character saturday: adventing 2025, part two

This week's Hero Forge Advent Calendar was... rough. We started strong with the mask, but everything else really fell off a cliff for me. Most notably the sword, which I swear somebody let the Work Experience kid or the boss's nephew design, because it's rough as hell. And I found the inspiration image, and it's not even as detailed as that. R-O-U-G-H.

Likelihood of using any of these... low. Maybe the mask, maybe the boots, possibly a version of the jacket (there's a long sleeve version). But I'm not holding my breath. 

Anyway.

I moved officially over to "Salad Season" this week. I went back and forth honestly, but in the end decided it was time. And it wasn't terrible. I definitely didn't use enough chicken, but otherwise it was decent.

Mini Media Reviews as we move into the final length... Peacemaker. No. Absolutely not. No thank you. I have no idea who the audience for this is supposed to be, but I absolutely do not want to spend any time with those people. Nor do I ever want to watch any more of it. And can somebody check in with James Gunn's dad, because the way Gunn seems to feel about fathers in general is... worrying.

I also snuck in a the 50th Anniversary Rocky Horror documentary, Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, directed by Richard O'Brien's son, Linus. If you're a fan of the movie, this is excellent. Although seeing everybody 50 years on is, in spots, hard to do.

No Friday Night DnD this week, so Fluffy and I did Movie Night again and I got to introduce him to Torch Song Trilogy, which we'd only had a conversation about a little while before. Given that is one of the movies that is Very Important To Me. More so, actually, that movie is, as I said to him afterwards, one of the building blocks that I built large segments of my personality upon. And even though I probably haven't watched it in the last 15 years, there are swathes of that movie's dialogue that are just committed to memory and live in my head rent free.

So if you've never seen it, consider this my early Christmas present to you.

Anyway...

Today was a little bit all over the shop.

We started with the supermarket as usual, and although we have both said that we're not just going to buy random shit just because it's the lead up to Christmas... guess what happened.

I also got the third free cast iron thingy this week... the baking tray or roasting pan or whatever it is.

After the supermarket, my car needed a run because it's been a little neglected with the on again off again D&D nights and us not really doing anything on a Saturday. But it's also two weeks til Christmas and only insane people are going to the shops for run. Instead we headed over to Burnside Library to give Ma a change to potter around a different library, and then we did a lap around Burnside Village with is still incredibly underwhelming even with all the renovations. But at least we got our steps in.

character saturday: adventing 2025, part one

Welcome to the pure nightmare fuel that is the first week of the 2025 Hero Forge Advent Calendar. It really started out strong and wrong with the Cyclops face (the only thing worse it putting on the eyebrows, because it just defaults to two eyebrows around one eye.

If we had to count the number of things from this week that I'll actually use... we're at like one and a half. The ruff on the right character. And maybe the spear, but it's just entirely too long. I want a shorter version. And yes, I know, ungrateful at Christmas on Advent Calendar items. The weapon swipe might be potentially useful, but I seldom even use the spell effects we have now, so I doubt it.

I very much look forward to a much less... eclectic... week two.

Anyway.

You can tell the weather we're currently having when I tell you that, in the first week of December, the soup was lasagne soup. But the lasagne noodles I had were... a little old, maybe, I don't really know, but they very much shattered in a way they normally don't. It didn't really affect the soup overall, just the texture of the noodles.

This week's Mini Media Reviews are the first season of The Musketeers. Costume and set design, 15/10. I just found that the least interesting characters were the titular Musketeers. Like, there really wasn't much there beyond the things that we all already know about the Musketeers. Athos is the grumpy noble one. Aramis is the religious slutty one. Porthos is the rough, fighty one and D'Artagnan is... the one who gets mostly led around by his dick.

I'm also not sure how much I cared about their version of Milady De Winter. Like, she was okay, but I like a really villainous Milady... and this just felt a little Discount Cerci Lanister.

I followed that up at the end of the week with the anime The Colors Within, which I saw on the shelf and picked up on a whim. It was... odd. If you combine queer coded teen girls with Catholic school run by nuns and creating a band with the two queer-coded girls and a random teenage boy who write songs that use Amen in the lyrics entirely too much... like, it wasn't bad, I just don't think that anybody involved really understood that they were making these teenage girls so very fucking obviously queer-coded.

Not terrible by any metric, but just a little confused and confusing.

Tiny bit of drama this week when the smoke alarm in my next door neighbour's empty apartment and I ended up having to call the fire department. Thankfully it only turned out to be that the smoke alarm was dying, but they still send two fire engines. Drah-ma! Thankfully less drama than it otherwise could have been.

Friday was Chiro Day... and after over a year of looking for the new PHB in Dymocks and talking to people in store and basically giving up... and literally having just been to the game store about bought a copy finally...

There were two copies on the shelf at Dymocks.

Fuck you Universe.

Granted, it was slightly cheaper at the game store.  I also picked up the new Faerun book as my actual Christmas present this year. So there's that.

Friday Night DnD was thankfully the result in me having to sit on my impulse control issues for two weeks. But I made the choice to leave my boy Whisper behind and send the party off to get things done. Because, honestly, I wasn't the only one who thought that we'd been slightly going in circles for a few weeks.

And in the intervening two weeks I did have a replacement character kind of drop out of the sky... and I wrote, as I have said a number of times now, what might be the most unhinged backstory I've ever managed. For very specific reasons.

It was also one of those times when the backstory just flowed out somewhat like water. Yes, I went back and edited it and finessed it. But the raw idea did kind of fall into my lap. It was also one of those Hero Forge models where the basic idea was essentially perfect, and all the changes I made were just finessing that idea.

My only uncertainty right now is how this character will actually manifest at the table. Like, I know who they are, I just don't know how that comes out in play.

I will only say that when I showed DM Mr the backstory document, it got halfway through the first line before he said "oh god" or something similar [evil cackle]. 

Sadly we never got to the point where the character showed up, so I was playing the dwarven cleric NPC that is travelling with the party. Which puts some space between Whisper and The New One.

And unfortunately no game next week.

Anyway...

Not much to report for today... we've definitely entered the portion of the year where we avoid stores. So it was just the supermarket.