photo saturday: halfling clerics

I'm obsessed with halflings. Of all my characters, the largest percentage are halflings (I mean, not by much, but it is where I gravitate). I just love the little fuckers.

And I wanted a halfling cleric, so what's the most sensible option? Make two and play the one you're feeling the most at the time I hear you say. Absolutely.

In the end I chose Littlefoot (on the left), the War domain cleric, who goes by her surname and is essentially a halfling policewoman, mother of twins and the definition of big Mum energy. I always describe her without her helmet as having a very plain face, a nose that has been broken at least three times and a sensible haircut. She's also the character who proved why pulling a strange lever in the creepy temple is totally a bad plan, because her head literally got chopped off. I mean she's fine, because death is never really the end in DnD, but I also haven't played her since then.

Otho on the other hand... I love his design, I love the freckles and the scar and at least some of the back story I came up with. He might need a little bit of a rework before I actually play him though. Or else I just need to tweak some details. And work out if I actually like the Knowledge domain. Or if I need to rejuggle things and make him a Grave domain cleric. Which honestly fits his concept so much better.

Also, yes, totally the same pose on both of them.

Every time I make chilli I always make what can only be described as a metric fuckton. I mean that's great, but there was a lot of chilli. And it was pretty good. Many beans, two kinds of mince. All the spices. And great with rice, mashed potato, pasta and your basic corn chips.

And I totally turned into an infomercial right there for no damn reason. Sorry about that.

This week's DnD was Wednesday and Friday... and honestly, we nearly had two total party wipes. I mean, it was kind of exciting, but also terrifying. The Friday game was weird, just because one third of our party wasn't there, because we're between characters with him. But we meet the new one next Friday, which will be interesting.

It's also super weird when you know your character is kind of in love with another character but you're pretty damn sure the player doesn't have any clue. I mean it's great, and I kinda want to get to the end of the adventure before it comes out. I also don't want to fuck up the great relationship they have either, because it is definitely awesome. And there are just these role play moments between them that I totally love.

Anyway.

I also went through a box of tchotchkes of various descriptions, a box I haven't been through possibly in... four years. Maybe. But I found some stuff I had totally forgotten about, some stuff that I knew I had but didn't know where the fuck I'd put it and some stuff that definitely needs to find a proper place outside of the box.

Friday was Chiro day, so I did the city trip thing... so there was that.

Today Ma was getting her hair did, so I did the shopping thing on my own. On the menu for this week is... fucked if I know... some kinda vegetable soup, honestly. I don't have a full on plan.

Then I came back, unpacked until Ma turned up, we futzed around here for a bit, then took a trip to Spotlight for no really real reason, then called it a day.

Current mood:

movies: spider-man - into the spider-verse

If I'd seen Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse when it came out in 2018, it would immediately have gone to the top of my list for movies I saw that year.

Which is why, a year and a half on, I'm doing a review.

Damn this is an exceptional movie.

Visually, this is like nothing else I've ever seen. Just the colours and the animation style... styles honestly. The use of text boxes and on-screen onomatopoeia... brilliant.

The slight comic book blurring took me a while to get used to, but otherwise, this movie is an absolute feast for your eyes.

And the fact that Miles goes from 12 fps to 24 fps throughout the movie as he comes to grips with his powers... perfection.

Then we get to the story... and of course the man responsible for both Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 and The Lego Movie was the driving force for this. It's clearly got his fingerprints all over it. Amazing characters who you care about and who have real emotions and an emotional arc throughout the movie. Yep, that's pure Phil Lord right there. You magnificent bastard!

Because that's the heart of this movie. Not just making a single version of Spider-Man that you relate to and care about... no, doing it a minimum of four times... then adding in even more Spider-Persons and making you still care. Giving them relationships that you care about. Making the relationships vital to the direction of the story without becoming overly sentimental or saccharine.

And the call back joke that could have gotten super old super quickly but absolutely does not. In fact the final time it occurs, it's actually an emotional moment.

This is also a stellar cast... I'll be honest, beyond two voices, I didn't recognise anybody, which I kind of like for this kind of movie. There doesn't need to be recognisable voices here. It needs to have voices that work for the characters. And boy oh boy do they work. But at the same time, if you can slip Lily Tomlin in there at just the correct moment, absolutely do that.

While everyone is excellent, I do need to call out Shameik Moore as Miles Morales,Jake Johnson as Peter B Parker and Hailee Steinfeld for giving their characters life and heart and a weight.

I don't often comment on the music in things, and I'll be honest, at a certain point in the movie I absolutely stopped noticing it (which is what happens in all movies unless it's a musical... I am listening to it while writing this though)... plus out of the 20 or so artists, I recognise about four of them... but the music is not what I would have expected from a Spider-Man movie and at the same time it fits beautifully with this world and this Spider-Man.

So while I'm so very late to this party, if you're even later and have somehow missed this, absolutely go back and check it out. Thank me later.

yani's rating: 5 goobers out of 5

photo saturday: imaginary family

We're dipping into the NPC (non-player character) box for this week's DnD character art.

The trope I see most often about characters is that they have tragic backstories... everyone died in a fire, was killed by raiders, abandoned the character when they were a wee baby... some reason for them to head out on the road and become an adventurer.

The majority of the time I say "fuck that". A character who has a loving family and a secure home and still wants to go off and see the world is much more exciting to me. So, almost all of my characters have some sort of family somewhere. Some of them lost one parent or another, but that's never the reason they became an adventurer... I do have one went that route after he lost his wife, but that's it really.

Which is the long was of saying, these two halflings, Brandien Beestinger (baker and crossbow fighter) and Melody Longpond (sage and beast master ranger... and her peregrine falcon Essel), are the parents of Belben Beestinger (that's him, second from the left in the header image), my first ever DnD character.

Which is also super appropriate because tomorrow is the third anniversary of my first ever DnD game.

Given that he's an adventurer, descended from adventurers who are in turn descended from adventurers, at a certain point I did designs and characters for his Beestinger lineage.

Belben's direct family all have names inspired by Doctor Who companions (yes, I'm that kind of nerd)... Brandien translates to "Blue Hero" aka the TARDIS (hence his blue colour scheme), his mother Melody Longpond is a variation of River Song, his sisters are Rose, Marigold (standing in for Martha), Belladonna (Donna), Cara (Clara) and Pearl (the first name of the actress who played Bill Potts).

And part of the fun of designing his parents was figuring out how the genetics worked backwards. At least for me.

I will say that I've always been super happy with how Melody came out... both the white armour, which is mostly impractical but looks stylish as all fuck and the fact that I got a very peregrine falcon look for her bird companion thanks to cutting and layering actual photos. Less sure about the green trim on her bow to be honest... orange might have been more appropriate... but whadyagunnado?

Anyway...

Today is my 15th bloggiversary. Holy fuckballs. I mean we're definitely not in the heady days of 400-500 posts a year, I haven't broken 100 posts per annum since 2017, but we're still here.

It's also super weird to look back at some of that early stuff, where I didn't have a lot of routines and structures in place and I would just post about whatever whenever. Probably in the way I have used Twitter I guess. Random thought, tweet that shit.

However if I spend too much time looking at how many of the links in some of those old post are just broken or don't go anywhere sensible anymore, I will go insane.

In other news... which isn't really news, but still... I am not as scary as folks seem to believe I am. I mean, yes, but that's mostly for and about people I don't give two shits about. So, you know, other people. Yes, I have opinions... I have many, I hand them out on a regular basis, you only need to ask. Sometimes I give them away regardless. Do with them as you will. But if you think that means you can't bring your concerns to me or have a conversation about an issue, to that I say "look at your life, look at your choices" because you've made a wrong turn somewhere. But I love you anyway. And for the record, yes, you, you know who you are.

Now that we've got that out the way.

Chowder was more of a success this week... still a little too thin, but that was more about me putting more liquid in than it really needed... on the up side, it made 8 serves instead of the usual 7, which isn't a bad thing.

DnD was just Friday this week. I won't lie, one game a week isn't quite enough. Two games is better. Three is kind of my sweet spot I think. I know that four is too many. The Friday game was all roleplay once again. It kinda needed to be for logistical reasons, and some of it was just information transfer, but it had it's moments. And I did finally realise the root of the issues my character was having with the other character. The voice. Which sounds insane, I know this. But the character's voice was drilling straight into the part of my brain that instantly rebels against being condescended to or talked down to. And it also made perfect sense that my character would have the exact same response to that kind of voice.

Plus the two characters were just incapable of actually seeing each other and not the idea they had about who the other was. Sometimes it all gets real "persykological", to steal a word from Terry Pratchett.

We'll see what the next "chapter" holds.

In the Oven Repair Saga... the one thing I said to my land agent that was important in this whole rigmarole was that I wanted to be kept informed on where we were at. I mean, not that fucking hard, right. You find out a piece of news, you spend at most 90 seconds on an email, then you go on with your day. But I had to chase the job up again, only to find that yes, the repair has been approved and we're waiting on parts. When was it approved, fucked if I know. Sometime in the last two weeks, clearly. And I know it was probably going to take about two weeks for the parts to arrive during this time of strife. So how soon will it be fixed? Sometime in the next two weeks, possibly. Who can fucking say?

Again I say, in a much less forgiving tone of voice...  "look at your life, look at your choices".

I just wanna fucking bake bread again. Like seriously. Bread... and sausage rolls... and maybe a cake... and a tuna morney... and a whole fuckton of roast potatoes.

The plan for this week is a reasonable sized batch of chilli. With mushrooms. Plus other hidden vegetables. And my chilli game is pretty decent.

Otherwise, we did the supermarket thing, came back here, did the YubTubs, then went for a wander across at the Village. Picked up a copy of Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse for under $10, so hopefully it's as good as I've heard it is.

And that was it really. A wander and then we called it a day.

Current mood:

photo saturday: boots the house down

Part two of my DnD character HeroForge/Photoshop art.

This time I'm putting Alby, the very odd human Celestial warlock (which is honestly amongst my least favourite classes tbh) and who is entirely based around the idea of a healing potion warlock, with his pseudodragon familiar, Leaf, up against Tranquillity, my voluptuous tielfling wild magic sorceress (sorcerers are amongst my favourite classes though)... given that they both have the exact same lower robes and boots. But come out very differently, partly due to body shape, but partly due to colouring.

I haven't played either of them yet... Alby was supposed to be my next character, but then the world caught fire and that never happened. And Tranquility was the first time I really built the character in HeroForge before I even had a proper concept. I just wanted to play around with colour and body shapes and tiefling horns, and then there she was.

Neither of them especially feel like characters I want to play in online games, so they'll just have to sit in the wings and wait for right now.

Moving on...

Yeah, I spent some of the weekend and a little of the beginning of the week still inside my head as per last week, but it got better as the week wore on. It also helped that I knew that I was in my head. It's certainly better than not being aware of same.

This week's soup was... less successful. I made chowder, only I think I sliced a lot of the ingredients too small, then possibly cooked it for too long for the size of said ingredients. So it was all a bit mush. Which I fixed by blending the whole thing... which was fine, but blended soup is always much less interesting and exciting.

And we had two DnD sessions this week... Wednesday and Friday, which will be the new normal for a little bit. Wednesday was pretty good, although we came a little too close to a total party wipe. So that was fun. For a specific meaning of fun.

Friday's game was basically 100% roleplay, which I love. But when one of your party puts it to your character whether or not their character sticks around... because for reasons I can't totally articulate, this character has worked my last nerve since about 5 minutes after I met them. And look, I wanted to say yes... but I just couldn't get past my characters objections. So we're looking for a new party member as of next week.

Fun times. Again, for a specific meaning of fun.

Also in DnD news, Critical Role is back, playing their first game since the middle of March. My Tuesday nights haven't been the same since, so it was nice to have that element of normalcy back... I mean they're all sitting between 5 and 20 feet from each other in the studio, so it's not totally the same, but it's better than nothing.

I mean it's not like they've been totally absent from YouTube or the world in general, but not as these characters, so it's nice to dive back into their world.

Otherwise, this felt like a long week. I don't know why exactly, but yeah, it just dragged.

Today was decent.

We did the supermarket thing. I'm having a second go at chowder this week. Without leek, which was the main issue last week. So we'll see how that works out.

Then we came back here, did the usual YubTub malarkey, Ma futzed around with the hat she knitted me, because the changes we've been attempting (and by 'we' I mean she) to make to the... wait, what's the rim of a beanie called? You know, the bit that surrounds the hole that you put your head in... anyway, that bit. This is the second time it's been changed, and it just isn't working. So we're going back to the original, because fuck it.

After that, we headed off to Cheap as Chips because Ma wanted a couple of rugs for her place. It turned out to be a pretty successful trip, I picked up some little notebooks and a bowl, because bowls are awesome... and I found a little storage case. Because dice. Because a percentage of everything is always about dice.

I had no idea now many dice sets I own, but it had 18 compartments, which I figure would be more than enough.

Turns out I have exactly 17 sets, plus a bunch of extra d6's. So that was awesome. And now all my dice are grouped by colour/set and I can see them all, because the box is clear. I mean it takes up like five times the room of my pretty little pencil case, and about twice as much as my wooden dice box. But it's awesome.

So that was it really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: in and out of my head

I've officially run out of usable 'featured photo' photos. Well, no, that's not true. I still have about 30-something photos, but they're ones from the last seven years that, at this point, I just don't have a match up for or just don't excite me. FWP, I know.

Instead, since I've been producing a lot of character art for my DnD characters, by taking HeroForge screenshots into Photoshop and cutting and colouring the living shit out of them. And in some regards I've started almost creating them backwards, putting together a HeroForge character and then turning them into an actual character. If I couldn't make a convincing facsimile of a DnD blue dragon, I didn't want to make a blue dragonborn character.

Because of course I like my dragonborn to have characteristics of the dragons they're descended from. Even though they don't have to.

So, I present my 5'4" teenage human wolf totem barbarian (hence the yellow eyes), Fenris with his shiny new battleaxe (because I love playing against type, and big beefy barbarians are boring)... and the 7'2" blue dragonborn paladin warlock, Marux (which I'm choosing to pronounce as Maroo, because I can pronounce made up words however I like) with his somewhat sentient metal eyeball sword, Nym... a sword who only exists because I had a moment of 'genius' during the colouring process when I realised that the pommel was a sphere and I could do something with that. I then turned it onto a character detail that I would absolutely not have come up with otherwise. Which are those ridiculous character creation moments that I love.

With both of these, I created a version, coloured it, lived with it for a bit, then realised I wasn't happy, redid the model and then subsequently redid the colour. Three times now for Fenris since I decided to change his weapon.

Will we see more of these portraits? Who can say. I do know that I have enough images to last until November (or January if I include NPC designs), some of which haven't yet seen the light of the gaming table.

Moving on...

This week's chicken soup was... decent. I make a decent chicken soup. Sometimes better than others, but generally decent. The secret ingredient is always chorizo. Granted that's generally the secret ingredient in all my soups, but still.

In other news, I got super into my own head this week. Yay. By which I mean, not yay. I'm aware, mostly of the whys and wherefores, but that didn't stop it from happening. And a couple of badly timed external things just made it worse.

It did colour the week in increasingly more saturated colour as we progressed though.

So there's that.

When I started this week there were four DnD sessions on the docket. However, in a fact that is surprisingly completely unrelated to the previous one, yet still coloured/flavoured by it, by the end of the week that number was two. Monday and Tuesday happened. Monday was the last Monday session. Or the last Monday session for now/in the current adventure. Tuesday was the debut of Marux, and the same group as the Monday group, but with an additional interstate visitor (because online). And while the adventure was too damn easy, it was a good session overall.

Wednesday and Friday didn't happen. Other people pulled out, so I came down with a severe case of 'no-fucks-given-itis' and removed myself from the equation.

I'll have to deal with that later, but that's a problem for future me, not right now me.

Today wasn't much of anything, as previous today's have been of late.

Firstly supermarket. I'm going back to the chowder this week... but without chicken, probably. Most likely because I'll forget to check my freezer, and I didn't buy any. I wasn't intending to add chicken anyway, so that'll work out fine.

Then back here for all the usual stuff... which then got sidetracked because Ma was attempting to make corrections to the beanie she knitted me because it turned out too small... which in turn made it even smaller. So that wasn't exactly a productive use of time.

And that was it really.

Current mood: