technonaturalist

Another day another not doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

Sunday was just a hard slog of realising that I’d completely munted everything and that the feathers are actually on stalks before going into the skin. I versioned the model to see if doing that would solve some layering problems I’m having.

And also making the shafts thicker while I’m about it.

At some point when I was rethinging my schedules, I decided that first Sundays were going to be mopping and windows days. Then promptly missed February.

The first weekend of March was a bit intense as J was in charge of scheduling the excursions and decided to schedule them both on the same weekend for whatever reason. We went to an Aboriginal Astronomy event at the Gravity Discovery Centre on the Saturday night and then went shooting at Topshot the following morning. I’ll write a tiny bit more about them with the metric boatload oh photos in March Homeschool Miscellany.

I had asked J to book the Aboriginal Astronomy thing at the Gravity Discovery Centre for this month’s excursion but as he had a lot of work on he kept forgetting/not getting around to it and finally booked it for next month.

Probably just as well as February has its own level of chaos with term going back in and having to settle into term routines. 18yo started back at TAFE with much more enthusiasm or at least tolerance than previously. 16yo and I started work back at gym. 14yo did not start at school as J (who is handling everything to do with that, I have completely refused to deal with anything to do with that side of things) decided that he hadn’t put in enough effort into going to bed and getting up on time, improving his writing or making sure he was on top of stuff that he “should” have from year 8 to be ready to go into year 9 to start this term, so he’ll have to actually start putting in the effort so he can start next term. An issue we’re having there is that he claims that he will do all that when he needs to but doesn’t see why he should bother til then, so they’re at loggerheads.

And another late blog without much prog.

The wing underside is a pain in the system to work on as the double shoulders and the location means I routinely end up inside the mesh even when I’m aware of where I am and even expecting it to happen and thus trying to avoid it. I think this is a minor downside to having cursor depth active but then again at least I remain in the area as the other option is ending up somewhere in space and having to press the home key and hope something is selected to home in on (or select something from the outliner if nothing is selected). I find close in quicker to reorient.

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. My current thoughts are if I don’t get it done when I had it scheduled for, I’ll keep plugging away at it while I’m hanging around the gym waiting for middle child to finish coaching.

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. This is going to make up the bulk of her homeschooling program alongside the monthly assignments. She’s been registered for OLNA and we should hopefully work out where she’s going to sit it as that’s happening sometime in the next couple of months.

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.

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. Currently only 18yo and C are playing, and both have nicely provided some world building as well (which I kind of want to encourage with this type of game with this type of system, at least when I’m running them) or at least very good direction for their characters’ origins.