things in order to get better at them. And more than that, you need to practice things you can’t do yet, not just repeat the motions of things you’re already comfortable with in order to make progress.

There are more interesting details of course, but it has given me something to think about as it is directly relevant to this year’s goal of learning every day. Amazingly enough, the year is almost up. And come new year I think I will re-evaluate my plan and see if I can’t adjust and supplement it with a tighter focus on deliberate practice of specific skills, instead of my currently more general approach of “seriously, just do anything at all”.

Japan In The Autumn

So this month (October) is going to present an additional challenge in that I will be traveling in Japan for most of it. I’d like to keep up learning every day during that time, and it makes sense that I learn something relevant, so my goal will be to improve my Japanese.

I’ll be immersed somewhat by just being in Japan, but that’s not enough. It’s very easy to get around, especially in Tokyo, without knowing much Japanese at all. So I’ll be taking one of my books that has Japanese/English dual text, as well as a built-in dictionary, and will work my way through it each day. Sadly, simply owning it and storing it on a shelf nearby has yet to significantly improve my comprehension.

Conveniently, this falls well outside my comfort zone as far as my Japanese skills go, and is a good opportunity to exercise some deliberate practice.

Checking The List

TL;DR

Pages flutter
Leaves disturbed by opening
And reading, this time