photo saturday: wintery weather

We return to our regularly scheduled broadcast after a brief stint of no transmission.

I was sick. And I both couldn't and didn't want to people. So I didn't.

So winding back to just the highlights I guess. The week before last wasn't much of anything... and then on Wednesday everything took a nosedive. I went to DnD as usual, thankfully under the circumstances there was no Wednesday night game. And a couple of people were getting over being sick. But I felt fine.

Then I came home and by about 8pm I felt like garbage... and went to bed at 8:30pm, always a sure sign I'm sick. Woke up around 2am totally feverish and couldn't get back to sleep for over an hour. Thursday morning I went out to the chemist first thing and bought some medicine, but mostly I just felt crappy. And possibly stupidly I went out and ran a game of DnD that night.

Let us just say that it was a little bit of a fever dream, but mostly okay.

Last weekend was the election, and I was even less interested in the whole procedure than usual. Plus I very nearly got into an argument with an old lady giving out how to vote cards because she was being passive aggressive. Seriously, if I tell you I'm "good", you don't get to make a snide comment, or in fact any comment. I'm politely telling you I don't want to interact with you. But if you come for me, I will read you to filth bitch.

Also, I may have voted completely incorrectly due to the aforementioned fever dream and lack of interest.

M'eh.

We stocked me up with cough medicine and nasal spray and vitamin C tablets and hand sanitiser and Nippy's Tangy Lemon and I sent Ma home.

I made very bad soup on Sunday. I shouldn't have bothered, but I did anyway, and while it wasn't the worst soup ever, I just wasn't feeling it and didn't end up eating much of it. I also sent a message to one of my Monday DnD group telling him he'd been selected to run that week's adventure (technically I asked him, but I knew he'd step up). Wednesday I also didn't go.

So that would be almost two years since I didn't show up on a Monday. At least not when there were actual games on. I mean there was one night I just wasn't feeling it and went home instead of playing, but I at least set foot in the place. Same with Wednesday. With the exception of Christmas and one week when I went to pick Ma up from the airport, I've been there every week. Which meant that this week was the exact opposite of "a lot". It was in fact "a nothing".

And I was bored.

Part of the problem was when I was sick enough to be bored but not well enough to leave the house. Plus it was better to not go and keep my germs to myself.

And by Thursday I was feeling mostly human again. Which was good, because not only was Thursday Haircut Day, I also had a DnD game I didn't want to miss.

Haircut Day was basically the same old same old. It was nice to leave the house honestly. And get freshened up after essentially a week of hibernation.

The DnD game was also good... perhaps not one of the best games for that group, but we've been a little fractured the last few weeks, with other people running and the core group of characters spread to the four winds. We're also having an "extra" game this Sunday... which is random, but should be good.

Which brought us around to today.

I'm leaning towards making chicken soup again (I made it the week before last, before I got sick... and it was really good, so maybe I'll dip back there again which I'm actually still a little sick). I mean I bought the makings for chicken soup, so we'll see I guess.

The rest of today wasn't much of anything really. We took a little trip out to Officeworks and Spotlight... and the thing I spent 20 minutes looking for in Spotlight only to discover they only had one style and it was $15, I got online in 5 minutes when I got home... and it cost $1. I mean they might be shit, but there's a lot of them and they cost $1 so who cares.

We detoured back past Haighs... which wasn't really "past" but was very much a detour. And yay, they finally had broken Easter eggs. I mean they might have had them last week too, but we didn't go last week.

And that was it really. I mean the weather hasn't exactly cooperating, and we did the little bit of stuff we needed to do, so, yeah.

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photo saturday: scaling

Winter isn't until June, right? Asking for a friend. Because in the space of a month, we've gone from full on Summer heat to Winter rain and chill. I obviously didn't get the memo we were skipping over Autumn this year.

This has also led to rampant paranoia that the crown moulding along the ceiling will start to leak again now that we're having rain. And given that there is a massive crack between it and the ceiling since they came and repaired it last time. Feel free to keep your fingers crossed for me.

I'm swearing off tomato soup... not tomato IN soup you understand, just soup where tomato is the primary ingredient. It seems that no matter what I do, it always comes out a little bit blah and I get bored with it by the second or third day. So in deference to the weather, I'm making chicken soup this week... possibly with noodles, maybe with rice, but definitely chicken.

We managed four DnD games this week... and I only had to run one, which makes a change. Monday was the first time I've run a Tier 3 game, and it wasn't too bad, although I should have cut it a little shorter, or at least cut out some of the combat encounters to that we ran a little more to time. The second part of the module is this coming week.

Wednesday someone else ran, but a character still died. I mean the module was a little stupid, and I was thankful that I was running my big dumb boy, but still, it was lethal enough.

Wednesday night, our regular DM is off on holiday, so we finished off the adventure that I started a couple of weeks back when most of the regulars couldn't be bothered showing up. And I got to do that thing that I usually do at least once an adventure with this character, run real fast and do the stupid yet awesome thing. This ended up with me locked on the other side of a door, a lot of water and glass and angry creatures from all the other characters. And the quest item was on my side of the door.

I mean I'd been hoping I could have done a grab and go, but the DM wasn't having any of that... although he also very nicely chose not to murder me very dead while trapped in a room with the final boss all by myself (even if he was pretending to be a halfling at the time).

Then on Thursday was possibly the very worst game I've played that I wasn't mad about. Let me break that down... the fifth wheel for the Thursday quartet volunteered to run and let the quartet play a particular group of characters. And while the module he chose wasn't doing anybody any favours, he's a terrible DM. And an unprepared terrible DM, which he shouldn't have been (as unprepared as he was I mean). But the quartet can make just about any disaster work, or rather, we just defaulted to roleplay and did whatever bits of the story we could be bothered with or that were clear enough for us to do.

And then my regular character's partner in crime failed a roll and died. Well, in the game as we played it at the table, he died... but in discussions later, he may have been too far away from the other characters for the spell to actually have affected him.

Weirdly though, I hope we keep the death canonical, it will be much more dramatic later on.  I get to run next week, but I'm not throwing anything super weird in, I'll save that until the following week when we're all back on deck in our regular roles.

Otherwise this week I had to take a quick trip to Officeworks on Monday, and Friday was Chiro Day.

Today was, once again, not much of anything.

We did the supermarket thing in the morning, but as tends to be the case at present, I didn't buy a ton of stuff beyond things for soup.

Then we thought we might drop by Haighs and see if they had any broken Easter eggs, totally forgetting that tomorrow is Mother's Day (since Ma doesn't give a crap about it), so the place was in chaos. And while they didn't have broken egg now, it seems that they will have soon, so we'll just have to keep dropping in, just in case.

From there it was a quick trip to Kmart for some stuff Ma wanted, then we dropped in at Officeworks and spent way too long looking at highlighters and marker pens and the like. Not that that's a bad thing.

And that was pretty much it for the day.

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movies: avengers - endgame

Let's start this off right... this review will have some spoilers for Avengers: Endgame. If you haven't seen it yet, why are you even looking at this?

So, I cried. Not like cried like a baby or the ugly cried, but I think I cried on and off for the last 45 minutes.

Backing up a bit... this movie did not go in any of the directions that I thought it might. Beyond the "everybody who still has a contract with Marvel will be back at the end" expectation from the previous movie.

This was the perfect way to wrap up both the Infinity Gauntlet arc, and the last 22 movies. By tying it into iconic moments from the other movies, it allowed the audience to remember the joy and give it a whole new feel. And it gave all of the original Avengers something to do.

I also appreciate that in some ways this movie is a total troll. Especially when it comes to Thor... it wasn't the Thor we wanted (well, probably most of us, but I'm sure Chris Hemsworth had the best time ever), but it was definitely the Thor we knew and loved from Ragnarok. Likewise, the Hulk reveal wasn't what I was expecting at all.

And of course the finale had to feature both a 5 year time jump AND time travel. I read that Kevin Feige cited the final Star Trek: The Next Generation episode All Good Things as an inspiration for this movie and that absolutely makes complete sense.

It was also amazing that they got to tie in just about every single guest star possible, right down to the kid from Iron Man 3 appearing as a teenager (that one person in a black suit you just couldn't identify in THAT scene). But the point at which I both cried and wanted to punch the air and probably said "YES!" very quietly to myself is during the final fight when the portals start to open and ALL the returned heroes show up (and of course they let the stars of their highest grossing movie walk through first). But Tom Holland was the point I started to really cry.

On top of which the point at which all the badass Marvel ladies step up to give Captain Marvel a hand (not that I'm sure she really needed the help to be honest) was fucking awesome. Give me more of that... fuck it, give me a movie where they all team up and kick some ass, I don't even care what the plot is.

This is why the writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and the directors, Anthony and Joe Russo really get how to write/direct action that's not just Thing A hitting Thing B, they put character moments all through this damn thing... they just know how to make a great superhero movies. From Captain America and Thor's hammer to the kickass women to the fact that they knew that waiting an extra beat before Tom Holland stepped through the portal would have people leaning forward in expectation. And the seemingly endless number of references, both explicit and subtle to the other 22 movies in the series.

They also gave me the thing I didn't know I'd been wanting since 2011, Steve finally making good on his promise to Peggy. Honestly that was the only part of the movie that was "spoiled" for me before going in... otherwise I went in knowing nothing. And I wasn't even annoyed about that one spoil... because of course if they discover how time travel works, he would want to go back and just be a regular guy... or at least as regular as he could be. And who knows, maybe they made little superpowered babies.

I don't even care to be honest. That scene was just perfect.

And yes, it's very easy to forget that the finale is actually taking place on Earth, because the bad guys blow everything up so that it's generic rubble and could be anywhere (or more accurately, is one part practical rubble and 9 parts CGI). And it is a shame that both Captain Marvel and Okoye aren't in the movie more, given the fact that they both appear prominently on the poster, and a number of things from the first movie (like the meaning behind Thanos' visions of the little girl) kind of get glossed over, but they also don't feel super important to be honest.

Plus now we're never going to find out what actually happened in Budapest.

It's not necessarily the best Marvel movie from a critical standpoint, but it did make me love it and love it hard. And it is the end of an era.

yani's rating: 5 timelines out of 5

photo saturday: orange you glad...

There was clearly something in the air or the water this week...

I made a pretty good chicken and corn chowder this week... it was maybe a little thin to start with (and also not the same recipe I used last year when I made my first ever chowder), but I mixed some flour and some of the broth together after I'd tried it and ended up making it pleasantly thick.

I killed two different people's DnD characters this week as well. One on Monday because, to be honest, the character was kind of asking for it and the player was making life difficult for the other players. He wasn't being a dick or anything... it was just not what I would have expected for that particular player.

Wednesday's day game can be a fairly brutal one, although the characters were making short work of a lot of the enemies thanks to a high level rogue in the party, so I upped the difficulty a little... but then I had the three remaining enemies attack the paladin for a total of 6 attacks, knocked him unconscious with the first attack and then rolled two natural 20's (great for me, bad for him) on the second attack. I'd also had a conversation with that player the week before about the fact that death is a little wobbly in Adventurer's League anyway, and that he doesn't care if his characters die. So instead of moving on to the rogue who I would probably have knocked unconscious anyway with those attacks, if not murdered, I slaughtered the paladin.

Which is just a weird feeling, doubly so for other characters at the table, since the rogue and the paladin had played together on my table for the last three or four weeks. I don't mind killing characters, especially if they screw up, but it's still a weird feeling.

Wednesday night's game didn't happen because fuck my friends. They just decided that it wasn't happening. That's all the explanation I got. I'm sure people had perfectly reasonable explanations, including the fact that our DM is going on (or has already left for) an overseas trip. But fuck you all.

Thursday night's game was total and complete insanity.

It was the same group that I've been playing whenever I turn up on Thursdays for a while, but we wanted to give the usual DM a chance to play, so she stepped out and one of the players stepped in (it's my turn in a couple of weeks before we go back to her as the DM)... and she brought her cleric to meet my cleric. It did not go well. They hated each other. Or rather they're mostly the same people but they view the world in opposite directions, which of course meant that they hated each other. Which led to two of the other characters who've been with my character for a while now having something of a dummy spit at me (my character), which was great. Because my character IS a total dick. He's not nice and he's not good and he's arrogant and self-important and a control freak and while he's good at reading other people he has no capacity for self-reflection. And he's also all the awful parts of me that show up when I get up on the very highest of my high horses. And I adore him. And he's not going to change, because that's who he needs to be. And he's too much damn fun to play.

Plus the DM for this week went out of his way to fuck our characters over in the best possible way. There were literal moments when the other player and I were hanging onto each other for dear life and telling the DM we hated him, all while our actual characters were spitting figurative fire at each other. It was so good.

It's really the stuff I live for in DnD... those rich and juicy character moments where you can get deep into role play and you are no longer reacting as yourself, you're completely in the mind of who you're playing.

Anyway... the rest of the week wasn't much of anything to be honest.

Today was likewise not much, but at least a fun day. We did the supermarket thing... the play this week is to make a tomato soup without a) roasting the tomatoes and b) making it to the end of the week and still be eating it.

Then we headed off to the movies for Avengers: Endgame (more on that later)... and I totally misread the times, thinking that it was at 11am (I'm sure it was, just not at that cinema), but it turned out to be 10:30 or 11:50... but we got there at about 10:45, just at the end of the trailers/ads and walked in just as the movie started, so good timing there (actually we missed some of the opening scene, but enough to get the point).

Afterwards we came back here and had some lunch at the Village before calling it a day.

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