2023-08-17:

Fri:
Still not much work wise.
Finished the next chapter. The plan is in motion. Hundreds of rock creatures are gearing up to attack the castle as a distraction and the others can sneak inside. I think I'll throw in a betrayal too, yeah, I can see that happening just to add a bit of spice.
Went shopping, saw my parents.
Came home, checked sites.
Did xbox. We took out the cube boss and got a really nice pistol for our efforts. Let's not do that again.


Sat:
Went to see the guy. Just a few random things, nothing big.
Came back here, did some cleaning.
Ate lunch.
Checked sites.
Got the whistle in Remnant II so I can get the dog. Raised a few levels with him, but he can't heal yet. Who's a good dog? You are, yes you are!
Worked on the laptop. I got live mail open but it just freezes. Sigh. Tried to copy it to a new profile but it insists it's imap settings. But the lady said there was mail on this laptop that didn't move over. If it was imap that's impossible. Maybe she means in thunderbird? I got that open too just in case. Hate windows so much.
Catch up on email - especially registration of the car. Yes, I still have the car, NY, here's some money for you for doing absolutely nothing. No, I don't want new plates, thank you.
More Remnant II, getting up to the level the pup can heal. I beat my first solo boss. Go me! Took me a few tries of course, but I did it. It was a boss we had already beaten so I sort of knew the trick but I'm the most useless one so it's sort of a miracle I managed it at all.
Dinner.
Started my Sunday reading as there was some time before my parents came over.
Parents came for movie. Mom brought harnesses for Tinker, we'll try him with it tomorrow, see if he wants to wander around outside a bit.
Finished Sunday reading. I think there are a few that will update tomorrow though. (There were not)


Sun:
Warframe, got a new limited time weapon that's pretty good. Even at level 0 I went into the simulator, turned on some level 70 enemies, activated my powers, and blew away 5 of the 8 of them in one hit. That's decent!
Checked sites
Paperwork for last month, all 3 jobs I did. Honestly don't know why I bother at this point.
Went for a kitty walk. He accepted the harness right away, didn't even seem to bother him. Why does he want to chew on everything?
Did the lawn.
Plant trays, made up a tray full of tiny pots. Realized later I didn't have to take it to work, I have many, many plant babies upstairs of my very own. So I put them in there. In two weeks I'll cut the cords they should be rooted by then (they always have been) and take them to my mother to sell.
Neil gift, I think I know what I'm going to make him. I have a 3d file of the first bit, but I will have to work on the base. I don't like the provided one. It shouldn't be too bad, I think even I can handle it.
Lunch! Yes, all that before lunch.
Went on another kitty walk because we were teasing.
We were teasing after our kitty walk too. I think we like kitty walks.
Made a new spell and popped it into the book.
Did some Remake. Getting near the end, we've made our way into the building to rescue Aerith, only thing left is the stuff there, the escape, and that's it. Then the Yuffie stuff of course, can't forget our favorite ninja.
Got ready for tomorrow.
A bit of xbox with the others. A few bosses taken care of, nothing like that cube thing, they went down pretty easily compared to that.

Mon:
Got some salad, sadly it looks like it went in last Friday night. Sigh. It was pretty bad. I'll take them all home and the composer buckets will eat well. I've got a nice empty one ready for the stuff so with some leaves, this stuff, it'll be on its way.

Spent part of the day filling out forms. All the "new employee" stuff and I need to get a drug test, again. Uh, you know I've been there since 2015, right? I'll be sitting in the same chair, doing the same job. If I was some drug addict would I have lasted this long? Maybe, it's just a little weird to go through all these gyrations just to continue doing exactly what I've been doing the whole time.

Anyway, I'll go tomorrow morning.

Worked on Neil's gift. It involves modeling rocks. Did they really model all those rocks? I tried using the rock generator, and I guess it looks okay, but it's not the same. These rocks are very angular. My rocks are not. Do I really need to try to model all the rocks? I mean I have time, I guess I can try it. Maybe it won't be so bad?

Came back here, checked sites, had dinner.

Tried modeling some rocks. See, here's the thing. I'm taking screenshots from a game, right? So I can't exactly get a top, left, right, front, back, view of the dozen of rock I need to model to make this pile 'o rocks. The best I can do is sort of an angled top view, and a very skewed less top but still looking down on the rock view. I have to somehow translate that into what the rock actually looks like, and then fit it into the screenshot so it's in the right place. It's going to be completely skewed otherwise when 3d printed. It won't look right. I'll have made it look right from that exact angle, yes, but how tall it is? How thick? I can't tell! How do you even do that? Maybe I can try drawing what I think the rock looks like from all those angles, and just wing it?

I'll give you an example: Here's the same rock. Honest. I tried to take a screenshot of the rock as "above" as I could and from as low as I could, maybe a "front" so a "front" and a "top." But look at it. It's way stubbier in one screenshot, and seems much taller.



How in the heck am I supposed to know what this rock actually looks like if it changes this much by moving the camera down a bit?
And how can I place it into my own scene with any accuracy to match it up even if I "magically" was able to properly  create it so that it looks the same? I don't know what projection method the in game engine is using.

Now if the game had a photo mode, so I could swing the camera wherever I wanted and get side views and such this would all be much easier. But it doesn't. I can only see it from over my own shoulder. So I don't know what I'm going to do about it.

Tues:
Went right in the morning to do the background check stuff and the drug test. They are right across the street, so only had to go once. Nice. Of course, I got to the medical place at 8:45 or so, and "it'll be about a half hour." Uh, there are "3" people before me and doing a drug test, that takes all of 2 minutes, if that, is going to take 30 minutes of waiting? Huh.

I didn't leave until almost 10:00. That wasn't half an hour!!!!

Anyway, got in to work. Not much work wise but I got a huge haul. Very huge. Filled the box to overflowing. Lots of cheesecake, more sandwiches, 3 salad, some pasta salad. Nice. Took some home, and my parents can get a bunch too.

Worked on the rocks. I'm just making some rock looking things and plopping them down.

Looks like crap. As expected. Not sure what else to do. I picked this route because playing yesterday it seems the rock formations are not the same. Yes, they actually modeled different rocks for different locations. They're crazy. They didn't even seem to cheat by just rotating them or anything. No, it's all different rocks. I mean look at that rock picture above. It's got bump mapping baked into it, so it looks scratched up and dinged. For a stupid rock. My rocks have no texture of course because it's a 3D print but their rock pile still looks better than mine. Yes, I can't even get a pile of rocks to look good, that's how far my ineptitude goes.

Came back here, checked sites.

No calls, yay!

Did some reading, got ready for tomorrow, and then Xbox with the others. We have one more shard to find to give to the floating eyeball. (Don't ask)

Rainy day.

Wed:
But not so rainy today, though there were flood warnings.

Pretty boring work wise still. No news on the drug test, hope I got a 75% at least.

Looked more at my pile of rocks. Then decided to see if others had made a pile of rocks. They had! They had made a pile of rocks. So I'm cheating, mostly. Downloaded a good looking pile of rocks but I don't know if it's just poorly done or file format weirdness or what but the rocks need a lot of work. I finally hid all the rocks, and started unhiding them one at a time to move them into position and make sure they're actual objects. Some of them aren't closed, they're 2d shapes that wouldn't print. So they all need work. But this is going to look a lot better than my feeble attempt so it's worth it. I just clean up the geometry of a rock, lower it into position (as the pile is a mound in the game, where this is flat) and move on to the next rock. There's about 300? or so? Easy.

Came back here, checked sites.
Got ready for tomorrow so we can do game.
We solved the puppet problem. And without even any violence, even.

Thurs:
More rocks at work, I think I've got about 100 of them done. Also had the meeting.

Not much else exciting though. Dates on the food are tomorrow, so maybe another haul or it might be Monday.

Came back here, one call. She's been "working" with geek squad, yeah they're the best. Anyway, wants me to look it over, I'll do that Saturday.

Ate dinner, checked sites. Let Tinker out for a bit before it rained.

Tomorrow the usual, I have enough to go to the bank with, so I'll do that. Go shopping. See my parents. More rocks I expect. I don't know if we're doing game again, it would be pretty quick to do it. But we're not doing Wednesday anymore, Stan has to work next time and then Sean goes back to classes that day.

Saturday was the planned Emberhaven game, we'll see if that's still on. Otherwise maybe the front lawn? And the lady, she's not too far away. If I can get the rocks done I can start 3D printing. Actually, I could do the second piece either way it's going to be a long one. Maybe on Sunday, yes.

Did more FF7, almost to the last battle. Sheesh, I hate the Rufus fight.

Well, that's it for today. August is half over. Hope you've been enjoying it. See you all next time.