April 29, 2018

I got a lot of sleep last night and it was great.

Then I spent several hours trying to follow a seven minute Blender tutorial on making a 3D model of a book. I made it about five minutes into it over the course of those several hours. It was rough. It's the tutorial with the best looking book that I have seen but the tutorial kind of sucks. Or at least it sucks for someone with little to know previous experience with Blender. There's no talking and the only hint as to what is happening is a little thing in the corner of the screen that logs keystrokes and mouse clicks. But I don't think it catches all of them. And it is hard to follow things when there is a combination of things being clicked on the screen and keyboard shortcuts, because I had to keep going back over and over again to look at what the thing said in the bottom corner, and to see where the mouse was clicking. Also, there are things in the tutorial's version of Blender, that aren't by default in mine, so I was having to go out to the web and figure out how to search for whatever was there that I couldn't find. And there was a lot of just clicking around trying to find things or do things in the program that seemed to be glossed over in the tutorial. It was beyond frustrating, and kind of felt like a waste of my day. In the end I kind of got something that was passably book-shaped, and it almost looked decent only because I started with an actual book jacket. I think I might need to find a tutorial that is better at stepping through the process, with actual narration, and then maybe I would know enough to come back to this tutorial.

To get my frustration out I played a little CoD: WW2 before dinner. That helped. I am now ninth prestige, which is pretty cool. After ninth, there is tenth, and then after the tenth is master prestige, which comes with another emblem and then the numbers for levels just keep going instead of stopping at level fifty-five, which they do with a normal prestige. There is still a change I'll make it to master. The new Shipment map has really saved my interest in the game. It is this iteration of CoD's Nuketown, which is to say it is small and fast-paced. You die a lot but you're right back in the action, something that I like because I hate spending minutes running around a map trying to find someone, only to be killed, and have to start the process all over again. I was afraid the map was only going to be up for a short time but it has been available for awhile now, so hopefully it will stick around.

For dinner I made the last Hello Fresh meal, which was a Mediterranean-themed dish with roasted vegetables and couscous, topped with sliced almonds and feta cheese. It was very flavorful, which I was not expecting, but it was really good. Much like the pasta dinner also in this box, I want to get it added to my rotation. I need to do more than just roast vegetables and make rice. These two meals also involved roasting vegetables, but they included ingredients and seasonings that I haven't explored before, making them interesting to my palate.

After dinner I ironed my pants for the week, took a shower, and then played Space Pirate Trainer again. It's such a workout. Once again it feels like I did a hundred squats, mainly because I spent so much time crouched down trying to avoid getting shot. It was frequently insufficient to keep me alive. But I did make it farther in the game, and got to experience two bosses. One of which seemed huge, because I had only seen the smaller drones, but then the second one completely dwarfed the first boss. It's so much fun playing it.

To unwind a little bit I jumped into a new VR environment made to look like the Pacific Northwest. It's pretty big, set along a beach, and it was really nice. A perfect chill place. I spent a lot of time looking at the book models, because that's on my mind at the moment. Some of them were spot-on, and others were super simple, which I found interesting.

I jumped into CoD: WW2 after that, just long enough to finish one more daily order (because I was one away from a supply crate). It took me two rounds of TDM to finish it but that's not bad. And now I'm going to go to bed. I'm not sure what I'm going to do at work this week. Hopefully something productive.