technonaturalist

March was kind of insane like February was as 12yo started doing FreeG and we started vaguely prepping for our somewhat unexpected April trip to Christmas Island and 8yo had diagonistic-related appointments, and it was crazy to the point where I didn’t take notes on our random interesting conversations for this thing like I usually do, so it’s just photos.

12yo made himself a riot shield type affair out of a box and almost an entire spool of twine (which 10yo was rather unimpressed about as it was her twine and she didn’t realise he was going to use the whole thing):

We do an awesome impression of having a pretty quiet month on the homeschooling front, but what was actually going on was getting used to “in term” stuff starting up and trying to make some crazy logistics work out. We ended up dropping swimming lessons altogether as all three kids are watersafe as far as swimming pools go (anywhere involving tides is going to have to be dealt with experience).

After eating a lot of avocado and guacomole, we decided to have a crack at sprouting some of the avocado seeds. According to the instructions the bigs looked up, we needed two skewer the seeds on toothpicks and suspend them in water for 6-8 weeks or something to that effect.

10yo found an experiment on Youtbe that she wanted to try, which involved dropping hot water into cold water rapidly to see if they mixed. So we would be able to see if there was any mixing going on, she colour coded the water with food colouring after boiling the hot water.

The plan for streaming on Thursday was do a quick sketch, then carry on with the rig test anim. That didn’t happen. What happened instead was this.

I don’t do anything more complex than textures for backgrounds, the bed is just one ridiculously oversized prop masquerading as a background. I don’t hink that’s going to be a normal thing either. I am not really looking forward to shading those tattoos XD

The problem with doing 3d or animation or 3d animation (for me at least) is that the works in progress shots can be exceedingly boring. I spent pretty much the entire streaming day yesterday finishing up the tail end of the rig test anim, and am currently letting it finish up a timing render which didn’t finish overnight because I forgot to turn Avi’s particles off. Oops.

I’m aware the feathers are being awkward, they will get folded down in the detail run (I need to figure out how to do feather controllers, or if there’s just a better way to rig them, they’re doing my head in). These are from the end of the test, where the three of them have a quick conversation while turning away from the camera (because I wanted to end with the My 3 pose) which then pans around to be in front of them (I do also need some panning practice).

Straight off the bat, nobody likes doing bookwork, not even the primary homeschooling parent (that would be yours truly). I have the books mainly so I know what they’re technically supposed to be doing if they were at school (and it would be a handy syncing device should they ever decide to go to school or if I need to chuck them in there for whatever reason). So I’ll be getting English, Maths and Science books from my usual source for these things once I have money to do so. We have been doing ChoreMonster on another homeschooler’s recommendation which has been working out better for longer than other things I’ve tried. However the bigs are getting to an age where I want them to be a bit more responsible with how they manage their time and the things that need to do (rather than me telling them what they should be doing and then nagging them because they don’t want to do it). To that end the bigs and I are now giving Habitica a go as we’re all gamers and roleplayers so the idea is a bit more appealing than the simple reward system that ChoreMonster is. The bigs have copied their bookwork into the daily list and the other chores into habits, and I’ve told them they can add whatever else they like. Unlike ChoreMonster where I assigned how many points each chore was worth, they can assign how difficult they feel each task is and reap the rewards (or the punishments if they fail to complete their dailies). We’re still in early days and change is hard on anyone, they currently don’t like it and want to go back to ChoreMonster possibly because the interface is a lot more complicated and there are in-game consequences for not completing tasks (the character loses health) and the sudden responsibility is a bit overwhelming. They have since added their own todos and habits and dailies on top of the ones I’ve given them and we’re on a quest to defeat the Dust Bunnies, and 12yo actually scarpered to bed when he realised what time it was as one of his habits was to be in bed by 9:30pm, so it might go all right.

I’m usually streaming on Picarto on Sundays after 12 and Thursdays from 9am-3pm AWST, though lion dance season is coming up which may throw the Sunday streaming a bit. I did a random ~4hr stream today as the in-laws have a busy week this week and decided to come today rather than not coming at all because they’re awesome like that, working on an Ingress wallpaper:

Yesterday I switched up between working on the Zul’jinn concept:

Stuff I was working on as the year ticked over (because we apparently don’t do parties anymore).

Still working on the rig test animation, just about at the end of the blocking phase and then I go back through with the detail phase (there should only be one but there will probably be 2-3 and me trying and probably failing to stop myself). The unofficial title of the above is “YOU IDIOT”. All will become clear when I get the render out XD D is average Dragonkin height (2m tall) but I think I made Avi and Base a little bit small, should have made them 1.7m instead of 1.6.

We didn’t get to do our Solstice Wreath this year due to a little more craziness than usual. But other stuff got done.

10yo figured out how to make fingerless gloves using her loomband loom and wool after watching a few Youtube videos:

She has since either given this one to her best friend or made her best friend one and there has been a request to teach another homeschoolie how to make them.

Because they’re apparently useful to have and I haven’t done one forever (seeing as I’ve spent so much time redoing things). Let’s try a 5 year plan.

2017

• character concept art for all characters in the first and second blocks
• come up with a name for the arc the first and second block are in (yes it’s been over a decade and it still doesn’t have a name). Episode names optional.
• build all of the things for the first ep
• make intro, outtro and trailers
• start writing second block
• continue writing Aidan’s blog
• possibly start writing script for Seamus’ storyline (comic)
• make AER website

2018

• build all the things for the second ep
• see if I can interest people enough to be voice actors and run auditions
• -record and animate first ep
• character concept art for every other character I know about. Yes, all of them.
• keep working on second block
• continue with Aidan’s storyline, start Seamus’ if haven’t already

2019

• with luck my build list should be a lot smaller now so should be able to build out everything else
• is the second block finished yet?
• run auditions for new parts or unreprised roles
• record and animate as many eps as possible to my ridiculous standards and assuming I have the hang of things by now
• start writing out C’inokh and Ter’wyn’s stories, decide whether they’re comic or animation

2020

• build/modify all the things for second block
• if possible build all the things for Seamus’ comic
• if possible start work on second block

2021

• have we finished animating and released the entirety of the first block yet?
• can we start producing the second block now?
• I suspect there might be a third block

The 2018 part of the plan involving finding voice actors actually terrifies me because that involves trying to find people who might be interested. I’m actually seriously bad at the marketing side of things as I prefer people to be interested if they find it interesting and feel like even resharing from Patreon and announcing Picarto streams is “too pushy” even though I have been told I’m probably actually not pushing it enough. Everything else is stuff I would be doing anyway. Trying to work out how to get sound into the video is similarly terrifying because I’ve never done it before.