Flowers on hats. 
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I’ve been in a creative lull of late.
I have sat in my shed & pondered (as in sat & stared at), both of the motorcycle projects I’ve had going for some time, but have not been able to get enthusiastic about actually doing anything.
So I’ll just write about stuff instead… 
Recently, we’ve had a spate of homestead orientated breakdowns, both mechanical & electrical, which given our fairly remote location, results in considerable downtime while I kludge a temporary repair, hunt for parts, wait for parts, enact the repair & then wait for the next mini disaster.
To add to this frustration, it seems half the parts I’ve recieved lately have required modifications to work or are simply so poorly made, that they do the ‘magic smoke’ thing a week later. Yes, there’s warranty & so far customer services have been great but that doesn’t help with the days lost while doing repairs a second time in crap weather.
Have you ever noticed how when you need to repeat a job (like fixing something), how it never seems to go as smoothly the second time around…?
Having one vehicle decide to host an electrical gremlin hasn’t helped either. Rotten thing goes from beautifully reliable to extremely questionable from one day to the next, yet records no fault codes leaving me to guess & replace bits & wonder if I’ve exorcised the gremlin or its just hiding today. Once we get a decent break in the weather, I think I’ll just send it away to a specialist workshop with better doodads for ‘talking’ to it.
Seems bad weather is plaguing the whole world right now. Cold, hot, soggy, icey, floody, windy.
Been quite wild out there.
I’ve also recently found out my oldest dog (9) has cancer, which hit me quite hard. Technically, she’s my son’s dog but I think each of my kids dogs are kind of mine because its me they hang out with the most & I’ve always been ‘dad’ when it comes to feeding, bedding, baths, medications & rides in the truck. They’re my buddies so I’m attached to them.
She’s a real adventurous little beasty & quite cat-like in her casual attitude. Some time its ‘I love you! Your the best!’ & other times its ‘P*** off human!’ while she sprints off, ignoring me.
I kinda like that.
She’s dropped a fair bit of muscle & has become quite sooky lately but so far she’s still hungry, bouncy & cheeky so there isn’t any ‘suffering’ but I know she’s on limited time now. 
In gamey world, I’ve barely touched the consoles in literally months. My wife is interested in the new Avatar game, which I’ll admit does look pretty. I’m inclined to just wait for Light No Fire as my next splurge. A young friend of the family is always texting me asking about this or that regarding No Mans Sky (which they only recently discovered) & I’ve noticed that I’m already getting rusty, trying to remember details. Must be getting older than I like to admit.
Anyway, that’s a long & rather self-indulgent ranty post but I figured I’d better say hello since I’ve been pretty quiet lately. I’m always lurking… I just haven’t had much to say since I haven’t been playing at all.
Glad to see this forum is still the little oasis it’s always been.
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Wow! We must live parallel lives or something…
Last year has been labeled by me as ‘the year everything broke’. Not a reference to the real world so much as a reference to my little corner. Several major home repairs and a truck that suddenly and quite thoroughly decided to retire.
My dachsund developed a heart murmur and is going deaf. She is still playful and hungry as ever though.
Currently, I am awaiting a severe cold front which will bring up to 6 inches of snow and days of below zero wind chills. Very unusual this far south though, not as unusual as it used to be.
I jump into NMS on PS5 to run the expeditions, have been slowly working thru Starfield but mostly crocheting lately.
Things are not so different these days from one part of the world to the next…
So glad you stopped in @Mad-Hatter . Sounds like you have plenty of parts for some creative tinkering.
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So cold, nothing to do but stay in and crochet. So I decided to pull up Disney+ and watch Snow White. Was a fave when I was about 6. I just realized where my love of cleaning comes from. 
Whistle while you work…it won’t take long when you sing a merry song
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Pretty sure that makes them your dogs XD Unless all your kids are under 13, then its still their dogs 
Just coming out of a 3 year creative lull myself. Haven’t made any music since the week before the lockdown. Haven’t even picked up an instrument.
Getting there. Hope you get out of yours soon too <3
Sorry to hear your dogs not well but glad to hear they are still happy and living their best lives.
Technology Gremlins are awful. Nothing fixes them until eventually they just stop. My PC would go in to sleep mode by itself every 5 minutes even if I was playing a game or watching something. I would go in, turn sleep mode off, save settings, after an hour or two passed it would revert the settings. (would also do this on computer start up).
I got in to the habit of going in to my sleep settings every time i booted up the computer. I spent the first year trying all online solutions on and off, nothing worked. PC just kept behaving like it was a plugged out laptop with low battery charge. Last summer it just stopped, for no reason, no longer does it, or at least last summer is when I noticed (cos I forgot to change settings on startup or check them every hour on day). Checked to see if I had recieved any windows updates but according to my pc I hadn’t updated windows since January 2023 at the time. It just eventually stopepd doing it ’ ^ _^
Funny thing about us day one long term NMS players is, all the information we remember off the top of our heads has been outdated and no longer relevant for 3-5 years so dont worry about it
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Personally, I ‘sing’ made-up (& often insulting) lyrics to popular songs, infuriating other family members who are less enthusiastic about getting the chores done & don’t seem to appreciate my noise.
(Sing may not be the right term: its more of a mix of squarking & bellowing)
Thats a shame. You were really into music. Perhaps I should ring you & sing to you with my ‘unique’ coalminers raspy squark.
That will help you crave real music…& ear plugs 
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Pardon me boys,
Is that the cat who chewed my new shoes?
(Chattanooga Choo Choo in case you are wondering)
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All this has done is made me realise Music was a mistake and must be stopped at all costs
While watching this video in youtube, all the reccomended autoplay videos were chewing gum related. I’m now watching a video essay about a gum company that apparently annihilated its brand image…
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Have you reached enlightenment? 
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I ended up joining a cult… The Order of Menthol.
What makes us different than the other cults is, we don’t try to hide the misogyny. We of course do our best to cover up all the other horror stuff we do. Which we all just refer to as “bad breath”.
To be honest I just kind of joined because you got a cool alarm clock for taking the entry exam…
Sometimes I find myself late at night, staring in to its blinking red analogue display and wondering “Was it all worth it?”
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I am at a crossroads. Too many small projects. I need to settle into one or two. Thinking of opening an Etsy store and see if anything takes off.
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I totally can’t relate. I’ve never had this problem. Me, I always have too many big projects… 
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I just want to toot my own horn for a second. I have begun a deep dive into my family history. Most I already partially knew but now have confirmation. So here is the ‘toot’ 
I am related thru my mother’s side to a man who directed and wrote script for many early Disney cartooons including Krazy Kat, Silly Symphonies, Dumbo, Bambi, Fantasia and Song of the South (yeah, I know what many have to say about that one)
Anyway, done ‘tooting’
Oh, he also wrote a comic strip from the 40’s into the 60’s
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So, since I am, you know, making a game and stuff, I’ll eventually need some art. I have a vague idea of where it’s supposed to go stylistically, but not that much of one.
I really hadn’t planned to get too much into this aspect of development yet, as obviously the code needs a lot more love before being able to justify spending a lot of effort on that, but it just so happened that with me putting some time into worldbuilding lately, I kind of got the urge to come up with some early concepts just to kinda know what things might end up looking like. And so, against my expectations and own better judgement, I actually “arted” something together. The main focus here was not so much on beauty and almost only on stylistics and reproducible workflows. I have some sort of style in mind, and I need a work pipeline that lets me get there quickly, actual details can come later.
And so, after a way too long introduction, here is the first piece of concept art for orbital margins, and one of the very few pieces of visual art produced by me since I was a kid. Tell me what you think. As in, don’t just tel me how you think it looks. Tell me how it makes you feel, what it makes you think of, what associations spring up in your mind. In my opinion, these things are much more useful metrics for determining how close I am to what I’m aiming at than likes and dislikes…
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Honestly it looks quite good.
So much better than I could ever do.
It makes me envision a rather sterile, vulnerable existence where technology is blended into the very structure making the interior space clutter-free to the point it might be empty…or lonely. The lack of external features suggests it may be autonomous. The lack of stars or background features make me wonder just how deep into space this thing actually is.
I’d suggest (from my skillset that hasn’t moved beyond crayons 
), that the lighting seems to make it look ‘little’.
Like it has a shadowed glow that brings to mind something the size of a wedding band rather than a large structure.
Perhaps altering the way the blend of the shadow goes from light to dark might give it an increase in size. A bit less of the really shiny bits might help too
I’d suggest adding minor functional imperfections to the outer skin that help identify size and add functionality to the structure. Pods or access hatches or something that reduces the sterilty, makes it more recognisable & helps to subliminally suggest a size the viewer can relate to. That might also give extra references for shadowed contours helping to size it and make it seem used.
Something I always admired from the Star Wars franchise was the ever-present curved cornered polygon. It’s everwhere to the point you stop noticing it, yet it provides a subliminal scale to every window & panel. This coupled with the long oval wall lights and seamless blocky tech-lumps & the scale is just made obvious.
Aged objects with imperfections, mismatched appendages or just a bit of weathered grime, really tells a story.
This themed attitude is also very common in James Cameron movies like Aliens & Avatar.
Lots of military/OHAS warnings, lables signage, colour coding and weathering. In fact there is an entire ‘language’ in signage that was created just for the Aliens movie. Totally different from Star Wars and perhaps a little more generic but the colours & shapes add visual stories.
Now if your satelite station structure isnt old and used this makes telling its ‘story’ upon first sight a lot trickier. Perhaps some tiny perimeter lights could suggest the size. I noticed that Hal from A Space Odyssey & the robotic ‘villian’ from Wall-e both have segmented white bodies with the menacing crimson glowing eye-light.
Often high-tech white objects have descreet but noticable blue pin-lights or teal hidden lighting, suggesting pure, perfect technology.
The whole reason for this oversized response is basically a suggestion that you include some visual story telling that helps give a ‘feeling’ to the image.
The picture is beautiful & I see nothing wrong with the design. If it is meant to be a pure structure of indeterminate size then you nailed it. If however you want the viewer to connect with it at a more ‘personal’ level, then maybe add some subtle features to place it in a recognisable theme.
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Thanks a lot for your detailed response.
That’s interesting. The rest of your post seems to suggest that the lack of scale is due to missing detail. Detail just hasn’t made it into this one yet, since I wanted to explore what I could do just with style first. Also, scale wasn’t even on my mind. For some wild reason, I didnt expect people not to recognise a stanford torus when they see the shape of one… which is of course extremely presumptuous, so that bit of info is quite valuable. I’ll think about what to do about it…
Ok, that’s 2 of the associations I was going for, that’s not bad. Did not really see the sterile coming, but makes sense. Guess I’ll need to find some way to kind of break that a bit.
Yeah no. Both are currently just a matter of momentary expediency/lazyness (though I find it interesting that a lack of stars would make you think that it is further out in space… In low earth orbit, you have so much earthlight during the day that you can’t actually see stars, while further out you have stars all the time…). But it’s good to know that this is what it looks like right now.
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Was racking my brain for a while why I knew this song…
Some time passes and I realise I’m humming just this one part of something. I can picture an old man singing it softly to huimself between uncomfortable silences… I realise I’m singing Moo-Pa’s song from season 3 of Black Books. Pretty deep cut, havent seen the show in 20 years, what an odd tune to come out of nowhere from a tiny scene…
Then it hits me. The song he hums was Chattanooga Choo Choo. It’s in my head because of those damn Citizen Scientests at Atlas!
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The 3d prints of Nada and Polo I ordered while exploring pet plushie possibilities for @Linshell have arrived, and the artist threw in a few little bonus extras like spare capes for Nada, stand variants and a bonus Biological Terror I didn’t even know they were selling. Came packaged very well and in great condition <3
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Oh wow they love wonderful xxx and added friend! The people who make these are very generous hearted it seems… I am waiting for my Traveler to arrive fingers crossed it will be soon. Thank you for this pictures xxx
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