Web Comic
Instagram: @depressed.butoptimistic
A place where the jokes are bad and the drawings are worse! Come witness the human condition distilled down to silly shapes and colours.
YouTube Channel
YouTube: @RussellPhung
A place where I put on my main character hat and openly discuss my journey, while learning about content theory and video editing along the way! Here I will post vlogs, reviews, ramblings, and all sorts of things outside and in between.
Worldbuilding Project
The Luminaris Initiative
A worldbuilding project for an alternate universe where the sun has disappeared, and the human race must continue their legacy underground, while adapting to the harsh changes to the planet. I want to write more, and this is a fun universe that I’ve dreamt up.
Algorithmic Trading
Make money printing machine
Combining my knowledge of data analytics, programming, and (a very rudimentary understanding) the stock market, I thought this would be a fun one to try to develop. At worst, I would be developing my skills further in a very practical way and have fun exercising my problem solving skills.
Started playing Magic: The Gathering around 2023. Aim is to create content and one day maybe make it onto the Pro Tour! I maintain a spreadsheet compiling any free written MTG primers, guides, and sideboard guides that I come across. I love the sharing of knowledge that happens in this community and want to do my part!
Game Development
Project Eternal Dark
Learn Unity and game development principles in order to make a simple mobile game. All my hours spent separately playing games and learning programming need to come together somehow (haha). Set in the universe of the worldbuilding project mentioned above.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
There are so many beautiful and wonderous paths I can take, and I want to do so, so many things. Here I endeavour to document some of the things I get up to.
Russell Phung 