brainwipe's blog

2024 was really fucking hard. Naomi's nocturnal sleep cycle absolutely fucks with the extended family as a whole. Kate's ex-other-partner "A" was a twat and the understandable fallout from that went on for months. Glad that's over. Kate's got other partners now and is much happier. I'm happy with my extra comet relationship with Beki, I imagine that will de-escalte naturally over time but we're cool where that's at.

That said, I'm still trying to live a life outside the 7-11 days.

7-11 day

A typical day for me (for posterity):

I'm a bit unfit. Not massively but there are some days where I just don't leave the house! I need an activity that's fun in of itself and isn't running because fuck that. What I did like about running is that doing couch to 5K gave me something of a challenge or a game to play. I'm on Strava and that's great for nerding out on maps, stats and so on but it's not really a game. I'm having to overlay my own shit onto it and that's what you have here.

The FPV goggles appear to be a migraine trigger so I'll be saying goodbye to my drones. It's frustrating and numbing.

I could wait, I could try different things but I don't really have spare time to maintain them and tweak them as is the hobby. In the last 6 days I've had a total of 30 minutes to myself just before bed. Most days I just pass out exhausted.

So much of my life is outside of my control. Naturally family comes first and they need me to drop everything on a regular basis. So I got a bunch of stuff that I hope to do. I wouldn't go as far as saying goals. They're listed in order of importance. Stuff near the top more likely than stuff at the bottom.

74kg

I'm over 80 now and I want to loose a bit to get into a more healthy weight. I can be disciplined about what I eat, so with the one below, this should be ok.

I definitely feel like we're having good times in Los Santos. Popping a good few caps into bottoms. The new missions were fun, I particularly enjoyed my air escort on the water bombing one. I liked that it didn't fail us because you went double chopper.

Thanks also for helping deliver my cargo. If, well, that was what you might call help.

We'll start with Big R's Super Yacht. It's not as super as EMW's, which has fucking neon and shit but it's more super than mine, as I don't have a yacht.

I snuck away for an hour after a spot of work and learnt how to do curves with point manipulation and grease pencil. I give you: SQUIGGLES!

Definitely good fun. I'm enjoying the course, it gives me a little bit of structure to work with.

Next step is working with 2D, I don't think that's more grease pencil but using 2D reference art; which will be handy because that tends to be how I work.

This evening was all about booleans, kitbashing and sculpting.

One of my goals for this year of doing was to learn Blender 3D and with some of the other goals going rather well, I decided to plough this evening into it. My end goal is to start reproducing Icar models in Blender.

I don't have the time to learn Blender like I did Lightwave, which was to sink thousands of hours of play. I have precious little free time, so I've decided to be a little more structured in my approach.

Well, this is a lot easier than bloody Lightwave (LW), that's for sure. I want to open source Icar, so I've decided to start rebuilding my models in Blender. Most of the original LW are old, tired and have dodgy renders, so I am happy to redo. It's so much easier to learn 2.8; even given that most of the tutorials use the lightyears-different 2.7 UI rather than the sexy 2.8.

2018 was largely wasted. Yeah, I did some stuff (Cloudship, got most of my teeth sorted) but 2019 is going to be the year of doing stuff. The next six months is going to be hard because Kate is starting doing therapy on real people and it's going to be the hardest part of her career. To help, the family has to adjust around her a bit more and that usually means me picking up the slack. That's cool, we've known it's coming since Kate started. That means that I need to be better organised and do the thinking so that when I do get free time, I can just get on with it.