Mupdate

Mupdate = a portmanteau of “me” and “update.” Mupdates!

IT’S HOT.

I hate it. My AC is struggling to cool the house. It feels wet outside. The sun hurts. I’ve got so many pimples from sweating.

Thus, it was the perfect time for my car’s AC to kack!

But before that, the battery died.

Luckily it happened at home. But unluckily, it happened right after I had placed a Doordash pickup order! UGH. My roommate had just left for her parent’s house too! So there was no one around to help.

You can’t cancel or change a Doordash order once it’s confirmed. So, I decided to take myself to the food. I got an Uber. It took about an hour, when it would usually take about 40 minutes. It wasn’t too bad—just expensive.

My roommate’s parents came to help the next day, and together we went in search of a car battery. That took a while because of stupid tourist summer traffic. Also, the first store we visited didn’t carry the size I needed. But eventually we got the right sized battery and got it in my car. And lo, it started!

But even before the battery died, my car’s AC was havin’ a real struggle. So, its death wasn’t unexpected. I’ve endured a few years of mechanics telling me that my car’s AC compressor was on its last legs. But it finally died for good last month. My car is a 2013, so most of the parts in it are now 11 years old. I’ve replaced a lot of it over the years. Almost enough to call it a Car of Theseus huhuhu /pun.

In addition to the AC compressor, it needed 3 wheel bearings replaced. I replaced one of them last year, so now I have 4 brand new wheel bearings.

I went to a different mechanic this time. After taking it to a Pep Boys for the last few years and coming to find they kept making stupid mistakes, like leaving my oil filter loose so that oil leaked… or losing the cap to my Freon intake… I figured it wasn’t worth it. Especially since they already quoted me around $3k for fixing the AC compressor alone.

Instead, I went with a mechanic recommended to me by my roommate’s dad. He charged me a LOT less, and did more solid work.

So… there went $2.5k onto my credit card. Ouchie. But still less than $3k! And that still beats $20k and 8% interest on a new car.

So, I had to deal with all that in June.  

TRIGGER WARNING: PET DEATH – Feel free to skip this section if you need to!

And… we lost another pet this month. My roommate’s cat, Paws, passed away.

We think it was old age. She was around 10 years old, which is average cat lifespan. She was healthy and doing well up until the end—whatever happened, happened FAST. My roommate saw her at 11pm the night before, and I found her at 7am the next morning. That’s only 5 hours.

I miss her. She was an ornery kreechure, but she kept me company and demanded nothing but the chance to sit next to me in my bed sometimes.

In slightly happier news, the saga of the armadillo children continues with the appearance of one of the missing duo!

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw him digging around outside. I snatched him up and took him to the hospital. He was doing better than his siblings—he was fatter. But he also had a cut on his leg. He left blood on the towel I used to catch him.

Now he’s at the wildlife hospital. And hopefully doing well.

Focus Time!

Apsu’s Children Novella

I compiled the feedback I got on this and have a way forward now. My next step is to rewrite the outline with the information I learned.

I’m also wondering if I should try outlining a few other stories that I would like to draft. Just so I can get the feedback I’ve been craving, but also so I can have a little collection of stories ready to be written when I have the brain space to do so. Right now, I’ve not been in a very “writing” mood. I’m itching to draw, which is a nice change of pace for me. So, we’ll see! Definitely stuff to look forward to.

vTubing

I reached out for feedback on my avatar recently. I made a little preliminary video featuring it. The biggest thing I got from the feedback was that the mouth tracking was distracting—mostly because it was meh.

So I took that to heart and went on a journey to figure out how to make the mouth tracking better. I bought two “study” models by a couple of avatar riggers and extracted info from them to make the best rig I could.

I ended up using blendshapes that correspond to the iPhone’s ARKit face tracking. I used the example model I bought to learn how to get the shapes I wanted, and I finessed the parameters in vTube Studio until it tracked my face better.

My next step is to re-record my first video and see if the mouth tracking works better. I already think that it’s much improved! I also learned a lot from recording my first video, so I’m hoping this will just make everything better all around.

So… next steps for me on this:

• Fix up a few small things with the mouth rig

• Create an animated background for videos

• Rerecord Video 1

• Rewrite the first set of videos based on peer feedback

Fundamentals of Lighting Schoolism Class

Since I completed my storefront in May, I added another activity for this month. That way I keep 3 focuses at a time. So, I started working on a class!

After getting some feedback on my art, I was told that lighting was my weakness. I’ve been wanting to take a lighting class ever since. I’m currently on Lesson 4 of Sam Nielson’s Fundamentals of Lighting class on the Schoolism website. I’ve already learned a lot!

The biggest takeaway I have so far is the idea that lighting is “additive.” You just pile lighting aspects up on top of each other—fill light, shadows, bounce light. It’s a different kind of blending. I’m currently doing the course with a digital art program, but I’d love to try doing it traditionally. The lessons would still apply, but the methods would teach me a lot more, I think.

One of the biggest struggles for me with traditional art is color mixing. It takes a long time for me to mix colors, and I don’t know their relationships by heart yet.

But in addition to the color struggles I have with traditional art, I’m noticing another weakness. And that… is painting texture.

Texture is not easy!

But yes! Here are my completed assignments so far. You can really see me struggling with texture here…

Preoccupations

None for this month! I’ve just been feeling sweaty and sad, and I’ve not been thinking much about anything particularly interesting.

Faretheewell

My newsletter now has an archive! Yaaay! Like a little blog. So, if you liked any past issues, you can go back and check them out again.

Check it out here

And thus we come to the end of yet another scribbling.

See you end of July! It can’t come fast enough…. ::wipes away sweat::