photo saturday: call him mister flint

So... sometimes you just do a throwaway thing and then you stop and think... wait, is this something? This was the situation I found myself in for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book. I was half fucking around with the (yet even more) new swords that dropped this week and the weird rock people race that appeared a couple of weeks back, thinking about some kind of Fighter.

And I just slapped an existing costume on the model and looked at the dumb, dumb, dumb hat on that head... and it became a character.

I also love the idea of taking something that would otherwise absolutely be a gunslinger of some sort, and turn it into a sword and board fighter. And originally I'd picked out a normal shield, but then I saw the busted up one. Now, firstly, I wish there was a "clean" version of that shield, because I really like the wood texture, but secondly, I love the idea that it's still a fully functional shield, but at some point some random monster took a bite out of it. Which, honestly, tells you a lot about Flint as a character.

And yes, while he's a "samurai", it's less about him being a fantasy version of a historical Japanese military nobility, and more the description on the subclass... 

The Samurai is a fighter who draws on an implacable fighting spirit to overcome enemies. A samurai’s resolve is nearly unbreakable, and the enemies in a samurai’s path have two choices: yield or die fighting.

Yeah, story checks out. And that very much syncs up with both an Earth Genasi and an Urban Bounty Hunter.

Will Mr Flint (and yes, I think he's probably Mr Flint, but the sword kinda protruded over where they would otherwise appear) ever see the light of day? Would I give him a makeover if he did? Who can say. I mean, I can, I can say... and probably no to the first and probably yes to the second.

Anyway.

This week's soup was one of those tomato, chicken and rice deals... and, honestly, I very good version. I added a touch of cayenne pepper which added a really nice warmth to it.

Also, I had my rental inspection on Tuesday, so I did half the cleaning on Sunday and then did the full vacuum/mop/wipe down everything not nailed down clean on Monday. And as such, it didn't consume the entire day like it used to when I did it all at once.

Fast forward to Tuesday... and after checking everything was good to go about 400 times, I toddled off around 1pm to do a bunch of other things and generally Not Be Here.

That involved... [deep breath]...

• Driving to Burnside Library to drop books off
• Leaving the car there and walking over to Burside Village
• Having The Feelings about the place I used to go All The Time
• Getting a pie from the Village Bakery, which is The Best
• Walking down to the bus stop I always used to use and catching the bus into the city
• Picking up my preorder copy of B Dylan Hollis' cookbook, Baking Yesteryear from Dymocks (woo)
• Catching the bus back to the library
• Reading my book for about three quarters of an hour and picking up a book that was on the No Holds list
• Coming home four hours later to a very clean and inspected apartment

And I say it every single time, but the very best feeling in all the world is coming home to a thoroughly cleaned apartment that has already been inspected and you can just enjoy.

Unsurprisingly I let my body recuperate after all the bending and stretching and doing of things.

Thursday Night DnD was... a lot. Which is what happens when your character has the personality trait "I must know the answer to every secret, no door remains unopened in my presence" when confronted with what is clearly a secret door with a very disturbing phrase scrawled on it about basically being fine with your own death and abandon all hope ye who enter here and such... and basically meant that my character and another character were disappeared off elsewhere and the rest of the party had to work through the "are they dead, are they alive, what do we do" trauma.

Then, when we finally managed to reunite after having to play basically two different games for a while, half the party were sent insane and started attacking the rest of the party. Well... half the party went insane... two thirds of the rest passed their save... and... I hadn't stepped into the space that triggered the effect yet.

Until the very end of the game, when, in order to distract another member of the party from trying to do a murder on the last remaining crazy person, I stepped into the room. And we ended the game there, at my request, before I rolled my save. Because I am, in fact, literal Satan.

But I rolled the save last night when DM Fluffy arrived at my place. And I rolled... a 4. So, look forward to next week when the rogue with the magic item that lets him turn invisible fucks up the barbarian who hasn't gotten around to raging yet.

Or. Stab, stab, stabitty stab.

And I get to be evil to the player who will absolutely be the most "traumatised" by it. So, you know, good times.

Thursday was also the six year anniversary of the first game I played with the original three Thursday boys, which very much makes me go both "how has it been so long?" and also "it's literally been five minutes".

Friday Night DnD is what happens when Mr Grumpants McSecret-haver fails an Insight check against my Bird Boy who "always wants to know how things work and what makes people tick" after someone from his past who clearly Knew Things and also Was Dumb showed up... and the party basically keeps splitting up and doing it's own thing, leading to me being able to discover A Big Secret. 

I mean, I basically have a name for Mrs Grumpypants. And while the character doesn't know yet, Fluffy, the player in question, hates Everything About It... which is, in fact, giving me life. See aforementioned literal Satan.

Also, my current Really Dumb Idea is that that sword that has a name and that he won't let out of his sight, won't let other people touch, literally sleeps while cuddling... is Mrs Grumpypants. Somehow. I mean, I'm also sure that it literally isn't (it's much more likely that his wife just GAVE him the sword or something pedestrian... but that's the fucking boring option). But I just want to record the idea here so that later when I'm proved correct I can be smug about it. Which definitely won't happen. But should.

Anyway.

Today was foggy.

No, literally. I got up, took a shower, opened the blinds in the living room and went "huh, guess the shower fogged up the windows... also, the bedroom windows and the kitchen windows... wait... what?". Only to look out the bathroom window, which was open, to discover, no, just actual fog.

So that was exciting. For a limited understanding of the word exciting. Given that we rarely get mist or fog or similar.

And honestly, it was more lazy rain than it was fog. Basically rain that couldn't be bothered falling all the way to the ground. But it lasted all the way from when I got out the shower to after we finished at the supermarket, but disappeared shortly afterwards. Although it hung out up in the hills a while longer.

We did the supermarket thing. And after not really deciding to do anything else, changed out minds and did a brief trip to Spotlight for Looking At Things.

photo saturday: 18th blogiversary realness

Happy Blogiversary to me! Tuesday was my 18th Blogiversary to be exact. So, yes, my blog is now 18 years old and can buy alcohol, gamble, vote and get an intimate piercing... then take a picture of it and send it to someone.

Yeah, that slightly got away from me.

But still, I've been banging away at this thing for the same length of time as an actual adult person. Scary that. Even if it is mostly just a once a week update and random DnD characters these days.

Speaking of same.

After last week I realised that other than my couple of wizard characters, I don't tend to fuck around with potential wizard designs, because it's not really my preferred arcane class, sorcerer all the way baby. So I started considering potential wizards for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book.

And although they lean into it less in 5e, a Gnomish Illusionist was a staple of previous editions. Also, I do love me a bitch who is extra. So that's how we ended up with Glim Glittergem (because nothing says extra like alliterative names) and his blue furred rabbit familiar, Horcusporcus, or Horcy for short. In a perfect world he might be wearing a top hat, but all the Hero Forge top hats are a little too goofy looking.

Anyway.

For some reason I've had a brain fart the last two weeks and ended up making soup that was a little too thin. But then it was pea and ham, so it was generally okay anyway.

Thursday Night DnD was... weird but good. Mostly weird because everyone was really timid about going into Obvious Bad Place... and I have the traits "I must know the answer to every secret, no door remains unopened in my presence" and "I care about the truth above all else, even if it doesn’t benefit anyone"... so, good times.

Also when you basically invent perfectly reasonable backstory in the moment based on things that happen. Although we also had to fight a fight we basically could have avoided because everyone else wanted to go right and I wanted to keep going left. Granted one of the players also got a cool magic item out of it, so not terrible.

I also just realised that given the magic item we found at the end of the last game which my character kept, he's now a big old nerd in glasses. Which I kind of dig.

Friday was also Chiro Day, which was good, because I was sorely in need of an adjustment, no pun intended.

Friday Night DnD definitely didn't go according to how I thought it would. But it was still good. It was a late night though, we left at 1am, and I didn't probably get to sleep until around 2am. And then woke up at 6. So, I'm gunna crash out super early tonight I think.

Anyway.

For the aforementioned reason, we didn't do anything beyond shopping today.

movies: elemental

Well, Elemental is...solidly middle of the road. It's not the worst Pixar movie by any means, but it is both very on the nose at times and conversely it did make me tear up by the end.

I will say, that I went into this movie knowing NOTHING. Beyond the fact that it was called Elemental and it was about elemental people. That's it.

It's essentially the first Pixar "rom-com". And I only put that in quotes because it's not the kind of dumb comedy rom-com that seems to exist currently, it's more of a romance with some comedy but also, you know, drama and stakes.

Weirdly, I would have put money on somebody associated with the writing or directing of this movie being second generation Middle Eastern or something similar, because the flame folks in this movie are SO incredibly Middle-Eastern-immigrant coded (down to the music, and a lot of the design in the fire part of town) that it's ridiculous. But, no, turns out it's at least partially based on director Peter Sohn's life as the son of Korean immigrants.

Interestingly, the water people are definitely Caucasian-coded. And we don't see enough of the air/cloud people or the earth/tree/grass people to draw a parallel.

I will say though, that the overall story isn't the greatest. It feels like it keeps picking new plot cards, playing with them for a short amount of time before throwing them away and picking a completely different card and going in another direction. It also feels like it introduces a main character trait at the mid point of the movie when it's never really been explored (I mean, kind of, but not in the way that makes it clear from the jump). Most of it gets paid off, but it's a little all over the place. Essentially, the script could have definitely done with maybe one more draft with a fresh pair of eyes.

I also maintain one of the same things I said after the abysmal Strange World, Disney, can you maybe pay for some therapy for your creators? They clearly have ongoing parental issues. I mean, I know what this story is going for, a story that while not "universal" is something that a lot of people can understand, but at the same time... issues.

And does this movie somewhat copy Zootopia's homework, less from a plot standpoint, but more from a design aesthetic? Absolutely. But that's going to happen when you set a movie in a fantastical city with design elements that lean into a world with a specific theme.

There are also a lot of design choices here that I love. I love the "formal" clothing for the flame folk that is essentially stained glass. I love that the fire people have legs that come to a point at the bottom, because of course flame spreads out as it rises. I love that there is no one look for the earth people. They're basically "dirt plus plants" in some combination, but they range from people with trees growing out of their heads to covered in grass and everything in between. At the same time, it's hard to do creatures made of air, and their shorthand was "cloud", but that's just water vapour, which essentially just makes them a different race of water folk.

As is expected, the effects of the fire and water and cloud are beautiful, there's a whole underwater section that is stunning, but that's only to be expected from a Pixar movie.

Would I have expected that I would get teary at the end based on even the midway point of the movie? No. But they still got me there, which I count as a success.

yani's rating: 3 sparklers out of 5

photo saturday: silver lady

So this is why I like to do my research when it comes to DnD Character Colouring Book. Which mostly means digging into things from old editions, because for whatever reason, 5e is hideously allergic to providing actual information about the way various races might live or worship their gods or whatever, for reasons that I really don't understand.

In any case, I was just playing around with half of an idea for a female dwarf paladin and went to look at the Dwarven pantheon just to see what interesting god or goddess she might worship, and found one I hadn't really explored before, Berronar Truesilver, goddess of home, healing, marriage and dwarven home life. And is also the wife of the main dwarven god.

And back in 3e they would put out these books about the gods that included how the church was organised and also if they had "affiliated orders", which mostly covers knights and the like. Which is where I found a mention of the Berronar's Valkyries, who were female warriors who would observe battles from a distance and swoop in if dwarven warriors where being overrun or if a dwarf was too badly hurt to withdraw. I'll be honest, the overall feel of it was good and slightly sexist all at the same time, but I like the idea, so tweaked it to the idea of Truesilver Valkyries, who wade into the battle with the other warriors, but they act as field medics, protectors and rallying the other warriors. And seek both their own glory and to inspire glory in others.

I also love the idea of these warriors in armour that just shines on the battlefield, and in this instance, the disadvantage on stealth from heavy armour is because it catches the light constantly rather than because it makes noise. And that her cloth garments would be made of some kind of cloth of gold, but, you know, cloth of silver. Which seems like something dwarves would be into making. The very subtle inlay of the goddess's symbol on the weave of the cloth (which barely shows up in the image) also amuses me. Likewise having the symbol embossed very discreetly on the shield boss rather than splashed across the whole shield. Originally I was going to go for horns on the helmet, but I like the silver wings on either side.

Anyway.

I made up a mostly vegetable soup this week but sliced up a stick of pepperoni and added that in, so the whole thing had a bit of a spicy kick to it, which wasn't bad at all.

There was no Thursday Night DnD this week, surprising nobody.

Friday Night DnD was more talking... and then the plot kicked in in ways that I did not see coming. But then you don't really expect a wizard's tower on a cloud to show up and the cloud giant wizard just lay out the entire plot in the least elegant way ever. So there's that.

We were interrupted about half way through though by a very surprising instance of the two cats who are usual the chillest babies ever fully going at each other in ways that shocked everyone. So, basically, pause for cat drama.

Anyway.

We did the supermarket thing this morning, surprising nobody.

Then we went to the movies (more on that later).

photo saturday: hello lover

Let's call this week's DnD Character Colouring Book, the answer to a question nobody asked. But rather, knowing a certain player and the character they're currently playing, what's a character that would get under the skin (not necessarily in a negative way) of that player AND that character.

Also, it's trying to embody the vibe of "she's going step on your neck and you'll enjoy it" in a character.

The weird thing is that I make a lot of different warlock characters, but I'm not really that excited about the actual mechanics of the warlock. They are one of the most interesting classes to build a character around though. The Genie Patron is one that I either want to basically make Aladdin or lean into the elemental heritage for, hence the Air Genasi. Also, I just like Genasi.

If this was a character who actually saw table-time, I think the dress may be turned into either tartan fabric or potentially I'd mess around with the colours to see if I could get a vaguely velvet look out of it.

The stupid thing with characters I think about as back-up characters is that I always know what their "entrance line" would be... it never ends up happening, but it gives me a way into thinking about the character I guess. In Blast's case... "Hello lover". 

Anyway...

This week has been about three and a half months long.

In keeping with the overall theme of the week, which is "nothing ever works out like it should", this week's soup was probably the worst version of chowder I've made in a while. I mean it was tasty, it was just too thin. Thankfully a little cornflour generally fixes that problem.

Sunday night I had to do a banking thing, which should have been easy and something that took an extra 12 seconds to complete. Turns out no, because fuck me I guess. So that turned into my dumb ass standing on the doorstep of the bank when they opened at 9:30am on Monday morning and getting the problem fixed (why the problem occurred in the first place, nobody fucking knows), and then trying to access the banking on my phone with the shitty reception in the bank. What felt like 900 years but was probably 5 actual minutes later, everything was fixed. But still... I slept like crap on Sunday night, because I kept thinking about the issue that needed to be fixed.

Moving along.

After Chiro Day the other week, I'd been getting some weird cold sensations in my legs and put off going to see my chiro because surely it would improve over the week. It didn't really. So once I got back from the bank I called and managed to get in to see my chiro later that day.

Turns out it wasn't a major issue, more of an offshoot of the problem that keeps recurring, but in a vaguely positive way (if pain is the default, and that lessens, your brain doesn't know how to process a different set of feelings, it defaults to cold or vague pins and needles or such... so, yay, I guess?).

But then I caught the wrong bus home. I mean, it wasn't a disaster, it was one of the buses I used to catch to the old house, and I got off at the closest possible spot to current house and instead of the walk home taking me about 5 minutes, this took maybe 15-20 minutes. Also not the worse thing in the world to walk a little more and shake out my back after a chiro visit.

There was also no DnD this week. DM Fluffy was On Holiday, so the Thursday night game was already marked down as Not Happening, but he had intended to be back for the Friday game, but developed Holiday Cough. So, no thank you sir, you keep your interstate diseases to yourself, thank you.

I did also go back for a follow up with my chiro on Friday just to make sure everything was still where it was supposed to be.

So that was basically my week. It doesn't sound like a lot... it just felt like it stretched over a Very Long Time.

Anyway...

Brief sidebar.

Women He's Undressed is a documentary about a very famous Hollywood costume designer called Orry-Kelly. Basically if you can think of a famous movie from the 1940's to the 1960's, he may possibly be the costume designer. Jezebel, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Arsenic and Old Lace, An American in Paris, Oklahoma!, Auntie Mame, Gypsy, Some Like It Hot... all him, or the women at the very least.

Plus he was also, at one point, in a secret relationship with a very famous Hollywood leading man.

It was, when I found it, free on YouTube. Worth checking out if costumes and old movies are your vibe.

Anyway...

Today was... not much of anything.

Basically, the supermarket, then wasting some time here before Ma went home.

photo saturday: boat-hat and frogs

Weirdly, I thought I'd revisited this particular character at some point after his first appearance in DnD Character Colouring Book... you know, back when I was actually colouring them by hand in Photoshop. I did give him a do-over once things went to colour, but I went back and redid him again for this iteration. Is there that much of a point to it being as he's a character that I'm probably never going to get to play again? Not really. Do I enjoy doing it anyway? Yes.

Also, it lines up with the idea that he keeps finding more interesting or newer bits of clothing and armour and swapping it out... not that it's BETTER, just different.

To steal from the last post about him...

Firstly there's Vrak. Vrak is a fighter/rogue/ranger goblin who likes to lick things. He licks things he doesn't understand, in an effort to understand them. He licks things that may or may not be food. He licks things he absolutely should not lick. Vrak is a licker. It's what he does.

Vrak also put his armour together from whatever he could steal, scavenge or otherwise acquire, so none of it matches. And when tasked with an adventure that would take him onto the high seas, his only stipulation was that he wanted a "boat hat". Later he turned said "boat hat" into a magical boat hat that he can make produce a frog up to three times a day. This, obviously, involved him licking the inside of the hat, amongst other things.

And as far as I can tell at this point, Vrak's main aim in life is to Be Useful. So he's the character who will not necessarily attack the enemy, but instead go and assist one of his new friends. His ranger spells aren't the premier choices (Goodberry and Speak with Animals), but they suit him. 

 I do love the idea of him ending up as a Swarmkeeper Ranger and being perpetually surrounded by little spectral frogs. I also like the idea of him just lifting up his hat and his swarm of frogs just falling out of it. And even though I have his subclasses listed, I don't think he actually got to high enough level to trigger any of them... I think the last time I played him he was Fighter 2, Rogue 2, Ranger 2. So his full deal wouldn't kick in until Level 9.

What's super weird is that I now can't remember what he looked like before the hat. I think he was supposed to have a mask or a animal skull face plate or something (I have a vague memory of a frog skull helmet), but that never quite worked for me. The hat suits him much better.

Anyway.

Turns out that sweet potato soup isn't as good as regular potato soup. It was decent... but it just wasn't really my thing.

Thursday Night DnD was great... Was that because it was mostly a roleplay session? Yes. Was it because the session let me have a moment with another player who I always enjoy roleplaying with? Also yes. Was it also because it resulted in having another one on one roleplay moment with DM Fluffy on Friday to wrap up my character's bit of storyline without having to make the rest of the table sit through that.

Friday Night DnD was a return after two weeks off. And somehow, for some reason, I never printed off my character sheet after we leveled up last game. I leveled up, I just never printed it. Stupid me. Thankfully I had enough time before the game to borrow Mr's computer and do myself a serviceable version for the evening. Once again, also very much a Talking About Things session. But we very much organised ourselves into a party when, at this point, we didn't have much of a reason to be (outside of "because that's what the adventure says happens").

Anyway...

Not much to report for today... although I did get my hands on the tea I tried to get at Coles last week (turns out that it wasn't actually available until the beginning of last week), so very excited about that, given that I've been waiting for this tea to show up in Australia since 2020.

But nothing else beyond general supermarketry.