busybee fluffy rambles

Art

I’m going to have some stuff in a show at CoCA Seattle next month. I was actually specifically asked to participate by the show curator, which is a first for me and also a huge honor!

Pottery

I now have a total of 10 espresso/cortado cups back from the kiln. There’s a few things I need to work on with my pottery technique but I’m getting better all the time. I really ought to list them for sale on my Etsy at some point, although one of them has already been tentatively pre-sold to a Mastodon follower so that’s super cool too.

Car

Still don’t have my car back or any word on when I’ll be getting it back. I did check on its status in the Kia Connect app and it shows the battery as being at 0%, which hopefully means they’ve disconnected the traction battery in anticipation of it being worked on, and doesn’t mean that they’ve managed to run the battery down all the way to the point of it being damaged.

Every few days I’ll text the service advisor asking for an update, and an update never comes. This is so frustrating.

But at least I have the shitty loaner to get me around for now, even if it can’t do all the things I have a car for (for example, I’ll need to rely on help from others to get one of my art pieces to the gallery, sigh)

VRChat

Been working on my avatar a lot lately, mostly playing with the ValueFactory Goo shader but also doing things like fixing topology and rig proportions. I also finally learned (thanks to stumbling across some ancient and vague VRChat-related stuff) that the foot tracking issue I was experiencing was due to the avatar measurement being based on arm span instead of height. So, lesson learned: if your floor is at a weird height, or your foot trackers are significantly above or below your avatar’s feet, set your measurement to height, not arm span.

It’d be super great if this stuff were more clear and if you could adjust the way that it tries to reconcile the rig with reality. This is a hard problem to solve and is always rife with compromises, but a bit more transparency about what’s actually going on would be nice.

(Relatedly, it’d sure be great if VRChat gave a better means of diagnosing lighting and audio issues, because those are pretty much impossible to figure out in-game without having someone else in the room with you who is willing to record video.)

Garden

I started building some retaining-wall-block stairs a bit over a week ago, and then had a massive pain flareup, and I need to resume that now that I’m feeling better. I also haven’t mowed my lawn in like two weeks and it’s getting a little iffy. Maybe I’ll just claim I’m participating in No Mow May, which I just learned about from Rebecca Watson’s latest vlog.

(Not that No Mow May does anything to help pollinators, and the important thing is to plant non-grass plants instead. Which I’ve been doing plenty of.)

UPDATE: I went ahead and did another step today, and oof I am in so much pain. Fuck this body.

Cats

Tyler is super cuddly lately.

Fiona is mostly just sleeping and cranky when she isn’t. She’s definitely showing her age and I wonder how much time I have left with her. She’s around 14 years old, which is getting up there. She isn’t showing any major health problems, at least, aside from no longer being able to jump up to places she loves to get into. She’s also sleeping alone more lately.

When she does go (which hopefully won’t be for a while yet) I think I’ll just stick to having a single cat for a while. Tyler’s enough of a handful for me and he’s also so big and strong that I’d worry that he’d harm anyone else that I adopt, even though he’s pretty gentle when he plays.

Heck, even when he caught a mouse a few days ago he didn’t harm it at all, he just dropped it in front of Fiona to give her a gift (and she utterly failed to actually catch it).

Music

I feel like I should probably work on some.