Now With 400% Less Wisdom!
June 2025
Last month I had all my wisdom teeth ripped out of my mouth. That’s a whopping 400% reduction in wisdom! Despite this extraorthodontic deficiency in my mental faculties I was still able to get a bunch of stuff done.
There’s also the video edition of the Hydromonthly in case that previous paragraph completed your reading quota for the day:
Monolith Field
This is something I threw together in Blender to practice using ucupaint, a plugin that adds a whole bunch of really useful functionality to Blender's texture painting.
The model is loosely based on long-term nuclear waste warning messages, something I first learned about back in college.
The purpose of those messages is to figure out ways to tell future humans, who might not even understand any of our current languages or culture, that dangerous nuclear waste is stored in an area.
Part of that includes physical structures meant to appear hostile, intimidating, and unnatural. That's what this model pulls from, with the monoliths, spikes, and weird grid sorta thing.
Some highlights of the paintjob include blue painted over the shadows, a painted-on normal map for the terrain, and some gradient work on the main monolith.
HEISTSONG
It’s been a while since I made some music. This song started as me just messing around in LMMS, which eventually metamorphosized into something that sounded like spy music, so I ran with the idea of it being about a bank heist that goes wrong.
I really like how the bongos turned out in this one. I’ve been wanting to use them in a song for a while, largely inspired by how they’re used in the TF2 soundtrack (Faster Than a Speeding Bullet specifically).
The songs I’ve made so far are all up on Newgrounds. I should probably put them up on YouTube at some point as well.
I also got started on another song based on an earlier version of HEISTSONG. It started as a drum ‘n bass thing but now it’s sounding a little more like something out of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Here’s what I’ve got for now:
I feel like I can do drums and basslines pretty decently but I struggle when it comes to figuring out melodies. Hopefully something that gets better with practice.
Bugalo’s Back, in More Ways Than One
For those not in the know, Wonderful & Fancy High School Bait Club, also known as Bugalo for the sake of brevity, is a deranged collaborative comic experience wherein I draw textless pages and a friend remedies the lack of lettering.
I had been publishing a new page per month pretty consistently until I missed the last two. We now return to the regularly scheduled whatever-this-is. Click on the page below to read the whole comic on my website (not formatted for mobile just yet).
In this new page, Bugalo is forced back to life by decree of Gerbil Dictator using the aptly dubbed “Forced-To-Live-Ray” that had only appeared in-name prior.
If the new page isn't loading try clearing your browser's cache.
Break Action Spellbook
Ever wonder what a magic super shotgun might look like? Wonder no longer! This is the Break Action Spellbook, another model I made in Blender using ucupaint and Krita for the textures.
The Team Fortress 2 players in the room (that includes me btw) might say “Hey that looks like the Force-a-Nature (or the Soda Popper)!” and yeah, it does. It was one of my references when making the thing.
The model originally had some funny looking barrels that made it look like some kind of floo-floober instead of a gun. Although a blunderbuss looking thing might be cool for a future model.
The texture painting includes highlights on the edges, darker colors in the recesses, and some subtle grain on the wooden parts. Not to mention the glowing green wear on the barrels.
This is the second Spellgun model I’ve made so far (click here to see the previous one on Newgrounds). Spellguns are firearm-shaped housings for spellbooks designed to be more ergonomic for adventurers. I’m making these with my tabletop RPG system in mind, where elemental gems are used as ammo for magic items.
I also started on some first-person animations that I’m hoping to get done sometime this month. That’ll go up on my YouTube channel whenever it’s done. Here’s a preview:
Mystery of The Memoryhole Monastery Pt. 2 - A Table Knight Short Story
I recently participated in the 2025 Writer’s Jam on Newgrounds, a roughly 72 hour writing jam with a bunch of single-word prompts to choose from. This resulted in a short story in the world of Table Knight, one of the settings for the previously mentioned TTRPG system. In Table Knight every player is named [Word] Knight, where the chosen word determines your character’s abilities and some of your starting equipment.
This story follows Mine Knight, Tackle Knight, and Psych Knight in the second part of an adventure into The Memoryhole Monastery. There is no first part. I got the idea largely from an episode of The Venture Bros. that had a similar concept. You can read the story either on Newgrounds or on my newly minted short story Substack, Hydro’s Story Plot. I’ve also uploaded a small back-catalog of older things I wrote with more to come.
The Memoryhole Monastery was originally an idea I had for a dungeon within the game. I might do some more stories exploring other dungeon/quest ideas I had for it.
And that’s all the stuff I finished between now and the last edition. I’ll see you next time with another Hydromonthly.
Have a good one,
-Hydromecha