Week in Review #10: Causing a Scene

I was going to make a joke in this week's Week in Review about it being Friday but I ended up not even writing this until Friday so it's not a joke anymore. It's real life.

The new Gaming PC is kinda cool, I got to play PEAK as foretold and had a good time! I'll do it some more! I am sorry to see that the Windows/PC ecosystem has not really improved in the twenty years since I've engaged with it and in many ways has gotten worse. Why are all the Windows card games now bundled into one program with microtransactions? Why would I want to log in to Minesweeper with my Xbox account? What have you done?

As far what I've done, here's the latest render of my 3D model:

A 3D render of a scene in a shadowbox, like a dollhouse: four blue humanoid figures arranged around the front porch and yard of a small house. One is sewing pennants onto the end of a rope while another is nailing the rope to the roofline of the house. A smaller figure is sweeping the yard and looking at the fourth, who is sitting on an upturned apple barrel and tooting on a horn.

As a reminder (or for the first time if I didn't adequately describe this before), this will be an animated diorama that sits in my front yard for a few weeks after I build it. It's designed as part of a larger story but I want to present it on its own as a kind of still life, like a living genre painting.

I made this in Blender using a couple free models, namely this human and this dog. I started modeling a human myself and it wasn't going well and that's not really the point of this exercise. The real characters will be a little more interesting and unique and I'll sculpt them by hand.

I'm going to continue to fuss with this model a while, take some virtual reference photos of it in the yard to confirm what size it should be, and then start fabricating! I'm scared of that part but I think it will be fun. (I was scared of this part too and it's been really fun.)

Do you remember my idea for a new show? I mentioned it in my very first Week in Review, nine long weeks ago. I have nothing new to share about it but I haven't stopped thinking about it. This week I pitched it to the Elysian Theater's Spaghetti Festival! I don't expect anything to come of that, it's just not enough of an idea to really be viable yet, but thinking through it enough to explain it on the form got me excited about the concept again. I really really love the Elysian Theater and I feel so lucky to live near it!