technonaturalist

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Blinded by science

Sunday, 28 September 2014 @ 8:00am

[following a discussion about vampires and zombies and what times they’re active]

5yo: Mum pretend you’re a zombie!
me: I’m too smart to be a zombie.
5yo: Stop blinding me with science!

[not much later]

7yo: I can tell the future! I predict Daddy will be home soon!
me: Will he be wet?
7yo: Maybe a little bit…unless there’s an unexpected thunderstorm.
me: If you can tell the future then it shouldn’t be unexpected!
7yo: I can’t predict thunderstorms!
me: But you can tell the future!
7yo: …now you’re blinding me with science!
me: It’s not science it’s just logic.

Arachnidding

Wednesday, 24 September 2014 @ 12:04pm

9yo: Why is there a giant spiderweb there? It’s really bugging me. Or arachnidding. Or something.

Yet more retopo

Saturday, 20 September 2014 @ 9:00am
Head and torso retopology in Blender 2.71

Head and torso retopologising in Blender 2.71

Ended up poly modelling after all as Bsurfaces doesn’t work in Blender 2.71. Least it’s not too horrible with the magnet and the correct “snap to” thing on (it’s a picture of a magnet which is greyed out in the above screenies, next to the picture of the cube with one white face close to the bottom of the screen, don’t ask me the names of anything :). Though by “doesn’t work” it appears that it’s missing some buttons, I have no idea if it would continue working after those buttons were reinstated. I could probably read the code if I tried but otherwise don’t know enough python to hack it and apparently no one else that knows what they’re doing uses it enough to fix it. I guess I’ll look into it if I can find some of this mythological spare time stuff. The face loops are doing my head in. And the head is really dense compared to the torso (trying to console myself it’s because heads tend to be round, torsos just curvy and I have smoothing on so what I’ve got looks smooth enough). I’ll have to see if the face loops actually work when I get around to doing morphs (or shape keys, apparently). Hopefully I should be able to retopo sections if I need to as I really, really don’t want to do the inside of the mouth again (I thought last time would be the last time damnit!).

Squirt

Friday, 19 September 2014 @ 4:12pm

[overheard from the kitchen]

JJ (to 5yo): Don’t squirt that. Don’t squirt that. STOP GRINNING LIKE THAT YOU’RE GOING TO SQUIRT SOMETHING.

Homeschool snippets

Monday, 15 September 2014 @ 12:09pm

The mosaic thing got some good use while it was rainy, with 9yo and 7yo both copying patterns from the book and inventing their own:

Playing with the mosaic thing

7yo’s English workbook:

7yo English workbook - doesn't go to school every day

9yo played a “Little League” game at halftime at one of the Perth Demons games. Technically it was the Year 5 GosHawks (what JJ and I have decided to call the Gosnells Hawks) that were supposed to go and play but I don’t know what happened and most of the Year 4 group and three of the Year 5 group ended up going along instead and played against an entire team of Year 5s from Manning. To Nanna’s horror and Pop’s delight the GosHawks ended up in West Perth colours:

Doo-wop

Wednesday, 10 September 2014 @ 2:50pm

I told 7yo and 5yo they would have to wait a couple of hours for a box of frozen raspberries to defrost.

5yo: How much is a couple?
me: Two. Dua. re.
7yo and 5yo: Doo-wop! Doo-wop! Doo-wop!
me: [laughing too hard to correct them]

Drupal 7 notes - making javascript work in a modal

Wednesday, 3 September 2014 @ 10:35pm

Or more accurately in my case, making a jquery gallery work inside a modal. I am really bad at javascript so I have no idea if my hackjob is a good way to do anything but it did what I wanted.

What we needed in a recent project was for a gallery view with a thumbnail slider to launch from a gallery index comprising of thumbnails made up fo the first image in a multiupload image field. We used Gallery Formatter (the only one that would show up in the Colorbox Node at all).

Stolen crackers

Sunday, 31 August 2014 @ 3:26pm

JJ: Ahh you’ve got some crackers there! 5yo: Freshly stolen from the English!

Head retopo

Monday, 25 August 2014 @ 1:32pm

Alternate title: my Blender muscles are atrophying -_-

I had a lot of work on the last three weeks and have now slowed down as I put out a call for help a couple of days ago and now waiting on a response. In the meantime I’m slowing down back to normal and getting back into the 3d (no 3d for three weeks make bek something something). So three weeks ago after stuffing around with the rig I eventually came to the conclusion that the topology around the hips was wrong. After trying and failing to fix it by spinning edges, I decided to just retopo the whole thing because I wasn’t sure about the loops around the face either.

New norcia excursion

Sunday, 17 August 2014 @ 1:54pm

I keep forgetting to write about our day trip to New Norcia.

It was one of those things that had been suggested ages ago by mother in law as she had gone to school there and was interested in showing it to the kids (and us, though both JJ and I have been in the area previously, me on a Yr11/12 art camp and him…well he was not quite sober for most of it apparently). This seemed like a nice little local history and anthropology/society and environment type thing (New Norcia is the only monastic town in Australia) and we finally got around to it, in the in-laws massive shiny new Toyota something or other that they’d bought as part of their retirement plans.