h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

not intended to replace your regularly scheduled conversation thread


*Lil rides up to the entrance on Ferrari, gives him a hearty hug and vaults down* Thanks fella! It was good to ride after all those weeks of confinement, and the little gallop along the shore was beautiful!

*Ferrari wanders off a short distance, drops his head and begins to graze the lawn, as Lil enters the guest cottage. Chloe has evidently been in, for the bed is made up and a small fire is burning in the hearth of the corner fireplace. Lil also discovers towels in the bathroom and a good selection of her clothes in the bedroom*

*after a quick bath she comes back out, makes herself a cup of and sits down at the computer in the sitting room. As soon as it logs in, several monitors come on along the table, showing various rooms in the atelier as well as the CLI lobby*

Ha! CLI has come through! *Lil discovers that the small array of joysticks next to the mouse allow her to pan the monitors, and this is how she realises that the atelier has been vandalised. Unpainted plaster patches mark the walls where bullets evidently stitched a path, and some of the furniture is not the same as when she left. Her eyes well up, not for the first time*

*sipping her and hitting a small green CLI button, she rejoins the group in a remote sort of way...*

*enters the cottage, removing her flying goggles* puts the DFB back into its goo blue leather carrying case and hangs it up on a coat hook*

Have you got room for a small houseguest, Lil? I've brought my sleeping bag .

There's an empty matchbox on the mantelpiece, Amy, and I could fill it with cotton wool -- would that make a decent bed for you? To be honest, I'll be glad for a bit of company. I mean, there's not room for all the salonistas in here *surveys the rustic cottage* but after a while I would begin to feel like a biome experiment.

Have they found the bomb? *goes to the efficiency kitchen to make tea*

Is the matchbox one of those nice large ones? They hadn't found the bomb when I left. It's all a complete mystery.

It's a serious kitchen matchbox. *comes in with tea and a bag of cottonwool, which she begins to tear and arrange into a mattress* What size of fitted sheet have you?

*pours out two cups of of greatly different sizes, then brings out a plate of mbougatses* Well, this is my first chance to hear what happened to all the salonistas before they found me. Got any good stories?

*looks at the label on her sheet*

[Queen ant size, 10cm x 10cm, Do not tumble dry]

It's a big sheet. I can tuck the edges under the cotton wool.

*sits down to drink *

We had lots of adventures - and lots of tea . I liked the bit where Zeppo tricked one of the jellos into blowing himself up with a bomb. Zeppo has been a very brave and resourceful doggie throughout the quest and he deserves a medal. He saved my life at the Pass, you know.

Ooh. Changing the subject completely. I have the address of a gallery you really must visit. It belongs to Potholer's sister. She paints pictures of horses . http://www.btinternet.com/~alisonwilson_art/

I love the Ponies on the Mynd -- are these digital artworks, or scans of "brushware"? She could sell stuff like this to the horse trades; over here the equivalent of Horse and Hound is Chronicle of the Horse, and I believe they take stuff like this for cover art. It really is exceptionally good.

I'm only taking one art class this semester, Design. Not sure I like it. The teacher is good enough, but, for the first time, I have taken a dislike to some of the more talkative fellow-students. Or perhaps it's the fault of the teacher, being too friendly and not telling them to be quiet so the rest of us can concentrate.

Between the homework -- brushware, a study in black and white using acrylics -- and the Huge Render, I don't expect to finish Baba Yaga till after the 26th. The render has to be completed, and I will need a few hours for post-processing, by 4 pm that day. It's a contest.

Are you doing anything outside of the community art?

I'm not doing much art at the moment other than the h2g2 stuff. i've been quite poorly again and in between times I've been trying to set up my Web Accessibility Consultancy.

*has another cup of *

Well, I hope the consultancy works out. And I wish they could find a root cause for the health problems you've been having, too.

But back to digital art, I have to confess that I uninstalled the Painter 7 upgrade and went back to 6.1. In the first place, they changed the interface in a few subtle ways, like there being an extra menu-click just to make a new layer. And I was horribly disappointed in the new "natural" watercolour brushes. Corel passed the management of Painter onto a site called Procreate which is a fancy disaster unless you have some kind of broadband. Maybe I'll try it again some other time. Right now I'm trying to find a 3d object modeller I can like.

And I seriously wish I could afford to jump fence and have powerful MacIntoshes...

I can't recommend a 3D program. I haven't found one I like as much as the old Extreme3D but you can't get that any more. I'll stick with Bryce. And I'll be sticking with Painter 5.5 for a while if 7 is not worth having.

Has your big render finished yet?

*nearly chokes on a swallow of tea* Aagh! What a screw-up that was. I discovered, way too late, that I had accidentally duplicated the entire side of a ruined temple and left it in place, AND, as if that weren't enough, I had accidentally submerged a piece of transparent terrain under another transparent piece of terrain. The renderer was going nuts.

I've made the fixes and set it going again, but only at night. And fortunately I had a slightly coarser version which I have just finished uploading to 3dcommune.com. Check the "ancient vistas" section of their gallery -- it's a contest and I have uploaded my piece just 24 hours before deadline.

Wish I could have submitted it with true ambience, but there you are. Live and learn.

I did a trial download of Amapi 5.15, a French 3D program which appears to have wonderful possibilities, but no documentation, even when you fork out the 400 dollah for the full version. The tutorials are ludicrously general; I was following one happily enough until I came to the instruction "...and fill in the back." Spent nearly 30 minutes digging around for a "fill" tool until I realised they meant to use the extruder tool to close off the back. I think that's what they meant, anyway.

So now I'm going to start learning ZBrush.

When you were a teacher, what did you teach?

Amapi is emerging as the standard but I haven't enjoyed using the trial versions.

Sorry, my monitor has just gone mad -- back later... I hope .

As I was saying...

I have a copy of Pixels 3D Studio but I can't seem to get on with that either.

Surely you knew I was a teacher? I was a teacher for x years where x is a larger number than I'm admiting to in public and I taught mainly physics, electronics, science, maths and design technology. I still teach, I suppose. But now it's to masters students.

As long as I've known you you've been a student.

I found your picture. It is wonderful .

I'm still a student, I suppose, but I'll have to finish the PhD part-time now. Ill health had made a big dent in my resources .

Oh, thank you! So far I'm the only one who used depth maps from Xenodream to make objects. I hope uniqueness counts.

I know you've been having some very challenging times. But I also know you're very dogged, and you'll find a path through these obstacles.

You know, my only barrier is entering the building. Do you think it would be safe for me to walk on the terrace?

I would think the garden is safe but I'm not sure about the veranda given the spatial and temporal pecularities of the site (courtesy of our landlords).

*sighs*
I suppose you're right. And it's getting late now. I shall take a walk in the garden tomorrow morning, and wave at the windows.

*looks outside* It's a lovely day. Would you like to go out? If you're poorly, there's a bath-chair in the shed and I'll be glad to push you along. The leaves are just beginning to turn...

No, I'm feeling ok today. I'll get the dragonFLYbot and fly along as you walk.