Best Of

Nice slab @Ashervisalis! What kind of wood is that?

I've barely had any time to do woodworking, my wife got a job in Denver so we had to finish a bunch of renovation projects on the house and sell it, and find a new place out here. Now I'm waiting for a construction company to build a ~2 car garage-sized build in the back yard for my shop. It will be great to have a dedicated space but it might be another 6 months before I can work on projects again.

I did get a lathe though, and there are a bunch of interesting Russian olive logs in the yard, some with cool burls, that the previous owner left. I've been learning how to turn them into bowls. These are rough cut waiting to dry to the right moisture level, will do the final carving soon hopefully.

The lathe is great because I can do almost all of the work for a project on a single tool. Don't need space for the table saw, jointer, etc. No joinery or complicated stuff to think about either, just chuck a weird bit of wood on it and see what happens.

Also working on insulating and drywalling the existing garage so we'll have a nice place to park the car when all the tools can be moved to the shop. Got a big set of shelves set up and most of my hardwood stacked on it too!

NikhilR said:

One aspect to keep in mind with protagonists (women or otherwise) is what a default is and how the audience feels about it.

No, that's exactly the thing you shouldn't keep in mind, because for this you'd have to assume that there is some default "normal" state and everything else is just a modification of that default. That's not true in real life, and it doesn't seem healthy to hold that thought in public minds through art.
If you just continue to conform to - to respect - their prejudice, then you only help the "core audience" to stay close-minded and entitled in their ignorance. Only sustain the state of unconscious fear and hatred before the "unknown" and "exotic".
Games shape us, shape communities, like any other art. It's not just about reaching new audience - it's about imagining the world where we don't treat others as collections of labels and modifiers. If you can imagine it, it can eventually become. If we only look at most efficient way to sell product, than we might as well say goodbye to the industry now - it wouldn't be worth saving. There would be no point to it.
Looking at some gaming communities now, you'd think we're on the fast track to the past, when it was okay to assume that the typical gamer is an ugly teen with zero self-respect or life... and everyone else were not "real" gamers.