photo saturday: beestinger pairs

The last three Beestinger sisters come in sets of two... which, I realise as I say it, sounds confusing. But this week's Beestinger sisters start out with Belladonna and her fiance Beau, who wasn't originally a thing, but I made him for something else and realised he'd made a fun addition.

And of course, the Beestinger sister with the fiance is based on my second favourite (or maybe tied first) Doctor Who companion, Donna.

Does she have incredibly bad taste? Clearly, yes. Or at least she likes too many prints and colours in an outfit.

I also appreciate the fact that I ended up with at least three different halfling gods represented in the family. Belben has Brandobaris, Belladona had Yondalla, the twins (up next) have Sheela Peryroyl.

But Belladona is basically "front of house" for the bakery, but also turns her hand to both icing or decorating things and making various candied fruits and nuts and other things made of or with sugar. And clearly Beau has a very sweet tooth.

And rounding out the Beestinger sisters, the twins, Cara and Pearl. Beekeepers, gardeners and makers of mead. They're also the only members of this branch of the family with heterochromia

They also take their names from the last two good companions, Clara and Billie. But of course, I went with the first name of the actress who plays her, Pearl Mackie. And like the character she played, I always had in the back of my head that Pearl was the other same sex attracted member of the family (Belben being the other one, because your first character is always mostly just you).

I also envisaged that the pair of them turned the little plot of grass behind the bakery into a riot of wildflowers and herbs and ingredients their mother uses for remedies and teas. And the flowers also feed the wicker beehives they use. Well, the bees in said beehives, obviously.

Anyway.

This week was a week full of tomato soup and cheese toasties. And I pretty much perfected my cheese toasties (the secrets are low heat, real butter and using a vegetable peeler to slice really really thin pieces of cheese and then using a lot of them). I did run out of steam for the soup on Friday, not through any fault of the soup, and I will say that I non-zero amount of that might have been that I'd basically run out of good bread for toasties at that point.

After doing some rough calculations on the granny square blanket I was attempting to make for myself I discovered that I would need something in the region of 180 squares... and have made 24. So, while I'm not necessarily giving up... I am putting that on the back burner a little. Also I want to maybe do some different pattern squares, so we'll see how that all goes.

Instead I decided to maybe try something that would take longer to finish. So I broke out the chunky red Merino wool I got from the Friday gang and started working on a scarf. And because I am a glutton for punishment, I decided to try the ribbing stitch I'd been unable to get with the thinner black yarn.

Turns out that chunky yarn, a bigger hook and stitches I can actually see make all the damn difference.

However... all things come at a price. Because I was trying to make it into an infinity scarf, but managed to twist the first row around on itself completely, so the whole thing has a giant kink in it and also, my join is absolutely fucking hideous because it's the point where I need to flip the work around and go back the way I've come and it's a disaster.

So I came to a decision last night, even though I'm just about at the end of the second ball of yarn... I'm frogging the whole thing, starting over, and making it a straight scarf that I will then stitch together at the end.

On the plus side, it only took me a couple of days to get to this point, so I should be able to get back to the point I'm at now pretty quickly.

Oh, yeah, before I forget, I picked up a couple of the later Marvel movies from the library last Friday, because they're just sitting there and why not. Specifically Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

Wakanda Forever is, potentially barring the usual Mandatory Third Act Giant Battle Scene, sensational. If they could have seen their way clear to lifting that nonsense out, it would have been pretty much perfect. I get why it's there, but it's not needed. Because the movie is a conversation about grief. Partly the grief of the cast and crew at the loss of Chadwick Boseman, and partly the grief of the characters at the loss of the character of Black Panther.

It's also funny that you can see the parts of the script that I think existed before Boseman died, because there are a number of scenes that you could clearly just swap out Black Panther and add in either Shuri or Queen Ramonda. But there are other parts that absolutely only exist because of Boseman's absence. Props also go to both Angela Basset and Letitia Wright who carry the entire movie on their collective shoulders. Well, the pair of them along with Ruth E. Carter, the costume designer.

The other thing I could have pretty much done without was The White People. Because the scenes back in Washington with Martin Freeman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus add nothing. Also, is Louis-Dreyfus wearing a fake nose in addition to what might be a terrible wig, or is that just her face? Yeah, none of that please.

It's also 100% a female driven movie. Basically there are three male characters (with more than like four lines) and only the villain is really what I'd class as a main character... everyone else is a woman, and a woman of colour at that.

I do find it interesting that both movies include "the next generation" of Marvel characters, so it's clear where they're headed, because unlike the comics, they can't just keep reusing the same characters over and over and over as their actors age out of the roles or refuse to come back or retire or whatever.

In contrast to Wakanda Forever, Multiverse of Madness is just... dumb. Sam Rami was so busy try to either ram in Constant References to either his own back catalogue or Things From The Comics, that they don't bother to really have a movie in their movie. It wasn't unwatchable, it was just incredibly underwhelming. There were bits that I disliked, unfortunately most of those things were anything  including Banderscatch Crumplebottom and Not Amy Adams. And mostly the things I did like was anything involving Elizabeth Olsen.

And not only because this movie gets us one step closer to Hulkling and Wiccan in a movie. Also, now that we're fucking with Multiverses, nobody who might die STAYS dead, because we can just go pluck them out of some other universe.

So, there you go, a mini double movie review out of nowhere. Not enough to make it it's own post, so it can just live here, lost to time.

Thursday Night DnD was... The End. The end of this campaign. The end of the adventures for these characters. The end of my involvement in Thursday Night DnD for... the foreseeable future. Am I sad? Not especially. Am I happy? Not especially. I suppose "relieved" is the better term. But even that's not completely accurate. I have no strong opinions at this time.

Ask me again later I guess. Or don't.

Friday Night DnD was Doing A Heist Without Heisting Anything. And Much Angst About Graph Paper Children. Good though.

Anyway.

Today was basically the Supermarket, followed by Looking At Things at Kmart.