The blog

 A small one, but one I want to draw attention to nonetheless. I've now updated the Interactive Legacy of Kain Timeline  to include a few quality of life improvements: I updated some of the data, specifically the connections, to be more accurate - as an example, previously some of the connections for the Soul Reaver blade bypassed some nodes. Whilst this was technically correct because they were straight lines, this also meant that the arrows on those connections were drawn under nodes, and it didn't look great. Some arrows are still drawn under nodes, but there are fewer instances of this, and it's a difficult problem to avoid. I've updated it to use the most recent version of  simple-as-pie  - this doesn't really add much, but at least I'm keeping my own stuff up to date with my own libraries (I still need to update the demo page, which may be a job for tomorrow) I've made the timeline more responsive - previously it was fixed to a width of 750px, but now ...

  Good news everyone ! Over the weekend I managed to finish migrating  The Interactive Legacy of Kain Timeline  to use React.js rather than Vue.js A few years ago, I had a pretty catastrophic computer failure, and as a result I lost the source code. I had to re-do this one from scratch, but I did it to imitate the Vue.js one closely, whilst adding in better features. I've taken precautions, so will be able to make changes to this one very swiftly - which is especially good considering the upcoming Dead Shall Rise comic, and the Encyclopaedia. As part of this, I also ended up creating a re-usable component for creating SVG Pie Charts. I called it  Simple-As-Pie Both of these still have some improvements that I can make: making the timeline default to the full width of the available space; making it look better on mobile; allowing you to edit the minutiae of the controls; ensuring a parent of the Pie Chart is an SVG element; making sure the dependencies are spot on; Ho...

I started this one on November 1st, as my first project whilst undertaking the challenge of crocheting every day in November for Bone Cancer Research Trust. In total I've managed to raise £463.13 (including Gift Aid and my employer's match funding) and did 45 hours across the 30 days (I slowed down at the end to not burn myself out) If people want to contribute, the donation page is here  - alternatively, people can just donate to the cause directly. Left: The doll, glowing in the dark. Right: The doll, in bright light Stats The doll is 12 inches tall and just over 9 inches in wing-span. The Wraith Blade is 9 inches long and about 2 inches wide. In total it took 39 hours across 19 days (so just over 2 hours a day), using 11 different yarns. Posability To ensure that the doll was posable, I used the wiring instructions detailed in Hoffman's "The Travellers" pattern. Well, roughly - she recommends a particular gauge of wire, but I just used what I had to hand. I don...

This one was particularly difficult: The Soul Reaver itself!   Probably the hardest part was constructing the skull, which had a fair few false starts. I found a pattern for a skull on club crochet  which was the basis for that, but I had to narrow the eyes, alter the nose, and narrow the teeth. It ended up looking more cute that intimidating, but that sort of fits in with the rest of the toys Pattern alterations The colours I chose were an off white for the bone, and black for the holes. Follow the skull pattern until Round 4 Rnd 4 sc 10, tr 3, sc 1, tr 3, sc 1 Rnd 5 sc 10, tr 1, split 2, tr2, split 2, tr 1 Rnd 6 sc 9, tr 1 blo, black sc2,  white tr1,sc1,tr1, black sc2, white tr1 Rnd 7 sc10, tr4, sc1, tr 4 Rnd 8 sc 1, inv dec1 x 3, sc9 Rnd 9 dec 3, sc1, dec 1, split -  sc4/ dec 3 The blade This also had a fair few false starts, but eventually I found a pattern for a zig zag or lightning bolt, which I followed. Annoyingly, I don't seem to have bookmarked the link. [...

After the Mario film came out I asked my son which character he would like a toy of, and he chose Bowser. This is pretty much the reason I started learning yarn craft in the first place, so I made him one. The pattern I followed was from this particular blog post from 2011 https://epic-yarns.com/2011/10/04/bowser/ I submitted a comment asking for some clarification, but didn't get a response. I think the blog is somewhat abandoned. However, you could consider this post as a supplement, as I have some suggestions on how to improve things. 1) First of all, the instructions for putting everything together are not the best. Even the follow up edit with photos doesn't make things much easier. As such, I will put some diagrams here (as they are clearer than photos) 2) The mouth is made of 10 pieces - 4 big balls, 1 small ball, 2 small tubes, and 3 big tubes. These all get stitched together using their tails. I'm not the best at stitching, and I would worry that things could come ...

For the past couple of years I've been dabbling about in Unity, but due to their recent PR disaster, I've shifted over into dabbling with Godot instead. The project I'm trying to create is a turn-based strategy game, which would include terrain. As such, units might be hidden behind terrain, so the user should be able to rotate the camera. To this end I've been following the Godot tutorials, creating a 3d plane, and putting a box in one corner so that I can see how the whole thing would rotate (if it were a plain plane, I wouldn't be able to tell it rotated). I didn't bother putting in a player character yet (as the concept is quite different to the example in the tutorial), but I did follow the steps  for implementing a camera. I wanted the camera to rotate by increments of 90 degrees (so there would effectively be 4 positions). Unfortunately, most of the maths in the documentation is about radians, which doesn't seem useful to me for this case, as it makes...