technonaturalist

July and August were a bit of a blur as some not fantastic events occurred which monopolised my thought processes. We got reacquainted with death when my last two cats died within two weeks of each other (the one before had died Christmas last year and we had also lost a guinea pig recently). There were some extended family dramas which didn’t involve us directly which fortunately resolved before getting down and dirty with the legal system became necessary rather than advisable. Sprat was up for the semester break which is always great and the kids and I had lots of interesting conversations. Unfortunately I can’t remember any of them.

This one is from last Thursday! A lot of stuff happened that prevented solid work on it so it ended up getting dragged out for the entire week! And then I didn’t stream this Thursday because other stuff had to happen. But we got there eventually! In this one I finish off High and continue working on Red. Digits are my nemesis (yes I have several of them).

Track list

• Third Eye Blind: Semi-Charmed Life
• Savage Garden: Affirmation
• Secret Garden: You Raise Me Up
• Mark Mancina: Toe Feiloa’i
• Collective Soul: Run
• Walk the Moon: Shut Up and Dance
• Thomas Bergersen: Dragonland
• Fun ft Janelle Monae: We Are Young
• Red Hot Chilli Peppers: Tell Me Baby
• REM: Shiny Happy People
• Thomas Bergersen: Promise
• Thomas Bergersen: Soulseeker
• David Arkenstone: Starlight Inception Main Theme
• Thomas Bergersen: Aura
• Cat Empire: The Chariot
• Red Hot Chilli Peppers: Scar Tissue
• Lin-Manuel Miranda and Opetaia Foa’i: We Know The Way (from Moana)
• Thomas Bergersen: Starvation
• The Wallflowers: One Headlight
• Mark Mancina: Navigating Home (from Moana)
• Imagine Dragons: Radioactive
• Jason Raize and The Lion King Ensemble: Endless Night (from The Lion King Broadway Musical)
• Bon Jovi: You Give Love a Bad Name
• The Mighty Mighty Bosstones: The Impression That I Get
• Youth Group: Forever Young
• Globus: The Promise
• Guns n Roses: Civil War
• Paul Cardall: Our Love
• Scott Irby-Ranniar, Geoff Hoyle, Kajuana Shuford and The Lion King Ensemble: I Just Can’t Wait to be King
• Eric Whitacre, Conspirare and Craig Hella Johnson: What If
• Andrew McMahon: Synesthesia
• Thomas Bergersen: A Place in Heaven
• Thomas Bergersen: Remember Me
• Eskimo Joe: Just Don’t Feel
• Piano Guys ft Megan Nicole & Alex Goot covering Begin Again (original by Taylor Swift)
• Alex Goot and ATC covering Good Time (original by Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen)
• Thomas Bergersen: Soulseeker
• Mark Mancina, Opetaia Foa’i, Te Vaka and Pasifika Voices Choir: Te Ka Attacks
• Vai Mahina, Sulata Foai-Amiatu and Matthew Ineleo: An Innocent Warrior (from Moana)
• Jebediah: Harpoon
• Mummer’s Dance cover (original by Loreena McKennit which is what’s linked because I still can’t find my version)
• Ramin Djawadi: The Children (from Game of Thrones)
• Lindsey Stirling: Shadows
• Coldplay: Clocks
• Mr Mister: Kyrie
• The Smart: City Lights
• Everclear: Wonderful
• Creed: My Sacrifice
• Eskimo Joe: New York
• Spin Doctors: Two Princes
• REM: Bad Day
• Samuel E Wright and The Lion King Ensemble: They Live in You (from The Lion King Broadway)
• Phil Collins: Another Day in Paradise
• Thomas Bergersen: Age of Gods
• Yanni: Looking Glass
• The Piano Guys ft Shweta Subram: Don’t You Worry Child (original by Swedish House Mafia)
• Red Hot Chilli Peppers: Otherside
• City of the Fallen: Immortality
• Starship: We Built This City
• Fall Out Boy: Young Volcanoes (explicit warning)
• Black Eyed Peas: Where is the Love?
• Eagle Eye Cherry: Save Tonight
• Survivor: Eye of the Tiger
• Thomas Bergersen: Fearless
• Avicii: X You
• Audiomachine: Young Blood
• Bush: Glycerine
• Thomas Bergersen: Homecoming
• U2: Numb
• Thomas Bergersen: Cassandra
• Tracy Nicole Chapman, Stanley Wayne Mathis and Kevin Cahoon: Chow Down (from The Lion King Broadway)
• Peter Hollens: Some Nights

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Last Thursday stream as I’m switching to Fridays next week or so (whether I’ll manage next Friday is another thing as Sprat is up on holiday so we’ve been hanging). Decided to stream despite not having backup as I was going to be busy doing other things on the Friday when I did have backup so decided to continue working on @jedau and @randomli’s engagement present.

I usually pay at least some attention to my chat clients while working and people were talking about surfing in the TeamAus channel on Discord. @scooter77 had once asked if I could draw an upgoat on a surfboard, so that got well stuck in my brain. I know how this kind of thing works by now so new document was opened up and surfing upgoat was knocked out in a relatively short amount of time so I could get back to it. I’m thoroughly pleased with how the engagement present is turning out.

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.