We’ve all done it before, purchased a diary for next year in December and promised ourselves “we’ll stick with it this time” and then three weeks in it’s at the bottom of a drawer already coated in a fine layer of dust. I’ve been guilty of this many times over the years and often tried to convince myself that my memory was good enough not to need a planner. We’re kidding if we believe that about ourselves, human memory is fallible and limited; a perfectly photographic memory only exists in the movies.
After my success with the papercraft Battlecruiser from Starcraft I decided to complete another model based on machinery from a sci-fi franchise. Initially I looked at my library of Warhammer 40k vehicle templates but realised many had major structural issues. Eventually I resolved to build a heavy star of Clan mechs, with the current plan involving a Shadow Cat (medium), Timber Wolf (heavy), Summoner (heavy), Mad Dog (heavy), and Dire Wolf (assault).
I’ve been an avid follow of microfiction author Uel Aramchek (@ThePatanoic) on Twitter for some time, so in time I became a huge convert of North Of Reality where he drops a new piece of interconnected, surreal, and gripping fiction thrice weekly. When he announced his plans for the Patreon-based Cryptofiction, I was instantly enthralled with the idea and have been signed up since the start.
To summarise the project, he creates one work of fiction per month that is produced in a strictly limited supply where each piece is signed, numbered, and hand-mailed to the recipients.
Continuing on from the reveal of the first completed piece in my last post, I kept working on this model in the afternoons and on weekends as a meditative and skill-testing hobby.
In the above pic I have all the completed parts for one wing. The little tubes on the wing sections caused me probably the most grief, just really fiddly and hard to keep formed when using this cardstock (~200gsm).
In more recent times I’ve been getting back into origami, regularly folding cranes and lucky stars; small, meditative pieces that help clear the mind and relax an individual in the stress of the day. However part of me wanted to get back into something a bit more complex that would also require an abundance of patience.
Papercraft.
I use to haunt the /po/ board on 4chan, never posting but just skimming for interesting models and saving them to my computer.
Time to break the silence that has fallen over this blog. Some pretty dark things happened a few months back, stuff that hurt me badly and severely harmed my mental health. I’ve moved in with my Dad again, back in my old haunting grounds in East Perth. It’s been really helpful and freeing and I’ve started to get better now. I’ve lost a heap of weight, started gaining confidence and feel like I’m connecting better with people.
So I realise I haven’t written much personally about me and I think that could potentially be a good thing. We often turn to our diaries and blogs in times of hurt or hardship and thus they can paint a negative picture of our lives to the casual reader, despite the potential realities of the situation being quite different. To this end I’ll try and refrain from posting stuff about my personal life too often and I will aim to (no promises though) even include positive posts about the happenings in the meatspace I inhabit.
Alright, I finally took the plunge and dove properly into Hugo and used it to set myself up with a new personal website. In doing so I also decommissioned my Dropplets and Ghost blogs, porting the content into this new static site. Has been a lot of fun, really glad I got into it and now I’m looking at every problem as potentially solvable with static site generators.
Also got some movement on ButWhatWillPeopleDo.
I wrastled with the layout of one of my projects today, thankfully most of it was just reverting changes back to my original designs. That and some troublesome tables + CSS + JS. Also hit some snags with the asynchronous, non-blocking I/O of JavaScript but managed to find an optimum solution with Bruce. Towards the end of the day I got tasked with adding a legend, info-box and toggle to Leaflet.