Happy New Year! Listen to the song XD I really should have finished this piece hours and hours ago, but I got distracted reading Chronicles of Darkness books and suggesting to the kids that we try a short run to test the system out and see if we like it enough to switch. And so I don’t have a story for this one because it’s 1am. I feel bad for poor Dak, I have trouble figuring out how to shade dark skin at the best of times and dark scenes are the worst x_x I did actually start a different version of this piece on Christmas Eve but it was very sadsack (the theme song for that was Blow Up the Pokies by The Whitlams) and was basically Zara staring up at the stars being depresso (she gets depressed every Intercalary which contains AER’s New Year as she misses her mother more then) and Juan in the near background trying to work out how to deal with things (he kind of got thrown violently in at the deep end with the parenting gig) while I wallowed about how much Christmas sucked this year.

Yeh right like I ever take them. I have seriously been moving like molasses and I really do need to actually change something, but because I’m me I’ll probably just burnout again, have to recover for a few days again during which I’ll relentlessly beat myself up over being an idiot again and that I really should have fixed it before it became this bad again, only to do exactly the same thing down the line again.

The last major gymnastics event for the year is over, which took a lot of pressure off. I finished the photobooks, more pressure off. Then stuff happened with made things ramp up again, and it got so bad that I deliberately didn’t do some mental health stuff that would have helped the frame of mind I fell into because there is literally absolutely no point whatsoever, because I’m wrong and everyone else is right and that’s all there is to it no matter what.

Stuff is ramping up. I’ve been mostly working on photobooks trying to get them done in time for printing and shipping back to the island in the vain hopes it might not get there too late. I’ve also been working on my dice system (it has undergone two major overhauls in about as many days) and roleplaying notes (gained a bit of extra time as the kids didn’t feel like playing the weekend just gone, I brought the stuff over anyway just in case I actually needed it but got to just hang with my friend the entire time).

I should probably start going to bed earlier as I’m constantly tired and staying up late trying to cram more work in doesn’t seem to be working. But I keep doing it because I feel bad about not getting a lot done. It’s a vicious perpetual cycle. I’m also feeling bad because it was my last day at work today, I’ve just found out someone else at the centre is dropping because of the vaccine mandate. I don’t know what’s going to happen with their program, they were the only one running it. There’s been interesting conversations and sometimes I’m wondering if the people claiming “I get it, I really do!” after I’ve explained my reasoning to them do actually “get it” (in fairness some really do even if they made a different decision, and others are really, really struggling with the fact that after considering essentially the same information, how other people could possibly have come to the “wrong” decision). Work is also now severely understaffed and my boss is stressing which is making me stress because I like my boss and there isn’t a right thing to do.

There are many and some of them are just things I’ve decided to add on because I’m not very smart like that. After WoDMod1 finished I started hacking on a dice system I’d written for AER two decades ago x_x when I was roleplaying a lot more. It mostly worked out fine when I was playtesting it with the friends I roleplayed with frequently back then because it was a fork of World of Darkness with a lot of my fudges and homebrew built in (it’s actually more or less the system I run now when we’re playing World of Darkness, just closer to the original than my fork so the children reading the sourcebooks know what’s going on).

I actually had them for the delay for once, and that was going out for birthday churros (not mine, but someone’s). After that I was trying to render out some super quick and dirty walk cycles (which are literally just hands and feet approximating walking motions, no refinements or personality injected whatsoever, which partially accounts for the jerkiness and the other part is only vaguely remembering how to do looping gifs and animated gifs in general and couldn’t get the timing right when making the gif, I haven’t done one for game engines yet and I don’t use them at all for animations) and my computer crashed three times while rendering the first one (I’m a bit extra so I did three different views because of course I did).

Late progblog is late again but that’s nothing new. This time was an interesting combination of I had to go in to work early and completely forgot to start (I’ll usually make a start on writing in the morning, pick at it throughout the day and then finish up at night when I get back from work and do super basic if any edits) and then because I’m really close, figured I’ll just get a render done to use as a cover image because I’ve been doing my usual doing a lot but nothing to show for it thing.

UASG Spent today trying to catch up with the last couple of weekend’s worth of work and I have now almost completed the three main items that Yue carries around with her (partly because they’re things that she uses very regularly and mostly because they’re kind of a security blanket). First is the airfoil, which is a sword when folded up: and a giant fan that she can both fight with and glide on (skaterpunk Yue’s skateboard wasn’t going to work in an airship setting, and I went with a variation of the Talespin “airfoil” rather than the slightly more sensical Avatar: The Last Airbender glider partly because ridiculous steampunk anime, partly keeping some aspects of Skaterpunk Yue and mostly because I hate staff x_x).

I still do too many stupid things to count. This is just one of them. No not that in particular, that’s just my attempt at approximating Chinese brush painting (I have exactly no idea so I watched some tutorials, and I still have no idea). The *actual *stupid thing is this.