character saturday: muscle mommy

Today's DnD Character Colouring Book is from the "Let's explore 9000 different variations of Barbarian" playbook. I believe what I was roughly aiming for was the idea of Muscle Mommy Karlach vibes from Baldurs Gate 3. A game, I will add, in which I find every single companion character deeply unattractive. Admittedly, I also haven't played the game, but going purely off the game art and vibes... no, absolutely not, you're all terrible, get in the bin.

However, this was out starting point. I think the scar and the tattoo kind of came as a package deal, but I do know that the hair was blonde for a good chunk of time until I was looking for something that pushed it a little bit more interesting. And I realised that the whole pink/green combo was working overall. 

Zahri was also one of those characters where I realised I do often make a slightly masculine female character. Not always, and some of it is what works for the character, or the specific look of some of the facial elements in Hero Forge.

I'm not 100% convinced that the Berserker subclass fits her. But, you know, it'll do till something better comes along.

Anyway...

So, chicken soup with alphabet noodles and just enough cayenne pepper to make it interesting. It's just simple and clean and tasty. I'm a fan.

In Mini Media Review news... sometimes just randomly grabbing something off the shelf at the library just because it's there and none of the things you ordered had come in actually works. Like, unbelievably well.

First up was Mickey 17. I don't know that I knew it was by Bong Joon Ho going in. I did know it had Robert Pattinson, but honestly, beyond that I really didn't know anything. And it was absolutely amazing. Big, big fan. It's very, very dark black dystopian humour. But damn it's incredibly well done. No notes.

I followed that up with The Dead Don't Die. Again, I had literally no idea what I was getting into, except for the fact that the cast list for it was ridiculous and it was clearly about zombies. I was a little concerned when the name Jim Jarmusch popped up as the director. The only experience I'd had with Jarmusch movies was Dead Man back in the 90's, and I absolutely hated that.

However Dead Don't Die is just the right kind of unhinged. I mean, it gets a little bit "Old Man Yells At Cloud" at the end, because Jarmusch clearly has some Very Specific Opinions About Capitalism. And you know, it does kind of end with a whimper rather than a bang. But I was never bored or not completely entertained by the level of ridiculousness.

I've been slightly dragging my feet on the crochet cardigan... partially because I'm just not feeling it. And also today I realised that I'd been decreasing too much on the second sleeve, because I just randomly did it on the first one, and I got a little too focused on doing it. So that got frogged and I restarted that bit.

We got to actually do Friday Night DnD this week. Which was good. Also, Fuck you Fluffy. You know why. With your replacement character and your fucking backstory clues. And me being entirely concerned with the literal wrong parts of said clues [sigh]. Fuck you.

This was also definitely one of our "come back to town, do random conversations with people" episodes.

The drive up there and the drive back were... challenging. Because it had been raining pretty much all day, we were up in the hills with either fog or very low cloud, depending on your opinion I guess, and a car with no working windshield demister. Good times. We only nearly died like three times. Not really, but kind of.

Anyway...

Not a exciting day today.

Basically we did the usual supermarket circuit. Not really anything else to report. 

character saturday: tiny ginger menace

I'll be honest... for a variety of reasons, I haven't been making many new Hero Forge DnD Character Coloring Book of late. I don't know exactly when I made this one, but he's kind of a remake of the very first character I played, Belben. You can tell I made it a while ago though, because young Tobias uses the pointy halfling ears that I've stopped using.

And once again, because I've never played a redheaded character, for reasons that just baffle me.

I'm not sold on the name, to be honest, but that's really the easiest thing to change. I also don't know that I'd want to revisit the halfling + criminal + rogue character. I do like his cute little haircut with the stars though.

Anyway...

This week has been... pfffffffffft.

So Saturday evening I just started feeling a little bit off. Not fully terrible, just off. And either a little bit fevery or else I had just left my very warm blanket hoodie on with the hood up and felt a little overheated.

But in that weird, "I have a mild fever and feel bad, so I'm going to cook whatever is wrong with me out of my system" kind of way. 

Which also feeds into this week's Mini Media Review... which was the first season of Titans. Because I was trying to watch the first three or four episodes while also not really feeling right, and feeling a little sleepy. Still not sure if the sleepy was because I bored senseless or slightly sick.

Because the original New Teen Titans comic books were the thing that really got me into superhero comics way back in the day. And I still own a giant box full of Teen Titans/Titans comics. It was my literal jam for the longest time, and the main reason why I consider myself a DC comics boy.

And Titans is... in a word... shit. The show absolutely did not understand a single one of the characters, or their history or their lore. And yes, trying to pin down any superhero character down to one version of their lore is like trying to nail Jello to a tree.

But in the comics, Raven is my girl. No other version of Raven gets her right. Well... I liked the AU version from the Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picolo comic books. Which is like the decent version of these characters.

If I can give future creators a piece of advice... stop treating Raven like Wednesday Addams. 

They don't get Raven right, they don't get Starfire right, they don't get Robin right. I didn't stick around long enough to see what they did to Changeling (not Beast Boy, thank you). They just fell into the "We Are DC, We Must Have The Angst" issue that is what I generally hate about almost all of the DC properties I've watched as part of this little ongoing experiment. 

And I'll fully admit that I'd been slightly falling asleep through what I believe was the third episode I watched. That's fully on me. But do you want to know the point where I 100% pulled the pin, where I noped all the way out?

The Doom Patrol crossover. Because, no. I mean, yes, great that they remembered/used the fact that Changeling first appeared in the Doom Patrol comic, and he was part of the line up there before he moved over to Teen Titans and was adopted by characters from the Doom Patrol.

Characters that I know are not together in the TV show, since I saw them both in the first season.

And it wasn't even when the Doom Patrol mansion showed up, I could technically have lived with that. No, it was when they had one of the DP characters show up that I literally went "nope... nope nope noppity nope" and stopped the show.

No.

On the plus side, I did end up going to bed pretty early for the rest of the week, so at least I was free to do that.

Soup this week was... Disappointment. I was supposed to be making a potato and leek thing. With sausage. And, to be fair, I did do that. But for whatever reason, I was just underwhelmed by it the whole week, and never finished a full bowl of it outside of maybe once. Of course, a non-zero amount of that could very likely be a lack of appetite from being sick. So... you know.

It was also the first time in a good long while where something caught on the bottom of the pot and I had to resort to baking soda and vinegar.

I was never hugely sick thankfully... just kind of borderline mildly sick. With a number of early nights.

Which should have meant I was okay for Friday Night DnD. And I mostly would have been I believe, but I was going to mention it, but before I did, it turns out that Mr had also been sick all week, so we decided to call it off.

And that meant that I finished reading my book last night instead. Which was enjoyable.

Anyway...

Today really wasn't much. We did the supermarket thing, I bought the things I would have bought last week if I'd known I was going to be sick (most notably the makings for chicken soup and Nippy's Lemon Drink).

And I pulled out my mask for the first time in a good long while, just because I didn't want to share my germs with the wider populace. I also sent Ma home relatively early for the same reason.

But Ma did bring the extra ball of grey yarn we went looking for last week, so that's a bonus. 

character saturday: drowned diva

So, in the last few weeks I've done a couple of "redesign character who was one thing into another thing". And much like Silence before her, this one had a gender flip and also became a Trickery Cleric. But not a rename.

Let's be real... I need to play a cleric sometimes soon.

But in this case, this is another one of those where I like to disregard the recommendations of matching cleric domains with individual gods and just... make something up that works for me.

In the case of Umberlee, aka The Bitch Queen, it was mostly due to this line from the blurb about her clergy...

When there are no worshipers present, Umberlant priests then remove the offerings from the stone block altars at Umberlee's shrines and sluice the altars with buckets of sea water containing seaweed to signify that the Sea Queen has come for what is rightfully hers. 

And she's an evil goddess... who doesn't really care why people worship, only that they do.

So it all tracks in my head.

Also, I do love a slightly sassy woman who used to be a sailor. 

Anyway...

This week's soup was beef, barley and vegetable. I might switch up some of the vegetables next time, but overall it was good.

The Mini Media Review for this week was the "follow up" series to Penny Dreadful, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels.

And I don't think anybody has absolutely failed to stick the landing on a follow up as hard as City of Angels did. The original series is small and intimate and full of characters from the aforementioned genre of Penny Dreadful novels.

City of Angels is sprawling and bloated and instead of the idea of these characters and storylines from Victorian Gothic literature being given a new life. And because they only got one season, the story has no conclusion, it just ends.

There are some amazing performances, there are some great moments, but also, leaning into the Los Angeles late 1930's of it all with racism, Nazis, Jews and police corruption. It was all... a bit much. It also really ham fists the "supernatural elements"... but then really does nothing with them.

I almost didn't bother after the first couple of episodes, but I really wanted to see where they went with it. And I'm kind of glad I did, even if it was mostly a disappointment.

I will also give full kudos to Natalie Dormer, who works her ass off. Likewise Nathan Lane, who is always excellent.

Otherwise, it's always slightly strange when you don't realise you've entered a competition and you get a call early in the week telling you that you've won a $500 gift card just for scanning a loyalty card. I mean, yes, thank you very much, I'm not going to complain. So that was a nice surprise.

As was the Gentleman Caller who swung by early on Thursday morning. 

Friday was Chiro Day... and I absolutely needed it, my back has been whinging for several weeks now in varying degrees.

It was also Friday Night DnD for the first time in a month basically. Which is currently as much Dealing With Kittens as it is Playing DnD. Which I'm not particularly mad about.

The session itself was... one of those ones where you realise that if you'd gone left instead of right in the previous session, it would have been an entirely different outcome. But it all worked out in the end.

Anyway...

Today wasn't hugely exciting. We did the usual supermarket thing, and then we took a trip to Spotlight to look for some more yarn for the random cardigan I'm still working on. 

And, of course, the Spotlight we generally go to has their stockroom organised by... I dunno... circus animals. Because the last two times we've been in and I've had to ask about yarn, they've either not been able to find the yarn that their system tells them exists or find it but it was in some precarious place they couldn't get to.

Thankfully they supposedly have "loads" at the store near Ma, so she's going to take a look this week.

Also, there was a very random moment after I'd been waiting for the shop assistant but Ma had been asked by a couple of women about picking the right crochet hook... so, of course, while she did tell them what was what, she asked me to talk to them about it (like I'm the damn expert LOL), so I did a little bit of song and dance with them and they left happy.

You're welcome Spotlight. Have the fucking yarn I need next time please.

But that's it really. 

character saturday: cerulean sketch

A while back I posed Ari Chasing-Bear, a halfling barbarian. He was based on a Aasimar barbarian with the same pose and outfit, who in turn was based on, as I said in the previous post "a dual bladed wizard for Samwise", one of the Thursday Boys. And Aurelius was initially based, at least before we changed the pose, on a Wood Elf World Tree Barbarian. 

So, at this point we're four characters deep. 

Mostly I based him on an existing idea because I know that Samwise is the "poster child for distraction", as I previously described him, and I wasn't about to start completely from scratch on an idea that I was sure had the shelf life of room temperature milk.

The request itself went something like this...

Him: You have a task when you are bored 

Me: Do I now? 

It then proceeded to the point where I asked him several other questions before presenting him with the first version of our boy up at the top there. 

Neither of us are that enamoured with the swords, but we both also acknowledge that Hero Forge has a dearth of good looking scimitar style swords. Those ones are my favourites of what we have. Samwise's mileage may vary.

Will I potentially recycle him into something else at some stage? Possibly. 

Anyway...

This week's soup was not in fact soup but Tuna Mornay. I did a few bits and pieces that I haven't done in a while, including adding onion (which the original recipe listed, but I don't know that I've done for a long time) and some celery. I also threw some rice into the roux/sauce... which... yeah. The idea is solid, but next time, cooking the rice first and throwing it in with the tuna and everything else may just work better.

I also need to remember to add cheese to the roux. I always think about putting cheese on top and then change my mind, when what I should be doing is making a cheesy roux.

But it was very tasty. And I didn't go too hard on the spices.

The crochet jacket is getting there. I'm nearly at the point where I can join the shoulder seams and then I have the very fun job of tying off all my ends and weaving them in. Not the most fun job, but it needs to be done.

I may also have to think about the idea of pockets at some point. Probably before the ribbing goes on. 

This week's Mini Media Reviews start with How To Train Your Dragon: Hidden World (aka HTTYD 3), and I don't really disagree with anything from my original review (except the idea that Eret might have been queer coded, I think I was reaching a little).

Next up was 65. Which is absolutely a ridiculous title for a movie. And I was fully expecting the movie itself to be a total shitshow. And bits of it are. But I don't know that it absolutely deserved the savaging that it got when it came out. There are a couple of minor tweaks that I feel like could be made... because the movie is both trying to go for an "It was Earth the whole time" both from the beginning and in a reveal at the end of the movie. While also having totally wacky designs for a lot of the "dinosaurs". I think you could excise a lot of that guff and just make them "dinosaur like monsters" instead.

But even though some of it was a little bit formulaic, I still quite enjoyed it.

And we finished up with Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. Yes, yes, I know. Most of the Kevin Smith movies shouldn't necessarily be For Me. And some parts of them absolutely are not (I also definitely skipped the ones about the walrus man and the tiny bratwurst nazis... those I haven't seen). But there's just something about some of them that really get to me.

I'm also not going to lie, Jason Mewes manages to actually do the required emotional heavy lifting for this one. Yes, granted it's not like it's a particularly large weight. But he does well.

It's also interesting so see the range of people that Kevin Smith has either had in previous movies, directed in episodes of other people's TV shows, or has some other kind of relationship with who will absolutely show up to be in a movie for literally one scene.

Then, the thing that I should have expected was going to happen, happened. Because all through the Before Times, J would absolutely text me out of the blue on like a random day of the week and go "hey, I'm at a place not that far away from the place that is your place, we should coffee". I should have known that nothing would have changed in the intervening 12-ish years.

Because rather than doing something pre-planned like actual grown ass adults, he did what he always did. Which, you know, is what it is. And we are where we are.

He came over, we chatted, I finished up the scarf I had made for his mama, but I also recognised, once again, that there were definitely reasons that I wasn't especially bothered that time and distance meant that he slid out of my life. You know?

It's nothing terrible. It's mostly just that his life went in one direction, my life went in another direction and there's actually not that much left to the join anymore. The overlap that used to exist is the barest of slivers and most of it is based around having had a history together during a formative period for both of us, even though we're about a decade (potentially actually a decade, I forget) apart in age.

It also doesn't help when I have Fluffy to compare him to. Because after a certain point there were always periods where J and I would come to an awkward pause or awkward silence. Where the conversation just ran out. And I could feel it again this time, and it wasn't a new feeling. It was the same feeling as always.

Fluffy, on the other hand, I think we're at like seven years... plenty of silences, none that either of us could remember felt like awkward silences.

As I said to him on Friday, I traded up.

Speaking of Friday. No Friday Night DnD again this week. So instead Fluffy and I had movie night. Well, mostly we talked a bunch before we haven't seen each other in like three weeks. And then we watched Some Like It Hot, because it was on the Show Fluffy Movie List. And I haven't seen it in a hot minute.

It's still great.

Anyway...

Today was very simple. A slightly underwhelming supermarket visit... and I don't quite know why exactly... 

And then we wasted some time here before I went Ma off on her merry way.

So, yeah, not exciting, but fine.