photo saturday: avcon 2018

Okay, it's been a couple of weeks... there's quite a bit to get to.

To start off, I'm sick currently, or at least in the beginning stages of same, so honestly, I can't be bothered with anything right now. But it's been two weeks, so we're doing this.

First up, the Sunday after my last post I spent about four hours cleaning the house for my rental inspection. I tidied, I mopped, I moved furniture around.

Monday comes, I skedaddled out of the house before 10am when they were supposed to arrive, went to the library to prep some DnD modules, then got a call at 11:30 (half an hour before the end of the inspection window) telling me that sorry, the inspection person had had an emergency and they were cancelling. Spent the last week and a half keeping the apartment in an approximate state of readiness, then get an email that said it'll be this coming Tuesday.

And of course, now I'm sick, and I hate doing any kind of cleaning up when I'm sick. Fuck this and all this bullshit.

Also, I did last week's shopping on Friday morning, since I was going to be busy all weekend. I may have gotten a little over excited and bought too much stuff at the supermarket.

There's a sizeable chunk of DnD related news... most of it revolving around AVCon (hence the photos), but more on that in a hot minute.

I played my usual games, although I had a character who died died (since death is seldom completely permanent in lower levels of AL) the week before last... well, she technically committed suicide/sacrificed herself to save her companions (I know, but it was a somewhat heavy couple of minutes). I now have a replacement character who will fill in until we get around finding the NPC who can raise her from the dead.

I also ran the first ever game for one of the managers of the games store on Thursday just so he could see what this DnD was all about. He seemed to have a good time, which is the main thing.

My DnDniversary was also that week. One year since I walked through the door of Greenlight Comics to play for the first time. It seems so weird that it's only been a year.

Then there was AVCon. I was, obviously, part of the tabletop/RPG/DnD area, and picked up my staff shirt and pass on Friday afternoon... while walking away I looked down at the things I was carrying and said, aloud, "What the fuck even is my life right now?"... I mean 12 months after starting DnD, I'm not only running games, but I'm running games at a major convention and I have a teeshirt that says "STAFF" on the back. What even is my life indeed.

I ran essentially three and a half games over the two days. Almost entirely for new players, and in a couple of those situations more than half the players at my table were either under 18 or under 15 (I now understand why the award for doing that refers to a saint of the god of endurance). I also ran a module I've now run 5 times, so other than monster stats and the occasional check for certain effects, I didn't really look at the module at all. Which was nice, I got to embellish a bunch of stuff.

I did seem to be the "and also" table more than a few times. Or at least it felt that way during the big epic game on Sunday when I had a table of 6 all leave me after about an hour and replaced them with a guy and his young son and one of the other DMs.

Otherwise AVCon was okay. I got a bit of a wander in on Saturday afternoon, and then another on Sunday morning, I also got to hang out at the cosplay competition on Saturday (which is where the two photos above were taken), chat with the lovely man at the Level Up Dice stall (who treated me like we'd known each other for 10 years or something... I don't know if that's just him, or if it was because I told him I was a big fan of the DnD online stream show that they sponsor, but it was amazing either way), stalked a few cosplayers (in a non-creepy way in order to take photos).

Then on Sunday we went and chatted with the lovely lady at the LARP (Live Action Role Play... essentially DnD, but standing up and running around in the world somewhere) stall for a good quarter of an hour before heading back up to the tabletop area and two of the three of us having a table's worth of players flung at us not long after we returned.

I also thought, yeah, I'll be at the Con until about 5:30, come home, my evening is my own. Not so much.

I ended up going out for dinner afterwards, on Saturday with a girl I didn't know all that well, and we had a great time and hung out for about 4 hours... when on Sunday a group of about 7 of us all headed out to debrief and chat and just wind down a little. I got home at 11pm and midnight respectively. And the only reason I left at midnight was that that was my last bus.

I'm not sure I'm going to repeat the AVCon experience, but it was definitely something to add to the bucket list in order to check off and one I enjoyed, but yeah, not sure it's for me. But we'll see. I am going to step back from the upcoming Con in September though, not only to give someone else a go, but I am currently, what is the phrase, financially insolvent, so yeah.

This week I had Haircut Day, Chiro Day and found it very hard to add up four very small numbers on Monday night after AVCon. Seriously, adding the results of four four sided dice should not be that hard.

Haircut Day was the hairdressing equivalent of "second verse, same as the first". So nothing changed there. I got a call earlier in the week saying my usual chiro wasn't available on Friday so I went to the other one on staff instead. Which is always a different experience, but okay.

Yesterday and today were the two days that this stupid cold/flu/petri dish of gross really hit me. Not a fan.

Today we did the shopping thing, I basically bought the makings for chicken soup and not much else, because of course.

Then we went into the city because Ma wanted to go to Dymocks. Which we did... then we wandered briefly, then we gave up and came back here. Then she left.

Now I'm trying to decide whether going and laying down is a good idea while having a stuffed up nose.

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thirteenth bloggiversary

This is a relatively quick post... It's also the first time I've done this semi-properly since about 2011.

Today is my blogiversary. My 13th blogiversary to be exact.

And tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the first time I went to play D&D, hence the dice photo and all the 13s.

So there's that.

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photo saturday: purple and blue

I think most of this week was spent in something akin to existential dread... but I can't be completely certain.

Anyway... I made the tuna morney again this week... and as always, even though I tried to keep the spices to a minimum, it still came out appropriately spicy. I can't help it, it's just the way I make it. As least it didn't dislodge the back half of my skull with every spoonful like it's done on previous occasions.

Otherwise DnD continues on as usual. My Monday game was a smaller group, which suited the adventure to be honest, and I liked the particular quartet, so that was good.

Wednesday's game was looooooong... like almost 6 hours instead of the usual 4. But we kicked butt all over the joint, almost all died, but didn't and that's the main thing. It was also nice to get a gigantic amount of XP, since that particular character has been limping along for a while now.

Thursday's game went somewhere I didn't expect... but I think it's a good thing. At least until we can get back to the other game we were playing on a Thursday. Because I didn't do arts and crafts to NOT play that character.

Otherwise there has been some cleaning/tidying in preparation for the inspection on Monday... wait, I was going to double check that... yes, definitely Monday... although interestingly enough the time is 10am to noon, rather than 2pm, so that's something at the very least.

It also means that I'm going to spend all of tomorrow morning (and hopefully little to no part of the afternoon if I can help it) doing the major clean. I need to do some organising tonight so that that's out of the way also.

I do have a feeling that it's going to consume almost all of my day tomorrow though. I just need to be on the ball and get shit done. Not exactly one of my virtues just at the moment.

Today wasn't much of anything to be honest.

Ma was doing the haircut thing this morning, so I shopped on my own. And given that I don't want to clean the whole house and then make a large amount of food and have to clean half the house again, I'm going for the individual meal plan this week.

After I got back here and Ma arrived we headed out to IKEA with a quick detour to see if I could find a refill for one of my pens... which ended up being more complicated than I think it really should have been.

But we also had a wander around Officeworks, which is always good/dangerous.

Then the usual route around IKEA... which wasn't very much of anything to be honest. Ma picked up a few things, but she was the one who really wanted to go.

And that was about it.

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photo saturday: ships of fools

So, this week was... what the fuck even was this week?

Okay, the main dot points...

Monday's game of DnD was the first time in eight weeks that one of my players hasn't shown up. I mean a bunch of the others have been there or not there, but the guy I started running for in the beginning. Hopefully he's back next week.

Wednesday we were back in the land of vampires and gothic horror, and the only thing we fought other than a swarm of rats was each other. Because my dwarf wizardess doesn't take no shit from no snooty elf noble.

Thursday we were still a player down for our hardcover game, so I ran instead. It wasn't a bad game, although I let the penultimate encounter get way out of hand and as such we didn't have a ton of time for the final encounter.

What else...

Oh, just because I want to record it for posterity, I got laid in the most spectacular fashion at 3am Wednesday morning. It wasn't quite The Best Sex of My Life, but it was close, and quite similar, and worth the wait since I've been talking to this guy about once a year since 2015. Yeah, I know, and it's never going to be much of anything because he's a straight boy who has sex with guys on the side, but it was damn good.

Let's see if it actually happens again... the other issue is that his schedule is almost the exact opposite of mine, so it's hard to connect... plus he's pretty deep on the down low.

He is sexy as fuck tho. And I want a repeat performance. Even if 3am is super inconvenient.

Anyway... unsurprisingly, that made me super mentally horny the whole week... which was great given that I started to come down with a cold or something until I dosed myself up with cold and flu medicine.

Moving on.

Otherwise the week was a week. No soup again, which led to at least a couple of very lackluster meals, but I'll live.

The shopping was, average. I'm planning on making some version of tuna mornay this week, so that'll be easy across the rest of the week.

Once the shopping was done, we faffed around for a bit, trying to work out what to do with the day, and ended up doing what I like to call the Cross Road Run... where we check out Big W, Target and if we're feeling daring, Kmart on Anzac Highway.

Not that we really needed or wanted a hell of a lot, but we did find a few things.

And then we made the mistake of stopping at Cibo for their "secret menu Italian hot chocolate"... I can tell you why it's on the secret menu... it's because it's actually thick custard that has been heated up. I know because I've done the exact same thing to thick chocolate custard and it tastes, feels and behaves exactly like that.

Once I readjusted my brain to the fact that is was warm chocolate custard, it was great... but as "Italian hot chocolate" is was a big fat fail.

And that was about it really...

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