photo saturday: alt boys

We're going to do a brief reprise for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book... with the full final version of my last Thursday Night D&D character, Dax Oreva.

I realised that I only posted an earlier version of him, and then added the final version to the banner art.

But, because of DM Fluffy shenanigans, we're going to briefly step into the Multiverse of Dax for a second. That's a thing that happens when one of your fellow players has a character who is a time wizard, and doesn't give the DM much of a backstory... especially DM Fluffy. What you get instead is a peak into the multiverse at other versions of who your character might have been. Even if it's just a name and a brief description.

And you know I then had to fuck around and make those characters once we were done with the campaign. Obviously.

Three of these are the ones that DM Fluffy invented, the second from the right is my own addition. But what's funny is that with Dax and with the addition of Brother Kas, I cover all possibilities on the human/orc/elf timeline. But we have human, half-orc, orc, uniya (elf-orc hybrid, specific to Critical Role) and drow elf. I suppose if we were to complete the circle, there would be a half-elf version too. That one might just be full Rogue though. 

Also, as much as I love DM Fluffy, naming things is not his strongest suit... so the human and drow timeline versions got more fitting names... and he can fight me about it. But once I realised that "dax" was an actual suffix on the Drow naming table, it had to happen. I did keep his name for the orc wizard, because, honestly, it was the best of the names.

And there was a version that is only one step away from Dax, but the main difference between those two was between requited and unrequited love. Also the difference between a lucky and an unlucky dice roll at a point before the campaign.

I'll be honest, the ones that Fluffy invented might not have been the alt versions I would have made myself, or at least with the Ranger I might have gone for a different subclass (Gloomstalker or Swarmkeeper probably)... because we're leaning very heavily on some Drizzt Do'Urden fanfic there, which is fine for a throwaway character mentioned once that I was never going to play. But at the very least, I would have picked a different animal companion. The idea of him rolling around with a tiger is appealing. Or one of the in-world creatures that looks pretty much like a panther with tusks. But on the plus side, there is a version of the Beastmaster where you can decide what your companion looks like each time you summon it... so, you know, it would definitely be that.

Interestingly, just putting these together, I started pulling on the timeline threads that would have needed to change in order to get Dax from Dax to one of these characters. Some of them honestly aren't that long of a walk away. Some of them are just a change the location or circumstances of his birth, or a slightly different upbringing.

I did keep Dax's grey/colourless eyes though. Because I feel like that's a one of a couple of constants throughout the multiverse. The day he was born and the fact that he was born with those pale eyes.

But this does mean that I can now put this particular idea to bed where it belongs.

Anyway...

This week's soup was essentially just chicken and vegetable... but I added some medium grain rice for a change, as well as a healthy dash of cayenne pepper... which very much gave it the "fighting off the last remnants of the cold I had a few weeks back" vibes. Because that will clear out your sinuses. Good stuff though.

This week's mini movie reviews are a documentary, an old favourite and a series.

We start with the documentary Scream Queen, by/following/about the lead actor in the second Nightmare on Elm Street movie (you know, the one that's incredibly queer)... and it was... interesting. Honestly, I feel like he could have just gone to actual therapy to work through some of this stuff, but at the same time, given that some of the issues he was dealing with were also very much public and out in the world, it makes sense.

Next up, an old favourite... that I simulcast with Fluffy (by which I mean "we both hit play on the same YouTube video at the same time")... Vibes. If you haven't heard of Vibes, I'm absolutely not surprised. But it's an 80's movie about people with psychic powers going on a "road trip" (for want of a better term) starring Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Lauper. And yes, I put all those words together in that order, and that is a movie that exists.

And sometimes when you go back to old movies that you watched a lot in your teenage years, you suddenly go "well, this is actually terrible". This wasn't the case. It was actually better than I remembered. Still completely bonkers. And very much a movie from 1988, but everybody is giving their all and it's a lot of fun.

Last up was the Discworld adjacent series, The Watch from 2021. Is it on a level with the best of Discworld? No, absolutely not. Did they take ideas from Pratchett and go their own way with them? Yes. And, honestly, I like a lot of those places. They also fully acknowledge that they're doing their own thing in the credits at the start of every single episode.

I also love a lot of what the production design, wardrobe, hair and makeup and set dressing are doing. Some of the versions of particular characters don't quite work for me, but I like the core cast of the titular Watch.

But for what it is, it has a charm.

Friday Night DnD was... nearly a disaster. We nearly got drowned, we nearly got squished by a giant... but we still managed to squeak through by the skin of our teeth. Or beak, in the case of my character. We are into pre-end-game at this point. As in, the actual end-game will happen whenever we finish doing a bunch of other little bits and pieces that we didn't do before now.

So, some good old DnD level grinding. Which, honestly, is not really a thing that often happens, but I'm here for it.

Anyway...

Supermarket was as supermarket does. I'm winging this week's soup and going for a weird hybrid of two previous soups, so we'll see how that goes. Otherwise we didn't do anything exciting.

photo saturday: merchant of magic

I've said before that wizard isn't my favourite class. But I was also working through all of the new 2024 PHB classes for the DnD Character Colouring Book, as I've said... so I needed a wizard to complete the set. And, weirdly, I do love a dwarven wizard. 

Also, because there are only four subclass choices for each class in the new book as opposed to the eight from the current PHB, Evoker was the one that stood out to me... the "make go bang" wizard if you will. It was also good timing because Hero Forge dropped both a whole new outfit as well as a whole new set of dwarven beards with jewellery in them.

Because I've also been giving everyone a different background, I leaned into "merchant" for Emrik. And he represents a group of either enamel workers or glass makers and both his beard jewellery and his staff are an example of their work. I think I'm leaning into glass makers, because then that also covers his glasses too. Plus, glass and fire...

Works for me.

Anyway...

I set up my "new to me" TV on Saturday... and then spent the next several days trying to find the bits in the menu to make it not make me crazy. Mostly that was turning off the "make the screen dull when there's less light in the room" because I fucking hate that. Also, turns out that the sound on my old TV was much better. But also, this TV is bigger and doesn't have a giant thick line of dead pixels on the left hand side... so, you know, swings and roundabouts. Also it was free. So how hard am I really going to fucking complain.

Not that much.

Soup for this week was a lot of my made up Minestrone, which was nice and thick and chunky and full of pasta. Was there a moment when I dropped the chopped bacon all over the kitchen floor and had to scoop it all up and wash it before I could use it. Yes, yes there was. Also, don't judge me.

This week's mini movie reviews are, once again, a movie and a TV show. And the movie, again, turned out to be a biopic when I thought it was going to be more of an actual documentary.

And it was also a gay artist. This time, Robert Mapplethorpe, in the eponymous movie Mapplethorpe. It was fine... but, honestly, it could have done with more gay. It felt a little "safe" at times, even though it often featured his explicit photography.

Between this and the Tom of Finland movie, I think that is the better movie overall on a similar subject. But it wasn't terrible. And I got to see Matt Smith a lot more naked than I necessarily expected to.

The other choice was the Watchmen TV series from 2019. And I really liked it. It's a slow burn, and I wasn't sure I would after the first couple of episodes, but it pulled me in during the nine episodes and I really enjoyed it. Plus the cast is outstanding.

There's not a hell of a lot else to report for the week. My head cold is mostly gone, which is good.

Also there was no Friday Night DnD because Mrs also had a head cold, so instead I continued Fluffy's Movie Education with Breakfast at Tiffany's and Outrageous Fortune. An odd double bill to be sure, but both enjoyable for very different ways.

Anyway...

Today was decent... and we actually got to do things which made a change from the last two weeks.

The supermarket was fairly average, although I think we were running earlier than we usually do.

Afterwards we did a trip to Kmart so I could finally replace the "active tights" I tore the other week when I fell down. Which would have been easier if a) I hadn't walked past them 8 times and b) if I could have found literally any staff member in the entire store or when I did find one, any other staff member had answered his radio call. But after tracking down the one actual staff member and him telling me they were somewhere that they weren't, he finally looked up where they were and we found them immediately.

And that was it really.

photo saturday: farm boy

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that there would be a Wild Magic Sorceress in my future... turns out I might have gotten the gender wrong. Also, this continues the 2024 DnD Character Colouring Book edition along with Zak'n, Rin, Oren and Micah (amongst others).

I've been playing around with trying to make characters for each class and all the races without repeating any backgrounds and with an even split of genders. Granted these might not all be characters I ultimately play, it is more than likely that by the time I get around to a sorcerer character, it might be something else entirely. And while I did play around with a female Orc for a different class, I ended up trying out the idea of a male Orc for Sorcerer. And, of course, Wild Magic Sorcerer.

And somewhere in the process of making him and playing around with the new hair options that dropped this week, I kind of fell in love with the idea of him/with him. Also with the idea of both an orc farmer and a farmer who suddenly wakes up one day and goes... "what is this magic and where did it come from?".

I was also playing around with the idea of Shadur being deaf. Because one of the languages you can take in the new PHB is Sign Language. How well that would work on a practical, at the table way, and how well it would work for me to play a character who has high Charisma but is potentially unable to speak to everyone they encounter, and how I would adapt to that kind of character remains to be seen. But I feel like he's going to live in my head for a little while. And remain at the very least partially deaf for the foreseeable future.

Originally I tried him out with a couple of different magic focii ideas... firstly a crystal, then a wand... but honestly, he wouldn't have either. I'm not completely sure if the drinking gourd he's carrying is his focus, or if it's full of mead (which would, in turn, make him a beekeeper) or seeds from his farm or if it's full of like dried beans that he uses as a way to attract attention when people can't see him. Or, you know one of those things as well as being a focus.

And yes, those stripes on the top half should continue onto the bottom half... but no matter how I slammed that idea into Photoshop repeatedly, I couldn't make it work the way I wanted it to. So I gave up. But just pretend like it does.

Anyway...

Just for the record, I had four hours sleep and I'm not really functioning on some of the higher levels. But more on that later.

Soup this week was a pretty decent potato and bacon soup. Nothing to write home about necessarily, but decent.

My cold/flu thing did kind of knock me about for a large chunk of the week, but the cold and flu meds definitely helped. Right now I'm mostly left with a minor runny nose and the occasional half-hearted cough.

This week's Mini Movie Reviews are a very mixed bag. We started out with the fourth and final John Wick movie. I... didn't like it that much. It all got a bit silly, even within the frame of reference of "The John Wick Universe" because suddenly people wearing what are clearly linen suits are acting like they're bulletproof, which means Keanu spent about half the movie holding the side of his jacket in front of his face and looking like a total goob.

Would I have preferred a movie where Keanu and Bill Skarsgard spent two hours making out instead of being on screen together for all of five minutes? Yes, yes I would. Do I adore the choices the costume designer made about Bill's wardrobe? Yes.

I also don't buy the ending. I'm not going into it further than that, although you can probably imagine what the end of that quartet of movies might be... but they also absolutely left it open enough for another one. As such, the ending as presented, I don't buy.

Next up was a biopic about gay erotic artist Tom of Finland. I didn't realise it was a biopic when I ordered it from the library... I had assumed it was a documentary. But it wasn't bad. There were times when it might have been served by more of a documentary format with additional information about certain events. Also, the occasional on screen date wouldn't have gone astray in order to place us better in time.

But it was interesting, none the less.

And rounding out this little trio was the sequel to 2013's The Croods. The Croods: A New Age is... fairly pretty, contains all the previous voice cast and is also... a hollow, slightly soulless follow up to a much better movie. Not really surprising given that it's not the original writers and directors and that it got cancelled and restarted a number of times, also that with one thing and another it took seven years for them to make a sequel. I feel like every time somebody replaced the person who was originally going to be part of this, the whole thing got a little worse.

It's still pretty, and I still love the ridiculous world/animal designs. It all just feels a little too "by the numbers". Although at least they didn't reset everybody's personality back to the start of the first movie. I don't know that I'd recommend it, but at the same time, it's perfectly fine. It doesn't hold any kind of candle to the original though.

Friday I took delivery of a second hand replacement TV, which is bigger than my current, slowly dying TV. I haven't hooked it up yet... there needs to be tidying and reorganisation first but it's still very exciting. Also free, which is the best kind of exciting.

Friday Night DnD was basically one big battle... and a slightly more intense fight than we've had in a minute. Are we probably completely screwed next week when the kraken wrecks the boat we're currently on and drags us to the bottom of the ocean... but, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Or you know, free the king of the giants and get him to save us... one of those.

However, because it was a whole big battle that we didn't really start until almost 11pm, we didn't finish until about 1:30... and by the time I drove Fluffy home and then got home myself it was after 2am. So my brain is broken and very much at the "Fire Bad, Tree Pretty" school of thought.

Anyway...

I did also wake up to discover that I'd forgotten to charge my phone overnight, which was a minor inconvenience.

Otherwise the morning was relatively easy... other than the slightly useless check out girl.

And because Ma had something she needed to do by a certain point today, she headed off early, although not quite as early as last week.

photo saturday: demyan on repeat

If I actually kept all the old versions of my characters in Hero Forge, I get the feeling that my Dumpster Fire cleric, Demyan might have ended up with the most versions. Because there was a time there where every time I made "the version" of him, some new item would drop and I'd have to update him.

We have the original version from back in 2021... those are the 2018-2021 versions that changed very little. And then we had the Pre Face Customiser version, which I still really love. There was also a Post Customiser version, but that only shows up in the header. But then, during the Advent Season last December, they dropped the hand fan. The item that I had been using at the table as my shorthand to get to Demyan. The item that I should have flavored as his shield the whole time I was playing him, because it doesn't make a lot of sense that he'd walk around with an actual shield. So a new version was born. But not long after they dropped both new hair, shaved hair decals and a set of new breastplates.

Which brings us to where we are now.

I don't see many new versions coming from this point onwards, not least of all because the only thing I would want to update from this point forward is if they drop a new version of the hakama pants. Although they did revise the original version at some point, but I wouldn't object to a whole new set. Also, if they change the way that the minis hold onto items like the fan.

And I think that, in the real world, that breastplate would be longer and actually sit more on his natural waist, handing down over the pants. But Hero Forge doesn't like doing that, keeping a strict waist seam on pretty much every item that isn't a coat. So, my headcanon is that the underlayer and the sleeves are a very, very fine metal mesh/chainmail.

Anyway.

Short version. I sick. I've been on a slow downward track all week, before really hitting a proverbial wall yesterday. It feels like the same kind of head cold that I had back in 2022. Although without the overwhelming urge to nap. That might come this week to be honest. For most of the week it's just been a general feeling of lurgy. Which I dealt with, like I do every time I get sick, by mainlining the leftover Codral I have in the medicine cabinet from the last time I was sick. I did buy more of the usual supplies for combating being sick, but I'll get to that later.

This week's soup was beef and barley. And actually really good. Admittedly, because I resisted the urge to add tomato and did add a lot of parsley, it came out somewhere in the grey/khaki/green/brown colour palette and looked very unappetising, but tasted amazing. Also, I love using beef that just falls apart when you cook it long enough like this did.

My bruises from falling down and going boom at the start of last week are mostly gone, having been relegated to a slight dark mark under where the thumb pad meets the wrist. The graze on my knee is more of an issue, because, like I said last week, every time I bend or unbend that knee, I break the scab in places, so that's fun.

This week's movies were actually not from the library, since nothing I'd ordered in had arrived last Friday, so instead I fell back on The Maze Runner Trilogy... because I have all three movies but I'd never seen the third one. I also, weirdly, had a completely false memory about the second one. Because I had convinced myself that they had reconned a helicopter crash at some point... I have no idea what that was about.

It's a weird fucking series though. Because the first one is basically a sci-fi drama. The second one is a zombie movie and the third one is basically a heist movie. I don't know how closely they all stick to the books (I think none of them are especially close, based on what I've read), but I do wonder if the books also do the same tonal shift as they go along.

I also don't really "get" the ending. I mean, it ended, I get it. But I don't really know what they were going for, because there's a (fairly fucking obvious and telegraphed) reveal after the mid point in the third movie, and then everybody who knows about the reveal ends up basically dead... and then nothing comes of it.

Having watched all three inside of a week, they're all a bit of a mess, honestly. I think it's one of those things where they cut a bunch of stuff from inside the books that would explain most of it, and if you've read the books, you just kind of colour those elements in on your own, but if you haven't, you just go "huh?".

The ensemble cast does well throughout, although they do kind of get wittled down to a small group by the third one. And not all of those characters are especially memorable. But I enjoyed the movies well enough. And it was good to round out the story, even if it doesn't necessarily all connect in the way that I feel like it should have done.

I also managed to crochet another set of bracers/cuffs and get most of the way through a beanie this week. Turns out that the trick is using much chunkier yarn and a bigger hook. And because I was using variegated yarn, it ended up making a quasi repeating pattern across all three items that I quite like.

How well the hat actually fits remains to be seen. Also, because I took the pattern I was using that didn't work for me and basically modified it so that it did work for me.

In other news, after having had the kitchen tap work itself loose a few weeks back, it developed spontaneous holes in the spout for no well explained reason, and after the landlord attempted to fix it with a little bit of epoxy putty and it didn't work, he came and replaced the tap in the middle of the week.If you didn't know, you'd never notice, because he replaced it with one that looks essentially identical. But after having had general tap issues for a long period of time, it's nice to have it all fixed.

There was no Friday Night DnD this week, because Fluffy had Plans. But I might have pulled the plug on it anyway, given that I wasn't feeling great yesterday.

Anyway...

Today was... brief.

I had called Ma yesterday just to warn her in advance that it would be a short day because I was sick, and I didn't want to pass on my cooties to her. So basically we just went to the supermarket, came back here and then she headed home. And I kept a mask on the whole time she was here. Just to be safe.

And she was gone by just after 9:30.

photo saturday: pink lady

Revisiting an old idea for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book... and there will absolutely be a Wild Magic Sorceress in my future... it probably won't be Tranquility though. She did definitely need a make over though.

I'll be honest though, I'm not sure the boob shading is in the right place. Or I resized it weird or something. But I like the re-do other than that, even if we could do with some more kimono style garments.

Anyway...

Lots to discuss.

So, after last week post, I fluffed around for a while and then set up the old PS4 and the new PS4 (so small, so sleek, so missing the pretty light line that runs along the top of the old one that I miss) around 5pm, thinking that, you know, transferring data wouldn't take THAT long, and then maybe I could get a quick play of Horizon Forbidden West in before I made dinner and watched a movie.

I logged into things, I remembered passwords, I plugged things into other things, I followed instructions.

And then I said "yes, please transfer all that data over", only to be told that it would take 11 hours. And I went "pffft, says you" because it never takes as long as it says it's going to. So onwards and upwards...

At first the system said 29 hours, then 13, then settled down to around 7 hours. And I looked at the little progress bar and went "well, it will make a big jump at some point, it always does, it's fine".

Six and a half hours later...

Not how I intended my evening to go. I let it run and made pizza. I let it run and half-watched things on YouTube. I considered watching a movie, but didn't. So I just intermittently watched a progress bar for the whole evening waiting for it to suddenly jump forward... and it never did.

But I have a fully functional PS4 now... wooo. And on the plus side, the old system didn't spend 6 hours beeping at me like it had been known to do.

Have I played a lot of Horizon Forbidden West this week? Yes. Did I accidentally finish the game? Also yes. And I say accidentally, because I thought there was going to be more game left... and then suddenly end credits. A little like the way the Assassin's Creed Black Flag credits just came out of nowhere.

But there might be post about the overall game later once I've wandered through the post credit game for a bit and collected my thoughts.

Monday we reset the counter on Yani Fall Down. I did, in fact, fall down on my morning walk. I might have tripped on a gumnut, I might have tripped over literally nothing. Nobody knows. So now I have some gnarly bruises on the muscle at the base of my thumb (which I just learned is just called the "thenar") and the mother of all grazes/scabs on my knee. I also tore my "training tights" that I wear under my short in winter. So, fuck all of that.

Also, it's been so much fun because the scab on my knee is right on the point where my knee bends, so literally every time I bend or straighten my leg, I'm basically splitting the scab again. So I'm just loving life. Which is extreme sarcasm, obviously.

This week's mini movie reviews are as follows...

The Suicide Squad... like, the second one, because the first one doesn't have the "The" in the front. I didn't mind it. I liked it more than Birds of Prey. It was a good average superhero movie. With a surprising amount of full frontal male nudity, male butts and men in very revealing white underwear. And that amount would be literally that any of that was in the movie. Also, I feel like this is how you do a movie with actual anti-heroes.

Next up was The Tiger's Apprentice (based on the book of the same name). Basically, it's your quintessential "teen discovers he has powers" story combined with the animals from the Chinese Zodiac. And for a movie that's from "Paramount Animation" (whose claim to fame seems to be the Sponge Bob movies), it's pretty decent.

Rounding up the week was Love and Monsters, starring Teen Wolf's Dylan O'Brien and a bunch of real weird mutated critters. And I enjoyed it a lot. It's very, very, very clearly filmed here in Australia, although set "in California", so that amused me. And I don't know who else could have pulled off this character other than O'Brien, because it's so very much in his Teen Wolf wheelhouse of dorky lovable loser who has a lot of heart and kicks ass when needed. I honestly don't know who else could have made played the part, or at least played it as well.

This week's soup was... not as good as it might have been. It was roughly Chicken Cacciatore inspired, but I put rosemary in it... which sounds good, but then I was picking tough little pieces of rosemary out of my mouth all week. And I bought a jar of olives that turned out to be little globs of nothing. For some reason, all the salt was in the brine they came in, not actually in the olives. It was very fucking strange.

But it was otherwise decent, just not as good as I expected it to be.

Friday Night DnD was us kind of hashing out some emotional fallout from the last couple of games. And also having a bit of a High Seas adventure. But then ending up running away from a ship full of Frost Giants. But it was still a good session.

It's just perpetually interesting to me playing a character who very specifically I designed with few strong ties to his backstory (he has people he cares about from his past, but it's more of an apprenticeship vibe instead of a family/relationship thing) in a game where the other two characters have such weighty relationships tethering their characters, to sit back and observe the other two players sitting in that place. I mean, I did it in the previous campaign (before I ran), so I get it, but it's interesting to just be the person who isn't in that place.

I'm not sure that thought came through clearly, but you get the gist.

Anyway...

Today was essentially just the supermarket. Nothing exciting.