technonaturalist

I had bought The Art of War in very recent history (can’t remember precisely when but I feel like it’s been at least a year by now) as 14yo had expressed a desire to read it. He didn’t get around to actually reading it until recently, when he suddenly went on a health kick (both physical and mental) and on advice of J and 18yo, started trying to get in at least a little bit of exercise, eat a healthy breakfast (the kids and I don’t really eat breakfast as we never feel particualrly hungry for a while after waking up) and read a book every day.

Because while it’s still not amazing it’s at least somewhat passable and it’s working out a lot better than the polydown (much easier to layer for starters). I really, really, really should be doing separate systems for the body and the wings but I’ll fix it later (as there will probably be something better to fix/redo it with later) but meanwhile fortuitously the edge transitions to skin will actually look fine as the child hairs from the top looks conveniently like fluffy down (sadly it didn’t work upside down both ways I tried it but this is fine).

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.

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).

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.

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). This batch was apparently a test run for Halloween when he has plans to go out in the streets dressed as shadily as possible and hand some out to kids. He and the friend did have some vague plans to dress up as the main characters from the show but distance (the friend lives about 40min away) and other plans (no idea what’s happening around that time) may be challenging.

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. And now I don’t know which one I want in the thought track. They’re currently both back to back in the Spotify version of the thought track (which is missing a couple of tracks that aren’t on Spotify) while I attempt to make something resembling a decision.

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.

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.