technonaturalist

Sibling dearest and I are trying to initiate our project chats again. The project chats were a video call where we’d talk about what we were working on and it would kind of be like the good old days where we’d actually be sitting next to each other and would chat and occasionally look over to see what the other one was doing. We’ve had to replace looking over with screenies (screen sharing would be a complicated setup as while she uses the same machine for the video call and work, I don’t, and that would probably cause her connection to drop and people in my house to complain about me nomming all the bandwidth) but it’s definitely better than nothing.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself as I’m internally screaming my way through laying out polygon feathers and thinking about how the curve/particle feathers were easier (even if I couldn’t get them to look nice) and there will be more experienced people than me out there facepalming and headdesking or both like why the bloody hell did you go and overcomplicate it like that for when you could have just done {some technique I don’t know about that does the same amount of work in less time with better results}.

I’m still trying to settle the other work stuff into my mix. Like with the classes themselves, I need to get the timing right. Lesson planning is still taking me a ridiculously long time. I did find out I can do it in a hurry when I need to (last week I basically had a couple of hours to come up with one) but I like feeling like I’m being thorough.

The year started off great with 16yo and I getting our jobs back at the kids’ gym (they’re “just” volunteer jobs but won’t be too much longer). A lot of stuff has changed, a couple of things are really not great, some stuff is fantastic, and some stuff is kind of wait and see. As well as being put on for an introduction class and a group of level 3s, she was allowed to help with the Kindergym classes seeing as she wants to get into childcare.

I missed posting last night as I was up til 1am finishing off lesson plans. I like to joke about how it’s taken me three days to write the lesson plans. Most of the time taken was actually refining a few things with my Obsidian lesson plan templates once I actually started using them, and then having to work out a format for my notebook when I transcribed them. the notebook is partly an excuse to buy cute notebooks and mostly because I’m intending on taking it home over the weekend to transcribe the week’s lesson plans and leaving it there during the week in the unlikely event that I can’t make it or am running late, then whoever is subbing can just grab the notebook out of the cupboard and use the lesson plan I think I’m going to have to put the drills and their equipment requirements in a table to save space but that’s more formatting issues that’s getting kicked down the road to deal with next week.

I really don’t like repeating work. As a result it was super easy for me to get distracted world building for a playtest of that system I made (it’s currently called Skill Monkey because the way I designed it, eventually long running characters will probably have a very long list of Skills). I decided on “notShadowrun” as the setting ie using something similar but different to the dystopian cyberpunk Shadowrun universe but also casually doing a lot of our own thing.

I am going to do the down in two systems and I am most likely going to regret it. The big downy feathers (which aren’t called that but I can’t remember what they’re called) were finished not long ago, they are topside and underside but they look pretty much the same. The render actually isn’t terrible at a distance. Different story up close x_x I need to fiddle with the strand thickness and number.

As is normal for us, November kind of slowly ground to a halt as there was a rather large thing to take care of and then we focused hard on/got roped into helping with end of year stuff, and December was pretty much a write-off. 15yo worked through a Netflix documentary series about F1 racing as her boyfriend is really into it so she was trying to learn a little more about it.

And I very nearly missed it (okay technically I did miss it coz it’s now after midnight but shhh x_x) because I’m trying to get used to a modified schedule and there was a bit of stuff on today and also the usual not being sure if I should bother postinng because I don’t feel like I’ve made enough progress. But first one of the year and I am trying to get back into the habit of weekly progblogs.

13yo continued on his dessert presentation experiments, jumping on the Halloween bandwagon with this “vampire” themed one (the bananas were meant to be fangs), and the goblet was a prop we’d bought some other Halloween). Towards the end of the week where we’re running out of stuff and need to do more grocery shopping, there was this much simpler but still very delicious fare (can’t go wrong with peanut butter as long as you’re not allergic to peanuts).