technonaturalist

Really nothing much happened this month, mostly because I did something to my neck which had me pretty much out of action for a couple of weeks and I spent most of it in bed, and then took it extremely easy for the rest of the month. Unlike Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the types of plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes and Aristophanes (all of which the kids kind of know about and have a very passing interest in thanks to Horrible Histories) were not so interesting for children (and to be perfectly honest not doing too much for me either). 12yo has been reading our Manga Shakespeare collection again though, mostly Midsummer Night’s Dream which is a favourite of mine.

I started on an engagement present for @jedau on Wednesday, and decided to continue it on Thursday so of course it got streamed.

Did something slightly different, instead of just cutting a piece out of each track as usual, I axed anything that wasn’t sappy, upbeat, uplifting or didn’t have lyrics I could use and used slightly longer samples than otherwise. The first and last tracks are still the first and last tracks (and in fact the first track was the inspiration for the piece as well as what I thought of when I read Jed’s dramatised recount of the proposal to his girlfriend). The ending is rather abrupt because I was pretty tired by that point and my computer was playing silly buggers.

Who would have thought that editing a 6 hour video would take longer than a 3 hour one? Additionally I had some fun and drama with KDEnlive, apparently its annoying settings are per project; I had to specifically tell it to use most of my cores for rendering as it kept trying to use one and overheating my computer which caused it to hang and made me mad. And even after telling it to use 7 threads (so I could have one to do stuff with) as it turned out I had to just sit and let it do its thing all by itself as if I attempted to use my computer while it was rendering something would violently overheat and then the computer would hang.

This one’s especially for @jedau on Steemit hive who has made numerous requests for a process video. So here’s me retopologising Za’haran/Red like I know what I’m doing, 3hrs timelapsed into ~8.5mins (bonus: learned KDEnlive). I apologise if the flinging around in and outside the head I was doing gives anyone motion sickness. And who knew trying to credit everything I was listening to would take all day, might never do that one again XD

My headache has finally cleared but my shoulder is still hurting like hell so I managed to completely forget about streaming this weekend, not that I would have been able to stream for more than an hour anyway at the rate I was going, had to take very frequent breaks!

Retopo is another thing that really isn’t my friend so even if I did know a way to reuse retopo models I would likely just keep doing retopo per character just for practice.

Yep I’m trying to stream again. I’m currently looking at Thursdays again (because that’s when the inlaws come down to hang with the grandkids and then somehow my house gets cleaned in the meantime, yes I have awesome relatives), Tuesday nights and one of the two weekend days (which one will depend on what is going on at the time), won’t be announcing them til I can make sure the schedule works reliably though. If you’re keen as mustard you can still drop in if you like though.

May was a pretty cruisy month for a variety of reasons. Initially, we were recovering from an April that managed to be both crazy (but not nearly the same level insanity as the end of the year usually is) and relaxing. Then everyone took turns being sick. We’re all good now.

12yo seems to be headed into the know-it-all self-righeous phase and it’s a good thing he has a lot of different aged and types of people around him to bounce things off as it tempers his views and stops him from being insufferable. We’ve had quite a few interesting political and philosophical discussions usually on car rides, which are great except when I need to concentrate at a busy intersection. Trying to get him to be more observant of his surroundings is still an ongoing battle. He went cold off gymnastics at completely the wrong time, declared he was bored and didn’t want to do it anymore. I figured he was being hormonal and told him that he was doing it this term whether he wanted to or not because I’d already paid for it. He has found his love for it again, and I have told him that while I won’t make him keep doing it if he completely loses interest in it and really doesn’t want to do it anymore, I do want him to keep doing it as it’s something that he struggles with and I want him to keep working at something that is hard for him as a lot of things come pretty easily to him and he’s not used to struggling, so needs to learn to build some resilience from somewhere. Anyway he went cold at completely the wrong time and when he should have been working hard to qualify for badge testing he did his absolute best to skive off, and by the time he got back into it, it was too late. He initially tried to blame me for the fact he couldn’t qualify but eventually had to accept that it was his own refusal to train that has led to him having to remain in t he same level til this time next year.

…is so he doesn’t have to listen to my inane rambling XD

So he’s over at the table minding his own business, listening to whatever it is he’s listening to while opening boosters and sorting and sleeving Magic cards (sometimes audiobooks, sometimes podcasts, sometimes footy games, sometimes music), and I’m working on detailing this thing:

when I idly wonder out loud: “I wonder if Asian dragons ever have spinal problems.”

Wings are more or less done.

I say “more or less” because I was spending a very long time obsessing about the edges of the wing membranes, and then figured I should just make sure they’re thick enough to retopo around and not obsess about that kind of thing too much. So I did that for the two inner membranes (I obsessed over the two outer ones before making this realisation) and made sure the wing fingers were more or less symmetrical on either side and easily visible to retopo over.

We spent almost the entire month of April on Christmas Island. This post is part homeschool log and part “travel photos” therefore more picture heavy than usual so grab a drink and a snack.

The idea behind going up for Easter was to avoid getting crabbed in as often happens when we go up for Christmas. Being a tropical island we just got rained in for a bit of it instead. Additionally we spent a fair bit of time hanging with family and general chilling. In the first couple of days we decided to go out foraging and see if we could find some limes for Mum.