technonaturalist

The title is a cute mispronunciation youngest used to say for that word group when he was a toddler (circliar, triangliar, particliar…).

Circular is closer to where I’m getting.

I’m really glad about this as for a moment I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to fit everything into a circle.

Even if the middle bit (the rectangle where the crosshair looking 3d cursor is) is 40min long x_x

I managed to draw up a rough schedule to try and fit everything in, and am fully prepared to shuffle stuff around. At the moment hive and Duolingo are my biggest time sinks, going well over the hour each I’ve allotted them; hive because it’s hive and there’s a bit going on plus I’m supposed to be moderating a couple of communities and I’m doing a terrible job even looking at them never mind anything else, Duolingo because I was finding it easy so I gave myself a challenge of getting to the next level each time instead of just doing one stack, and then got a thing where it wanted me to use the keyboard instead of the word bank, and I found out the hard way that I’ve been sight reading Chinese and Japanese and haven’t actually associated many sounds with characters.

One of the good things about The Big Reset (although the kids don’t really feel it at the time) is the slow and very limited internet (my parents actually have a quota as they don’t use nearly as much internet as we do or more specifically as the kids do), which means they tend to spend slightly less time on their devices. The boys actually spent a few nights playing chess against each other and JJ, and Sprat taught them how to play a game with a Chinese name somewhat similar to Poker (the similarity that I could pick up being that you had similar collections of cards you could use).

The plane managed to land (rather heavily by the sound of things) despite the dubious weather on Christmas Island, and we made it back in the appropriate number of pieces just in time for what sounds like a proper lockdown, it seems.

Seriously though why do people insist on hoarding toilet paper.

Well, one week extra planning I guess, and I have to reschedule two appointments. The extra planning time will be helpful as I will probably need to actually have a work schedule again so I can learn the nonsense I need to figure out this hive front end silliness.

As soon as Protective 3 had gone into cooldown, I started work on Acaedia, using Red and Zip to help with sizing.

The Flyers (especially Dragonkin!) take up a lot of space and need a lot of space.

I’m starting with the Royals’ apartment which is in the central tower. Each of the squares is 10x10m, the walls are 5m high.

Oof I haven’t done a progblog since the beginning of December and that wasn’t even a progblog, it was a noprogblog x_x

So surprise surprise, the MacBook Air struggles with the kind of work I do. I had to keep toggling the particle hair on and off in Blender because adjusting things on my big rig was making that thing complain (it’s an i7 something or other with 32Gb of ram), the small rig was unusably laggy with the particles on.

I usually don’t do December and January unless interesting things happen as December is usually write-off month (too many end of year things happening for anything to be effectively planned and even if it could be planned we’d be exhausted as normally around the end of year things we just want to chill) and January is planning month (because my organisational skills are that atrocious that I need an entire month to plan).

I thought I’d already done August Homeschool Miscellany but apparently I’d done July and collected photos for August but not actually written the post. Oops. So everything ended up getting grouped as I’ve been struggling this year.

It’s no accident that October was left out, apparently we didn’t do anything that I could include.

Goolugatup Heathcote Museum

We initially heard that there was a museum in the building of the Heathcote Cultural Precinct when we attended a relative’s birthday party there. The precinct was a mental institution in the 1920s for mildly afflicted people and was one of the pioneering ones that broke away from the methods that seem to result in buildings being haunted.

Stuff is a mess right now. Don’t really want to talk about it as it involves other people (spoiler alert: nobody is dead yet and J and I are still together seeing as those are the things people seem to be jumping to). End result of that is my head went into interesting places that are hard to come back from and while I really tried hard to do some art to stabilise, well basically it didn’t work out, so buggerall got done.

I wonder if my hive crew have been missing my incessantly nonsensical comments or if they’re enjoying the serenity.

As I mentioned at the end of the last progblog I wrote two weeks ago (x_x), I finally managed to pick up a cute laptop (I’m so used to getting the highest spec’d things that getting something practically off the shelf and only upgrading storage feels so weird and wrong) and get back into the overpriced (I’m now broke for the next 6 years) and very…um…“special” Apple ecosystem that I have this love/hate relationship with (love it because it’s the one that gives me the least problems and I find their devices fun to use, and hate it because it is so very overpriced and some things make me -_-).