photo saturday: magic hands

There's a reason why I often just have whatever the last DnD Character Colouring Book character I've made sitting on the side of my desktop... it allows my brain to work out what's missing or get a handle on the character in general.

Zak'n is definitely one of those. Because when I made him, I was making a Warrior of Shadow Monk. Hence the fact he's a drow, he's dressed all in black/grey, etc. Also, I was fucking around with the idea of courtesan/sex worker as entertainer, because for whatever reason, I often gravitate towards the idea of a male sex worker in a lot of other TTRPG systems, even if I never end up wanting to bother playing those systems.

So chasing those ideas to the bottom of the jar gave me the idea of him being part of an order of Sune, goddess of beauty and passion, hence the amulet with the lips on it. And also adding a resized key, because the position I'd put his hand in really looked like he should be holding onto something.

But then at a certain point I was looking at him while also watching something on the laptop and I realised that he should be a Warrior of Mercy Monk, because they both heal and do additional harm... and the idea of a masseuse plus the snake tattoos (which I just added because they looked cool and I haven't really played around with those new tattoo decals very much).

And is there a large amount of Photoshop fuckery in order to get the "spider silk" mesh shirt in place, yes, yes there is. But I do quite like him.

Anyway....

I fucked by basic chemistry this week and made what should have been really good soup... bad and then questionable at best. Because I'd read a bunch of tips about removing some of the acidity from tomato soup, and I think it said either baking soda or baking powder, but I went with baking soda, which I think was wrong, and I also went with too much.

And guess what gives tomato it's general flavour? Yeah, the acidity. I also threw off my mouth's general pH and made the soup and my mouth taste generally a bit soapy. Not fun. I mean, it mellowed out generally as the week went on, but it wasn't great. And I won't be doing that again.

This week's mini movie reviews are the first three John Wick movies. I'd already seen the first one and really enjoyed it, but hadn't dived into any of the sequels.

I'll be honest, of the three, I think the first one is still the perfect version of that idea, but the thing I like about all of the movies is less the gun-fu/murder 900 people with a pencil of it all and more the world that these movies hint around without ever going too far into detail to over explain things.

I also love that in an alternate timeline, they're all incredibly low budget movies starring actors that you've never heard of or vaguely remember from the 80's and probably never made it past the first one. But instead we get to the third one and have collected people like Halle Berry, Anjelica Houston and Laurence Fishburn.

Also, the production design, costumes and lighting on those movies is fantastic.

If I had any complaint, it would be that a lot of the digital squibs/bloodsplatter/bullet hits look a little fakey. And sometimes the fight scenes seem to go from a little to fast to what feels like incredibly slow. But, once again, some of the fights are the least interesting part of the movies for me.

And I have the fourth one on order at the library... and have no idea why there are a whole bunch of copies just marked as "available on shelf" at various libraries and none of them are currently being sent to me. But it'll show up eventually.

In crochet news, I finished the second arm warmer/cuff/bracer and did, indeed, start on a hat. And progressed on the hat until I started to lose the will to live and then frogged the entire hat because I was going slowly insane because counting crochet stitches is my kryptonite and also slip stitch ribbing is really fucking hard.

I will give it another go, but once again just making up my own pattern as I go. 

After checking various places we go for a clear shower curtain, I finally thought about just fucking Googling it, only to find that Bunnings had some this whole time (well, I assume the whole time). So I took a little sidequest off to the Kent Town Bunnings on Friday... and, honestly, they need to sort out their damn parking lot, because it's a disaster. I did, however, get a park very quickly, but then, after asking for directions, continued to not find the shower curtains until I asked for assistance from someone else entirely.

Because they were both packaged in a shape I've never seen shower curtains packaged, and also hidden right at the bottom of the shelf and I just didn't pattern match them to what I expected to see.

Also, for whatever reason, the actual plastic on these ones is much closer to something like a department store bag plastic than it is to the inflatable beach ball type plastic of the old ones. Which isn't great. But at least this one doesn't look all gross.

And, finally, at lost last... after three weeks off, Friday Night DnD was finally back. Woo. But as Fluffy said as we were about to leave my place, it felt like both a long time and also no time at all. Which makes perfect sense.

The session itself was very much a "planning what comes next" kind of game. Which is never a bad thing when you're coming back after a break. We're also not that far away from "the end", but then the actual end will be if we run out of things that we want to do. Because there are more than a few loose threads. Admittedly, not all of which we care about, but some we definitely do.

Anyway...

Today was perfectly reasonable.

And I say perfectly reasonable, but it's also going to drive me very insane in the very near future.

We did the usual supermarketry, and given the amount of stuff we had in the trolley, I was sure we'd slightly overspent, but, turns out no. Not sure what happened there.

Then we went off to JB Hi-Fi to investigate the PS4's that they had on sale. And by investigate, I mean buy a very early Christmas present. We also then poked around both JB and Good Guys just looking at various things it. Mostly vacuum cleaners, TVs and sandwich presses.

The next step should be relatively easy... but at the same time, I have to remember passwords and also put up with the old PS4 doing the beepy thing that caused me to stop using it in the first place.

Cross your fingers for me that it's much less painful than I think it might be.

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