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).

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 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.

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.