The problem is I say "I need to post an entry today," and I may even have something to say in it -- first thing in the morning. But then I have to go do other stuff, even maybe sometimes earn a living, so I'm like "I'll do that after dinner." But after dinner I am usually thoroughly caught up in trying to crank out renders as fast as I can -- as I've said before, the renders are the slow part -- and I forget. Then it's eleven o'clock and I might remember to think "Hey, if you're going to do an entry today you'd better do it, otherwise it's gonna be tomorrow" ... but often I don't, because if I have to stop to concentrate on that even for a few minutes, then that's time I'm not setting up the next render.

(The timesink of renders is seldom actually in the render time itself. Those usually run five minutes or so. Ten, tops. Some big panels can go twenty-some minutes, but usually by the time they get there I've already cut it off because I can see the image isn't going to improve substantially and the renderer is just doing what I describe scientifically as "pissing around." There is another milestone for "pissing around" I discovered late last year: I watch my CPU temperature closely because I'm scared to death of the damned machine melting. It has several stages during a render, where it tends to plateau and not climb, then it climbs, and plateaus again for a while ... anyway, when it hits 80 C that is an infallible sign that it is now just diddling. This is the CPU temp, remember, not the GPU. There is no reason for the CPU to get to 80 C during one of these renders. So that's when it gets halted.

No, the time is mostly spent setting up scenes -- posing and re-posing and moving and lighting and re-lighting the figures in the scene and so on. It is not unusual for there to be at least half an hour of setup for a five-minute render, and one of my long stories will have more than two hundred renders. And that's active time, alas; I can play Hexceed or read social media or do something else mindless while the render's rendering, but scene setup requires my attention.)

Anyway, maybe I should set an alarm or something. Eleven o'clock at night, stop what you're doing and post an entry.

This is also a belated Release Day entry -- on 1 April I put out the Easter story. I'm not going to link it, if you're reading this I think you probably know where to find it. I have another story ready -- the TFRND story I discussed last time -- it turned out to be only nine pages and it's ready to go, but I don't want to release it until mid-April to give the Easter story some breathing room.

Actually, that's not true, I'd love to release it right this second because it is Currently Topical (unusual for me) and my thoughts/anger about LLMs have reached such a fever pitch that my rage is leaking out all my orifices. I ranted in private work Slack for about five hundred words this morning. Fortunately they are accustomed to my occasional outbursts.

(You may not understand why the TFRND story and LLM rage are in the same paragraph together. Well, wait until mid-April and it will become clear.)

In other news, I am of course the current owner of all chametz in our household. It's kind of hilarious to me -- my spouse is culturally Jewish but about as far from religiously observant (any kind of religious observance) as it's possible to be. She does not keep kosher -- except during Passover. When it presents extra challenges. (If you don't understand why, find someone Jewish and they'll explain.) I don't know if she welcomes that challenge, or if it's just that one time a year she feels a need to acknowledge her heritage in this way, or if she just feels it makes the pizza bender she closes out Passover week with even sweeter.

We don't do a seder but we do some of the food, because, again, this seems to be culturally important to her -- some things, like charoset, that she only makes and eats at this time of year. (I understand the idea of ritual foods but I don't much do them myself. I am not overly fond of the basic king cake, for example, and while I have a periodic burning need for gumbo, that is not tied to a particular observance or time of year -- except I almost always make some after Thanksgiving because it's a great thing to do with a turkey carcass.)

I like charoset but I can't eat very much of it; I'm like "yup, had that, it was good," and don't want more than a few spoonfuls. I am not fond of matzos. I always kind of thought that you weren't supposed to be fond of them -- bread of affliction and all that -- but I'm pretty sure she genuinely likes them. Though, again, by the time Passover week ends, she's also pretty sick of them.