technonaturalist

Today was the last day of regionals at our gym, there were three rounds of level 3s, then 11yo and I stayed to help reset the gym back to normal for training for states in ~4 weeks.

I’m feeling kind of pathetic as after guarding doors for two weekends and helping move heavy equipment everything from the back down are pretty sore (okay in hindsight it was probably stupid to lift the big p-bars by myself but I have good stances, maybe not as good as Zip’s but all I had to do was lift each end in turn so the floor protectors could be put under the feet) and…apparently while I can still use my hands for typing and poking at touch screens, I can’t draw. Well I can but working on @f3nix’s piece is taking way more concentration than it should.

And hopefully I’m not going to have any more backwards steps as I’m thoroughly over them!

Our club is hosting regionals so weekend just gone has been extremely busy (hence why progblog is late) and there is another one is coming up next weekend which will hopefully be not quite as busy. With luck I’ll have this week’s progblog done on time, but it depends on whether we need to help set up on Friday night (as I tend to make progblogs on Friday nights, I do try to post them then as well but it can end up being sometime on the weekend if I don’t finish on time.

Hopefully this will be the last month of not much happening as most of the chaos surrounding the closing of our business has been taken care of and there’s only a few loose strings left to tidy up now.

As usual, June was dominated by preparing for and then helping out in badge tests. 11yo and one of her agemates volunteered to be errand grunts at the boys’ badge test, which basically involved running food to the judges and messages between the adult staff members and occasionally grabbing more sugar from the canteen for me. 13yo passed his badge test with flying colours.

I have a cold which has managed to work its way up into my head and still quite a lot going on so I’m thinking really stupid thoughts at the moment. Like feeling guilty for not working on websites despite the fact we’re currently closing down our business so all the website work I need to do are on technonaturalist, perhaps at some stage the two freebies which are the only ones still kicking around on my server, and working with the clients’ new hosting companies to get their sites transferred. I managed to get over that after a few minutes of applying some logic to it.

It’s been an insane month and I didn’t get much art done for most of it, hence the larger than usual dearth of progblogs. For the last few months Sprat and I have been closing down our business (which for me means doing all the techy stuff of moving or helping move websites, and at some stage I have more stuffing around to do with the server and more services to cancel), went to Melbourne for a quick getaway, my car was broken into and the house hunting has not stopped (except for this weekend where there were no house inspections except for a house we’d already viewed and JJ didn’t organise any other ones).

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there were two siblings, fyn and Sprat.

fyn had been having a bit of a difficult time, and Sprat decided that they needed to bugger off on a holiday together as the last time they had done that had been when they were school-aged and jetsetting about with their parents. fyn and Sprat had a 99 year old grandmother who lived with some other relatives in Melbourne, and as fyn hadn’t seen her since her 90th birthday, Sprat decided that would make for the perfect holiday.

Obviously, I haven’t done uv mapping for a while. Last time was three years ago (jeez I’m so slow aargh it’s too late for me save yourselves). So while I remembered how they worked and seem to have gotten better at actually making/unwrwapping them, I managed to completely forget what they were. So when I was setting up the paint object, I automatically selected the largest they had available (16k), because in Krita I always paint on 16bit canvases.

I was actually intending to do this on Friday, but I was also setting up some new backup drives (my original drive was appropriated) and needed to copy the old backup from my computer (where it’s currently taking up a HELL of a lot of space!) and I found out the hard way that I can’t use 3d Coat and have big copy operations going at the same time because it makes my computer run out of memory.

May was pretty quiet and boring as well. Think we just ended up gaming most of the time (occasional bout of Skylanders with the small one, and a few rounds of Monopoly with everyone, and I think there was some Exploding Kittens in there somewhere as well). Magic and Pokemon cards were sorted (at least by colour and type, and further sorting in the case of the Magic cards depending on how pedantic people were, I think 13yo just sorts by colour and 9yo sorts by colour and type til he gets bored). As per usual when we’re stuck home there was a lot of docos, again mostly concentrated on Horrible Histories and David Attenborough. Very hard for other types of docos to get a look in against those.

I forgot to mention last update. Ages ago (6 years eep) I mashed a calendar for AER. Years later (because I always seem to notice glaring things years later, this does not bode well for whenever I finally get around to animating x_x) I suddenly realised, all the scientists in the Tranquility Calendar are guys.

They were all great and interesting people but seriously?

I mentioned this to darqx and said I wanted to “even” it out a bit (there’s 13 months so it’s going to be slightly lopsided but near enough is good enough as far as I’m concerned). So being the awesome sibling she is, she helped me find a whole pile of notable female scientists from a variety of fields (and by that I mean she found most of them in the time it took me to find a few because one of us can just do things and the other only just do things when the focus is there, and then I somehow had to choose which was bloody hard work).