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).

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.

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 found out at some point during these shenanigans that the new hair system was actually in 3.2 which is the version the Manjaro repo is stuck on, but wasn’t appearing for me 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.

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.

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.