Jules Jones

Thanks to Green Knight, who posted a heads up that Daz 3D are offering all 3 of their heavy-duty 3D modelling packages for free until the end of February -- and those are full versions of the pro level of Studio, Bryce and Hexagon.

I downloaded last weekend but only started trying to install Studio today. It is a bit of a bugger on a Windows box, to put it mildly. This is because a) the developers assume that everyone runs in an administrator account all the time, b) the documentation is currently non-existent. I found out about (a) by attempting to install it, and about (b) by attempting to work out how to make the damn thing let me use it from a user account. You see, I think that administrator accounts and user accounts exist for a *reason*...

Several hours (and I'm being utterly literal here) later, I was ready to give up on the bloody thing. But I eventually managed to pick the right screen layout to follow along on the introductory video, and by much use of the pause and rewind buttons on the youtube video was able to try out the stuff being demonstrated. Am much happier now that I might be able to actually use this for what I had in mind.

And that is for playing with models of my characters. I'm not interested in doing my own covers -- that's one of the things my publisher gets their 65% for. But I'm not exactly the most visual of writers, to the point where several people have remarked that I obviously hear my stories as a radio play rather than seeing them as a film. Yes, I do, and I'm trying to make this less obvious. I may find it just as useful to have posable models as to flick through photo collections when trying to work out what my characters and their surroundings look like.

All right, for the benefit of those readers who do not hang out in rec.arts.sf.composition, or other places that use this bit of terminology, I repeat the explanation from the first time someone asked me this. :-)

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From the rasfc FAQ:
Cat-vacuuming: An activity that pretends to be useful, but is actually
being done so that you can avoid writing.

The derivation is that when you're trying to avoid writing, all sorts of normally unwanted tasks suddenly become very appealing. It becomes vitally important to finish the housework that you normally cheerfully ignore. So you tidy the lounge, and then you vacuum it, and you think that the furniture is ever so covered in cat hairs, so you'd better vacuum that, and hey, we could save a step here and vacuum the cat itself, and get rid of all that loose fur that's come loose but hasn't been shed yet. And this will save time in the long run, because it means you won't need to vacuum *that* cat hair off the carpet and furniture tomorrow, because you've already vacuumed it off the cat. So it's *useful* work, because it means you'll have more time to write tomorrow...

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We have an icon nowadays. You will see it on various LJs, including this post. You will also see it on lapel pins at cons, if you look closely, for lo, we are Sad Bastards (TM), and decided that it would be a most excellent recognition signal for that small social problem of recognising those you know well without having the faintest idea of their physical appearance.