em ơi
by nuu and somdy
Wednesday January 31, 2024 08:56
from Mỹ Anh – “Em” | Official Album Visualizer
I woke up at 4am today after falling asleep sometime between 12:30am and 1am, and I guess I'm up for the day. I was initially going to talk about things that are stressing me right now, but I shut down for maybe 10 minutes after trying to think about how to word them. So I'll talk about the things I'm excited about instead.
The announcement for the finalists for a game jam that A and I joined will be announced tomorrow. I've been nervously waiting all month. I have no idea how to predict how our game landed with the judges and whether or not we would make it into the lists of finalists. But I just hope. I just hope and hope.
I am working on a new game jam with a technical artist and a character artist. I get along with both really well. We had a lovely 2 hour call brainstorming ideas for the game, gathering reference, and sketching concepts. Today the tech artist finished some of our main props, set up the project and the repository! The props are so cute. The character artist made our player character, and she looks AMAZING. I blocked out the environment for our main area and made a lighting test. We still have 2 days so I'm thinking tomorrow I really iron out the level layout. I'm not sure if I or the technical artist will have to set up character movement or if one of the programmers are actually available to do it, but that is very important! (The artists have really been on it but we've had a bit of communication issues with some of the other members, likely because of time differences. But it seems like it will turn out okay.) Then the last day, I will make sure to really make the environment properly built out, filled, and lit! I'm very excited. I haven't gotten to really focus on environment in a group project yet, but that's my area of interest. And the technical artist will teach me some stuff!
I found that I really like the Vietnamese artist Mỹ Anh, so I have some new việt music to listen and hopefully learn from! I think a goal of mine this year is to...maybe not necessarily move away from KPop, but since I absorbed some Korean without intentional study by listening to KPop and watching KDramas. So let's say I want to gather more music and TV I really like in the languages I'm actually trying to study. I'm currently listening to the album Em by Mỹ Anh and it is very much my taste. It kind of reminds me of the dreaminess I like from Solange, Kali Uchis, and Red Velvet. In an interview, she talks about how the name of the album means herself as in "I." Vietnamese uses relational pronouns like little sibling (em) and older brother (anh) or older sister (chị) as "I" and "you." A lot of songs use em and anh for the two people in a romantic dynamic, so em in this case is her perspective. BUT, she also thinks of her inner child as a younger sister (em) to her that she has to take care of. I think that echoes my experience with trying to reconnect with my inner child this year.
One project I wanted to do was to make amigurumi to represent my inner child so I can look at, talk to, and hug something outside of my body. But also the thing is, I know the inner child is in there as another part, they just aren't speaking to me... I was goint to say yet, but I think they're nonverbal. There were long periods of time where I think I was dealing with selective mutism or verbal shutdown, so maybe the child is from that time.
Okay, finding a name for the kid... Let's call them Hattie. I'll make them a profile today.
Ah. The sleepiness is finally catching up to me after 5 hours. I was thinking to stay up all day but I don't think I can do that to myself on only 3 hours of sleep. I will try to sleep now. Hopefully I can still maintain a night time sleeping schedule though, missing the sunlight really gets to me.