BECAUSE DREAMS DON'T HAVE A CARE

I successfully finished all my required objects for my wheel project in Ceramics! (A total of eleven objects, for various reasons, one of them being that we had to make duplicates of everything to manually destroy to simulate losing half of our work in the kiln. (I made a triplicate of one item.))

Anyway, with that done, we're on to our final project for the semester: Slab Houses.

In theory, I love this project. The teacher showed us some examples from previous years, and it has so much potential to be fun and quirky! The assignment is to make a home that tells a story about who or whatever lives in it. We also need two "roof angles" (not two sides of the same roof, as in an upside-down "v", but another roof thing in addition to that).

Unfortunately, the last constraint is killing me: There need to be a minimum of two slabs of 11" x 8.5". Holes can be cut into them, and structures built onto them, but they must otherwise retain those dimensions, because this project is ultimately about building slabs. Oh, and it also can't be more than like, 18" in diameter in any direction.

Idea sketches were due on Wednesday. I had five ideas for slab structures, and ended up finalizing one of the two I was least enthusiastic about because it's easy for the design to follow the "two piece-of-paper-sized slabs" rule.

We had to make models of our idea for a skill builder, due by 4:30pm today, and mine is. Not great. We're allowed to skip a lot of the final embellishments, and mine is still not great. Chiefly because it has a flat roof, and I didn't think through why that was a horrible idea. But it was also literally the only idea that would really work without being too big.

I've since come up with a couple of other ideas out of desperation, but I don't know if I'll be able to switch to one of them at this point. Still, it's gotta be better than my current attempt 😩

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine I used to work with at AnimeIowa contacted me with questions about running Accessibility for the convention he's since joined; I've rounded up everything I could think of and sent it to him, though I don't doubt I'll be thinking of things I missed for a while longer 😛

Anyway, that was more floating around the back of my mind than anything, until I found out about TwitchCon's major accessibility fails, including (among other things) not having a ramp to the main stage for one of their Guests of Honor, for three years running. I'm no professional, just a passionate, self-taught amateur, but even I can fix something that egregious after the first time!

With that in mind, I'm going to do my best to start sharing some of the stuff I thought about and planned for Accessibility back when I was running it for AnimeIowa. I've got a bare bones timeline for stuff to do posted at access_fandom already (with questions and input very welcome!), and am planning to share more there as I get the wherewithal. Because my efforts and knowledge aren't perfect, but I still somehow did better than a convention with corporate funding to throw around.

H'okay. Grades from our first Current Event Journal for Social Problems are finally in.

...I got 100%.

I'm more confident about my second CEJ than I was about my first, even with overhearing the teacher say she was planning to grade the first very liberally. Like the Asynchronous Class Notes assignments for the first third of the semester, we are assigned three of these, of which the lowest scored will ultimately be dropped from our grade.

Methinks I might indulge myself and take a zero on the final one.


After stopping by the ceramics lab this afternoon, I finished my pieces for the throwing assignment! I've got doubles of each piece, as assigned, which is more than rather a lot of my classmates can say 😓 Apparently, including the wheel in Ceramics 1 is specifically a community college thing in this state, while other institutes will have coil-and-pinch and slab stuff in Ceramics 1 and save throwing for Ceramics 2. With all the trouble my classmates are having, I can understand that! In any case, I'm glad I managed to finish my stuff. Pics soon, I hope!


Finally, I made a new mood theme! No pics as yet, as I am being lazy about it, but I'm submitting it for consideration as another official mood theme, so hopefully everyone will get to see it soon anyway 😉 I must confess that I stole an idea from someone's planning at the beginning of last year and made cloud moods. Still, I did my best to follow the official mood theme preferences to a T this time around, which meant a maximum of 30x30 pixels in size, which is tiny. I expect that someone who wanted to work with the full 100x100 pixel space, or even 50x50 pixels, would have a better time of it!

I may see about getting a basic screencap of the moods up at some point, but I'm not sure I'll be uploading all of them individually this time 😅