Hello November!
So, Inktober didn’t last too long. I don’t usually work on the weekends, so it was hard to keep up. Plus, it honestly just wasn’t that fun… I have a lot of other stuff right now that I’m really enjoying, so it wasn’t that hard to let it go and move on… Oh well, always next year!
…that said, I know part of the problem was I didn’t love the way my style of drawing was working with the prompts. I had wanted to create cute illustrations of scary Halloween characters. But they really weren’t cute at all… Interestingly, when I stopped worrying about Inktober, and just working on all the other stuff instead, I started learning intentionally how to create those cute drawings I had wanted to make at the beginning! So, ultimately, it didn’t work out the way I expected, but I think I’d still call it a success?
We did stick to our Halloween movie tradition for the last month. It was soo good! Some of my favorites included: Arachnaphobia, Rifftrax’s version of Birdemic, The Host, Leprechaun, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, and The Raven. Most of the slashers were pretty ridiculous (I Know What You Did Last Summer was TERRIBLE). But Friday the 13th was really good! Though, I think some of my favorites were the classic black and white movies we watched — The Invisible Man, Cat People, and Onibaba, to name a few. We watched nearly a movie every day, so I’m a little overwhelmed remembering it all. But it is such a fun tradition, and this year’s was just awesome! Yay!
We also started watching The X-Files this past month. I’ve never seen it before, and knew surprisingly little despite how popular and long-running it was. I was expecting totally cheesy and campy, and yeah, it is — but it’s also a lot of fun, and can be super creepy too! I really like it, and am glad we have a show to watch regularly now. We’ve been in need of one since we ran out of our cartoons lately.
For a whole bunch of reasons, I’m trying to get better about buying physical copies of books again, or using the library for e-books. And I’m also determined to read more of the books I’ve had piling up for a while…
This did lead me to going through my bookshelves and reorganizing, which included packing up a lot of old textbooks. It kinda sucked to box up most of my philosophy books, recognizing I don’t really do anything with them anymore. But I’m now resolved to add at least some “pop philosophy” books into my reading rotation. I’m starting with How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well by Catherine Wilson, since I already had a copy and it’s pretty interesting to read (spoiler alert: I do NOT want to be an Epicurean). I’m thinking after this I’ll explore more classical philosophy too — think Aristotle and the Stoics… but we’ll see, this isn’t my first foray into “I swear I still legit use my degree!” (although having a casual, self-help-ish, lifestyle focus will probably help this time. 😛 )
Thanks for joining me in The Shallow End!
Summer Child Designs 