So I actually had some unexpected extra time yesterday and thought I would get a whole pile of work done before the time I should be doing the progblog and…got stuck into Duolingo because of course I did. I’ve been doing the bare minimum just to keep my streak going for the last few days and thought I should try to get through all the languages this time and I’m doing six languages because I’m dumb, the Memrise streaks meanwhile are long gone because I have to do those ones individually which obviously would take up more time x_x End result, didn’t get nearly as much done as I wanted to before starting the progblog which I started late and had to postpone posting til today because I kind of passed out last night. Sigh.

Still trying to get used to the schedule I set for myself. I’d love to say I’m getting there but I’m really not, quite the opposite in fact. I still want to kill problems and I still want to just finish whatever I’m working on at the time (which is always stuff that is going to take a long time because it’s the nature of the beast, and less common but still more common than I like, because I’ve completely misjudged how long something will take) or also infrequent but still too frequent, something goes wrong somewhere like a computer crash or Blender acting up and I’ll lose a pile of work that I then just want to get back to where I was before I stop.

There’s a bit going on again and it seems like youngest and I have crashed back hard into undesirable old habits (he’s basically refusing to go to bed and staying up as late as possible and needing to incessantly natter at me while I’m trying to work, and I’m just staying up late because I work best at night and can get quite a lot done in a short space of time unlike during the day where I distract at the slightest movement of air especially when it’s on things I hate (like javascript).

The title is a cute mispronunciation youngest used to say for that word group when he was a toddler (circliar, triangliar, particliar…). Circular is closer to where I’m getting. I’m really glad about this as for a moment I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to fit everything into a circle.

I managed to draw up a rough schedule to try and fit everything in, and am fully prepared to shuffle stuff around. At the moment hive and Duolingo are my biggest time sinks, going well over the hour each I’ve allotted them; hive because it’s hive and there’s a bit going on plus I’m supposed to be moderating a couple of communities and I’m doing a terrible job even looking at them never mind anything else, Duolingo because I was finding it easy so I gave myself a challenge of getting to the next level each time instead of just doing one stack, and then got a thing where it wanted me to use the keyboard instead of the word bank, and I found out the hard way that I’ve been sight reading Chinese and Japanese and haven’t actually associated many sounds with characters.

The plane managed to land (rather heavily by the sound of things) despite the dubious weather on Christmas Island, and we made it back in the appropriate number of pieces just in time for what sounds like a proper lockdown, it seems. Seriously though why do people insist on hoarding toilet paper. Well, one week extra planning I guess, and I have to reschedule two appointments. The extra planning time will be helpful as I will probably need to actually have a work schedule again so I can learn the nonsense I need to figure out this hive front end silliness.

As soon as Protective 3 had gone into cooldown, I started work on Acaedia, using Red and Zip to help with sizing. The Flyers (especially Dragonkin!) take up a lot of space and need a lot of space. I’m starting with the Royals’ apartment which is in the central tower. Each of the squares is 10x10m, the walls are 5m high.

The result of Sprat nagging me to draw. Red and Zip weren’t always this friendly. I kind of matched the image she finished while I was starting, and she also suggested I match with my previous Protective, so I did that too by doing a full body shot, otherwise my composition would have ended up more like which is a “slight” difference from Sprat’s composition as her characters are standing further apart and have a much less severe height difference.

Oof I haven’t done a progblog since the beginning of December and that wasn’t even a progblog, it was a noprogblog x_x So surprise surprise, the MacBook Air struggles with the kind of work I do. I had to keep toggling the particle hair on and off in Blender because adjusting things on my big rig was making that thing complain (it’s an i7 something or other with 32Gb of ram), the small rig was unusably laggy with the particles on.

Stuff is a mess right now. Don’t really want to talk about it as it involves other people (spoiler alert: nobody is dead yet and J and I are still together seeing as those are the things people seem to be jumping to). End result of that is my head went into interesting places that are hard to come back from and while I really tried hard to do some art to stabilise, well basically it didn’t work out, so buggerall got done.