two thousand and twenty one in review

I very nearly didn't do this. In the end, I only really decided to do it because a) tradition but also b) I would very, very, very much like to look back this time next year and breath a sigh of relief that my life has improved in a significant number of ways.

So... there's that. 

Don't expect a lot of introspection though, because, honestly, I don't have the mental bandwidth for that right now. 

I'm also not really in the mood to reminisce about a mostly shit year and one where when everything is potentially about to fall on it's ass in my life in the next month... or at best is going to be majorly fucking stressful. 

Urgh.

But enough of my mental baggage, 2021.

Almost nothing happened this year. Days passed, things happened. But nothing HAPPENED. You know.

Like last year, I would have gone insane if not for my friends. And having a routine that actually got me out of the house more than once a week.

January: Friday night DnD finished our almost year and a half Descent into Avernus campaign. Still sad, still amazing. 

February: I had a bout of dizziness that lasted a couple of weeks, involved a doctor's visit and then disappeared as quickly as it arrived. 

March: My birthday. For which no shits were given by me. I developed a DnD character basically live on the blog. We went to the movies for the first time in over a year. 

April: I shaved my head after threatening to do it about once a month since March 2020. It remains shaved. 

May: We started a "non-campaign" campaign for the Thursday night Dnd Group. 

June: I explored the DnD Cookbook. We started the new major Friday night DnD campaign. Critical Role Series 2 ended with a 7 hour game. 

July: A roof leak. Getting Ma on the internets. Having to isolate for two weeks and it taking five and a half hours for my first test and 10 minutes for the second and third. 

August: Roof/ceiling shenanigans continued, resulting in a hole cut in the ceiling. 

September: I got my first vax shot. And I ran a one shot game for Fluffy's birthday. The hole in the ceiling got patched. 

October: I got told my lease, which expires in February, isn't being renewed. I got my second vax shot. Friday Night DnD's two year anniversary. 

November: My shoulder stopped being fully functional for no well explained reason. They finally fixed the actual roof leak. 

December: The Christmas Tree went up (see also: Fuck Christmas). We did Board Game Christmas with Mr and Mrs again, followed by Movie Night with Fluffy. Christmas happened.

I did make a lot of additional DnD characters or sketches or ideas for use in place of actual photos this year. DnD was once again... very important in my life.

I didn't really do much in the way of movies this year... even older stuff.

What I will say is that Luca was great, Shang Chi was much better than I expected, Cruella SUCKED, as I knew it would, and Raya and the Last Dragon was uneven but 100% is a Disney movie with a lesbian lead/love story.

Current mood:

post christmas round-up 2021

It's Saturday, but it's also Christmas Day... which basically just leads to my brain imploding in on itself at a certain point.

So we're going to do a modified weekly round-up, such as it is, then do the Christmas thing, such as that is.

First and foremost, I need a Bundaberg Spiced Ginger Beer... because that shit is tasty, tasty Christmas in a bottle, and I love it. I don't think I've mentioned it before, but it's fucking great, and I'm 100% here for it.

Secondly... I told you we had one DnD Character Colouring Book Reindeer to go.

Cousin Rudolph. Because, he's definitely not a Jingle Brother. And of course he's a Warlock. And a little bit extra. With Santa as his patron. I do really love how his outfit turned out to be honest. And I also love that the little doll in Hero Forge can be coloured to look like Spiderman... because that's silly and fun. And it's also the thing he "inherited" from Santa. And his Talisman Pact Boon. Or else the doll is the talisman and the staff is the thing he inherited. One of those.

So there's that.

This week was all topsy turvy... 

We had Friday's DnD on Thursday. And it was basically almost entirely a roleplay episode. Because we came back to the place where all the NPCs are right now, so we tend to talk to all of them. And my character got Wine Mom Drunk and spoke Truth to one of the other characters about them being awesome. I mean, she is due... she's had a hell of a couple of weeks.

Thursday was also Supermarket Day. Which I did on my own. At 7:30am.

Only to discover that every other muthafucker had also decided that 7:30am on the day before Christmas and the same amount of people we usually see during the course of one entire supermarket trip were all crammed into the fruit and veg department.

Grrrr.

But I was out of there and back home by 8:30 give or take.

I also wrapped up my Dice Advent Calendar from Mr and Mrs... which ended up in a very eclectic set of dice, plus one red and white Santa themed set, which I quite like. But the weird thing being that, other than that set, I did not get a single d8 dice. Everything else. No d8's. Weird.

I had assumed that while the dice were "random", there would be the Santa set, two full sets of random dice (as in a d20, d12, d00, d10, d8, d6 and d4), then the extra d4 from the Santa set, the special metal dice and... you know... another d20, probably. But not, the dice were super random. I got a lot of d6's... Fluffy got a lot of d20's in his calendar... and it was just... odd.

Anyway...

Welcome to Christmas Day.

I woke up... fairly early... but no earlier than I've been waking up of late.

And because we don't have places to go and people to see these days (and honestly, even if we had, I would 100% have cancelled it, because, The World Right Now), I didn't feel compelled to head down the road super early.

So I messaged Ma, wished her a Merry Crimmas, futzed around on my phone for a bit, got up, had a shower, did my physio exercises (because while my shoulder is 95% there again, I'm still doing the exercises for the foreseeable, just until the little bit of weakness that I can still feel is gone), which watching things on YouTube... 

And then, honestly, it felt very weird that I didn't get to open a window in the Dice Advent Calendar, since that has been a thing every day for the last 24 days.

But I finally packed up the car and headed down the road at about 8:45am. The roads weren't perhaps as empty as they have been when I've done the super early drive, but it was find.

And of course, when I got there, Ma was pulling a bunch of Ham Hearts out of the oven, so yummy ham, cheese and puff pastry morsels for the pre-breakfast snack. Because, fuck it... it's Christmas, and I can have breakfast before my breakfast.

Anyway, we did the croissant thing. Because as much as I loved having to get up two and a half hours before I intended to leave in order to make fresh bread, bake the bread and then take it down the road to Ma's place... honestly, I just fucking wanted croissants. Because I have bread on the regular, I never have croissants.

I could just say here that everything happened in much the same way as previous Christmas Days... but it kinda didn't. I mean, mostly it did, but it also kinda didn't.

And I'm not super getting into it, but for any number of reasons, we barely did presents this year. There were a couple of bits and pieces, but Ma gave me some money, because, honestly, either I need major items that I wouldn't expect to get as Christmas presents, like a *whispers* newlaptop *whispers* (we don't say it too loud so the laptop doesn't hear) or a new TV or a new iPhone... or I don't really need much of anything right now.

Anyway.

We kind of pfaffed around... a lot. I messaged a bunch of people with Christmas greetings. After that we prepped for lunch. After the semi panic of, I think, last year... or the year before... I can't be bothered looking it up, I prepped all of the individual things that went into the salad beforehand, so it was just kinda plug and play.

And then we did... "presents". Most of these were things I got from DnD Christmas with Fluffy, Mr and Mrs... but we do the full list here, because... tradition, I guess.

• The Wild Beyond The Witchlight Campaign Book (from Mr, Mrs and Fluffy)
• Thousand Year Old Vampire (from Fluffy)
• Wyrmwood Dice Box (from Mr and Mrs)
• Q Workshop Dice Advent Calendar (from Mr and Mrs)
• Handmade Embroidered Bear with a Whip ornament (from Fluffy, crafted by Fluffy's Mum, themed around my Asshole Cleric)
• Wooden Incense Box
• Avengers: Endgame DVD
• Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings DVD
• Light Up Crystal Ball (sadly, not as pretty as I'd hoped, but we got it real cheap when they were selling out Halloween shit... and I can make some use of it)

So, there's that.

After all of that prep... including just throwing together a salad dressing with mustard, cranberry sauce, oil and vinegar at the last second (because the one that Ma had was a little too... much)... and I burned the haloumi because fuck Ma's electric stove top.

But thanks to a Jamie Oliver Christmas cooking special was on in the background at some point, I squished the roast potatoes part way through, and they came out really nicely. Sadly, throwing dressing on them makes them much less crispy instantly, but overall, it all worked out.

Then we cleaned up and played a few games of L.L.A.M.A... and then a game of Here To Slay, which we played last year. While mostly ignoring White Christmas which was on in the background.

We made the usual Eton Mess thingy with gin and lemon meringue, mince pie icecream and fresh berries. It's always nice, it's always super sweet and super rich, and I couldn't deal with it more than once a year.

And when White Christmas finished, I packed up and came home.

In a word. Blah.

Current mood:

photo saturday: jingle bros part two

The second half of the Jingle Brothers for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book - Xmas Edition.

• Comet - The Light Domain Cleric
  The kindly young healer that lights up the lives of everyone he meets
• Cupid - The Fey Wanderer Ranger
  The quiet and calm bowmaster who got lost in the Feywild as a child
• Donner - The Clockwork Soul Sorcerer
  The debonair arcane spellcaster harnessing the magical power of toys
• Blitzen - The Way of Mercy Monk
  The stern eldest brother with a heart of gold who is beloved by the toymaking elves

Of these four, I think Comet is my favourite. I just love how his colour scheme came out, but I have a bit of a soft spot for Cupid also (even if, in this arrangement of images it kind of looks as though he's about to take a potshot at his brother). Blitzen had to be the stern and serious one because his costume is kind of the silliest... along with the candy cane bo staff.

Those of you playing Reindeer Bingo at home, might be saying to yourselves... "hey, you missed one"... never fear, after all, Christmas Day is on a Saturday.

Moving on...

So... Tuna Noodle Do for food this week. Without eggs, because I ate entirely all of the eggs last week.

Then, on Monday afternoon I went hardcore on Rocky Road, by which I mean I made a big old chocolately mess, filled two foil trays with it and then later on cut it into appropriately sized pieces and filled the bottom shelf of my fridge with it.

I also finished off Fluffy's present, which was a collection of recipes, mostly from the blog, but also from life in general, and a simplified version of a couple of the DnD recipes (because he's got the book, but some of those recipes definitely over explain things... plus you don't want to get the pretty, pretty book out every time, it could get dirty). But it looked quite smart in the display book I got.

Then we get to Wednesday, which was Board Game Christmas with Fluffy, Mr and Mrs. Well, mostly Fluffy and Mrs... Mr had other things he needed to be doing, but he did show up a few times.

I made cheese, chive and black pepper bread, and took Rocky Road for Mr and Mrs. We did the present thing first... and I'll mention those with my other presents next week. Then, we were on for games. We played quite a bit of L.L.A.M.A. followed by several rounds of Coup, a spirited game of Disney Villainous: Perfectly Wretched where I played Cruella, obvs... and Fluffy won, because, for some reason, Fluffy always fucking wins Villainous. Followed up by a seemingly quite short game of Mysterium, and then rounded out with a few more games of L.L.A.M.A. And we fitted lunch in there somewhere. Possibly between Coup and Villainous I think.

It was a fun day. We got there just after 10am and didn't leave until... just after 4 I think.

Then Fluffy and I came back here and watched Christmas movies. The original idea was Bad Netflix Xmas movie, but, honestly, I wanted "camp bad" not "people who can't act bad"... so in the end we went with Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (which is freely available on the YooToobs), which is unabashedly, certifiably TERRIBLE, but fun to make fun of. We really knew what we were into when the credits at the start of the movie listed the "Custume Designer".

But, fun fact, that movie is the first documented appearance of Mrs Claus in a motion picture. And the second is in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Rankin Bass stop motion animation classic, which came out three weeks later.

Then we went down the road and grabbed a pizza, came back here and watched The Muppets Christmas Carol, because after all that bad movie, we needed something good to balance it out.

It was a long day, and I want exhausted by the end of it. Which is weird, because it doesn't sound like all that much. But, you know, stuff.

Friday was DnD as usual.

Except, you know, I somehow cast a DnD spell in real life. The short version is that there were some bad guys coming up towards the cave we were in, so my druid cast Call Lightning, a spell that, unsurprisingly, creates a 60 foot radius storm cloud that you can call down lightning from.

And not 10 second after I'd said that I was going to cast that spell, we saw a flash of real lightning outside. It's not even like the day had been stormy or rainy... it had been filthy hot, if overcast, all day, and a lightning storm was the last thing any of us expected.

So, yeah... that was weird.

Otherwise, it was a decent game. We mostly did diplomatic negotiations... well, after we murderised the bad guys at the start. And I talked to plants again. Which, honestly, was more confusing than the diplomacy.

Moving on.

Today was... brief and to the point.

With everything going on right now, the last thing I want to do is to be making unnecessary trips to places... so we did the supermarket, came back here, didn't really do much here, and then Ma shuffled off home.

It does mean that I'm going to need to sneak in a shopping trip sometime towards the end of the week. Most likely first thing on Thursday morning honestly, since the supermarket opens at like 7:30am. And I don't need a ton of stuff, due to, you know, Christmas leftovers, mostly just some salad stuff and some milk products. But, you know, grocery shopping two days before Christmas... everyone pray for me.

But that's that really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: jingle bros part one

So, maybe I did a thing.

It started with Prancer. Although not that version... a simpler version. And that was going to be it. But then my mind started doing that thing it does. Then came Dasher. And then, one by one, they all appeared.

Before I knew it, I had the Jingle Brothers, adventurers and defenders of the North Pole and Christmas. And, you know, actually buildable in DnD without any fancy homebrew if you just use the Satyr race as your base and just tweak the non-mechanical details slightly.

They're already Fey creatures, have a faster walking speed, the ability to make an extra long or high leap, they have resistance to magic, they get the Performance and Persuasion skills and they have a Ram (horn) attack. What more do you need really?

You only get four of the brothers this week though... you'll need to tune in next week for the other four.

This week's boys are...

• Dasher - The Arcane Trickster Rogue
  The sneaky but anxious youngest brother (featured with his magical Mage Hand)
• Dancer - The Oath of the Ancients Paladin
  The brave and hot tempered protector of the North Pole
• Prancer - The Path of the Storm Herald Barbarian
  The sweet himbo wielding the power of winter storms
• Vixen - The College of Glamour Bard
  The ostentatious flirt and charismatic musician

I don't quite know why the cow faces (which is what these are) are so damn expressive, but with just some minor adjustments, a range of characters presented themselves... even though they all ended up with the same face, the hairstyle and the same colour scheme (well, for the fur anyway).

So there's that. And there will be more of that next week.

I made another quiche this week... not as good as the previous one. I'll just say, I'm not completely sure mushroom works in quiche. Or else, I needed to cook them down a lot longer and really get most of the moisture out of them. I dunno. It was serviceable.

Shoulder update: The end of the week was much better than the beginning. I'd go as far as to say that I'm mostly on the mend. There's still some weakness there, but I can lift my arm more than 45°... which is great.

This week was the Christmas breakup for the Thursday DnD group. So I made cheese and salami bread. And much like when I took the cookies fresh out of the oven back in June... they descended on said bread like the proverbial seagulls. And it was all gone inside of about 5 minutes. Ten at the most.

But they enjoyed it, which is the main thing.

And we didn't die and my character got himself a fancy magic item, which I didn't expect to be in the book.

Friday was Chiro Day... so insert the rinse and repeat of taking a trip into town, seeing my chiro, sticking my head in at the gaming store, then coming home again.

Friday night's DnD is not stopping for Christmas. I mean, we have to move the game in two weeks, because Friday is also Christmas Eve, but we're still doing stuff right through.

This week's game wasn't bad. We had some interesting moments, but also some combat that felt like it was going to be much more epic than it turned out to be. Not bad, you understand... but I was expecting a number of enemies. But we did the thing we needed to do.

Oh, and my character talked to a thistle. Because spells are fucking weird.

Anyway. A good time was had.

Also, it's funny to me that Fluffy and I are basically headcanoning a whole second campaign for the group of rangers that consists almost entirely of my backup characters (I need to post the image of that whole group at some point), plus my imaginary son. Not that we're doing anything with it, we just keep talking about it on the drive back to his place.

Today wasn't much.

We basically bent the supermarket over, and beat the Christmas right out of it. That, I see now, is a weird sentence. What I was attempting to say was that we bought a lot of the random things you need for Christmas that can just sit in the cupboard or the freezer for a couple of weeks. But we bought a lot of stuff.

Insert my usual quote here about "a lot of fuss and nonsense basically amounting to one meal and nothing much". Bah, humbug, etc.

Anyway... I needed a thingy from Officeworks to finish off a project, so we did that trip and then called it a day.

Current mood:

photo saturday: lady lady

This is what happens when I reply to a DnD worldbuilding question on Reddit, and like my answer so much I need to come up with a character that fits into that idea.

The idea being that there are certain High Elf owned/staffed... houses of negotiable virtue... for want of a better term. But that they're more like courtesans or a little like geisha... and are, in world, called Adab Lastar in Elvish... House of the Listener. And the individual houses have names like House of Golden Jade or House of Twilight Rose.

And that's where Lady Orel comes in. A High Elf entertainer who is also a Divine Soul Sorceress whose power comes from the Elven goddess of Love, Hanali Celanil.

With, you know, a dress and a corset and knee high boots and makeup and whatnot. And combining a top and a skirt that are absolutely not meant to be part of a set, but colouring them like it's a dress. Weirdly, she only really came alive to me when I tilted the head to the side a little. I can't quite say why that works, just that I know it does.

Anyway...

I went up to Ma's place last Sunday to enact the Christmas tree decoration ritual... with exactly zero enthusiasm about the whole fucking process.

Doubly so because reaching the top of the tree with only one arm that wanted to go that high is something of a problem.

I undertook the writing inside the box rituals, as I have done through the ages.

And... weirdly there were just two pink baubles that I don't think we normally add to the tree, but I added them this year, stepped back and then realised that I'd given the tree eyeballs. And the line of purple baubles kind of looked like a mouth.

I accidentally made a Muppet tree... and I'm not even a little bit mad at it.

But I put up the tree and didn't hang around after that.

So that happened.

I made a really good quiche this week. And it worked for four days worth of food, so I'm doing the same thing, only with slightly different ingredients, this week.

I also started my Dice Advent Calendar this week... so that's fun. I wasn't expecting the little messages inside each window, that that was an added bonus. They're weird, but fun.

Thursday night's DnD game was one of those rare occasions where we basically did nothing but explore and roleplay. So that was nice. I mean, we're stuck in a mystery where we have no idea what's really going on. But I have ideas... most of which are probably ridiculous and wrong.

Then Friday night's DnD was... roleplay... pretty much just roleplay. And thinking about what happened, it feels like it should have taken about an hour... but somehow it doesn't feel like it should have taken as long as it did. Simple, effective, but yeah, weirdly feels shorter in my head than the actual length of time we played.

Moving on.

Today, we went to the supermarket. We bought stuff. We came back here. And that was it really.

So there's that.

Current mood:

photo saturday: fey buddies

You call forth a fey spirit. It manifests in an unoccupied space that you can see within range. When you cast the spell, choose a mood. Fuming, Mirthful, or Tricksy. The creature resembles a fey creature of your choice marked by the chosen mood.

My halfling bard, Harland, the one I built in a previous blog post, got the Summon Fey spell when he got his magical secrets spells as a bard... and of course, since he sat out the last game (which I won) in the Feywild, I had to make the spirits be creatures that he'd met while he was away. He finally got to use the spell in this week's game (and, sidebar... it's a good spell)... so I can finally reveal his three Fey buddies he calls on, one for each mood.

We have Yako... my Tricksy fey friend, named not for the Animaniac (his has two K's), but in honor of a type of kitsune, although he does get summoned by using a line from the Animaniac's theme song.

Then Oleander, because who better to name the Fuming spirit after than a poisonous plant... she's straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream, so gets summoned likewise.

And lastly Bassam, who is absolutely just the Genie from Aladdin... but technically a slyph, or fey wind spirit. He didn't get summoned last game, but he, obviously gets the Disney movie reference.

He's also the only one that didn't go through about four or five reboots. Yako had a black and white version, an all dark version, then a regular fox version, before I settled on the purple... and Oleandar got completely redone when Hero Forge dropped a full fairy/nature outfit. I also like that she looks like a cute little fairy but instead is the angriest of the three.

Also, I had fun overdesigning the background of the image... with the rainbow and the border and the text of the spell along the border.

Anyway.

I made chilli this week. Well, mostly. I forgot to buy more tinned tomatoes, so it was a little lacking. At least it was better than the last time I attempted it.

I had my appointment with Lovely Physio Man on Thursday... I'd done my exercises for the previous week and a half, and he poked and prodded me appropriately, only to decide that it may not be a Frozen Shoulder after all, and that he wants me see a rheumatologist... which, not gunna lie, I was a lot more chill about until I just looked up what they actually do/are.

I mean, I'm here for the fact that he wants to be sure, and I want to have a functional shoulder again... but it's never, ever fucking simple is it.

*le sigh*

Thursday night's DnD was good... I mean it was basically exploring things and murdering other things. Even though a lot of the other things were kind of already dead. Ghosts, dontchaknow.

But it all worked out well, we did all the hero things, killed the bad guy, and I was the deciding factor in making us all forgot a memory because of reasons. DnD man... you can't script this shit.

Friday before DnD, Fluffy came over as per usual, but we watched the movie, Klaus. And I'm not doing a full review, for reasons that will soon become apparent, but... I hated it.

Okay, maybe that's a little on the strong side. 

It was a very beautiful looking movie for the most part. The backgrounds are stunning, but there was just something about the 2D animation made to look 3D with lighting and texture... but also with some 3D elements in there... more power to them for, you know, forging a new path and doing something new with 2D animation, but I just feel like it may have been a bridge too far.

Also, Looney Tune was 100% an inspiration for a large number of the character designs... there were some characters who were so very much extras out of old Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck cartoons that it just felt like... Space Jam: A Christmas Movie. That's not quite the right analogy... but it definitely had the "you've pushed this too far into 3D" feeling to it.

And the main (yet not titular) character. The postman. Fuck him. I hated him the whole movie. They started out with him being a thoroughly unlikeable, whiney, entitled manchild and did not make him likeable by the end. Oh, they thought they did, with their sappy musical timelapse and the addition of a small child character who has no personality besides "doesn't speak English". They were very wrong. I also didn't care about him, or his pointless and unearned love interest or the stupid townsfolk (including the plethora of children who get neither names nor personalities beyond "child"). 

Not to mention some very uninspired villains, who barely get names or personalities, and who get neither their comeuppance nor any real explanation for why they're the way they are. Oh, because "tradition" in that one scene... cool. Fuck you movie. 

And as for the titular Klaus. He has a painfully obvious tragic backstory and no real personality.

The movie just went down the list of "we need this reference to the Santa mythos" without stopping to actually create characters or tell an interesting story. And no, because it's "a children's movie", doesn't mean that you are allowed to get away with that.

As I said after it was over... fuck this movie.

Fluffy, who has seen it before, did not agree with me.

Friday night's DnD was... pretty okay. Certainly less stressful than the previous couple of sessions. We did some exploring, killed a beasty that might have turned us to stone without that happening, and a new mystery to be solved. So, good times.

It did end up as a late night though, with one thing and another.

Also, Mrs bought Fluffy and I a Dice Advent Calendar each... and I won't lie, slightly harder to resist than one containing chocolate. But I also feel like 90% of the ones I had when I was a kid were just the flat cardboard ones without anything fun in them. But, that doesn't kick off until next Wednesday, so stay tuned.

Today was... the supermarket.

Given that the weather still seems to think it's roughly September or October, I decided on making a quiche this week... nothing fancy. And probably not until Monday night.

Otherwise, we did the usual supermarket thing and then came back here.

And that was it really, because, as much as I honestly do not care about doing it, Ma wants to put the Christmas tree up. So, come tomorrow morning, off up the road to parts more north than me I go. Urgh.

But that's it really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: huntress

The moral of the story I'm about to tell is that if you suggest that you might run a particular DnD adventure for me/my group in the vague, nebulous future, I will possibly already be designing a character for it before you've finished talking. Or at the very least I will have one put together in the following 24 hours.

Rewinding a little... this week's DnD Character Colouring Book is Huntress Aryz, and, like I said up top, she's what happens when someone from the Thursday group says that they might want to run something in the future.

Honestly though, I'm kind of torn between her and Ghost from a few weeks back. I really, really, really want to play a rogue again right now. I think maybe I've been looking at too many DnD Reddit posts about rogues.

But I've never played a full ranger. I've had characters who multiclassed into Ranger, but never very much. And it's the only original class I've never played (I also haven't played an Artificer, but they only got released in 5e properly last year).

And I've dabbled in the idea of a Swarmkeeper a few times, because I like the flavour and mechanics, but I've also been slightly obsessed with the human form of the dragon god Bahamut since I started seeing images of him as a pretty, pretty monk boy... and his human forms travel with seven canaries (which are supposed to be the seven gold dragons who serve his dragon god form)... or seven other creatures. And making one of the new metallic dragonborn as a Swarmkeeper who is descended from one of the gold dragons and also worships Bahamut and believes that all of her magical class and subclass powers come straight from him, works for me.

Also, I played around in Photoshop to take the relatively enormous little birds into much more realistically sized canaries. Plus putting them into places that you can't in HeroForge. And my idea would be that in certain situations the birds basically merge into a single bird, because they're just "intangible nature spirits".. and in other situations the seven birds split into 14 or 21 or whatever.

My idea for her personality basically boils down to "Southern Belle Morning TV Host". How much of that will survive first contact with the table, I don't know.

Anyway... this is all for a campaign that is currently an idea. So into the hopper she goes until I actually know for sure, and then I need to decide between her and Ghost.

Moving on...

I made very lackluster soup this week. Vegetable with kransky... and some random pasta. Not my best work honestly, but I also wasn't really feeling it when I was making it, so there's that.

However, midway through making the soup, while it was simmering, I randomly checked my Instagram, only to discover that Owlgirl is having a baby. Woooo! It also made me feel really fucking old when I realised how old she is, how old she was when we met and how much water has passed under the bridge since then. And now she's making a whole-ass human being.

I couldn't be happier for her and her baby-daddy. Oh, I should not every use THAT phrase again... but, you know, still accurate. Also, literally her husband, but whatever.

I went to see Pretty Physio Man on Tuesday. The shoulder isn't any better but it also isn't any worse, which is something.

He gave me a bunch of exercises which are simple enough but just take five-ever to do. Because three exercises, three sets, ten reps each. So that's 90 for those of you playing along. Fortunately the last one is the easiest.

But I'd like my shoulder back, so we doing them all.

Thursday's DnD was interesting... we normally do a whole roleplay round robin at the start of a new adventure, but this one kind of went off the rails a tiny bit. My character came back from the Feywild and was basically stoned out of his mind for a couple of days, one of the other characters decided to summon devils and went temporarily insane. So there's that.

We did make Guest DM Fluffy weep behind his DM screen a little bit... because this party is just fucking overpowered. And that's me saying this about this group, but even by that metric, this party is a lot.

We didn't really make it all that far into the adventure itself... or it didn't feel that way anyway. But we also murderised all the enemies, so swings and roundabouts.

Friday I got woken up to a surprise... tradies finally fixing the leak in the roof. Yay. Of course, nobody bothered to tell me they coming, they didn't knock on the door or anything and had I not been here, I wouldn't even know that they'd been and gone.

But I finally got to put things back where they're supposed to be after 1000 years. Woo.

Friday night's DnD was delayed due to Mr and Mrs doing things. So Fluffy came down and brought his laptop and we watched some Pixar shorts on Disney+ (Ciao Alberto, excellent... Twenty Something, very sweet... Nona, cute... Loop, odd but lovely) and then watched the first of the Marvel What If? shorts... yeah... it was kinda bad honestly. The animation was pretty enough overall, but the story and some of the voice acting was rough.

We didn't bother beyond the first one.

So the DnD game was a little later than usual, but I made cheese and pepperoni bread, so, once again, swings/roundabouts.

As far as the game itself, we Ocean's 11'd the enemy vault (by which I mean Mr rolled a very bad persuasion check, but the guard rolled even worse and we just walked in the front door of the vault. And walked out with every single item in the vault... except for the statue that caused madness and the gem covered in body dissolving mould. Thankfully it dissolved the really dumb guard and not us... and the madness only affected me and it turned out to be... bittersweet.

Because of course DM Fluffy likes to torture me, the hallucinations my character started having were of her dead husband. And even though she mostly knows it was all in her mind, she got to say goodbye properly and it kind of hurt more when he was gone than when he was there.

And then we did some magic item shopping, trading in the non-magic things we found in the vault for magical shinys.

Then we tried to work out a plan for what comes next. Because we have like half a dozen things we COULD do next. Any one of them will give us a level up, but then that's it for those particular tasks. But we kind of still want to do a large number of them.

We have half of a plan... we'll see how we go.

Today was Second Verse, Same As The First.

Supermarket, shopping, ingredients for chilli of some sort, back here, then off to Spotlight because Ma wanted some cross-stitch thread and I wanted to look at some wool for ideas for things for later. Baby blanket, obviously, shhh.

And that was that.

Current mood:

photo saturday: dread boy walking

This week's DnD Character Colouring Book is what happens when you take an idea, base it around a pre-existing character, then at a certain point, turn left.

It started with the new Critical Role campaign (I think I mentioned that, maybe I didn't... Campaign 3 has started, I'm enjoying it quite a lot). One of the cast, Marisha, is playing a creepy Undead Patron Warlock. Which led me down the "how would I make one" path.

Which led me straight to my favourite FF7 character, Vincent Valentine... he's the best, and he's my boy, and once I worked out how to get him in the game (when I played it back in the day) I went and got him every other time (which I think was like... twice, maybe just once, it's been a few years).

But to my 20-something heart, he was just gothy enough, just tragic enough, just too fucking pretty even as a blocky sprite enough. And he also, spoilers for a 24 year old game, transformed into monsters as his Limit Break move.

For some reason... a reason I don't quite understand, I had thought that one of those forms was a werewolf. But not. He does transform into a demon beast thing which is the closest... but also a Frankenstein type monster, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre type man/monster, and finally a big winged demon monster. In my memory though... definitely a werewolf. But my memory, very wrong.

But I threw him into the blender with the creepy Undead Warlock, it's Form of Dread and Vincent Valentine, his shapechanging, the Gothic Lineages where one of them is the Reborn, a dead thing that didn't stay dead.

And ended up with... Vinsento Varentain. Which, I think is the transliteration of the Japanese version of his name (it's on his Wiki page, but doesn't specify what the name actually is). A dead man who didn't stay dead and now draws his power from the dead thing that brought him back. Also, his Form of Dread is basically the dead version of him.

I did have to do some Photoshop jiggery pokery in order to get the raven up on his shoulder (ie, just make the raven in a completely different character, screenshot it and add it in). And yes, for any Critical Role fans, the raven does have the same name as one of the Campaign 1 characters, but not named for them, it would be short for "vexation". I might also just change the raven's name to Hex. But then, that's a Warlock spell, so, confusing that way too.

I quite like him from a character design and visual perspective. Warlock isn't my favourite class though... the Invocations are great, but I get bored with the lack of spell slots and the reliance on Eldritch Blast. He could be fun for something short though.

Moving on...

Otherwise this week has been... *facepalm*. Yeah, that's the best way to describe it. Facepalm.

I made pretty decent pasta sauce this week... just mince and tomato and basil and onion... it came out pretty well. I did slice my finger open on a tomato tin lid though... because those fuckers is sharp.

I didn't mention it last Saturday, because it wasn't anything yet, but my should was a little weird. Like nothing I could put my finger on, just felt weird. And by Sunday it was worse, and by the end of Sunday I couldn't raise my arm on the left side past a certain point. That continued on into Monday. So by Tuesday morning I made an appointment with my chiro, because basically it all started, as far as I was aware, after my chiro appointment on Friday.

Saw my chiro, explained everything to her, realised that I'd been having some shoulder pain the previous week, but hadn't connected the two, she suggested that I should probably go and see a physio... and there just happened to be one down the corridor from her office.

I've been going there for... years. And I've never noticed or realised that before.

So I wandered down the corridor, made an appointment, wandered around for 15 minutes and then went back for my appointment.

My chiro is not a handsome 20-somthing man. My doctor is not a handsome 20-something man. My physio though... my physio is a handsome 20-something man. Which is fine. He's doing a job, I'd like a functional shoulder. But, you know, I noticed.

He seems nice though. And hopefully I won't have to see him for too long. But I left there with more peace of mind and a very simple exercise to do. And an appointment to see him next week.

The shoulder didn't get any worse throughout the week. But, yeah, facepalm seems to be the mood that most accurately sums it up.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, you never realise how much you use a particular limb or body part until it stops working properly. A pain in the ass... but not a pain in the arm. So at least there's that.

Moving on...

There was no Thursday DnD this week. There could have been, but it would have been Wednesday, and Fluffy is our Guest DM for the next couple of weeks and he can't do Wednesdays.

So, no Thursday DnD.

After last week's Friday DnD Three Stooges escapades, we buckled down and started murdering some fools. Enough running around and sticking pitons in doors. And in the grand tradition of Dumb Luck, I accidentally ended the effect that would have allowed the Big Bad guy to really, really fuck us over. Don't get it twisted, he fucked us over enough. Me specifically. I went unconscious, I think, every single round of combat once we got into the big battle.

And now, I have no spell slots left, a single class ability left and about a third of my hit points. So, now we just need to escape the enemy fortress without everybody dying. Fun times.

Actually, with all that being said, it wasn't a bad time. I just hate having characters repeatedly knocked unconscious... it's annoying. It's part of the game... but still annoying.

Today.. rinse and repeat. We did the supermarket thing. We came back here, watched the beginning and then the end of what may be one of the worst movies I've encountered in a long time... The Eagle Has Landed. It's a World War II movie, made in the 1970's, where the movie is constructed in a way that tells you that the Germans are the heroes. And that we should want them to succeed. While the cast is all English and Americans, pretending to be from countries they are not from. For example, Sir Michael Caine as a German. And Donald Sutherland as an Irishman. It is... horrendous.

It was like a disaster you couldn't look away from. But we did miss, like, the middle hour of the movie. I don't think it would have improved things. I did get to keep going "oh, it's you, from that other movie". For example, Queen Bavmorda from Willow, Kenickie from Grease, the nurse from American Werewolf in London, JR from Dallas... among others.

Anyway...

We did that... when Ma went home.

Current mood:

photo saturday: amethyst acolyte

Another "what would this look like" DnD Character Colouring Book this week...

I like dragonborn. I've played a few before (three technically, but the third one never got much past second or third level), but I very much enjoy them. And now they've had a bit of a makeover and we have a third type... not just metallic or chromatic, but now there's gem dragonborn.

There is 100% going to be one of those in my future somewhere. Right after I get to play a Fairy character.

Given that the new book is all about dragons in all their forms, it also contains two dragon related subclasses. I've mentioned the Drakewarden before, the other is a Monk subclass, Way of the Ascendant Dragon.

And given that the god of metallic dragons also spent some time dicking around as a very pretty human monk (based on the art they keep using for him) from the Monastery of the Yellow Rose, which also featured in the second DnD adventure I ever played, that seemed like a logical place for the origin of a gem dragonborn monk.

And honestly, if you're going to choose a gem dragonborn type... Amethyst is the way to go. Mostly just because there's no other way to be a purple dragonborn... and most of the other gem types have an equivalent colour in the metallic/chromatic.

I do wish that there was more actual gem dragonborn art in the new book. There's one piece but I would have liked some more, plus a better description of what they're supposed to look like. But, until that happens, I'll just have to make it up for myself.

Which is mostly what this was... an experiment to see how I could make a version of the gem dragonborn given the tools at hand. And I like the results.

Moving on...

After a second trip to the supermarket on Sunday to pick up some eggs, I made Tuna Noodle Doo again this week. It's a good standby because it works just as well reheated as it does cold. And because I couldn't give a fuck this week, okay, mostly because the weather couldn't make it's mind up, I just had it cold all week and it was just fine.

I was vaguely unimpressed with my anti-virus software this week when it demanded that I delete the version I had installed and install a brand new version... for some reason. So I did, and then issues with both the computer in general for several days before a message came up on Thursday saying that there was an error and I needed to do it all over again.

Sort your shit anti-virus company. To be fair, it does seem to have been fine since.

Then I tried to contact them on Thursday for some slightly related reason, and there's no way to just email them... no, you have to do their stupid "automated chat" thing. Which started off saying that there was a high level of demand and it would be 40 minutes before I got to talk to a real person. Over two hours later... and the chat just shut off or otherwise did something. I was doing something in a different window at the time, flicked back and, yeah, nothing.

Again, sort your shit.

Thursday night's DnD was good... my last time running for this particular set of adventures. It wasn't a super excited adventure, but it was fun. And they did well even if it wasn't a super challenging or lethal adventure. They enjoyed themselves, that was the main thing.

Friday was Chiro Day... so off I went into the city, did the chiro thing, came home again.

Then Friday night's DnD was... chaotic. People overthinking things, stupid choices were made... piton were hammered into doorframes, people (meaning me) transformed into bears... and right now, instead of dealing with the preceding three sets of enemies one at a time, we just barrelled on forward, triggering more and more enemies but not dealing with them.

And now we're kind of screwed. I mean, not completely. I've used a single spell at this point and I have ideas about what to do next. But yeah, weird times ahead.

Today was a right off. I slept really badly last night, I woke up a few times and didn't sleep terribly well. So... we went to the supermarket, I got the makings to construct some kind of pasta sauce thing for this week.

Then we came back here, didn't really do fuck all... then Ma went home before it was even noon.

Current mood:

photo saturday: three stages of bo

In a related set of images from last week's post... I've never wanted to play a family member of a character I'm currently playing quite as much as I want to play Quill's son with all the names. His daddy named him Kipper, Quill calls him Bo, he gets to choose between either of their surnames depending on his mood... because, as the section on Gnomes in the Player's Handbook says...

Gnomes love names, and most have half a dozen or so. A gnome’s mother, father, clan elder, aunts, and uncles each give the gnome a name, and various nicknames from just about everyone else might or might not stick over time.

Anyway... this week's DnD Character Colouring Book is the three stages of Kipper "Bo" Bafflestone-Silverthread... the happy-go lucky boy I first created... the post-destruction of Ten Towns/death of his father goth phase... and his final Ranger form, now with an artificial leg. I'll probably update him again when and if Heroforge updates the site with actual prosthetic leg options.

Also the fact that I'd decided that those tattoos in the final form were to mark the death of important people in his life. Which means that the first tattoo to honour his father will have been done a lot younger than I would have otherwise assumed.

What I think has caught my attention the most is the fact that this is a character who I've envisioned a possible future for, but I'm currently playing through events that influence and alter his past, changing that possible future. And that's not something I've ever done in a game. I have thought about it after games, but never to the extent where I want to actually play them. 

I don't think I explained that properly, but you kinda get what I mean.

Moving on...

This week was... a series of events that happened in a linear fashion. Yes, because that's how time works you fucking moron.

I made chicken noodle soup this week. Perfectly serviceable, even if the weather itself couldn't make it's mind up between Summer heat the first couple of days... then, just, on Thursday, I get woken up by tiny hair at 6:30am, then, by midmorning, you know a thunderstorm that dropped 70,000 lightning strikes across the state by mid afternoon... followed by more giant hale (which didn't fall here thank fuck) and actual gale force winds that evening that fucked up a bunch of trees. So there's that.

Tuesday was the first episode of Campaign 3 of Critical Role... well, actually, the first episode was Thursday last week (Friday our time), but the video only drops on Tuesdays our time, so that's when I watch it. Thus far, with one episode behind me, I'm less excited than last campaign, but possibly more intrigued. 

As I didn't watch their first campaign (other than a variety of clips on the YouTubes), Campaign 2 was the one I started from the beginning, which I think made it more exciting. And this time they're all starting at Level 3, but they didn't reveal full details about their subclasses, so that's definitely a source of the intrigued. Mostly, I was to see how they manage to bring together what feels like a much more disparate group of characters. Like, some of them don't even really feel like they belong in the same universe. But we'll see what happens.

I'm mostly just happy they've started the new campaign. Plus, Liam's playing a halfling, and we all know how I feel about halflings.

Thursday was... a fucking day.

And given that everything was actually fine and I was basically having a freak out, I'll try and keep this brief.

Because of the aforementioned storm/hail I wanted to check in and let Ma know what was coming, generally check in... I sent her a message, didn't get a reply, called her mobile, no answer, called a few more times, no answer... so, you know... I started to get a little freaked out. I continued to call a number of times, fully expecting either a call back or the phone to finally connect because she had it sitting somewhere in the house that somehow wasn't talking to the network. And then the freak out settled in in earnest, because, you know, none of us are getting any younger... and as far as I knew, there was no reason why she shouldn't have been picking up the phone.

So, a number of unanswered phone calls and a few messages left later, I was out the door, in the car, and had just turned the engine on... when Ma called me back.

She'd been at a funeral, so obviously, she'd turned her phone off. And I chose that particular period of time to call her.

So, maybe I had a tiny bit of a breakdown in the car park of my apartment block. I was fine shortly after, but, yeah... big freakout, little breakdown, better now. And everything is fine.

Then Thursday night was finally DnD night... and my turn at DMing again. With guest star, Fluffy, as an actual player instead of DM. It was a good session... didn't exactly go how I thought it might... and because it's the fucking Thursday night group, the monsters who were supposed to fuck them up didn't hit... anybody... at all. I think.

Which is annoying. But, you know, they were having a good time. And I was okay with that.

Friday was our actual 2 year DnD anniversary. Two years of Friday night games, except those weeks we didn't play and the time we all had to play from inside our own houses. Ahh... those were the days... I mean, they were definitely days, I never said they were good.

And to celebrate, I made three cheese and chive bread. Which was pretty good... mostly because I put a lot of cheese and a whole pack of chives in it. I mean, everything is better with cheese.

Also, leading off from last week's discussion about fictional husbands and fictional sons and fictional trauma... we had the tail end of that this week. But we also had some of those roleplay narrative moments that you couldn't script more perfectly if you tried.

But I was very happy to leave my fictional son in the hands of the wonderful himbo that is the leader of the rangers he's apprenticed to. I have to give it to DM Fluffy... he made that himbo just exactly the right kind of character for Quill to put her trust in.

So it was, mostly, much discussion, many decompressing, such catharsis. Very talky... but we loves us some talky DnD. Overall, a good session though.

Today was fine.

We did the supermarket thing... I'm making Tuna Noodle Do again this week... because the weather can't decide what season it is. And that's good, hot or cold.

Afterwards I did a little Tech Support on Ma's computer, because she called me yesterday and trying to talk her through what should have been an incredibly simple thing turned into me wanting to bang my head on things. I suspect the problem is that Ma's computer is getting on a bit, for some reason doesn't seem to want to download updates and is now being asked to do 2021 things and doesn't seem to like it.

But I did what I could, which was mostly resetting up her browser because it had shat the bed. So at least there's that.

Then we did the Spotlight/Officeworks shuffle. And, honestly, going to Spotlight on the Saturday/day before Halloween is possibly a horrible idea... but I did find a couple of fun things that were marked down, including a giant plastic battlehammer for less than $6, that I in no way need, but also couldn't leave without.

And, honestly, the looks I got from several small children (they were thoroughly confused/delighted) and the comment I got from one dude in his 20's when I went to price check it ("that's cool") made it more than worth it.

We mostly just had a look at display books and laptops once we got to Officeworks... and is it me, or are laptops really fucking tiny these days. Like this beefy boy I'm using right now is a decent size and has a decent sized screen... the ones we saw all look titchy by comparison. Weird.

That's it really... we did the Officeworks wander, came back here, and that was it.

Current mood:

photo saturday: graph paper grief

So... my graph paper husband is dead and my graph paper son was dead, got brought back to life off screen but has lost a leg and two fingers...

Well, I say MY... what I really mean is my Friday night character Quillamina. And thus we have some modified character art to commemorate the occasion. Memorialise? Eulogise? I think commemorate is the right word here honestly.

In any event... one dead and one amputated DnD Character Colouring Book. Yay? More on that later in any event.

And yes, the wheelchair is really only artistic licence because Hero Forge doesn't allow for the removal of legs or the addition of a specific prosthetic leg... not yet anyway.

So, moving on.

I made really basic vegetable soup this week. I didn't want anything heavy, but I did augment it by making myself some bread. Just the regular recipe, but I formed it into two "mini loaves" that ended up sticking together and doing that lovely pull apart thing while in the oven.

Otherwise, a very flat week.

Once again Thursday night's DnD game was on hold... because Player/Host Flatmate Flu became Player/Host Flu. Hopefully we can finally get back to normal this coming week. But we'll see what happens.

Friday night's game... yeah... We took a much needed rest, travelled back to my characters home town, fought a bunch of weird fungus dwarves and then, finally, descended into the mine that gives the town it's name. And found... a lot of dead people. Up to and including my character's husband.

For a second there, I thought it was a two-fer and DM Fluffy had also chosen to wiped out her son. But no... he made it. Barely. And missing his leg below the knee and two of his fingers. Clearly when Fluffy rolled for their fate in the last game, they were not good rolls. I'm sensing some definitely Natural 1, possibly 2, vibes. Like, 5 at the most. But I don't know exactly, because I don't want to know how badly the dice fucked me over. Because, really, it's not important to the story.

So I got a grieving widow scene, I got a traumatised mother scene, I got a rallying the community scene and I got a eulogy scene.

Plus, it seems that my spell from last week that I homebrewed myself did actually save a bunch of people. Or at least get them into the mine earlier and therefore deeper than they would have been before.

But it the midst of all that we got more clues to a wider mystery or rather a mysterious NPC who has shown up now in two dreams and at the side of my dying graph paper son to save his life. Is she the avatar of a god? Is she the softer, gentler aspect of the god who caused the perpetual winter in the first place? Is she a time travelling version of my character from the future? Is she just a really fucking old crazy gnome druid? Is she part of the book or something invented by Fluffy to drive us all crazy? Only time will tell.

It was a big session though... much emotions, many stress.

It was only on the drive home from dropping off Fluffy that I realised that, given the potential subclass I had envisioned for the future version of my graph paper son, what Fluffy had actually done was turn him into Hiccup from How To Train Your Dragon with the missing/artificial foot.

And, you know what, not mad at it.

Also, just quietly, I would have been totally okay if he'd killed the kid. As well as the husband, or instead of, honestly. Any variation would have made for great roleplay, so I can't be mad at any of it.

It did lead to me having a moment in the supermarket this morning when I realised they were playing a couple of sad songs back to back, which is all kinds of stupid... but I'm always down to feel the feelings. Even the pretend ones.

The rest of today was... nothing much. We did the supermarket and that was it.

Oh, and by the way, I am aware that this week's post image looks a teeny bit like a really awful 80's album cover.

Current mood:

photo saturday: ghost

Meet Ghost. Today's DnD Character Colouring Book entry.

Ghost is what happens when I try to answer the question "what would my version of that subclass look like". And then design it mostly from the outside in. 

In fact, the (originally) blonde hair/black eyebrows and stubble ended up being the catalyst for his whole backstory. Which also is probably one of the darkest/most edgelord ones I think I've put together to date (and weirdly, created him before I started reading the Mistborn book). But he also gets a little mouse friend (on his shoulder in the image), who I gave narrative plot armour to, so we don't have to worry about dead mouse friend after the first encounter with an area of effect spell.

It was also one of those cases that even though I wasn't intending to fully spec him out and give him a backstory, it all kind of just fell into my head fully formed.

He would also be a really different character from a roleplay perspective. Not completely sure it would be an interesting roleplay for me, but it would be challenging.

Plus who doesn't love a psychic chakram. There just aren't enough chakram in things these days.

Anyway...

This week I made... savoury mince again. Nowhere near as good as last time. But serviceable.

Other than a sore arm and a general feeling of blah for the first half of the week, there were no issues after my second vaccination shot last Saturday. Not that I expected any, but I had heard talk that the second shot generally had a more intense reaction... but this was like a 10% up from 6%.

Thursday's DnD game... didn't happen. Perfectly reasonable reasons, but weirdly, given that we finished the last adventure in one week instead of two like all the others, this puts us back on the original timeline. Or it does until we take another week off for reasons.

Friday's DnD was... a lot.

We fought a big old dragon. Which, honestly, was not as stressful as it sounds. We'd been stressed about it since it showed up at the end of the game before last, but, while it... you know, narratively speaking... destroyed basically all the towns in the region and killed a bunch of faceless NPCs, it was all a bit m'eh from a "threat of imminent death" perspective.

When there are only three of you and you, as the druid, cast two spells, a cantrip, do a total of about 9 damage and no combat healing... irrespective of the fact that the rest of your party are a monk and a rogue respectively, hence that's where all the damage lives, and the entire dragon combat takes, I think, three or four rounds split across two different combats.

But then, I think the dragon is more of a Deux Ex Machina/narrative threat more so than a party killing machine. You're supposed to believe, as a party, that it's a massive danger, and, in the right circumstances, it could be. But I think that it's role is to fuck up the locations and characters that the party have spent the last five levels falling in love with. 

And, you know, maybe it's just that I felt ineffectual during the actual fight, not least of all due to the aforementioned 9 damage and basically after setting off two things that would last for the rest of the battle in the second half, I got one instance of a spell effect off... and then the dragon was dead.

Cool, glad I used my last third level slot and my second Wildshape for 6 seconds of in-universe time.

Sure, I did a bunch of stuff outside the dragon fight, and actually wrote my own spell during the week... which, theoretically, saved a bunch of random NPCs by sending a warning, I don't actually know yet how effective it was as we only just finished the battle by the end of the game. And there was a bunch of roleplay stuff for my character this session.

So it wasn't a bad session, by any shape of the imagination, and I'm not calling out DM Fluffy in any way... I'm just overthinking it.

And on top of all of that I still don't know if Fluffy has murdered my graph paper husband and/or son. I mean, technically, the bad evil dwarf guys did the murdering, but you know what I mean. Rolls were made behind the screen for their fate, and in an extremely Schrödinger's cat kind of way, one, both or neither of them are alive, injured or dead, and until we open that particular box, who knows what we'll find.

Moving on.

How is it the middle of October and I'm still basically in soup season? Who the fuck knows, but it is and I am.

Suffice to day, I bought the makings for generic vegetable soup this week. Otherwise, the supermarket was the supermarket.

Afterwards we took a little trip to Cheap as Chips mostly for the Looking At Things. But also, because Ma is always with the knitting these days. Making blankets for charity things I believe. So, wool.

And a bit of poking around the combined Halloween and Christmas section. And while I was tempted by skeleton arms... what do I actually need a pair of skeleton arms for?

But that's that.

Current mood:

photo saturday: pigeon and the jetty

I don't have anything for the Colouring Book this week... I mean, there's stuff, it exists... I'm just not feeling it.

So instead we dip into those leftover photos from March last year... Señor Pigeon and Glenelg Jetty #327.

This week's soup was CHOWDAH! Well, technically it was chunky potato soup with choirzo... but essentially, that's just chowder. Tasty, tasty chowder.

Thursday's DnD game was something of a record for our Candlekeep adventures... we got through a chapter/adventure in a single session. A very fun session, guest DM'd by Fluffy, but short. There wasn't, as they say, a lot of there there. But fun enough while it lasted. And, honestly, it gave my character a perfect excuse to leave the party for a little while and for me to be absent as a player next week, because it's my turn to DM again.

*insert evil genius cackling here*

Which, honestly, is some bullshit, because I'm the least Evil Genius Laugh DM ever.

But it'll be interesting to dive back into the chair again. Especially since I basically picked the... only two adventures thus far (and at all I think) that take place entirely inside Candlekeep.

Friday night's DnD was ARGH followed by Fuck Yeah followed by ARGH. The first ARGH was left over from last week... big bad dragon heading for civilisation, which was also too many hours away for us to get there quickly, while we're on the doorstep of a bad guy lair we really want to explore. Then the fuck yeah of us wiping the floor with the first room of the lair, then having the most interesting conversation with a very nice lady and finding out that the dragon was 100% going off to fuck up all our shit and we needed to haul ass back to town real fast. So a big ARGH there.

Fun, once again, but also ARGH.

Also, if Fluffy kills off my graph paper husband or graph paper son, we will have words. I mean, if that happens, I will have the most fun roleplaying it, and it might be a severe psychological reaction, I don't know. But he still better not.

Today wasn't anything. Well, it was... bit wasn't.

We did the supermarket... I bought stuff, with which I'm going to make a food item. I dunno... it's probably stew of some sort... stew vs savoury mince vs whatever. Stuff. That is food. And that I will eat. All week.

Then we dicked about at my place for a bit, before Ma headed home and I headed off to get my second vaccination shot.

Interestingly the experience could not have been more different from the first time. In so much as a) I knew what I was doing this time and b) all the staff I interacted with were much less personable than the first time, and the nurse who gave me my shot could not have given LESS of a shit. Like literally... her giving a shit gauge was fully empty. Which made it less fun. I mean, not that it was FUN... you know what I mean.

But that's done now.

Current mood:

photo saturday: fairy rogue

So, because this has been... a fucking week... let's just say hello to Rook for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book.

Rook was half an idea and never meant to make an appearance, but, weirdly I kinda know exactly who he is. Maybe because he's a rogue. And I love rogues.

He's a fairy, because I will continue to be obsessed with the new fairy race until I actually get to play one... or, you know, until I run out of ideas for fairy characters. But he's a fairy who is very good at sneaking around and getting in and out of places and finding shinies that nobody has physically nailed down or that can be easily pried loose, and therefore, clearly belong to him now.

Then one of the thieves guilds introduced him to the idea that people will give him shinies in exchange for ensuring people stop breathing. And he likes shinies.

In a perfect world, he'd probably he wielding a rope dart, but those aren't actually a thing in 5e, so he just has daggers that look like part of a rope dart. And a metal mask that used to be someone else's shiny, but they didn't nail it down.

I also enjoy that his name is equally a chess piece, a bird in the same family as the raven and crow as well as an Assassin's Creed: Syndicate reference.

I will say that if I was actually going to play him, I'd probably make him a Soul Knife, since the later Assassin abilities are kind of trash for any of the exotic races.

And no, I'm not avoiding talking about this week by waffling on more than normal, what are you talking about.

Moving on.

I made some version of chicken soup this week. I say some version because I basically threw everything but the kitchen sink in. For the purposes of soup anyway.

After last Friday's unexpected tradie visit, I expected to hear from them again early in the week in order for them to come and finish off the job, do the painting, that kind of thing. What I didn't expect was a message at 9:45 saying that one of their tradies had just finished a job and could them come finish off in about half an hour.

To which I said, yes, yes you can. And then spent the next 20 minutes taking a bunch of shit down off the top of my bookcases, move other stuff around and shift one of my chairs into the bedroom along with the lap top to let him do his thing.

It wasn't the same guy as Friday, it was an older guy, and after I explained the dealio, I just went and fucked around on the laptop with my headphones on, listening to YouTube videos I would normally half watch while doing other things on the laptop.

Tuesday. Tuesday was the problem.

Tuesday morning I checked my email, only to find a message from my land agent with the subject line "vacate". Not going to lie, my blood may have turned to ice.

Yes, turns out that my landlord has decided that she wants to sell the apartment. Which means that I have to move out. And for those of you with deja vu right now. Yes, that is why I had to move out of my last two apartments. I mean, in the case of Childers Street, the whole building had to move out because they were gutting the place, but it amounts to the same thing.

But, yes, that was unexpected and unwelcome and really the last thing I wanted or needed right now.

And even worse that the landlord really wants me out ASAP because she offered me a month of free rent if I could move out within the month. To which, I said in the nicest possible way, go fuck yourself.

I'm staying for the rest of the lease, because I'm not doing this shit in a panic again like last time.

I mean it's not without a whole, vast, interconnected and array of issues that are, for the most part, beyond my control to actually resolve as they rely on other people making decisions.

And as much as I've complained about this place, especially when I first moved in, I now have my routines and I love the ridiculously huge oven and it's basically in the perfect spot for any of my DnD trips.

Speaking of which... Thursday's DnD was, this week, for reasons, on Wednesday.

The second half of that adventure was pretty good... and everybody lived and we killed the bad guy and uncovered the mystery and all that good stuff.

I will also say that when I told the group about the aforementioned Tuesday issue, there were immediate offers to help me when it comes to moving day, so that was genuinely lovely and unexpected.

Friday was also Chiro Day... so I went into town, did the chiro thing, stopped off briefly at the Games World that recently moved to a much bigger store, then jumped on the bus home.

I was the only person on said bus and so when the old guy driving the bus went the wrong way through down because he usually drives the OTHER bus that gets me home and not this one, he felt compelled to keep talking to me, even though I was clearly wearing headphones and am, for the most part, too polite to just actively ignore him.

Then Friday night's DnD game was kind of a lot of "little errand, little errand, little errand, little errand, MAJOR FREAKING PLOT DEVELOPMENT AND TERRIFYING MONSTER THING LOOSE IN THE WORLD".

Which made DM Fluffy a very happy Fluffy and the rest of us regret our life choices. On the plus side, we levelled up, so that's nice. Good to be level 5 before a giant dragon wrecks all of our shit.

Today wasn't much of anything.

We did the supermarket, came back here, futzed around a bit, and because I wasn't in the mood for much else, we did a little trip to Haighs, then called it a day.

Current mood: