Frustrations and WiPpet Wednesday

You know that render of RQ I had cooking last week?  Well, after almost a week solid of rendering time... it turned out to be useless.  Oh sure, the background looked nice, but RQ himself?

Not so much.

The figure I use for RQ has many, many problems in Poser anyway, and I guess taking it into the external renderer somehow zeroed the shape and pose...  More than a little frustrating.  I've made some changes so it'll render faster (at the expense of those pretty rose stems; might have to revert those without RQ in shot) and it's now cooking, but it's taking its time again so the best I've got is a part-done screenshot I've added some postwork too, to compensate for my awful lighting.  One day I'll actually have a sensibly-calibrated monitor set up somewhere.

I think my poor laptop, Sixteen, is on his last leg.  Due to a particularly intrusive and memory-hogging program my employers made me install, his already shaky fan ended up having to work in overdrive a lot more and even though I've now successfully dug the program out again the fan now runs (and rattles) non-stop.  I really need to get into the casing and see if it's off-balance or full of dust or something, but being a laptop it's not easy so... bleugh.  Not happy.  I love my crabby semi-sentient laptop and now he's on his last legs.  And honestly, I've gotten so used to the rattling noise that I'm just as worried when I can't hear it these days,

By the way, when I say 'dug out', I mean that closing instances in Task Manager didn't work (they came back) and trying to uninstall made it demand I contact my administrator for remote approval!  I should point out here I'm a freelancer, not an actual employee, and my laptop is supplied by myself at my own expense so not only was I unimpressed at this, I've now had to buy another (much cheaper) laptop to use solely for work.  I finally got the damn program out -- without administrator approval damnit, it's my laptop -- by disabling its eight different systems to let me uninstall it properly.

Aaaaaand then it turned out it had, by itself, uninstalled anything that looked remotely like an antivirus so that was fun to fix too.

I've had such a good week.

WiPpet Wednesday

WiPpet Wednesday is a weekly blog-hop where participants share snippets of their Works in Progress on a Wednesday, and each snippet should somehow relate to the date, whether through simple means or complicated WiPpet maths.  It's hosted by the lovely K. L. Schwengel and you can read all the blogs and sign up yourself here.

They're all lovely people who hopefully I will actually be able to spend more time with this week! *growls at last week*

Against all odds I managed to write a little on The Rose Queen and a bit more of J for Jonathan, and I think I've worked out where G for Gabrys is going (i.e. longer than I expected...), so while it's not been a massively productive week it's had its moments.

Today is the 13th May 2015, so it's 13 + 5 = 18, 18 + 1 (from the year) for 19 sentences which follow straight on from last week's, where Fayth has finally managed to get himself and his passenger/prisoner/willing follower back to his ship.  There is also some profanity involved.

He’d expected the Rose Queen to be in one of the ship’s two quarters, since Fayth had pointedly left both doors open, but instead found him sat in the unused co-pilot’s seat, already securely buckled in. “Is it okay?” He asked in the face of Fayth’s blank stare. “I wanted to see.” 

Fayth shrugged. “Suit yourself.” As he busied himself with some very hurried launch procedures, the Rose Queen nodded in his peripheral vision. Damn it, damn it, damnit, why did he have to be so distractingly fucking pretty, right at a time when flicking the wrong switch at the wrong time could end up incinerating the man the Rose Queen had been so adamant about protecting. 

Well, that was a little exaggeration, but still. 

Only a little. 

It wasn’t like he was sat there to be sociable anyway: he was simply ensuring that Fayth kept his word, even though Fayth would have done so without needing to be watched. Without looking at his passenger, he thumped his middle finger into a button, “ship, open access door.” 

“Warning, Handsome Prince,” the ship’s lovely voice filled the cabin at the same time heat filled Fayth’s cheeks under the Rose Queen’s startled stare. He’d kill Matthew. “Bay is still occupied.” 

“Override,” Fayth said, adding under his breath where the ship was unlikely to pick it up, “if he doesn’t leave then call it natural selection.” 

A screen displaying the rear camera showed the naked man diving through the doorway into the waiting arms of several conspicuously-armed guards before Fayth gunned the engines, the ship’s monumental dock door began to open and the automatic failsafes sent the access door plunging down again. He turned a broad grin to the Rose Queen and flicked down the switch marked ‘lock’. 

The one-time Handsome Prince blasted from the bay in a roar of engines.