Blog Post #16: And, and

T. 2/11/2025

Today I finished modeling Mercutio’s hair for the studio project that I’m working on. Sprint is tomorrow, and I want to have more to show, so I’m going to stay up a bit later and model the clothes in Blender, too. I still haven’t progressed in learning Marvelous Designer— but Mercutio has some specific elements to his clothing mixing fabric and leather, so I think it’d be easier to just do it in Blender. Also Marvelous is expensive.

I did Mercutio’s hair following Ezra’s advice, creating a Modifier —> Physics —> Particle System —> Hair, then shaping it in Particle Editor (grooming and snipping), converting it to a mesh,  then a curve, then increasing the bevel. I did the front two hairs separate from the rest, since they have a different shape— it would’ve been impossible to individually shape two individual hairs relative to the rest of the hairdo. It took two tries— the first one had too many hairs for the desired thickness. I’m going to refine the tips (narrow them) in ZBrush.

I also started the Viewfinder replication in UE5 tutorial two-part series. Got through the first part! Took me less than an hour to get through the 30 minute tutorial guiding the blueprints necessary to capture and place photos. We haven’t gotten to the photos actually “slicing” and altering the environment— that’s in the next tutorial, which is about three times longer— but I wanted to make sure that I can replicate the tutorial precisely, so I bought the environment pack (Brutalist Architecture Office) on Fab, since it has procedural assets. It was $65— which is a lot to lay down for just a tutorial, but it was kind of a necessity. 

The beginning of the tutorial stated a couple of disclaimers— the one that was relevant to my dark purposes was that this project must use uniformly-scaled assets, or the Viewfinder effect may stretch them.

I was quite pleased that I was able to follow along— despite the instructor stating that it was an advanced tutorial. I hooked up my phone to my monitor (had to manually choose my headphones again through the YouTube app; otherwise, my phone treated the HDMI input as the audio input), so I could have a bigger reference screen while I worked on my laptop. I had to pause and rewind, naturally, but that was mostly to troubleshoot; often, I found myself completing the steps as the instructor said them— before he actually did it himself. 

There were a few sections where the AsAPhoto variable returned “None”, so I tested out converting those instances to Validated Gets— which worked! So that’s one personal improvement that I enacted upon the process!

I recorded some videos of the result.

Th. 2/13/2025

I missed class today. Which sucks. I don’t have much to note on since Tuesday. Well, I stayed up until like 4am Tuesday night to try and get ready for the studio sprint. I didn’t even get that far. Seth said not to beat myself up, and that I’m still figuring out my workflow, and told me to get some sleep— but the sprint presentation— for me, at least— was lackluster. I’ve been messaging with Ezra about narrowing the tips of the hair tubes. He said that he could help me during class today, but, yeah, I didn’t go to class. 

I went to bed last night at like 8:30pm. It was so early that I figured that I could get some work in before class (I still haven’t completed last week’s Procedural assignment).

But I have a problem.

Since I set my alarm before the latest that I could afford to wake up for class, I justified snoozing. But that just created the “snooze-momentum”, a treacherous cycle that resulted in me missing class, and ultimately waking up at 3pm. Which brings the total sleep time to, oh, 18 hours?

My mum told me to try and focus on the progress that I’ve made in the past five years. That I didn’t used to have anything at all to get up for, and now I’m actually trying. And that I have a more full lifestyle. And that I’m not [mostly] nocturnal anymore. But it’s fucking with me. Because, I only have class in the morning twice a week, and even that’s not reliable to get me up at a reasonable time (see today). I’m not trying to go back to nocturnalism; my doctor told me that people who “work the night shift” consistently live 7-10 years less on average— and that’s just lifespan; life quality is also worse for them. But if I’m sleeping at least twice as much as necessary— and, therefore, my days are twice as short— I’m reducing my life by half. Not lifespan, but life. 

And I don’t really know what to do. I’m behind in most of my classes (except for Seminar, fortunately— I’m making progress on my Milestones), and my “plan” is to use Wellness Day and Spring Break to catch up— but what if the habit of snoozing just results in me using the extra time to sleep more? And I don’t know how to change that.

Because I’m trying to fix what’s been going on since I got really sick in 2020. And that hasn’t just been a long journey; it’s also been a deeply influential one. Partially beneficial (recovery), but also with some powerfully negative experiences. And despite my efforts, I don’t know how to change.

And I don’t want to talk about this in Seminar (unlike last semester), because I have limited time for my presentations, and it doesn’t seem an effective use of my time. 

I have a new creative project percolating in my brain.

I have this idea of a story of a magical school, known as Pearl Manor, that lives in the northwest of a Weird West setting. Last semester, I stayed up multiple nights mapping out relevant info and the magic system, but I haven’t done much on it since— other than jotting down ideas in my commonplace book when they arrive. The thing is, Pearl Manor is the kind of establishment that doesn’t easily fit into a prose format. It’s big— but not big enough to justify seemingly ephemeral layouts— but that’s what it has. You can wander around for days, and still find new things— strange rooms with strange murals, for example. And the teachers have the prefix “Silent”, because they exist solely in their classrooms during their classes, are prohibited from interacting with the other teachers, and don’t teach in a traditional sense; they precipitate “lessons” that seemingly aren’t run by them, and these experiences are tailored to each of the 49 students. And there’s this culture of mystique and paranoia cultivated from even before when the students arrive— so they don’t feel comfortable fully disclosing their experiences to each other. 

I have an idea for a pixelated sidescroller in which you play as a ghost in Pearl Manor, combatting interlopers who get progressively more sinister. That game is, prospectively, an RPG, but your abilities and stats are tied to your ghosthood. Ooh, I could use the stats from my trading card TTRPG, Elegy: Mortal, Social, Ghostly, and Occult. Just an idea. 

But I still want to write the main story of Pearl Manor as some kind of written medium. And yesterday, I was struck by another idea.

What if I write it as a Choose Your Own Adventure book?

I researched it a bit more, and found out that that title is trademarked, so people market their books as “gamebooks”— which is an even deeper culture and medium than CYOA books. In gamebooks, you have stats and abilities, and roll for successes tied to your choices. I messaged Ampersand (my group of TTRPG players from undergrad, who, incidentally, wrote one of my letters of rec for my Clark application)— figuring that they’d have some ideas about comps to read. Thomas immediately said that he did, but then went dark. He’s at a LARP right now, so it’s understandable. 

But a gamebook companion to the sidescroller could be really cool. It could use the same stats, and have more explicit worldbuilding, and a broader net of characters. And since they’re both original creations, I can make up the rules to be as unique as I want. 

Oh also! I went to the library after class yesterday and printed out the Introduction and Lesson 1 for Old Church Slavonic, from the University of Texas’ linguistics department. They have a whole website for ancient languages, and since it’s written by linguists for linguists, it’s a much more efficient method of learning the languages than the common apps and websites for the plebeian masses. At least, for me. Since I’m a linguist. 

I can’t remember if I wrote about this last week, but I was inspired to learn Old Church Slavonic from a Polish supernatural show on Netflix. In terms of lore, it makes no sense for the Big Bad to speak it— since the polytheistic culture that he’s from predates St. Cyril and St. Methodius, who, seemingly, created OCS to translate King James’ Bible— but any reason to learn is a good reason. And— and I forget where I got this— pattern recognition is key for creativity— learning languages is the ultimate form of pattern recognition— so it’d definitely be worth it. I intend to learn multiple of the ancient languages on the website— probably Sanskrit next. 

I’m publishing this post tonight, because tomorrow is Valentine’s Day— and, for the first time in like six years, I have a valentine. It’s already getting late (it’s 10:24pm currently), and I still need to shower. Regardless, I don’t have much else to report. 

What’s next?

Well, this weekend, I have my once-a-month online D&D pirate campaign with Ampersand (that’s Saturday night). I also need to complete my overdue Texturing assignment, complete my overdue Procedural assignment, complete retopologizing Mercutio for studio, work on his clothes, and continue replicating Viewfinder for Seminar. I am committed to having completed that last one for this Milestone (my presentation is Wednesday). I also want to use my breaks in between those things to commence work on the Pearl Manor gamebook. I still need to learn how those work. 

Oh, and, of course, I have to watch the lecture from the class that I missed today.
And, and, and.