technonaturalist

As requested by @dreemit who assures me that WednesdayWalk just has to be posted on Wednesday and doesn’t necessarily have to occur on Wednesday. As luck would have it, we actually went on a nice walkies on the correct day. And I’m a day late for me because shenanigans happened but I have the advantage of being on the side of the world where a day late makes it on time for the other side of the world?

This week has been thoroughly boring as far as progress goes. Even the progress I made on roleplaying notes felt pretty meh. The uv maps were so horribly borked that I decided I was just going to bite it and redo the sculpt (which is a comparatively easy thing to do). While I was there I noted that some fixes which I thought I’d done with the base model hadn’t actually been done, so decided I would actually do all the fixes on the base model that I was supposed to do, including applying basic textures, which is another thing I thought I’d already done.

the title partially comes from when 17yo was a baby and said pretty much that as I think he was trying to figure out the h sound I successfully crunched a lot of roleplaying notes and even got a decent start on a couple of major npcs (I only write character sheets for major npcs, everything else gets made up on the fly as I need it) and…game on Sunday didn’t happen as one player was working (which we knew about) and the other one had a family thing on (which we found out when we pinged them to let them know we were going to be starting soon).

There was drama with my uv maps. They decided to “helpfully” maximise my uv space by stacking (basically symmetrical things neatly align themselves on top of one another to maximise efficient use of uv space…however because I’m painting the uv maps and there’s different things on each side I absolutely do not under any circumstances want that) and I don’t know when that happened or how to fix it. And there were these random little black dots which I think are polygons (because they only show up in polygon selection mode) but are unselectable.

After last progblog I decided to break from doing the Avian model and work on the Dragonkin one for a bit. First level of panic was that the proportions were really different. That calmed down very quickly when I remembered…I only need the wings and everything in that area was proportional enough. I technically do need the tail but I could just pull that one out if the existing one wasn’t in the right spot and given the different topology of both models it may end up in a slightly different spot anyway I then took another deviation as apparently my base models did not have basic textures applied like I thought they had, so I did that with the ones I had already done.

Gundry still has not budged. I was supposed to do more work on him today but I ended up doing other things instead. I also need to have a chat with my young friend and find out if we’re still going along with…well I hesitate to call what we were working off any kind of plan, not even a loose and fluid one if this project is still going to go.

In that gap was a slightly unexpected new puppy (which I wrote a bit about in the homeschool miscellany and covid (not worth the ridiculously excessive fuss and the frantic stripping of as much freedom as possible in that space of time that was made of it, wouldn’t recommend the headache though). And then there was me figuring it wasn’t worth the blog because there hadn’t been much prog and trying to manage that and consistently failing as other things kept happening (not least of which comp season started).

15yo and I decided we desperately needed a shoe rack so after dropping 17yo at TAFE we headed over to the KMart down the road and got a bamboo one. It didn’t end up getting put together til later that day and 15yo did most of it on her own but was struggling with a bit of it, and 17yo happened to be on his way to or from the kitchen, noticed and leant assistance.

Precious little got done over the last week on anything as I discovered a fatal flaw in my scheduling. I have roleplaying stuff scheduled for most of the weekend (currently only playing every other Sunday so I just use the time for extra prep and generally failing to catch up with all the writeups I haven’t done yet, am starting up a new weekly game with my three regulars next weekend though).

We really didn’t do a lot in April because it kind of sucked. Both of our dogs died within weeks of each other. Everyone was pretty devastated, the kids had grown up with those dogs. The big dog was an early birthday/Christmas present for me as I’d decided I wanted a dog. The kids were 5, 3 and 1 at the time. The small dog came to us three years later.