Lately I’ve been in a slump since starting the reverse engineering project. Sickness, financial stress, and multiple factors had gotten in the way of doing work with it. I didn’t like how it turned out to be an “only good in the first act” thing for me, when I clearly wanted to invest more time on it than doing other things aside work, but enough excuses for today. Here’s what I’m currently up to.

1. I’ve been dabbling on AI due to mandatory work requirements, and I’ve been doing editing work for a living for a few years now. I’ve been tasked to automate the reel production using AI and that’s what’s taking most of my time lately. As for the details, as much as I’d like to share the method, NDA is getting in the way of it. Eventually, I might find another way to make a writeup of my findings in a way that won’t violate it.
2. Chiikawa happened. I found myself only being able to watch Chiikawa due to little time that I have for other things. It’s just 3-ish minutes to watch per episode and I’ve already started playing Chiikawa Pocket as that’s an idle game that I can leave out on its own. I’d like to talk about this but this is a whole rabbit hole to dig into, so this deserves a post of its own.
3. Research and production on the side of my mellyexe Youtube page. I’ve since been researching for material to cover for it and I’ve yet to start actual video production for it. The script and the audio were already recorded and re-synthesized, but I’m yet to find time to edit it.
4. Helping out with storyboard work for a colleague.
5. Fixing some stuff in my life that I’d like to remain private. This is one of the hugest chunks of responsibilities that I’ve been carrying as of late and this has since been taking much of my time with little to no space to do other things.

Even if I ditch Chiikawa on this (and there’s no way in hell that I will), I doubt that it’ll allow much room to actually continue working on the reverse engineering project that I started. Either that automation for work does its job in order to free a lot of time for me to work on a lot of things, or life’s lemons start sorting itself out on its own.

Either way, the project ain’t dead, but is just about to go really slow for the time being. Until then, I’ll send sporadic updates from time to time whenever I can.