Doing Something Every Day of 2022: COMPLETE

stylized digital painting of cartoon mastodons having a picnic in a garden, two sitting on a blanket reading and playing music, while a third paints the scene at an easel

2022

For me personally, 2022 was a considerable improvement over the previous year. My health situation returned mostly to normal, and mentally I was able to take the experiences from the past years and continue to apply what I had learned and develop the way I want to be.

Doing Things

In 2016 I started a project to learn something every day of the year, eventually evolving into a life logging habit that I’ve kept up since then, which includes these year end review posts.

Drawing

I have an uneasy relationship with art. I do have some amount of skill, but not enough to be satisfied with what I’m currently able to produce (I know… does anyone?). Creating art is both rewarding and intensely frustrating. I don’t find the process in any way relaxing, it is a mental and emotional slog from beginning to end. So I don’t do it consistently, so I don’t improve as much as I could. Repeat.

At the beginning of 2022, I had an unusual amount of time and energy available to direct towards some artistic project, and set myself a challenge of drawing a manga page every week. Having never drawn a manga page before, I had nothing to calibrate this challenge against, and it turned out to be wholly unrealistic (not a surprise).

I ended up making two and a half pages, which took about two and a half months, at which point I was exhausted and frustrated and decided to stop.

three manga page thumbnails, two complete and one draft

I’m happy with what I did, I learned a lot in a short time. I’m still searching for the elusive habit, routine, or way of thinking that allows me to maintain a regular and more sustainable level of practice and improvement.

Blog posts for Page #1, Page #2, Page #3.

sunny.garden

It was aborting the manga project that led to me having the time and energy to put towards what I consider to be my big accomplishment for the year, setting up the sunny.garden Mastodon server.

Quitting the drawing project coincided nicely with Elon Musk announcing his intention to buy Twitter, as well as my general ongoing project to decouple my life from Google and other big-tech companies that I had come to depend on too heavily.

I was somewhat familiar with Mastodon having signed up on mastodon.social back in 2017 when there was a wave of interest at the time. But this time I wasn’t working 9-5 and was already in the swing of setting up self hosted services. I wanted to set up my own server, so that I had a place I could encourage people to sign up without reservation or caveats.

I spent some time learning how to install Mastodon, and searched for a domain name that aligned with the spirit of what I wanted to make. After several nights of plugging keyword and domain combinations into domain search tools, I had a few candidates which I ran by my friends.

sunny.garden was the clear winner, not just because I thought it was pretty good, but also because it caught people’s attention enough to actually comment on it.

I commissioned a banner and – after a month or so of settings things up and testing with a few friends – opened up the server for registrations.

stylized digital painting of cartoon mastodons having a picnic in a garden, two sitting on a blanket reading and playing music, while a third paints the scene at an easel

sunny.garden banner

Quite a few people that sign up comment on the banner being one of the selling points that made them choose the server.

As I write this post, sunny.garden now has about 500 monthly active users.

You can read a bit more about how the year went for the server over on the hub page: In Review, November ‘22

Seasonspree

In the summer, after seeing a call out on Twitter seeking programming help on a cozy indie game, I began working on the game Seasonspree being developed by Kitewing Studio.

a vibrant title card for Seasonspree, a stylized tanuki character uses a large green leaf as a glider in a colourful world with purple sky, clouds, a cherry tree, pond and meadow below

A gentle time-nudging game about celebrating friendship and the changing of seasons

Seasonspree will be launching in summer-ish of 2023 on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Japanese (and now Korean too)

I’ve kept up with daily Japanese practice for the most part this year, although I let kanji slide a bit.

For no particular reason, I also decided to learn Hangul, which I now have a rudimentary grasp of reading, although I still know basically no Korean words or grammar. Ok, the reason was actually that I play Overwatch in the Asian region and most of the players in my matches are Korean. I at least want to be able to sound out their usernames, and maybe work towards understanding a few words from chat.

This was a nice break from kanji, but I’ve mostly switched back to doing kanji practice with WaniKani, as well as Japanese phrases with Duolingo each morning.

After three years of living in Japan, I’ve reached the point where I am mostly comfortable going about my day to day business without stressing too much about being able to communicate with shop staff, etc. But I still get thrown off if somebody decides to ask me a question I’m not prepared for, and I’m still a long way from being able to carry on conversation comfortably.

With all of the other projects going on this year, I didn’t keep up with reading Japanese kids books for practice. We’ll see how it goes for 2023, there’s only so much time in a day.

By the numbers:

graph of covid cases per million people in 2022, rolling 7-day average

COVID-19 Cases Per Million People (rolling 7-day average, 2022)

Japan had been doing quite well COVID-wise relative to some other rich nations but took a turn for the worse this year.

Onward 2023

Seasonspree will be my primary focus for the first half of the year as we get it ready for launch.

I’ll also have an eye on sunny.garden, trying to keep it a stable, friendly and welcoming place as Mastodon and the fediverse continue to grow.

Beyond that, who knows! I’m feeling like I might have enough energy to take on some small daily art practice again, but that’s always one of the first things to go when things get busy.

Bonus

Two sumo wrestlers clash in the center of the ring as the judge and crowd watch intently.

Sumo: Daieisho vs Terunofuji

A sliver of an orange setting sun visible above the edge of a dark cloud, brightly highlighting only a thin line of the cloud along the edge. Trees and power poles on the left, and an high apartment building to the right all stand in silhouette.

Asaka Sunset