Or not.  Short version, according to last night's bizarro dream, there's going to be a merger between "this" world and "some other dimension/universe" soon if it's not happening already.

Now that I'm awake I'm wondering if it was Yet Another Incarnation of the Crazy Dog House, though I don't recall seeing a cliff this time.  One day I should probably try to explain The Crazy Dog House, which appears to be a stupidly large mansion not a doghouse.

Ian McKellen as Gandalf in Peter Jackson's live-action version of The Lord of the Rings. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"It" was going to be very dangerous apparently.  I cannot for the life of me remember what "it" was.  Myself, the guy that felt like a wizard and dressed vaguely like Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings movies and the grumpy dwarfish guy waited a bit for the lift to come back.  The lift was this thing on the side of a building.  When it opened and the occupants moved out, we made sure they didn't see us ducking across the street and into the lift.

There was a "guard ogre" in the lift.  The lift itself was a normal sized/shaped lift, but had a window in the back.  I glanced at it on the way in and caught a glimpse of this piggish face with big tusks and then decided I was going to stay under the line of sight of that window.  The dwarfish guy kept muttering about the "guard ogre" and the wizard didn't seem particularly fussed by it.

At the bottom of the lift shaft, we got out into an airport like processing area, except it was unoccupied.  We moved through the counters and picked up some stuff, and on the way through the sleeves of my shirt started changing colour.  The left one turned red, the right one remained blue.  This made the dwarf really anxious and he continued muttering about how the guard ogre was going to come after us if my sleeves weren't the right colour.  I looked at the blue sleeve, glanced back toward the lift while picking more stuff up (can't remember what I was picking up, maybe just luggage), looked at my sleeve again and it was very slowly turning green.  I reassured the dwarf guy that "it's getting there" and we continued on through another door.

We ended up in this old looking town, though the building we emerged from didn't look a lot different from the one we'd entered by (despite having gone down what I recall being a long way). We went to where we were going in the same building, and "Gandalf" told me I needed to get some candy.  Apparently this was very important.  So off I toddled to get the candy despite not having a clue how the currency system worked in this place.  The money looked like those little papers that often get used to unsummon demons/monsters in anime.  Fortunately, I had a child come along to help me buy candy.

We went to the shop down the road (a fair way) and I asked her to tell me what was good to get as I had no idea what was good around these parts.  We picked out some candy, I paid for it and got the feeling we needed to act whatever passed as normal around here so I told the kid we'd go to the library once we finished shopping.  She was starting to get really antsy for some reason and said from somewhere near the door that she loved the library.  I picked up the candy and went to find her, and when I did we realised we'd forgotten something, so we went back to the counter to get it.  When I got there I picked up this strange package that looked like it might contain a book, and while there also picked up another child who reproachfully informed me that I knew she liked doing "that kind of stuff".  I got the distinct impression of "get the hell away from dangerous person", mumbled something about it having slipped my mind and hurried out to find the other kid.

She was extremely antsy.  The sun was starting to set and people were starting to move in off the streets.  The kid took off at a run back towards where we'd come from.  I followed her.  The candy was heavy and awkward (there were a couple that were about the size of French loaves) and I wished I'd done more work on lower abs (which were very sore when I woke up).  As it got darker people were getting extremely nervous and hurrying indorrs and battening down the hatches.  The doors were closing when we finally made it back to the building we had come from, the kid ducked in fine, I did a big dramatic movie entrance slipping in before they shut.

Apparently being indoors wasn't enough, everyone was also holing up in their rooms.  I spent a bit of time trying to comfort the terrified kid who told me there were monsters under the bed.  I told her not to worry about monsters under her bed when this big inky cloud with glowing eyes smoked out from under her bed.  I commented oh look, there was a monster under the bed, and had a chat with it.  I guess it couldn't help being a dream eater.

There was some dimly lit round table involving "Gandalf" and some other people.  Can't remember what the discussion was about, something about where the merge points were going to be between this place and where I'd come from.  I pointed out that there might be some widespread panic and confusion on my end as a lot of humans weren't used to dealing with non-humans in a norml fashion, but things should be alright as long as people didn't go around picking fights.

Me: Here Cub, a green nappy to go with your camo.

Cub: Camo! What's camo?

Josh: Camoflage.

Cub: Camel barge? What the?!

Business has been going pretty well.  This is great, and it also means I haven't had a chance to work much on AR.  I've been proofing and editing the scripts in between banging my head against code and deciphering client requests, and spent a whack of Sunday working on Red, but I'm pretty sure at this stage that I won't be ready to animate the first ep by the end of the year.  I am refusing to have panic attacks about it.

stop-panic-attacks (Photo credit: mia.gant)

I think it's slightly depressing that my current progress doesn't look a whole lot different from my last wip (last picture right at the bottom of the post) seeing as I spent so much time reducing polys inside the mouth (an activity that vacillates between therapeutic and tedious, depending on my mood, how long I've been working on it and whatever else is going on in my life at that point), and am currently working out the shape of the mouth and kind of expanding outward from there.

I've been told I'm all kinds of crazy quite a few times for doing this thing mostly on my own, especially when I lament how crap I am and how long I take to do anything.  I've so far spent about 8 years on this project.  What I have to show for it:

• stuff no one will ever see directly:
  • a timeline spanning from 2009AD-4200AD/1997AR in various states of detail peppered with other character/story "event chains" (basically a bunch of scenes in vaguely the order I think they happen in with not a lot tying them together yet) also in various states of detail
  • an event chain for the next "season"
• stuff a few people will see:
  • 14 scripts worth of one (finally!) mostly completed "season"
• stuff everyone gets to see:
  • the beginnings of one actual character model (as above)
  • a blocking out of one single solitary block in Fremantle (not even completely blocked out)

    

  • a rig that seems to do the job

Realistically, I have never at any stage worked anything close to full time on this project.  My oldest child is 7 and before I started breeding I was at at uni.  My husband reckons the amount of work I have done so far (including stuff no one will ever see or know about except when I tell them like I'm doing now, about the countless times the scripts have been rewritten because the characterisation was completely wrong or I fell into gaping plot chasms I had somehow not noticed earlier, or the number of times I've rebuilt my three, particularly Base, as my modelling skills gradually improved and I found it easier to just start again than try to fix the things that were wrong) is probably reasonable.  I am still fully convinced that I'm crap because I can't churn out a fully textured and rigged ready-to-animate model inside of a day.

It's been pointed out that production houses are...well...production houses, and have teams of Many so anything they do gets done in 2 years.  Currently my only counter of note is Timothy Albee who made Kaze, Ghost Warrior by himself in 6 months with two computers.  Sadly I lack his Lightwave skills, but it defintely can be done.  There's probably people out there who have done similar things and I just don't know about them because I haven't been looking.

I also have a budget of sfa for this thing.  Thankfully existing in this day and age means there are alternatives to selling your soul pitching at something with money and hoping they like your idea enough to run with it (and if you're really lucky, without them "improving" it).  Now we have crowdfunding (Kickstarter being the best known that I'm aware of, and the very cool offshoot Kicking It Forward, which I discovered reading the Kickstarter page for Tube, an open source animated film) and distributing and monetising with Vodo.  I am also eventually going to make a website and probably keep posting snippets of things on Artician and deviantART and trailers on Youtube and maybe Vimeo too.

I can't use Kickstarter as it's currently America only, but knowing such a thing existed got me onto Pozible, which is an Australian equivalent.  I'm going to be utilising it once I work out what the going rate is for voice actors and people who are good at doing sound and music stuff, because while I have on good faith that there are people out there who may like to help out just for fun, just for experience or just to say they did, and I've had a couple of people on G+ ask about voice acting, I really would like to be able to pay them in some form or other.

Now that I feel happy about having done some kind of progress report and having options for doing things I want to do, I should probably catch up on sleep so I can work faster so I can do more work on AR rather than whinging about not having time to work on AR 

We finally bought a NAS, it's living next to the router (which makes logical sense as it has to plug into the router).  I'm currently copying all the music and photos onto it and will probably delete them off my computer as part of my cleanup process (moving a bunch of Stuff off the 250Gb ssd to the 2Tb sata). 

Moving the iPhoto database was nice and easy (drag, hold down alt when opening iPhoto, selecting where the library had been moved to, delete the original file), and it kind of needed to go elsewhere as it's 53Gb and going to blow out as I'm shooting RAW.

Moving the iTunes library was a bit more of a hassle.  Dragged to new location, changed library reference is preferences, dumped original in bin, restarted to make sure all was good, it seemed to be, so I emptied the trash can.  I think I missed the consolidation step (another reason to not do this when tired) so it had a huge cry about not having a libary to use.  I "opened" the folder I'd moved and now all is well with the world.

The D5000 died on us, Josh was quite determined he was going to stick with film and never getting another digital camera as the thing had only been 2 years old when it stopped working, apparently afflicted by a known and common problem with the D5000s.  The film camera bodies he has (F3 and F4) are still going strong and they're relics from the 1980s.

I i nformed him that I needed a digital camera as I wanted to be able to blog photos shortly after taking them, not a month or so after we'd finished the roll of film and gotten around to getting it developed, and that I was going to buy one of those little point and shoot numbers that would fit in my cargo pockets.

He apparently couldn't cope with the thought, so he bought me a Nikon D70.

Nikond70front (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's a new-to-us thing and came with a Sigma lens (though I'm going to swap it out for my favourite which is an 18-55 that came with the D5000 and Josh doesn't think much of it) and a rather beat up old bag.  I'm now on a quest for a bag that will haul the camera, my laptop, wallet, phone and some miscellany, and I've also finally been able to take more photos of the aquaponics setup.

One of the growbeds containing spinach, onions, zuchinni and possibly some other stuff

Another growbed with basil, lemongrass, spinach and assorted salads

Those two pictured growbeds are going nuts.  All of them were going nuts but the other two got chicken ravaged when the plants got big enough to be noticed by the chickens from the ground, so they jumped up and helped themselves.  We ate the rooster that was instigating the attacks on the plants and put up the bamboo thingies and haven't had any problems since.

Fish in one of the tanks leaping for pellets

We finally got fish in the tanks.  There are 49 rainbow trout (was 50 but one jumped out when we weren't around when the covers got inadvertantly left up overnight), slightly more in one tank than the other. 

Seeing as I'm on the food garden, this is Josh's new rooster:

Kiwi - a black Australorp cross rooster

We called him Kiwi (thinking the All Blacks) as his wattles and comb were originally black as well, they've only just started trying to go red.

My slightly crazy Japanese bantam cross hen Daenerys managed to hatch out another clutch just before what passes for winter in Perth starts.  Think our broody season is well and truly over now.

Japanese bantam cross hen with three chicks

They're walking between two of the squaponics tanks (with the growbeds on stands over them), they were headed toward me and changed direction when I moved a little too rapidly in my attempt to take a decent photo.

The veges from the system are pretty tasty.  Josh and the kids finished prepping dirt gardens last weekend, including taking a trip out to The Mythical Farm of Legend to get more sheep manure.  The raised bed out the front and the small side garden have both been planted, the one out the back (close to the aquaponics system) is probably going to get done this or next weekend.

Still waiting on honey from the bees, they didn't make an excess again.  Hopefully this summer.  The colony looks like it's doing very well.

It's all happening, and we're just settling into it being normal.  Now all I have to do is sort out the rest of the house... 

Quick and dirty 3hr job of my gadgets, 1hr sketching last night and 2hrs slapping colours and a noise texture on earlier tonight.

ajana (big one that's supposed to be silver with tentacles and three eyes): Apple 27" iMac
symbiote (small one that's supposed to be white): Apple 13" MacBook
djinn (small black one): Apple iPhone 3GS
djuno (big black one with antennae): Asus Transformer

bek 6/04/12 10:23 PM
hee hee other cool thing with sass, i do this:

@mixin inline-block {
 display: inline-block;
 margin: 0 -2px;
 vertical-align: top;
}

and then when i need things inline-blocked etc (in a few places) i do:

#container {
 .stuff-what-needs-inlining {
 {
   @include inline-block;
 }
}

Darqx 6/04/12 10:24 PM
i look at that and see what looks to be php mixed with css and want to run away screaming

Also known as: I'm a blithering idiot.

I spent way too long overthinking this problem and only finding solutions with floats (I have very specific cases where I'll use floats for layout, also I could have missed anything that didn't use floats for layout as I was stupidly staying up way too late when working on this). The way to do it is actually embarrassingly easy. I'll be using it for the header and footer (after I've installed Sassy, prepro and phpsass).

The above image is a screenshot of the header image on my local as seen in Opera (because it was the only one that showed the outlines regardless of the z-index).  The middle columns are 950px wide (specifically set in the footer due to it being a background image, not set in the header as the image isn't backgrounded and the div sizes itself to it).

What I specifically needed was for the continuation images to start from the edges of the middle div (the left continuation image of the header and both footer continuations are uneven) and stretch to the edges of the container (which is the same width as the browser window, however wide that may be).

I'm taking a big long step by step approach, if you don't need the explanation or just want code jump to the bottom.

The html is pretty straightforward. You need a wrapper for the lot:

to keep it together on one line and also to contain the two outer columns which are absolutely positioned.

Now the three columns. In my case I have the correctly sized image making the middle column as big as it needs to be. If you're using a background image or using it for the content section, you will need to set the width in the css. You will also need one empty div inside the left column. Normally I'd have it on one line, the empty inner div is quite easy to miss when written like that.

We make all three columns the same height:

As mentioned earlier the two fluid outer columns are going to be absolutely positioned. They occupy half the screen each.

My right header continuation is a simple case of:

475 is half of 950 and everything is calculated left to right top to bottom, so easy to offset as required. On the left we work with the inner div, which we give a relative positioning so it can be offset with a margin.

Now you can resize away and the bits that are supposed to line up (otherwise you can see it looks broken) stay lined up.

Here's the lot:

html

css

Now all I need is a site design that gives me an excuse to play with multiple background images...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

F=Faham (Photo credit: :Salihan)

Not "versus" because it's not a contest.  Not really.

I'm about to give up on my Malay Anki deck, mostly because it's not ordered in a way that makes logical sense to me.  I grew up hearing a lot of Malay, sadly I didn't learn it formally because I couldn't be bothered going to Malay school on Saturday mornings (I already went to school five days a week, why in the hell would I want to go on a sixth?) and I didn't pick up nearly enough in daily life (partially because I think my parents were more concerned about me speaking and writing decent English while going through school, partially because I had for a very long time this idiotic notion that if I couldn't grasp something the very second it was presented then I was obviously too stupid to live, and mostly because I was probably too damn lazy to pay proper attention).  I figured that I should just be able to pick it back up, and I did to a degree.  I'm not sure how the deck was structured, perhaps relevance to something that wasn't relevant to me.  There were many instances where I wondered why the root word hadn't been introduced before a word that built off it.

I need better resources.  I can't seem to locate the Indonesian textbook I had from uni.  I think I'll try to sort something out with Mum. 

SVG logo of Lojban language (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've been finding my lojban deck a lot easier to get through, as the one I'm using is ordered by usage frequency which makes remembering them a lot easier.  Once I've got that deck dialled there are other ones floating around the place that I'll grab, and I really have to study the grammar reference a lot more, and try to work my way through that confusing mess of resources on lojban.org.  Talking to people would also help, and in that regard I could get my arse on irc and I could talk to the people in my lojban G+ circle (there are lojban people on D* but they don't say much).  Earlier in the year I was attempting to do socnet posts in both English and lojban, that's fallen by the wayside a bit as I haven't been looking at lojban grammar and thus am incapable of anything beyond extremely basic sentence fragments.  If I really got back into it I could probably throw something together to teach the kids.

As far as I'm concerned either language is equally fine to teach the kids some Language Other Than English, as is Auslan, which I started teaching the kids before they started talking but never managed to continue.  However the conlangs seem to receive some measure of derision as being useless languages because "no one" speaks them (aside from the people that do, but they don't count because "no one" knows them, good thing I am no one).  Otherwise apparently the only conlang worth learning is Esperanto because a lot of people speak it and it's the most popular.

Hopefully next week the kids will actually be able to do some LOTE related stuff, assuming I can work fast enough to cobble something together for them.

They want pocket money so we've started this new thing where we've assigned broad subject areas to each week day (science, maths, PE, LOTE and English) and each day they do a double-page from a related workbook (otherwise we don't do bookwork unless they feel like it which is extremely infrequently, and then a lot gets done).  If they do all their pages and participate in the kung fu class (it's a 2hr class so I don't expect them to do even half of it, they do come in and train for 10 minutes or so at a time) they get $5 at the end of the week, and up to $10 if they do more.  So far, so good.  Except that we haven't done LOTE stuff due to aforementioned problems and Ruan was quite upset that it hasn't been checked off yet.  I'd better go give them their money from the previous week.