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.

We also switched to doing it during the day as I once more designated entire days to working on things and as it's on a weekend it's convenient for her too.

I'm still placing millions upon millions of feathers.

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}.

This malarky is purely because I wanted to be able to assign materials per feather.

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.

As a result of that and some other things including my brain randomly shutting down on occasion (sleep is yet another thing I'm completely failing at) and being distracted at the drop of a hat because putting the down on is extremely tedious and I desperately want it to just be magically done perfectly without having to spend the time and effort actually doing it, I once more didn't get much done on my designated work day.

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 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.

Different story up close x_x I need to fiddle with the strand thickness and number.

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.

I actually didn't get to do much art last week as I spent most of it rejigging schedules and the Obsidian vault I use as a journal/organiser/thing (I'm still in the middle of modifications, it's a work in progress and changes whenever I discover a new process or shiny or they put in something new) and trying to sort out and organise things for this year, or at least first term.

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.

My camera work (the camera was my phone) was shaky and awful and the position I was in was the best I could do at the time but definitely was not the best.  But to get better I'd need a multiple camera setup in some interesting locations and I don't have multiple cameras.  The sound in the recording was also muddy so I had to overlay some tracks.

I'm on the third week of using Obsidian for a lot of things including organisation and I've worked out that the schedule I made for myself at the beginning of this year or end of last year or whenever it was does definitely work, it's me that's the problem (so about the usual).

I also kind of want to investigate what will blow up if I add markdown to the techno editor to make copypasta easier. But for now I have a plugin for Obsidian which copies markdown to html so moving the text is easy and it's just the images that require a bit more extra work (actual uploading for techno, and copy link or in the case of collages, screencapping for hive).

I didn't end up doing much on UASG because I was too busy writing roleplaying notes. Sunday was a lot more productive. Gundry got the default Ocean eyes from the CW Eye add-on

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:

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.