Crackpot Alley

Have I mentioned that I'm a regional leader for National Novel Writing Month? Anyhow, this year we're trying something new in letting people know it exists — we have a table at the Davis Farmers Market. (Credit for this idea goes entirely to my co-leader, because it never would have occurred to be that a) the farmers market existed, b) we could get a table there, and c) we could sit at a table for five hours on Saturday mornings. Not so sure about that last part, though.)

The Davis Farmers Market is a fun place to be, with lots of vegetables, crafts, and hot food. They also allow non-profits to have tables at the end of the park, and NaNoWriMo is a non-profit, so tada! Outreach!

What's not quite so obvious is that the non-profit spots are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis, and apparently people start lining up well before 7am.

So we were pretty far from the actual farmers market. Worse, we were at the crackpot end, along with the flat earthers (no, really!) and certain political groups who walked off the edge of that flat earth long ago. Luckily, the high school drama club got their assignment even later than we did, and they were a good bunch.

I'd been hoping to see college students who were interested in learning about NaNoWriMo (Davis is very much a college town), but for about three hours we mostly talked to retired people who clearly viewed the non-profit tables as captive audiences for whatever random thoughts they thought we needed to know. Though weirdly, they stayed away from the flat earthers and fringe political groups, which I thought was a little unfair. The students showed up after 10am, which seems about right for a Saturday morning.

Anyhow, after sitting in the sun and interacting with people for five hours (yeah, it got up in the 90s today), I got no writing done. Also, I never want to see anyone ever again. But I did figure out how to make the propulsion flames show up a bit (cutout opacity = 1.00, luminance = 0.00, glossy layered weight = 0.00) and I think I may call it good... Maybe?

(Oh, and because someday I may need to figure this out again, I fixed the hair problem yesterday by not telling it to upgrade to version 9, but instead parenting the hair to the figure's head. Then I had to mess around a bit to get it in the right place, but at least the pony tail wasn't disconnected and sideways.)

Now I just need to go back and fix the typography that I threw together a few days ago.