Screenshot of a render because I was too lazy to save out the actual render. Did it as a test partly because Blender is apparently slightly less likely to crash if I do renders as opposed to the viewport preview and mostly because it’s been a while since I did one and I have to do one every so often to make sure things looks how they’re supposed to look (the viewport render is pretty accurate but is also deliberately lower quality than even my preview renders).

August sucked almost but not totally completely. I think I did peck a bit here and there but didn’t really have time to sit down and actually work on anything, and even then not enough got done that I felt was worth the effort of writing about. And then I nearly missed September too for many and varied reasons. At one point I cracked it with the top of the wing being too pointy and went through and did the point by point modifications I’d been studiously avoiding and desperately hoping I could juust cover over with the feathers, because it didn’t enter my stupid head that the feathers kind of needed to follow the underlying form. Most of that comprised of just making most of the quads more planar (grey, some of them had to stay coloured/non-planar as it’s a reasonably low poly model and making the quads grey would cause the form to be lost).

New hardware! I finally got a new cpu and logic board…and some unexpected new ram as J accidentally bought a logic board that required ddr5 ram instead of ddr4 which was what I had. The upside of that was I got a massive upgrade (as I asked him to double the ram when he was buying new ram and he actually did) and we accumulated enough parts to put together a machine from the leftover parts for middle child.

A new problem arose. I have this song in my thought track: and I found out from comments on that video that there is a version with vocals. And it has beautiful lyrics.

Currently as I type, I’m pecking at Yet More Freaking Feathers, hive, lesson planning and somewhat trying to finish my Mekton character for a game which I’m not sure when it’s going to start as I haven’t heard much of anything other than some issues with mech building since it was proposed, but I did say at the time that they could start without me (and I would jump in if/when appropriate if they started without me) as at the time I wasn’t sure if I would be able to play or not.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the past ages because I’ve been wasting a lot of time playing stupid phone games because stuff happens in the games unlike in real life where it feels no matter how much effort and hours you pour into something, absolutely nothing at all gets done. My parents happened to be up for Mother’s Day as they had come over for a quick holiday (which of course involved catching up as much as we could as we only see them a couple of times a year) so sibling dearest coerced asked me to please get some flowers and she would send a hamper of goodies.

I have spent the last couple of weekends deciding that that particular weekend would be the one where I finished the wings. I did not finish the wings because it was so incredibly tedious and boring that my brain shut down on numerous occasions and I wasted a lot of time playing stupid phone games when this gigantic lump of cuteness overdose wasn’t destroying my posture and exacerbating old injuries.

I’m still reasonably happy with how it looks given that they’re polygons and I’m still internally screaming. This is a great case for geonodes. Sadly that’s beyond my meagre capabilities. I also had to fix a topology nightmare on the shoulder which I completely forgot to screenshot probably because I was trying to remember if I’d been drunk when I did it (spoiler: highly unlikely as I haven’t gotten past tipsy for a very long time).

That’s not an acronym, just me screaming in annoyance. The underside of the wing was the absolute worst thing ever as no matter how I moved the feathers, gaps kept appearing. Sunday was a super slow day to begin with as the bigs and I were recovering from doing a show on the Saturday (they were more tired than me as they were the ones actually flipping out and stuff, I was just kind of trying to help direct as I’d been unexpectedly thrust into that role as the coach who had been supposed to be doing that job had unfortunately come down with something the night before).

That feeling when you’re the only one that knows that you did stuff because it doesn’t look like much changed at all. That was a big part of why I decided to just let the streak break than try and push a late progblog. The other reason was that all the other stuff was a huge fight (some of it physically fights, or at least shouting matches, but mostly just the usual struggle trying to keep on top of things).