October 2026

2026 October 31

You can find the original newsletter here.

Life Updates

First of all... HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 🎃🎃🎃 You should tell me if you had any cool plans or costumes this year, as I have no Halloween plans and wish to live vicariously through you.

I wished so dearly to have a beautiful autumnal photo for this month's newsletter preview... but it was such a busy month, I didn't get out enough to take pictures. One of the only pictures I got was this picture after a rainstorm, as some of the trees started to turn a vibrant yellow. It was a pretty good year for foliage color, especially for maples which were a neon red!

It's the busiest I've ever been, and I had stressful major deadlines almost every week this month, the last of which being two days ago. So suddenly now, it's Halloween, and I'm scratching my head at where the time went and what to write in this newsletter. I've alluded to this before, but I changed labs/advisors a few years into my PhD program because of really excruciating circumstances (to say the least...). It had to be done, but as a result a lot of progress was completely uprooted, and I've been performing a rescue mission on my dissertation for the past two years.

I've had to stay in the program longer than expected as a result, but this week I had a meeting with my committee and no one seemed to object to the suggestion of a spring defense and graduation. We'll see how that goes, but I am really ready to be done and out of grad school, even if I'm not sure what comes next for me. I've thrown my hat in the ring for one competitive position that had come up and seemed like a good fit, but I won't know until next year if that's where I'll land... it's a stressful time, and I've been fairly offline as a result. Forgive me if I've been hard to reach or have left or withdrawn from any spaces!

As for other seasonal happenings... my mom and I went to a farm that had a bunch of really weird gourd varieties, some really small and skinny and others huge and lumpy. She handed me this one that had appendages and said it looked like a "creature", so I put some googly eyes on it and I've brought it to work as a conversation starter.

At some point this month, I also acquired this plushie of substitute doll from Pokemon. My brother's review is "it's about 25% larger than I expected it to be", which is also how I'd describe it, because it's bigger than my head! It's the perfect size to hold though so I've enjoyed this addition to my life.

Creative Updates

It must be said that if I wasn't working this month, I was probably playing Dog Online. Some friends introduced me to this petsite, and I've been enjoying it a lot. It's fairly new, so a lot of the completionist goals such as fishing, reading all the books, and battling every enemy (100%'d this last night!) feel attainable. It's really nice to have a non-social media site to sink time into, I've been helping update the game wiki as well as I find new things. It's updating fairly constantly (there was just a small seasonal Halloween event!), but a lot of updates are shadowdropped for players to randomly stumble into which I think is really fun. I have a few dogs, but was able to make my "main" dog look like one of my sonas. Well, my dog is quite scary looking, but most dogs on-site are quite normal... let me know if you are playing too!

Another fun creative update is that I've experimented with doing traditional inks/lineart in fountain pen, and uploading this to my computer, which has been so satisfying!! If you've been around a while, I only painted and drew lineless art for probably about a decade. But I've recently discovered my favorite part of the art process is actually doing lineart. I gave this a try because I was getting bad eye strain from working at a computer all day, and couldn't come home in the evening and stare at a monitor even more. But I missed art, so this was a really exciting way to still scratch that itch.

Fountain pens are really ergonomic too (no pressure on the wrist). My brother had gifted me this LAMY Safari a few years ago, it had run out of ink a while back and I was afraid to attempt to refill it from a bottle with the converter I had (did you know ink can mold? I don't know how common that is, but someone I follow talked about it once, and I was afraid of The Spores long enough I just never opened my bottle. lol). I got over myself though and other than having some inky fingers for a bit, the refill process was really easy, and then I could draw again!

I had grand ambitions for about 24 hours of doing a bug Pokedex art challenge and drawing every bug Pokemon, incorporating some nods to real-life biology where I could. Maybe it'll happen one day, but I experimented with this concept with Caterpie and Metapod.

And here's what that looks like after scanning, and coloring digitally! Some lines were touched up in post, but the majority of the linework stayed the same.

I want to experiment more with this method, because it was really fun, but I just hadn't had much time this month to sit down and open up my sketchbook.

Some future projects I'm looking to start on when I get a breather are creating an OC section on my site because I think it's time people learn about my weird bisexuals. It's difficult because the OCs I develop the most were originally created in a personal "sandbox" style setting years ago, and I'd love people to know what their deal is, but as a result a longform work like a comic or novel just never seemed to fit. I'm thinking an interactive and explorable section of my website might be a fun way to adapt this that still feels "true" to the spirit in which they were created... I have a few ideas (for my primary story project and some side projects), but I will keep them up my sleeve until I actually do something about this.

I always feel like I never have anything to share each month, but these newsletters always end up much longer than I expect. One last thought, if you've made it down this far, is that a few people have expressed to me that they enjoy reading these but don't like to leave comments. If you are reading this on my personal site, I've now created a "lurker" button (🌱) at the bottom right of these entries above the comments section. It's functionally a like button, but if you've read the newsletters and wanted to give me a digital "head-nod" of acknowledgement that is now there for you. These buttons will only be present in certain locations on the website (I don't check notifications on social media for a reason after all, so a "like" button will be used sparingly). Of course, I always still encourage people to leave little comments or reach out. (If we've interacted before, and you'd like to exchange Discord usernames, let me know...)

That's it for this month! Have a happy Halloween... and this month's creature is this maple spanworm moth I found outside, which resembles a dried fallen leaf and has some awesome plumose antennae 🎃🦇

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