17 August 2024

photo saturday: farm boy

shadur - farmer, sorcerer, deaf

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.

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