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

She also helped with the design of the silly shirts and socks by shooting me keywords.

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 got a little busy.

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.

Either way it didn't matter because the app that I desperately wanted to update didn't get updated. So I caved and got the snap version working.

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.

At least the reworks are getting faster? I might even finish this character this year, imagine that.

_{the title partially comes from when 17yo was a baby and said pretty much that as I think he was trying to figure out the h sound}

I successfully crunched a lot of roleplaying notes and even got a decent start on a couple of major npcs (I only write character sheets for major npcs, everything else gets made up on the fly as I need it) and…game on Sunday didn't happen as one player was working (which we knew about) and the other one had a family thing on (which we found out when we pinged them to let them know we were going to be starting soon). I've since decided to try running that game as play by post on my Discord server, hopefully that will work out better for the people that keep consistently not making it, and also resolves scheduling issues I was having nicely (I can now run my planned weekly game on Sundays seeing as the fortnightly game is getting moved to pbp).

There was drama with my uv maps.  They decided to "helpfully" maximise my uv space by stacking (basically symmetrical things neatly align themselves on top of one another to maximise efficient use of uv space...however because I'm painting the uv maps and there's different things on each side I absolutely do not under any circumstances want that) and I don't know when that happened or how to fix it.

And there were these random little black dots which I think are polygons (because they only show up in polygon selection mode) but are unselectable.  I don't even know if they're actually polygons or glitches in the matrix as they seem to randomly appear and disappear.

After last progblog I decided to break from doing the Avian model and work on the Dragonkin one for a bit. First level of panic was that the proportions were really different.

That calmed down very quickly when I remembered…I only need the wings and everything in that area was proportional enough.

_{I technically do need the tail but I could just pull that one out if the existing one wasn't in the right spot and given the different topology of both models it may end up in a slightly different spot anyway}