photo saturday: then vs now

How It Started vs How It's Going

I don't remember exactly at what point in the process of starting to manually colour Hero Forge character is was that I did my first ever Good Halfling Boy, Belben of the Beestinger Clan, I feel like I did a version early on, but circled back around and redid him later in the process.

Weirdly (or not), while there are some of the manual colouring final versions that I really like, and that are better than the versions I did after Hero Forge introduced colouring. Sometimes it's about texture, sometimes it's about me adding in things that the website can't do because of the limitations of an item that needs to be 3D printable.

However, this isn't one of those better ones.

Part of the problem is that his whole outfit, including the bow, hair, spell effect, everything, is all Hero Forge 1.0 stuff. And, honestly, all of that stuff needs a do-over.

So, when they dropped yet another great outfit this week, I ended up playing around and using the top and the "thief pants" that I'm obviously obsessed with, because strappies and pouches and kneepads.

Actually, that's a lie... I started playing around because they also released a freckles decal. Woo! Freckles!

I also gave it some Photoshop tweaks. Mostly the bowstring and the glow on the Mage Hand. The boots are also a Franken-Photoshop edit. Or the addition of the wings at least. As is the bow... because there's still only one actual shortbow. It's an actual bow... I just resized the arms.

So, behold today's DnD Character Colouring Book, Belben 2.0.

Anyway.

I'm going to skip over a lot of this week... because I disappeared into my own head/up my own ass very early in the week and didn't emerge for a couple of days.

But I did make the first CHOW-DAH (sorry, I literally can't NOT say it like that) of the season. Not the best version ever, but tasty.

There wasn't any Thursday DnD for reasons. See also two paragraphs previous.

I also made a decision that I'm going to finish out the current adventure we're most of the way through and I'm... taking a break. Not forever. Maybe for a while though. But, honestly, I need a break. For my own mental health.

Friday DnD was three hours of wrap-up... entirely roleplay, just sitting around the table talking about the futures of our fictional characters. And it was good. Cathartic. Things just came together in the way that they needed to.

So, now it's my turn.

Anyway.

Today was the supermarket as usual, and then after coming back here and unpacking we headed off to Good Guys because I wanted to take a look at a new TV and talk to a nerd about printers.

What is super fucking weird to me is that I look at the TV I have now all the time. I should now what size it is. But no, looking at TVs the correct size in comparison with all the gigantic TVs they have, they all looked too damn small. The TV man was also kind of a douche. I mean, he wasn't really, but there was definitely some miscommunication going on for a hot minute.

The guy in the computer section, however, was lovely. It's always the nerds, it was the same with the woman we went to see when I bought this laptop originally... and the printer... and the netbook. She was great, which is also partly why we went back to see her so many times. This guy, also very personable, very knowledgeable.

He also talked me though my printer confusion in a way that definitely made a lot of sense.

Not that we actually bought anything, you understand, today was very much about Looking At Things. And getting a better idea about how we should be thinking about things. Plus, the TV I want isn't even in stock yet.

We also did a quick yet pointless spin around Kmart, because I wanted to look for something I assumed that they would have that they absolutely did not have. Fun times.

And that's all there is about that really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: half-orc hot boy

So, this week in DnD news, we killed a goddess... more on that later.

Today's DnD Character Colouring Book is what happens when you've been thinking about half-orcs and you're watching a video on YouTube when someone says "half-orc equals hot boy"... and about fourteen different gears in your brain all seize up at once.

It's not like that wasn't a thought process I'd had before... but somehow it all clicked in and before I knew it Maxximilian Midnight, half-orc, hot boy stripper, formerly of the Platinum Peacock Gentleman's Club, was born. He went through a couple of variations... the first version was a sorcerer... but then I realised that I could slightly reflavour the Drunken Master Monk subclass and make his heavy silver mirror into a reflavoured mace, which counts as a monk weapon.

And making one of his parents an orc bard (I haven't worked out which parent yet, but I kind of like subverting expectations and making it his mother... but then that's two characters who have "entertainer" mothers) gets around some of the potential ick of half-orc lineages.

It's weird... I've noticed that all of my DnD characters are either very short or over 6 foot... there's not really a ton of middle ground. Clearly that says something about me... not entirely sure what honestly.

I've also been having fun of late playing around with some of the background things... sure, it's not actually a spotlight that is connected to the lighting at all, but it adds to the ambiance.

Moving on...

This week was Minestrone ala Yani... me making up minestrone from memory and not consulting a recipe of any kind. And, not to toot my own horn, but it's pretty fucking good.

Honestly not a lot happened for the first part of the week... Public Holiday Monday and all that.

I know I've said this before about Thursday DnD... but sometimes I fucking hate my friends. I don't know what came first, me being in a mood or the Thursday group getting on my last nerve... but yeah, one fed into the other which... something something... spiral.

I'm not getting into it, in the grand scheme of things, it honestly doesn't fucking matter, and I'll get the hell over it.

Friday was Chiro Day... and also me wandering around town for about an hour day.

Friday night DnD... we killed a goddess.

Well, the three corporeal forms of a goddess on the Material Plane... essentially, we killed the final boss with it's three health bars. Which means we've finished that campaign. Around 40 sessions, something like 10 months... not bad all things considered.

And then it's my turn... after we wrap up next week and also possibly have a week's break playing board games.

I will need to do a little thinking about what happens next for my good dwarf ranger boy as we do an epilogue session next week. I think I know the main dot points... but I need to flesh it out a bit. And no, I'm not going to do it "live" on the blog, so you can relax.

I do need to remember not to write War and Peace this time though.

Moving on...

Nothing overly special to report for today... Supermarket plus some wandering around shops... and a trip to Haighs for post-Easter broken Easter eggs. But when I got home I realised that I'd totally forgotten the main reason we went for a shop wander... typical.

But that's it really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: lady ostara

Lady Ostara Dawnglow follows in the footsteps of the Jingle Bros (parts One and Two) from Christmas and Master Bohai from Chinese New Year. The DnD Character Colouring Book personification of the current holiday.

And because I'm ever so slightly obsessed with DnD rogues right now... of course she's a Swashbuckler Rogue, with some Oath of the Ancients Paladin thrown in for good measure. Because Swashbuckler plus most flavours of paladin are an outstanding combination.

There's honestly not really any lore for her in my head. She might hand out gifts to those who deserve them as a paladin, but she also might knife a bitch, because rogue.

Fun times.

The halfling tomato soup remains a success. I honestly think it's slightly better when I have bread in the freezer and can make a cheese toasty to go with each serving, but otherwise, still solid.

You know how I ranted about the DVD cases not getting delivered last Friday... yeah, it took until Wednesday until they finally did. Because I assumed that I had, in fact, asked for them to be redelivered... but, no, I didn't check all the boxes or I did it on my phone and not the laptop or, you know, I didn't fucking hold my mouth at exactly 93.3 degrees from the lunar polar orbit of Mercury or something.

But, once I did all those things, then it got delivered the followed day. Which was Wednesday.

Thursday night DnD didn't happen... because a) that group can't make a declarative decision to save it's life and b) two of the members had to isolate. On the plus side, it's very possible that the decision not to play the previous Thursday is the only reason the whole group didn't have to go into isolation. Silver lining and all that.

Friday night DnD was... both nailbiting and slightly anti-climactic. Nailbiting because the entire party almost fucked a roll to resist an ability that dropped everyone to 0 health. Well, actually, the PARTY all fucked the roll... one of our NPCs didn't.

But anti-climactic because we were fighting, essentially, two spellcasters and a glass cannon. Which is how they justify putting an enemy that can potentially kill the whole party at the end of the adventure. Make it weak to being punched in the face.

I will say that I think that I would have enjoyed playing a Beast Master ranger from the beginning of this campaign. Because, honestly, I'm enjoying how they work in game. And the fact that, basically, your animal companion is your subclass. So, if you're not using them all the time, especially in combat, then you're not really playing your subclass.

I already knew that, but it really clicked during last night's game.

And, yeah... it would be interesting to do it again at some point.

Today was... more complicated than it needed to be.

Ma, in her infinite... Ma-ness... somehow forgot to not just lock her front door, but close it. And left the keys in the door. And only worked this out when she got to my house for some reason.

So instead of going to the supermarket, we went back down the road to Ma's place in order to close and lock her front door and security door, and then come all the way back down the road to the supermarket and continue on as normal.

Whether or not the shopping experience would have been better or worse if we had gone straight to the supermarket, I can't say. Invariably people all lose minds on Easter Saturday. And I've never been able to work out exactly why. Like, the shops have been closed for a single day... and they will be closed, basically for one additional day. Why you gotta lose your mind? Why you gotta get All The Things? Why are you in the supermarket taking up space? Stop it.

Would it have been worse... I mean, it has been worse. And maybe it would have been even worse at 8am, who knows.

So, we did the shopping thing.

Then we did a brief excursion that resulted in... well, nothing. And then Ma went home. The end.

Current mood:

photo saturday: caring fool

With the Thursday DnD group winding up our current campaign book, talk had started about what the next thing will be.

And, potentially, depending on what we end up playing, I have a few options... at the time it was four different characters... but there was some shade being thrown about whether they were all halflings. And none of them are. So I had to remind my beloved Thursday friends that I've played more races than them.

Also, that I've played every race (although, not subrace) in the Players Handbook, except for half-orcs.

Because generally speaking, I've never been able to come up with a half-orc concept that I really like.

And then Hero Forge dropped a full jester outfit, complete with big dumb hat, on April 1.

So this week's DnD Character Colouring Book is what happened when that outfit plus half-orc started living in my brain.

Brother Jinx started out as playing around with the outfit (with a totally different name) and ended up being an interesting character. Partly because I was digging into some of the lore around the Orc gods and found a couple of interesting bits and pieces that I could have built a very different character around... but in the end I invented an order of the human god of endurance and suffering. But kept some of the orc god stuff for background flavour.

It would be a weird character to play honestly. I already worked my way around some of the issues... he puppet is a re-skinned shield, the bells are all silent, he's a Trickery Cleric, which isn't connected with Ilmater, but, fuck it, I hate sticking to the recommended lists a lot of the time.

I work on clerics by Pirates of the Caribbean rules... they're more like guidelines anyway.

Also, they have him listed as being connected to the Twilight domain, and that makes no damn sense to me. So fuckkit.

I do need to come up with a better in-universe reason for why he carries the puppet around though.

However, as much as I was obsessed with the particular character at the beginning of last week, by the end of the week, my favour had moved on to a different character... or the ongoing development of a character I designed previously, abandoned, redesigned, considered, re-redesigned and is probably at the head of the queue for potential new characters.

But that's going to have to wait a couple of weeks before it gets a debut... 

So now I have five potential characters... but only three of the five were in the original four. If that makes any sense.

Moving on.

Oh... I had to make a brief trip to Officeworks last Sunday, so since I was already out and about in the car, I went, fukkit and went off to Burnside Village (and yes, the opposite direction, let me live my life okay :P) to the bakery.

Coming out of the bakery, I looked up to where I could see the old apartment and went... yeah, fukkit... let's go for a little walk. So I took a wander and went and peeked in the window of the old place. Well, first I looked at the For Sale poster outside, then I went up to be nosy.

I understand what a stylist is supposed to do, from a real estate perspective. Create an... atmosphere. Make people envision how they'd live in the space, but at the same time, doing it with the minimum of actual furniture and also, the blandest possible option. And there's always a Donna Hay cookbook and some sort of fruit or vegetable. At least when they take the photos.

But I generally imagine that real estate stylists just have a garage full of Kmart/Ikea furniture and really ugly paintings, a box of Donna Hay cookbooks and a lot of fake plants. Also, a bed that I am convinced is actually made of cardboard boxes.

Honestly, though, I don't get some of the stylists choices. Like, why that gigantic standing lamp with the huge black shade? And why is there a bottle of "champagne" and two glasses out on one of two small circular coffee tables? Why is the "orchid" (I assume they're all fake plants, honestly) on the dining table off centre? Why did you put a folding chair next to the toilet?

Important questions.

Oh, and they did install yet another set of those horizontal blinds in the kitchen window, so now the only window without them is the little window in the bathroom. Good luck cleaning that shit new owners... 

But honestly, I couldn't see a ton of that through the windows... a lot of it I saw in the real estate photos when I looked them up just now.

It was a little weird actually heading up the stairs, knowing I didn't actually live there anymore, but looking at the photos really just hammered that home. Given that I know every inch of the apartment in those photos (not counting the dumb temporary furniture), it's an odd feeling, but not a bad one.

Weirdly, while it seems like it's basically a done deal, as the apartment is "under offer", the actual listed price is lower than I expected. Honestly, I have no fucking basis for comparison, but it seemed... cheap. Totally out of my price range, but, cheap, relatively speaking.

Moving on.

Well... Soup Season 2022 has officially begun. 

And, honestly, it was a pretty good start. The only issue was me using a little bit too much bacon grease... because I had a bunch of it left over from various bacon cookings, and had intended to use it on the first potato and bacon soup of the year.

Which I did... but perhaps I should have only used a bit of it, rather than all of it. Because all of it was a tiny bit much. Tasty... but... you know.

The only downside was the fact that it took much longer for it to come to the boil... but, there are ways around that.

Also, it was a relief not to have to actually cook at all for the rest of the week.

Fun fact. I officially unpacked the last box on Monday. Well, the last of the moving company boxes, anyway. Woo.

And it consumed quite a bit of the day. Because I unpacked everything, went through everything again, then started putting things into the last two drawers. It worked out pretty well, but then the following day I went through a bunch of the folders in the bookcase by the door and cleaned out a bunch of shit I didn't need to be hanging onto. 

Instructions for things I no longer own, rental inspection sheets for the old apartment... many old and unimportant things.

And culled out a whole folder's worth of stuff. Or rearranged enough of the stuff that it all fit in one less folder.

I also gave all the stuff in the bedroom a stern talking to, moved most of the artwork that was still packaged up into places where it was out of the way (wardrobe, behind the bed and next to the external pantry shelves respectively) and unwrapped one of the big pieces and just leaned it against the wall.

There's still some mess... although some of it I just shoved into a storage box during the week, since I had no idea what to actually do with it, but at the same time it wasn't stuff I could just throw away.

So we're getting there.

Moving on.

There was no Thursday DnD this week. Because of possible close contact stuff, it probably would have been perfectly safe, but yeah, not taking the risks. Thankfully I'm not the only one that has that opinion which is good.

Friday was... a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things... but still an annoyance.

Basically, I ordered a thing, the thing was being delivered on Friday, so I knew it would probably arrive early, since that's what happened last time. So I dicked around tidying things up... no delivery. And when I checked the tracking, they were all "we couldn't deliver it, soz"... and I was understandably annoyed because I was in my fucking house.

Turns out the delivery driver couldn't read simple numbers and got confused and tried to deliver it to one of my downstairs neighbours who weren't there. So, they got a slightly angry comment in the "please redeliver" webform.

And I don't get my delivery until Monday. Sadface.

Friday night DnD was... mostly us being frustrated by an obtuse puzzle. And there's a lot of that in DnD... puzzles that are simple when you know the answer, but the puzzle and the environment (by which I mean the adventure designers) don't actually give you the tools you need in order to work the puzzle out.

Granted we'd also totally fluked a door trap that could only be overcome by a very specific spell earlier in the same area, so... swings and roundabouts.

Also DM Fluffy then had both a magical anvil and a weird insectile Ice Devil hit on my character. Well... the anvil was just creepily horny... the Ice Devil however, was definitely hitting on my good sweet dwarf boy.

Granted we then let Mr's character in to talk to the devil and he's always the one who's going to do the dumb thing and make a deal... which seems perfectly fine in the moment... and maybe never comes up as an issue in the game itself... but it's still an issue in the world.

Basically, I should have just fucked the devil, it would have been quicker and less messy in general.

Moving on.

Today was... a lot of going places.

Well... a lot of driving between places really.

We did the supermarket thing, I bought the ingredients for the Halfling Tomato Soup I was so very fond of last year. We came back here, I unpacked, which somehow seems to take forever at the moment. Maybe that's just because I'm putting certain things in other containers other than the ones they came in. So there's that.

Then we took some books and stuff into the Oxfam Shop in town... only to find they were having a book sale out on the footpath again. And as much as it might have been fun to peruse what was there, I just got all of my books to a perfect balance, which may now mean one in, one out for a while... so... no more new books right now.

Ma had decided on the replacement microwave she wanted, but, of course, she needed me to schlep the box and get it out and move the old one. So we headed to the Kmart nearest her, which is in a shopping centre that I don't think I've actually been to in... maybe 15, 20 years. It's just not a place I ever need to go for any reason. So it was weird, because the whole thing has clearly been done up and expanded and developed since the last time I was there, but there were still some bits of the layout and architecture that I kind of recognised. Which was weird.

So, microwave in box, box in car, car on road.

Cut to Ma's place, and box out of car, microwave out of box, other microwave in the car, new microwave in spot.

And then it took me like three tries to set the clock. Mostly because the first two times I was doing it like my microwave and that wasn't how it actually worked. Once I looked at the instructions, first time, baby.

Then we took the old microwave to Bunnings to dump it in their e-recycling bin. And had a bit of a wander around and I ended up grabbing a little succulent... so we'll see how long that survives.

Granted, I feel like I would have said much the same thing about the parlour palm and that's 16 years old.

Essentially Ma drove to my place this morning, we drove to Kmart, then to her place, drove back to my place via Bunnings and then she drove home again.

Good times. Good times.

That's pretty much that though.

Current mood:

photo saturday: getting his satyr-day drink on

Since the Saytr race came out I've been trying to find a satyr character that works for me. Is this is? Who can say? Welcome to this week's DnD Character Colouring Book.

I'll just say it's both a shame and something of a relief that the DnD satyr isn't the "male nature spirit with ears and a tail resembling those of a horse, as well as a permanent, exaggerated erection" satyr and much more of the "half-human and half-goat" faun.

Why wouldn't I dip into the satyr mythos for their love of "wine, music, dancing"... and I wouldn't want to cover up too much of the Hot Satyr Boy Energy with, you know, clothes or armour... so, what goes well with that... a Drunken Master Monk of course.

The fun thing about Drunken Master Monks though is that... they're not actually drunk... but they are really good at faking it.

And of course the name is Ampelos... "a personification of the grapevine and lover of Dionysus".

Also, have I mentioned that I'm borderline obsessed with that particular Hero Forge jacket. And ongoingly I do wish there were three versions of it. One as is, one with two sleeves like the left, one with two sleeves like the right.

Moving on...

In a lot of ways this week felt the most "back to normal" since the move. In that I didn't do a lot of shopping trips or otherwise unusual things happened. At least for the first half of the week.

Last week, I did finally give in and open the last two moving boxes... the ones with stuff from my chest of drawers. Not to put the stuff back in the chest of drawers, but more to find some of the "non chest of drawers" things I knew were in there. This week I pulled everything else out of those boxes, went through it, threw some stuff away and otherwise sorted through it.

I think I probably need to do it again when I empty the boxes, and be ruthless about it, but a number of things I'd just randomly hung onto for... decades at this point got dumped into the recycling bin. Other things got moved to go with existing things if appropriate... and then everything left over got dumped back into the boxes.

Thursday night's DnD game was... unexpected. Not the game... but things that happened in the game. Basically the game zagged when it should have zigged. I'm not unhappy with the zag... but it's a weird tangent that at first seemed very much separate from the rest of the adventure. I think I see where it links up... or at least how it might.

We'll have to see though. My character is very pissed off currently, because the bad guys targeted innocent civilians trying to get to us and he does not like that... so that's always fun.

Friday Mr and Mrs helped me take my IKEA dining table down to Ma's place. And by "helped" I mean, Mr carried the table downstairs by himself, put it in their trailer and then followed my little car up the road to Ma's place, before they took off for plant shopping at points further north and I stuck around Ma's place for about 45 minutes before bringing my new bedding home.

I then spent a good chunk of the afternoon finally organising my underwear and socks into the chest of drawers, which is now in the spot the dining table used to be in the living room. And then I shoved a bunch of art on the top of it.

By which I mean, I forgot that one of the original plans was to actually put the printer up there. But I'm still unsure whether it makes more sense to get a new printer or now... so... indecision is a bitch.

And the whole thing needs to be moved over about... 15cm. Because I had it there originally, changed my mind, and now, having lived with it for a day... it needs to go back where I had it originally. Because BLAH.

That's Next Week Yani's problem. At the very least it's Sunday Yani's problem.

But there is a lot more space next to the bed in the bedroom now, so I'm happy about it.

And the quilt cover I got last week is actually really pretty. Like, it's flowers and plants without feeling horrendously pink and pale and pastel and boring. I think this is possibly the only time that I've ever replaced both pillows, my body pillow and my quilt at the same time. And it's a lot.

The body pillow needs some time to stop being a big dumb rectangle, the quilt is... well, it's the first time in... a very, very long time, since I've used a quilt that isn't feather based. Which is going to be great when it comes to not leaving feathers all over the bedroom carpet when I change the quilt cover. But because it's a different kind of quilt, it's also going to take a hot minute to get used to.

The memory foam pillows are pretty good though. I will say that moving them around, they do feel like a bag of soup. I don't know why but that foam just ends up feeling heavy and my brain interprets that as being full of fluid for some reason.

Friday Night DnD was... well... my character got knocked unconscious about a minute into the game, so that was fun. And I think it kind of coloured in his performance for the rest of the session, even though we all had a rest.

And we met the cast of the Regional Faerun Theatre Travelling Company of Beauty and the Beast... well, the candelabra and the clock anyway. There may have been a feather duster and a teapot somewhere, we didn't search every room in the tower.

Fun though.

And I got to drop a little bit of Leif-Lore, which was nice.

Today.

Yes, we have reached the point where I just went... FUKKIT. So, welcome to Soup Season. I'm doing the potato, leek and bacon thing tomorrow. We'll see how that goes... both as the first soup of the season and the first soup cooked on an electric stove.

Pray for me.

So, we did the supermarket thing. We did the unpacking thing. We went looking at microwaves because Ma's microwave has a door that won't open. Which is possibly a very cheap and easy fix, but who knows. Also fitted sheets. Insert standard rant about fitted sheets coming in blue, paler blue, darker blue, beige, lighter beige, white and either pink or some form of grey. GIVE. ME. COLOURS.

Basically, we went looking for several things. Looked at several things in Big W, Target and Kmart. Came home with exactly none of those things.

We did go and get Easter things from Haighs. So that was a successful part of the day.

Current mood: