2020 Manifesto

An attempt to reclaim a much-maligned word. A better fit than "resolutions" for these...

1 - Regain 2nd Cat Race License

In theory I should have already started the campaign on this, however as I type this while the 2020 race season has begun, there have been no races organised locally. I haven't raced since June 2018, so as of the 1st December 2019 I lost my 2nd cat race license...so I'll need 40 points to get back up there before the end of November. Ideally I'll get it done way before that.

One of the offshoots of the rise of 3d printer tech is the proliferation of cheap "CNC" machines thet use the same control circuitry as a 3d printer but usually swap out the belts for drive screws and guide rails use a cheap spindle instead of the hot end and are usually constructed out of standard 2020 extrusion and a few machined parts.

I've seen these things knocking around but mostly assumed they were trash but their prices have been dropping a lot in recent years and you can pick one up for under 200 bucks.

My monitor had been showing some odd image discolouration so I've been considering replacing it and what with the black friday cyber monday and I guess mauve thursday I had a look what was on offer and ended up getting this bad boy

I've been looking forward to Obsidians new game for a while one of the splinter factions that spun out of the death of Black Isle who made some classic RPG's (Baldurs gate, Fallout) Obsidian have been making interesting if sometimes flawed games for a while with the great but unfinished KOTOR 2, Neverwinter Nights 2 which had alot of promise but was hamstrung by the engine. Things like Alpha protocol the slightly shonky Spy RPG game the third dungeon seige game and then the excellent but buggy Fallout New Vegas.

So borderlands 3 came out a short while back. Annoyingly epic exclusive although I managed to pick it up in the badly managed epic mega sale for a nice discount before they realised their mistake and pulled it.

So Epic is bad everyone knows it

They promised a bunch of features like preloading and cloud saves basic stuff all modern game stores support. If you look at their roadmap these are marked as implemented but it came out recently that the upcoming borderlands 3 supports neither preload or cloud saves. They've also pushed back a bunch of features to later this year that were promised in the first 6 months.

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.

Mangaged to unlock all the gateways on the surface of every planet and then the ones at their cores then unlock the platform thing and then I got "the ending"

Not unlocked the gold suit yet as I have 5 or so achievements one of which requires a multiplayer game to do not sure if I can be bothered with that or not

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.