Christmas is over. New Years is dead. The holidays are banished for another year. Last monday, Rachel went back to work, and I found myself in a bit of a pickle. See, I'd started getting work lined up again, but at time of writing we're still sorting out all the deets (keep an eye out for cool developments soon, though!). I still needed to get out of the house, mind. I'm still paying for the office down in Leith, and figured I might as well go and work on *something*. But while I'd created a cool environment in Unity over winter, I had no passion for making a "game" out of it. As an experienced purveyour of YouTube garbage, though, I'd once again been deep in a Source Filmmaker kick. Flipping between An0nymoose's incredible music skits, Maxime Lebled's stunning portfolio and some adorable Splatoon shorts, I reckoned it was time I picked up animation again. After all, I'd created one walk cycle for a mech a few year's back. How hard could it be? I started, as you do, with a veemo. Look, alright. There are, according to a cursory glance at the hashtags and Steam Community hub, three kinds of SFM creations in 2020: Edgy teen angst, hardcore pornography, and squidposting. I'll happily admit to the third over the other two. I'm in a bit of a massive Splatoon kick right now. Don't @ me. After a day of messing with the motion editor and basic smoothing, though, I found I wasn't making a huge amount of progress. I'd glanced at Valve's tutorials, but I wasn't following them. If I was gonna get anywhere, though, I needed to get serious. I picked something fundamental to work on - I'd try and get a walk cycle going, using this fantastic tutorial from Jesse Baumgartner. The first attempt was... stiff.