technonaturalist

This month was just as action packed as the previous one. There was one more excursion with the parents, extended family and Up Close and Local Tours but minus 17yo (who was feeling a bit run down and decided to play it paranoid) to Bunbury, where we stopped by a little cafe with its own little adorably put together food garden.

After that it was off to the Dolphin Discovery Centre.

Title I should be using if I cared about SEO: one way to use Obsidian to manage creative writing projects.

Apologies in advance, I accidentally upsized some of the images in this because I forgot an important character in the mogrify command, and I am too lazy to redo those screenies.

A “short” history

Once upon a time, I used to be a total pantser.

And then I started this project.

August started off really slow and cruisy and them ramped right up into September.

It started with the death of one of 13yo’s fish. He was devastated as it had gotten sick but had looked like it was starting to recover before succumbing. We had a little funeral in the side yard, burying it under the rosemary bush.

17yo had another quarter life crisis (he has had at least one in the last two years) where he decided he needed to “get his life together” and once again asked for organisational tips (he has asked me previously for things that I have already told him about in trying to get them to learn my organisational hacks and how to research and experiment with their own). He asked me for a corkboard (full corkboard as I’d bought them corkboard/whiteboard combos previously, apparently it wasn’t big enough for what he wanted to do) so he could pin things he wanted to organise on it. 15yo overheard and said the same.

Not sure what has been going on with Manjaro or whether it’s just my sense of time that’s been warped, but there seems to have been a longer than usual period between updates. I’ve been waiting for Blender 3.3 for a while as that has the new hair system in it, but Manjaro refused to update.

I finally got it to do a system update by force-refreshing the mirrors, but still don’t know if that did it or if an update was coming out then anyway.

The completionist in me is somewhat annoyed that I didn’t get the September Powerbee. I must have done it too early in the morning or something stupid like that (I did it around the same time as I usually do but my “around” tends to be an hour or so).

Oh well.

My parents have been over and seem to have decided to do a lot of tours this time round (probably because an uncle and his family are also over), and invited us out on a number of them. It’s been great because it’s stuff we either haven’t done for a few years or may not have had an opportunity to do so, and hopefully we’ve crammed enough stuff in to make up for the last couple of months.

I think I’ve finished the first light and shadow layers for the Eladrin.

It went pretty quick, I don’t know how long it actually took as while Toolsday is the day for it, there was a bit going on.

I was talking to Sprat about having difficulty with feathers (because I’m trying to do Zara’s head feathers better) and that I didn’t have a feather generator. Then it occurred to me to see if one existed and apparently one does.

13yo’s kitchen experiments continued, he made sticky date puddings with caramel sauce.

Was delicious warm with ice cream. He made two of them because he loves making massive batches of anything for some reason. Worked out alright as I think most if not everyone in the house likes sticky date pudding.

There’s been a keen interest in blacksmithing and weaponsmithing and general annoyance that we won’t set up a forge (which he assures us can be done on the cheap and while I’m sure it can, it’s also a fire hazard and we’re in Australia) so he can get into it. After some discussion of the really hard work that went into crafting stoneage tools, he went oldschool and made a “training sword” out of a large wooden gardening stake using only a file, and braced on the outdoor set as we don’t have clamps.

I really should stop trying to push to finish things before going to bed because the times that it has worked is probably still in the single digits.

I decided to postpone the progblog because I’ve been so out of it I really hadn’t gotten a lot of work done, partly because I just didn’t look at my schedule and partly because I managed to simultaneously not know what day it was and know what day it was because of who had to be where by when. All I had to show was stuff that has been seen before quite recently.

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.

It didn’t start out that way. I had taken Little Miss Puppy to my aunty’s place (having not been to see my aunty and grandmother for a couple of months because covid and colds and grandmother gets pneumonia so we don’t go there if anyone is sick just in case) and she had played forever with my aunty’s dog and been pretty knackered when we got back, so J had decided maybe we should just take her for a short stroll around the block (he also wanted his walkies).

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.