technonaturalist

It’s been a good while since I wrote about the baby steps of my very slow transition to as much open source as I can manage.

quick recap

• early twenteens: apparently (I searched my own blog XD) I was using linux on a small rig (laptop, the desktop is the “big rig”), and apparently it was Ubuntu/Kubuntu or some other derivative and I had a lot of problems with it (mostly because I wanted updates faster than I was getting them and getting what I wanted broke things) and went to Ubuntu Studio which was less of a problem enough to make a difference but still a problem
• 2016: acquired the big rig (fondly referred to as “the frankenbox”) with its current case and original parts, installed Ubuntu Studio, problems persisted
• 2017: so many problems that I fully cracked it after yet another dist-upgrade explosion requiring a reinstall, an online friend recommended Manjaro (and stayed up really late for him to make sure I got through the install process fine)
• mid-late twenteens: started using ownCloud, and at some point after that switched to Nextcloud (purely on principle as I wasn’t sure I liked the direction ownCloud was going, it still functioned fine at the time)
• late twenteens: broke away from the open source trend briefly with the acquisition of my current iPhone (reasonably certain I was replacing an Android which was doing my head in, I apparently hate Android a lot more than iOS) and much later a Macbook Air (both phones and Manjaro or the photo apps I was trying refused to play nice and my media was infinitely more important than my stupid principles)
• 2020: acquired a NUC and started properly self-hosting my websites (of which I’m down to just this one now) and Nextcloud
• 2023: the frankenbox got a lot of new hardware (basically all components except the case, drives and the gpu got replaced), switched to Arch for what ended up being no other reason than I’d mentally prepared for and committed to it (originally we thought I’d have to reinstall because Manjaro wouldn’t recognise all the new hardware but it didn’t care and just worked)

the watch

In much more recent history I’d told JJ I was going to have to switch away from Fitbit really soon partly because my Charge 4 was starting to die anyway (screen wouldn’t always turn back on with wrist turn or taps and then was never bright enough even if I explicitly set the brightness higher and the battery life had gotten noticably shorter but it was still going a few days between charges so that wasn’t a massive issue) and also Google had gone from being naggy (some crap about how it would somehow be so much better if you just use the Google account) to coercive (if you want to keep using this thing you have to use a Google account). J said the strap on his watch (some random cheap thing he’d gotten off ebay or something) had broken and he needed a new one too and told me to send him the one I’d been looking at.

Pulled earthy colours today so very boringly it was a plant, but at least not the one I had in mind when I pulled the pens out.

holoz0r started up a community for handwritten posts on hive and it seemed as good an attempt as any to try to post more than just my irregular progblogs.

^{I do actually have a lot of stuff that I would like to blog about, I just don’t seem to have the time to do it in}

I’m deliberately doing it in my sketchbook/journal as I’m very casual with it. I’m not sure when I started stressing about blog posts but I’ve just realised that I really do consider what’s “worth” blogging about and I’m not sure when that developed.

I got very briefly stuck when I found out that I don’t think I can do a double loop with the tail with five controllers.

Firstly there was a lot of keyframe shenanigans which I kind of just did but didn’t really need to stress about that much for a rig test (but I kind of had to do it because I KNOW).

I generally avoid frame by frame like the plague but sometimes it’s a thing that has to be done apparently.

Prehensile tails are a pain, why would anyone design a character with them.

^{why do I have pretty much no control over this head-universe}

Trying to get this tail to wrap neatly has been an interesting experience.

I’ve tried going forwards cleaning up everything between keyframes and going backwards from the shapes I wanted to end on and it seems I can break everything whichever way I do it so I’ve kept inching forwards as that seems to break things slightly less.

In my infinite wisdom I decided to stay up late again (to 1am which used to be normal bedtime once upon a time but I have been trying to make bedtime 10-10:30 for two decades x_x) to finish the blocking.

So now I’ve been doing more fun stuff like arcing the arcs (so that things don’t just shortest path to the next keyframe like they were doing in the blocking video from the last post)

Blah blah blah the usual. A lot of my projeect work time got overrun by other things that needed to be done. Some of it was kind of unavoidable (like the couple of times a year we do performances, and competitions when they come up). The rest of it was just somehow I ended up being the one that absolutely had to do the thing because for some reason everyone else was completely and utterly incapable.

I spent the first two weeks of March editing a video out of several that I took on and off during an old friends reunion/meetup. It was supposed to be a quick job and in fairness it only took me a day to put together and do the basic editing and a couple of hours , but I had a problem with led flickering and trying to fix that resulted in ghosting in places which required a directly opposing solution and that was what I spent most of the two weeks on.

Same freaking problem. I stayed up way too late and then didn’t end up posting on Muddling Monday because I hyperfocused on trying to kerbstomp it into the ground. The kerbstomping part didn’t happen but I did at least figure out something that worked (at least for now, I don’t know if it will still work later).

Anyway I have managed to work out that there’s some problem between Deform and Interpolate. With no modifiers on in viewport, everything is fine and dandy.

There is the usual reason for no progblog since the first one of the year, and that was I got stuck.

I needed to comb the hair on the highest multires level (because the render looked completely different to the viewport, which I thought was something to do with hair settings and didn’t realise the levels would make that substantial a difference) and I’m not sure if multires and curve hairs play well together as combing was really quick and easy at level 0 but at level 3 it’s jittery and unpredictable and often moves in at least the opposite if not some random direction (it’s not laggy at all, just unpredictable and makes an already tedious process extremely unnecessarily aggravating). I got really mad and deleted the hair node group modifier thingies I’d put on it earlier and shoved the Surface Deform node back to the top which has helped a bit, as in it’s not jittering randomly or pretending there’s some kind of force field active and it doesn’t keep flying off in random directions instead of going in the direction I’m pushing it.