In my infinite wisdom I decided to stay up late again (to 1am which used to be normal bedtime once upon a time but I have been trying to make bedtime 10-10:30 for two decades x_x) to finish the blocking. So now I’ve been doing more fun stuff like arcing the arcs (so that things don’t just shortest path to the next keyframe like they were doing in the blocking video from the last post)

Blah blah blah the usual. A lot of my projeect work time got overrun by other things that needed to be done. Some of it was kind of unavoidable (like the couple of times a year we do performances, and competitions when they come up). The rest of it was just somehow I ended up being the one that absolutely had to do the thing because for some reason everyone else was completely and utterly incapable.

I spent the first two weeks of March editing a video out of several that I took on and off during an old friends reunion/meetup. It was supposed to be a quick job and in fairness it only took me a day to put together and do the basic editing and a couple of hours , but I had a problem with led flickering and trying to fix that resulted in ghosting in places which required a directly opposing solution and that was what I spent most of the two weeks on.

Happy slightly late silly season! A little bit late due to a combination of family shenanigans and whatnot, forgetting how to draw, doing a different method, realising that method would take too long, attempting to draw again, finally remembering how to draw and then trying to blitz it out around everything else in by then one day left, stymied slightly by a very fun new year party and actually finished it on time but then when I went to export it Krita and/or the MacBook started playing silly buggers and insisted on giving me blurry images and so I airdropped it to sibling dearest to see if she could work something out. She couldn’t get it to resize nicely either and after trying to work out if it was a brush problem or a Mac problem she ended up taking a screenshot and sending me that, and that is what got uploaded at the end of the night x_x

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).

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.