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.

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. the notebook is partly an excuse to buy cute notebooks and mostly because I’m intending on taking it home over the weekend to transcribe the week’s lesson plans and leaving it there during the week in the unlikely event that I can’t make it or am running late, then whoever is subbing can just grab the notebook out of the cupboard and use the lesson plan 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.

I am going to do the down in two systems and I am most likely going to regret it. The big downy feathers (which aren’t called that but I can’t remember what they’re called) were finished not long ago, they are topside and underside but they look pretty much the same. The render actually isn’t terrible at a distance.

And I very nearly missed it (okay technically I did miss it coz it’s now after midnight but shhh x_x) because I’m trying to get used to a modified schedule and there was a bit of stuff on today and also the usual not being sure if I should bother postinng because I don’t feel like I’ve made enough progress. But first one of the year and I am trying to get back into the habit of weekly progblogs.

Alternate title: FREEDOM! Which is probably what Zara was screaming into the wind. Don’t do what Zara is doing, it’s very stupid and dangerous. And Megan’s seatbelt is currently not effective so don’t do that either XD And the pod windscreens are actually HUDs and Dakarai is looking at a rear view thing but the HUD can only be seen from inside the pod. The HUD is probably also screaming about an unrestrained passenger.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a last month of the year run according to any semblance of a plan and that may or may not have something to do with my persistent delusion that I can somehow continue doing the same thing plus all the extra time consuming things in the same amount of time. Pro-tip: it never works. The end of year display was great, and I had the “brilliant” idea to film the whole thing (I did get permission from the head coach to do it first) and edit them all together.

I got a little busy. Some of it was getting overexcited about my notes (which is so far working wonderfully), a lot of it was comp season, some of it was basically being told to upskill because apparently they need me to upskill which I went ahead and did as I had been intending on doing it anyway (just fast forwarded as the plan had been for next year, and hopefully it won’t turn out to have been a waste of money as I may have been shadowbanned), some of it was getting swept up in roleplaying notes (I get really excited about worldbuilding and trying to craft stories around my players’ characters) including the CoD PvP PbP Discord server (very slow because I still need to read books so can’t get 17yo’s Hunter started, and C who got started is taking his sweet time responding, and T and S who are idling on that server haven’t even made characters yet, I don’t think these kids are the best at pbp XD) and a newly created Pokemon server (playfully referred to as Pkmn PvP PbP but is actually called Frontiertown and I have beeen having way too much fun coming up with character names) where I’m attempting to test out a system I wrote (also very slow as none of the three players I have in there have made a character yet).