technonaturalist

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

And just as you’re enjoying the nice blissful month of no weekly posts from fyn, we’re starting again! Anyway we’re about midyear so this is part catch-up and part vague plan for the rest of the year.

We had one week of staggered flu (nothing too serious, just lots of sleeping, lethargy and general blarginess) followed by a week of gastro (again not too serious in the grand scheme, the kids were a bit lethargic but not listless, the biggest issue was the washing machine choosing to break down immediately before the gastro hit and it was out of action for a couple of weeks), followed by a short week (thanks to a public holiday) of me taking it easy because I was exhausted from the previous two, followed by a week of JJ catching a really bad flu and then a week of me catching a much milder version of that flu which technically only lasted a day, I just chose to take the rest of the week easy. We did have a few bouts of okay or mostly okay in that period fortunately.

[first scene - spy movie sendup]
8yo: how do they get all that stuff on the car? It’s not big enough.
[at some point during sweeping cinematographic scenes]
8yo: how do cars grow? How do cars make stuff anyway?
Husband: …you’re thinking too much into a movie that has talking cars.

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

So I’m hideously slow on WiP shots. Part of it is because I’m feeling a distinct pointlessness in them (there are many characters and whatnot to come) and most of it is simply because I keep putting off taking the screenshot when I think about it, and then eventually forget.

Every now and again though I need to remind myself I’m making progress. Here I’ve hidden the wing membranes so I can see what I’m doing, and left a point highlighted so that the close up pane makes some semblance of sense. Done some work on the arms but not a lot, none on the legs, focusing on the torso and pretty much making up the anatomy where the wings are attached as I go.

This weekly stuff is tiring. Seriously who reads this anyway? May just start hiding them as I still kind of need to write them. Anyway.

Bit of a slow week this week as the kids all caught a cold and I spent a couple of days heroically fending it off.

The kids wanted me to teach them how to draw. Actually what they really wanted was for me to magically confer kickass drawing skills onto them. I told them they would need to practise a lot as most of drawing was getting your eyes, brain and hand to cooperate and the remainder was your imagination. I put out a few items on the table including a Duplo block which I deliberately angled towards them. They don’t like drawing things on angles, everything has to be STRAIGHT. Even 8yo who currently has slightly better spatial perception drew it straight, even though he drew all three corners that he could see (in a straight line rather than having the middle one come down slightly as it did in perspective). Almost forgot about maths bookwork. 8yo is at a stage in Dragonbox where it’s stopped pretending it’s a game and has presented him with actual maths, with cute graphics like it’s marker on nicely textured paper. 6yo is struggling with Dragonbox so opted for her book and is progressing extremely slowly with it (getting bored easily and I think it’s s getting a bit hard for her).

My loving husband has told me on many occasions that I’m certifiably insane. While not exclusively so a lot of it has to do with the whole trying to be a studio around homeschooling, webmonkeying, being the one at home so having to manage the house and all the associated miscellany.

Recently I decided to muck around with something or other (precisely what escapes me now) and while doing so I inadvertantly discovered that the rig I had built in Lightwave 8 or 9 and dragged through 10 to 11 had blown up. Not sure what happened but it’s no longer working. I was a little peeved, but happy to discover after a bit of mucking around to find out how it works, it should only take me a few hours or at least under a week with Genoma, hopefully (allowing for numerous crashes as Genoma on Mac is buggy or at least memory leaky).

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Our garlic bulb has grown quite large but is now looking a bit limp and sad. Got the kids to draw it again (still have to find where 8yo put his first diagram). 8yo’s writing is improving a lot. Got him to work out the perimeter and area (both of just the floor and the entire building) of a building he was making in Minecraft.

Good enough for now, I’m sure I’ll fiddle with it more as I go. Was going to post a much earlier wip and of course it was “after I fix this, and do this bit, and what the hell is that, and…” now it’s mostly done.

I’m not sure if the model in my anatomy book has tiny ears, but if Red’s ears look massive it’s intentional, the Dragonkin inherited large pointy bat-reminiscent ears from the Chiropterans who went extinct a thousand or so years before the timeblock I’m currently working in.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Monday: sick. Fortunately there was JJ to help with maths. JJ was making noises about wanting to do modular arithmetic. When I passed the kids were doing basic arithmetic on the whiteboard. JJ wasn’t quite sure who was where and thought 8yo knew how to carry 10s. I said we were working on carrying 10s, he hadn’t quite got it yet but could so multiple digit addition and subtraction in his head as long as the numbers were under 10.

[pretty much all the images I had in here were hotlinked and they’ve all vanished because they’re extremely outdated models by this point]

The “Primer”: a fictional computer (“book”) in a work of fiction called “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson. It is carted about by the child and absorbs information from its surroundings and uses that information to construct appropriate learning experiences for the child in a narrative fashion.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Been a bit of a lazy week this week.

6yo made a (very) short story book with illustrations and a shape book to help 4yo learn his shapes. Bigs did their 10-12yo maths books and were either horribly distracted, not in the mood or they are starting to find the work harder as both only managed to get through one section before the endless fidgeting and recalcitration set in. As I watched 8yo prowling up and down the house while he worked out multiplication problems in his head I thought perhaps it was a good thing that he wasn’t going to school at this stage as he’d drive a teacher batty with his shark-like need to be always moving.