RJ Ramblings

Hey everybody!

Nothing big happening in my personal life last week. Things have been going pretty good though. It's super hot in Texas, but we have three air conditioners on my side of the house, and 2 on my roommate's side, so trying to stay cool. Haven't been going outside very much, except to work on the truck a little bit, which I have to do more of this week sometime. 

I built a couple of Lego sets this week. I did the new Van Gogh Starry Night set, which was really cool and is now hanging on my Lego wall. I also built a little toy store set that I'm planning on modifying and combining with an ice cream shop set and turning into a building that will fit on my city street shelf. 

I started setting aside one day a week for learning. I have a bunch of online courses I wanted to take in Blender and in Unreal Engine. I think it's important that I continue to learn things while producing content for the game. I have gotten into a tendency to just focus on producing content, and I'm frequently doing the same things over and over again and not necessary gaining more knowledge. So, learning new things is becoming a higher priority for me. I spent Saturday on this Blender course, reorienting myself with the program and learning some basic modeling stuff. Only about 12% done with the course. Had a lot of fun with it though, and I definitely feel more comfortable in the program than the last time I attempted to learn Blender. I did the donut tutorial before from BlenderGuru, but I feel like that knowledge didn't stick with me very well. There is a lot more repetition, smaller chunks of learning, and doing things on your own in this course, and I think that works better for me to actually learn things, instead of just following along with a tutorial. 

Other than that, just the normal stuff for me this week: TV, comic books, and video games. 

We finished Stranger Things season 4 (I'm pretty bored with it. This season has 4 separate storylines going on, and I only like 1 of them). We watched Bosch season 1 (I looooved it. This is the type of gritty noir detective show that I'm always looking for. We're already starting season 2 now, because I enjoyed the first one so much). 

I started playing a game called Sifu, based on some people's recommendations and I'm really enjoying it. Really fun, difficult, combat. Also been playing one called Call of the Sea that was part of this month's Humble Bundle - it's a classic adventure game in the style of Myst, but the art style is very cool and it was made by a small publisher in Unreal Engine, so that interests me a lot. It's pretty okay so far. 

That's about it for me. Looking forward to getting back to working on the game after taking the weekend off. Hope y'all have a great week. Love ya!