photo friday: grey man

Welcome to the new laptop. It's... fine. The phrase I keep using is that it's "worth the price"... which is less of a compliment than you might otherwise think. It's not great, but then again, it didn't have a huge price tag on it. Most of the issue I'm having is with Windows 11, because it seems like they're added a bunch of bullshit features that I can't really see anybody ever caring about or wanting to use, and they've removed a ton of features that were actually useful.

And the amount of times I've search up an issue in the past week, only to discover most of the answers online are "nah, there's no way to turn that off" or "nah, it doesn't do that any more" or "nah, there's no way around that". Which is frustrating.

Case in point. On the taskbar, there's a spot where it tells me I'm using the ENG US keyboard. Specifically the Australian one, obviously. But that's just there. And fucked if I can think of any time any single person in the world would really, really need to know that so much that it's on the fucking taskbar. But there's no way to remove it.

And, of course, there's so many little weird bits and pieces, either new stuff I don't have any clue what the fuck it does, or things that I'd set up the way I liked them some 8 years back, under a completely different operating system.

I just keep remembering to breathe.

Anyway.

Moving on to today's DnD Character Colouring Book...

We'll call this one a sketch. It's liable to change 50 times and become a completely different character by the time it hits the table. But there was a brief conversation on Friday night about What Happens Next, after I'm done running this current adventure, and based on that, this character kind of swam forth in my brain this afternoon.

And it's a wood elf, which I've never played. I've done a high elf, a dark elf and half-elves, but never a wood elf. He's also an acolyte of the most recent version of the God of Death (or perhaps, the most recent god to have that title is a better way to say it), and an order of monks who have some healing abilities. Which felt like it all just fit together nicely.

I did have a go at a Mercy Monk once before, and it's very probable that some of the proto backstory that was swirling around in my brain for that character might get transferred over to this one. There wasn't a lot, honestly, just a few little ideas. I do know where this character is from originally though, before he set out on his grand adventure.

It's also one of the most basic/least interesting costumes I've made in a good long white. I mean, I like the fact that now, with layering of clothes, I can put pants under the robes, but I also like that this is really, really basic. Canonically, there would be holes on the sides of the hood for his ears... and yes, he can see through the mask... I'm going with the age-old answer of "a wizard did it", at least until I come up with a better idea. I mean, I could just shade the eyes black, but I like the fully metal mask (which, yes, is just his face, with no expression, painted silver).

But honestly, this is the first in what will probably be a number of ideas. I mean, look at how many different rogues I made, and that was me being settled on a class. This could literally go anywhere from here.

Anyway.

This week was... a lot. Relatively speaking.

We started out with Tomato Soup... basically the first time that I've gone really off-script with the Halfling recipe I've made several times now. It came out fine, but honestly, not really all that much better or worse than the original.

Monday I spend a large chunk of the day setting up the new laptop, installing programs, uninstalling things, setting things up and essentially getting everything the way I wanted it. Or at least the first iteration of that. It's an ongoing process, that, honestly, is still ongoing.

Tuesday, the car was booked in for a service. So I headed down the road at about 7:30am, getting to the mechanic much earlier than I was expecting, but thankfully, he was in the store, he just hadn't opened yet. So I went off to meet Ma, who came down to pick me up and run some errands while we killed time waiting for the car.

Well, actually, the FIRST thing I did was accidentally headbutt the rear vision mirror while grabbing something on the floor of the passenger side, knocking it clearly off the window. And then had to drive to the mechanic with no rear vision mirror. On the plus side, there's no better possible time for me to have done it than right before driving to the mechanic.

First stop after Ma picked me up was North Adelaide for some breakfast. Which was oddly nostalgic. I mean, if one can be nostalgic about an empty, underground, supermarket carpark. The answer is yes, yes you can. Is it sensible in any way? No, no it is not.

But mostly it was just being back in the suburb, wandering through the little shopping centre that I've wandered through a million, billion times, seeing the things that were exactly the same as they were seven years ago, or whatever. So we had some breakfast at Cibo, had a bit of a wander and then headed down to Arndale, which we also haven't been to really at all since I moved out of North Adelaide. Because now it's on the opposite side of the city and, honestly, it's a bit of a hole.

They've made it look bright and shiny though, so that's a plus.

We basically did a wander around the whole place like we used to, picked up a couple of bits and pieces and waited for Mr Mechanic to call me. Which he did, but then we still had a couple of hour to kill. Which we did by going back to Northpark, where we used to do our weekly shop for about a thousand years, and wandering around the shops on both sides of the road, then stopping for lunch.

In the end we were still early getting to the mechanic, and then we basically had to sit around for another half an hour anyway, because the glue on the window/mirror still needed to dry.

Eventually though, the car was ready, I drove Ma back to her car and we went on our merry ways. With a brief stop off from me to grab a 2T external hard drive from Officeworks.

Wednesday was very dull, mostly because I spent a large chunk of the day copying files from the old laptop to the external drive. And that took ALL OF THE HOURS. Yes, it didn't help that at one point I was copying over like 20,000 files (I think that was all my iPhone and digital camera files to be honest), which took forever.

On the plus side, it hardly filled up any of the giant external drive, so yay.

Thursday was the public holiday for the funeral of the Queen... but we had it on Thursday because Victoria wanted to double stack it with their Friday public holiday... grrr. Not that it really matters because it was a one-off.

Thursday night DnD was good. We made it through relatively unscathed, I mean, my character took a giant arrow to the chest, but also, he ran into a room designed to lock you inside and heat up and took a grant total of like 4 points of damage from that, so, you know, he kinda had it coming.

On the plus side, we ended with him heavily flirting with a delightful elven bounty hunter... but also about the drink his body weight in alcohol in order to win a drinking competition. So we'll see how his evening progresses.

I mean, I think if push comes to shove he might pick the lady over the contest... but he also really wants to beat the current champions. Also, weirdly, he's very confirmed to me in the last couple of weeks that he's straight. Which is fine, I hadn't actually given it a ton of thought, but eventually my characters generally let me know how they're wired. And Dax is both straight, and predominantly attracted to elven women it seems. So there's that.

But I look forward to seeing how it all comes out next week.

Friday was Chiro day... so, usual trip into the city, with a wander around afterwards, poking my nose in basically the exact same shops I poke my nose into every time. But it was a nice wander in the sunshine.

Friday night DnD was cancelled. But we knew this, because Mr is on a work trip. So instead, Fluffy, Mrs and I had a board game night. And it was a good, chill night. With a good game. Which was very pleasant. Doubly so because I didn't have to prep for DnD.

Like I said, a lot of things.

Anyway.

Today was actually pretty good.

We did the usual supermarket thing this morning. Although one of the things you don't expect to see first thing in the morning on a Saturday is a bunch of people in their early 20's all dressed up in medieval garb. They looked amazing (well, most of them), and I told them so. Because that's what you do, you don't ignore them like everyone else seemed to be doing, you tell them how good they look.

Later research seems to indicate that they were probably heading down to Victor Harbor to the Viking Festival. Which I didn't even know was a thing. Also, turns out that there's a Medieval Festival in May, so might have to keep that one in mind.

The rest of the supermarket trip was much less interesting, although I'm trying out a new recipe for soup that I found this week. Which seems like it's a combination of the rice soup I've made a couple of times and my chicken CHOW-DAH. So it should be interesting.

After the usual unpackery, we went to IKEA to find something specific Ma wanted... and came back with a whole bunch of stuff we hadn't intended to get, because what's a trip to IKEA without doing that.

But a pleasant trip.

Current mood:

photo saturday: changing faces

So... these four images are, unsurprisingly, all the same character. And a character with a long timeline, but a brief history.

Dus started out as Dusk, a young half-drow rogue I played in a test game once. As in, we were asked to test play a module that somebody from our branch of Adventurer's League had written. So, I threw together a quick character, which was the aforementioned rogue.

The module was kind of a mess, I ended up providing some pretty extensive feedback, and I believe that it got better after the next edit. Or at least better than it was.

But then one of the guys from AL wanted to run a homebrew game, which, honestly, I wasn't super enthused about, but I also wanted to support him, because he was a friend at the time (he's since slide off the face of the earth, but, you know, that's fine), so I redesigned Dusk, turning him into Dus and making him a changeling, which wasn't AL legal at the time.

Changelings can take on the appearance of anyone, but as part of their "culture", they tend to have two types of appearances, Personas and Masks. Masks are a temporary appearance that you taken on as needed, and might express a mood, whereas Personas are, as the name suggests, a more developed identity, crafted over time and used for a specific purpose. There might be a Persona for combat, another for negotiation, or one that deals with a skill. And one of the parts of the explanation that I like is that in changeling communities, there might only be one persona that's the healer for example, but that persona is shared by several different creatures who use it when they're on duty.

Which, honestly, feels much more like an NPC thing than a character thing.

These weren't really Dus's personas at the time. Dusky was, and in honor of the original version, this one was also raised as a weaver and created the drow persona to match his adopted dad, but the other two were personas I came up with when I was throwing around rogue ideas recently. Dustaniel du Prost is the persona I've nicknamed The Fool... the persona he throws on when it's in his interests to be underestimated or otherwise overlooked. Or when he needs to talk to fancy folks. And Pleasure is for when you absolutely need to have access to a woman designed to get people's attention.

There are two downsides to changelings though. The first being that you can only shift into a shape that you have clothing for. So, in the case of armour, you'd need to have access to armour that could change with you. Or you need to stay in a similar shape no matter the persona or mask.

Or have a very kind DM that gives you access to armour that shapeshifts with you.

And the second problem is... playing what amounts to three or four characters seems like it could be a giant pain in the ass. Or at the very least, a lot more work. I also can't work out whether you just do the reveal immediately, or whether you travel as a persona for a long time, only transforming when it makes sense to do so.

I mean, it's very much the "when do you do any kind of reveal for a D&D character?" question. To me, the answer is always "as long as humanly possible"... or at the very least, "at the right time".

So, will I ever play Dus... maybe. I'd just need to work out a way to do it that makes sense to me.

Anyway...

This week's soup was what happens when I make Halfling Everything Soup without at any point looking at the recipe. Because what's the point of Everything Soup if you can only make it with one specific set of ingredients.

But it was pretty good regardless.

Thursday night DnD was also pretty good. I mean, I'm running around with a single hitpoint and we're about to go into combat, but otherwise, you know, it was a good time. I also completely forgot that half-orcs have the ability to come back up after being knocked unconscious, because as I've said before, this is the only race from the Players Handbook I've never played before. And it's also why I have the singular hitpoint.

I also discovered that my boy Dax is very much a "if you run, I will chase you" kind of guy... which would be great, if I had better armour.

Friday night DnD was great. And also happened to be Fluffy's birthday, so double good.

But they managed to take out one of the hags, while also being split up and there only being two of them in the combat. And yes, I was a kind DM a few times, but they still managed it in the end. So now she's head and they can go through and clear out the rest of her lair, finding all the things they need.

I also got to have a great conversation between Fluffy's character and the hag at the start of the game, and pull a few of his strings in a way that I knew he very probably wouldn't bite on, but I wanted to make him think about the offer she made him for a hot minute. And then she got shoved in an oven and died ala Hansel and Gretel, so that literally went up in flames.

And I was able to drop some lore on Mrs's character and introduce some themes that will be relevant later... and then we finished the game with Mr's character being reunited with the twin brother who went missing when he was a child.

Because, and I cannot state this strongly enough, if you give me a hook in your backstory, I will absolutely use it. You want a long lost twin. Done, he was kidnapped by one of the antagonists. You want to be a fairy and of noble background. Done, I will absolutely reconfigure elements of the existing story that I didn't like anyway into something that relates to your background AND I will have a character tell you a story foreshadowing it in your very first game. You want to have one parent who left you and another who's neglectful. Done, and I will make you feel every inch of both of those elements and basically the more you give me to play with, the more I will use it to mess with you... and then secretly hope that in the end I can stick the landing of the emotional payoff.

But, yeah, Mr's character and his twin were reunited right at the end of the game... and I had that thing again where, as a DM (and also as a player, but honestly it tends to happen more as a DM), when I play a scene where an NPC would get emotional, I in turn get choked up. And I could feel it coming on as we did the reunion scene with the twins, and I could see Mr going a little the same way, so, yeah, we were basically at time anyway, so they hugged and then I pulled the pin.

It doesn't really matter though, because I can guarantee that it'll happen next session anyway. But that's not for two weeks, because Mr has a work thing next week.

Anyway...

Today was... a thing that happened.

So we did the usual supermarket thing, and then finally got around to doing a thing we've been talking about for entirely too long. Around the time my computer started slowly dying of "being fucking old".

I bought a new laptop.

I didn't overly research anything, I literally went into Good Guys, spoke to the very lovely older gentleman in the computer section, he was, as previously stated, lovely... as the people in the computer section of Good Guys somehow have a tendency to be... in a way that no other store really seems to manage. I told him what I needed the computer for, he said, this one. I said, I have no idea what that brand is, he said, it's basically IBM, I said, yes, that does in fact make me feel better. He said a lot of words that probably mean something to somebody who knows more about computers than I do. And I said, let's do it.

So we did it, and I brought him home and got it out of the box and put it on the kitchen counter and keep stroking the pretty silver brushed metal (yet somehow incredibly square) top of it when I get up...

And I'm now freaking out slightly. We went right through the excitement part and came out the other end with remarkable speed... not a record by any stretch of the imagination, but we're here now.

Not least of all because I just realised that the old laptop (this one, that I'm typing this on) had a 750GB hard drive... and this one has, if I'm reading the box correctly, 256GB... which is just a little bit more than the amount of space that I currently have left free on this laptop.

And it doesn't have a CD drive, so I'm going to need to jump through some hoops in order to get some form of Photoshop working on the new laptop, and while I do have two tiny external hard drives, I think perhaps, just maybe, that there is a case to be made for spending another $100 on a 1T external drive... just, you know... for funsies.

Yeah, I should have known it was all too good to be true. Especially now, having gone back and looked at how much mental trauma I went through buying THIS laptop all the way back in 2014, I should have somehow sensed there would be a problem.

Regret, thy name is limited budget and lack of planning,

It's fine. It'll be fine. It's going to be a total and utter pain in the ass to move stuff across and set it all up the way I want it to be (Step 1: Kill Windows S Mode, Step 2: Install better browsers, Step 3: Uninstall Edge, Step 4: Uninstall McAfee, Step 5: Install Norton, Step 6: Cry) and, honestly, I'm not rushing into it. Unlike last time, I have a functional, if horrifically slow current computer to fall back on.

That's it, that's all you're getting today... my brain is currently fried and I need to go and do something else other than think about laptops.

Current mood:

photo saturday: crystal boy

I can't claim this completely as one of my designs... at least as far as the colour of the gem dragonborn skin... that was something that I saw on the Hero Forge Reddit and grabbed a copy of... I don't remember who it came from though, but I just liked the shininess of it.

And I think they had a more complex colour scheme for the body, I just simplified it down to the two colours that I really liked. Honestly, I need to deep dive into it and work out specifically how they did it.

Also, we're in the world of possible rogues... and the same armour I've used a bunch of times before.

I don't think I ever really came up with a whole story for him... he was more of a design exercise. But then the issue is that I'm kind of running out of new characters... because I'm not really making them right now. So I guess we'll see what happens when I run out of the current images.

Can you tell I'm a little all over the place right now? Yeah... that.

Anyway...

This week's soup was my slightly weird, very heavily rice based soup. So much so that it more or less became a stew. I'm sure there's probably an official name for that kind of thing. You know, beyond "rice soup". But it was very tomato forward with less chicken than perhaps it needed for the amount of rice I put in. It was filling though, unsurprisingly.

I do need something with more broth to it this week though, I think.

On Thursday, I went out to the car in order to head out to Thursday night DnD, only to discover that I'd left the window open a tiny crack on Saturday when we came back from our errands, and had left it like that all week. Which would have been fine, had it not hammered down with rain on Wednesday night and also Thursday afternoon about an hour before I was heading out.

Thankfully it was only open a little bit and I think that the rain was only able to get in from one direction, and might only have done so for the brief, if heavy rain on Thursday. But, in any event, I had to drive while sitting on a towel. And the seat is a little watermarked. Which is literally the last of my car's problems.

Otherwise, Thursday night DnD was pretty good. Honestly, I can see some of us falling back into "old habits", including myself. Which I get, but I also wish we could avoid doing that as much as possible. I might mention something next game if it's still something I notice, but we'll have to see what happens. There's also some of it that maybe I could address in character, but I never think that's great advice. Don't try and solve out of character problems with in character solutions.

Although, if my character does, in fact, take part in a drinking contest when we're all finished with the adventure part of the adventure, he might be a little less polite than usual.

Friday night DnD was excellent... even if it was mostly watching the party plan themselves in a complete circle at least twice. And then split the party and, for the second time in a row, have two members of the party go directly to the hag's bedroom while the other member of the party does something else entirely.

But, honestly, between you and me, I totally wanted them to attempt to sneak in, because it's the more interesting option, all things considered. Plus there's cool stuff that I want them to investigate and find. And also, I'm not doing the prep for this very complex section and having them have one conversation and then just run off, never to return.

It was a good session though. And there's good stuff coming, which I can't wait for.

Anyway...

Today wasn't much of anything... we did the supermarket, and that's about it really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: salt and spray

In previous campaigns, most notably the Icewind Dale campaign, I made too many fucking backup characters. Like, it got to the point where they were basically their own soccer team. It was a little ridiculous.

So, for the new Thursday night campaign... I'm just making one. Probably. Definitely. Maybe. Barring acts of the gods or the whim of the DM.

But this is Salt, Water Genasi and also a member of the Water Ashari... and a sailor. And a Swashbuckler Rogue, and a Warlock of some sort. Honestly, the Warlock bit is the part that will possibly change, but I absolutely want him to have a pseudodragon familiar... because I fucking love pseudodragons.

I also love the Ashari from the world of Critical Role, which is what we're playing on Thursdays right now... and if I'd been really thinking about things clearly I might have made an Ashari character as my actual character.

I haven't really written backstory for him yet, that will come as we play and if he's ever needed, I can adapt his backstory to fit with where we are in the plot.

But he's an older character, as in how old he is versus how old his race lives. And, you know, what happens when you have to guard the abyss... sometimes you find yourself staring into it, and sometimes the abyss stares back.

Anyway...

This week was potato and leek soup... with a couple of ham steaks cut up and dropped in after it was all blended. Actually pretty damn good.

As I said before, Thursday night DnD was the first game of our new campaign, Call of the Netherdeep, from Critical Role. Well, technically, we're doing some intro adventures first based in the same world.

And I won't lie... this game consumed my brain for much of the week. Or rather, my character and the potential relationships with other characters and general unknown-ness of what was to come consumed my brain.

The game itself... was great. I know I've been playing with these folks for a number of years now, but we really just came together quite well. And there are a number of characters who my character is very interested in getting to know more about. I'm also playing an investigator who has a mystery to solve. So he's happy, I'm happy, we're off to the races as they say.

I'm honestly not sure when I've been this excited for the next game.

Friday night's DnD game was also a big one. I finally got to drop a bunch of lore on the group which they've honestly been asking for with just about every NPC they come across. In fact it was so much stuff that Mrs took six pages of notes (which, admittedly, included a full page map).

But it kind of sets them up for the rest of the game, so that's good.

And I got to drop a bombshell on Mr, which was great. Which sounds horrible taken out of context, but, you know, is great in a game of DnD.

Anyway...

Today was the usual supermarketness... and then we ran some errands. Well, an errand, that meant we went to three different places looking for something that took all of 12 seconds to find... once we got to the third place. So, you know, it could have been worse.

Current mood: