I’m trying to restart my personal blog and mailing list with short weekly updates about our relocation, family life, and the development of Panda Pu. This is the first one.
We’re one week away from flying to the UK, and the rental market there has turned out to be more frightening than we expected.
Compared with Kazakhstan, Vietnam, or Bali, it feels much more landlord-biased. Short-term rentals in cities much smaller than London, such as Sheffield, Chesterfield, and even Hull, often cost around £3,000 a month. Long-term rentals look more reasonable, around £1,500 in Sheffield and £900 in Hull, but they often come unfurnished and expect a minimum rental period of twelve months, not five or even six.
So we may end up staying for only a month, paying for something on Airbnb, and returning to Bali much earlier than we hoped.
My granddad passed away this Saturday. His illness developed very quickly. Less than a month ago, he could still speak and walk, although with significant difficulty. I’ll miss him a lot. He was almost a father to me.
On the bright side, I’ve finished working on the story for the first Panda Pu book.
As I moved from writing the story to actually crafting the book, hoping to create the illustrations with AI, ChatGPT suggested that I create the character references myself. I jumped into that, expecting to spend maybe an hour or two on it. What could be so difficult about creating characters, right?
Oh, how wrong I was.
I’ve now spent a week learning how many tiny nuances influence the overall appearance and perception of a character. I’m still nowhere near the final designs, but I’ve learned what to look for: which features matter, what they communicate, and how small differences can completely change the feeling of a character.
At first, I had the idea that there were no details worth crafting by hand instead of handing everything over to AI. Now that idea seems as far from reality as the same belief would be in writing.
That was our week: rental panic, grief, and a surprising amount of time spent staring at panda faces.
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