Stuff went super slowly again as states happened (everything went well) and I dithered around trying to fix the feather patterning (including readjusting a lot of the feathers that got displaced and put everything else out of whack when I fixed the underlying mesh, I really should know better by now that while other people can get away with not doing things I never can) and flatten things out a little bit.

And after spending way too much time and effort on this malarky and really struggling with polydown, I revisited the idea of particle down.  The last time I tried this it didn't work out great.

Screenshot of a render because I was too lazy to save out the actual render.  Did it as a test partly because Blender is apparently slightly less likely to crash if I do renders as opposed to the viewport preview and mostly because it's been a while since I did one and I have to do one every so often to make sure things looks how they're supposed to look (the viewport render is pretty accurate but is also deliberately lower quality than even my preview renders).

I was trying to make sure that some of the skin gaps I could see weren't going to be as blatant with textures as they are in the candy shading and I think it looks mostly okay and also the chances of me ever being this close are slim.

August sucked almost but not totally completely.

I think I did peck a bit here and there but didn't really have time to sit down and actually work on anything, and even then not enough got done that I felt was worth the effort of writing about.

And then I nearly missed September too for many and varied reasons.

At one point I cracked it with the top of the wing being too pointy and went through and did the point by point modifications I'd been studiously avoiding and desperately hoping I could juust cover over with the feathers, because it didn't enter my stupid head that the feathers kind of needed to follow the underlying form. Most of that comprised of just making most of the quads more planar (grey, some of them had to stay coloured/non-planar as it's a reasonably low poly model and making the quads grey would cause the form to be lost).

May

14yo and one of his friends developed an interest in the series Breaking Bad and marathoned it, and then made some "crystal meth" (coloured toffee).

New hardware!

I finally got a new cpu and logic board...and some unexpected new ram as J accidentally bought a logic board that required ddr5 ram instead of ddr4 which was what I had.

The upside of that was I got a massive upgrade (as I asked him to double the ram when he was buying new ram and he actually did) and we accumulated enough parts to put together a machine from the leftover parts for middle child.

A new problem arose. I have this song in my thought track:

and I found out from comments on that video that there is a version with vocals.

And it has beautiful lyrics.

I tried to get J to organise this month's excursion to a cave in a national park that is not that far away from us in the grand scheme of things.  I had organised it mostly for 14yo but I had misunderstood, he had some vague interest in oldschool mines which was related to an interest in blacksmithing but didn't like caves, and neither did anyone else so that idea got nixed.

Late March saw some rehearsing for a performance for one of the local shows, and the show (and performance) itself happened in early April.  Both 18yo and 16yo were in it, and 16yo also got roped in to help with hair and makeup.

Currently as I type, I'm pecking at Yet More Freaking Feathers, hive, lesson planning and somewhat trying to finish my Mekton character for a game which I'm not sure when it's going to start as I haven't heard much of anything other than some issues with mech building since it was proposed, but I did say at the time that they could start without me (and I would jump in if/when appropriate if they started without me) as at the time I wasn't sure if I would be able to play or not.

18yo was also thinking about running a CoD game but aside from looking to see who's interested is also waiting to see what's happening with this Mekton game.

It's also laundry day so I have to do that too (at least there's no leotards to wash today, they need to be handwashed and it's cold).

That's what I've been doing for the past ages because I've been wasting a lot of time playing stupid phone games because stuff happens in the games unlike in real life where it feels no matter how much effort and hours you pour into something, absolutely nothing at all gets done.

My parents happened to be up for Mother's Day as they had come over for a quick holiday (which of course involved catching up as much as we could as we only see them a couple of times a year) so sibling dearest coerced asked me to please get some flowers and she would send a hamper of goodies.

I don't like cut flowers, however I only send the parents a Christmas present comprising of a photobook of everything the kids got up to that year and Mum loves flowers so I got a nice custom one from a florist.

I have spent the last couple of weekends deciding that that particular weekend would be the one where I finished the wings.

I did not finish the wings because it was so incredibly tedious and boring that my brain shut down on numerous occasions and I wasted a lot of time playing stupid phone games when this gigantic lump of cuteness overdose wasn't destroying my posture and exacerbating old injuries.

She loves curling up behind me on my chair.  The problem is she takes up this much space