character saturday: my favourite little scoundrel

Sometimes you just need your charming, talkative, meddling, protective, lying little scoundrel of a character. I realised that while I've posted various images of him, I never posted just the solo version since he got his new face.

And I just need some Peregrin "Pery to my friends" Swiftfoot energy this week.

He's a design that I look at and think "you know, I should really redo a lot of you because that armor is the very early stuff and it's janky as hell". And I think I tried at some point, and it just... didn't come out like him. For better or for worse, or until Hero Forge completely redesign those armor pieces, this is him.

And I'm not gunna lie. I do miss him. There are only a couple of characters that I miss and that really live in my head rent free. Pery is absolutely one of them. For all the reasons previously discussed.

Anyway.

For the purposes of keeping this as on ongoing diary of sorts, but also not getting into certain things, this is me reminded myself that This Week Was The Week Were All The Things Happened. Or at least started to happen. The Process Begineth. And you survived.

Unnecessarily cryptic, yes. But honestly, I also don't really want to go over it in detail anyway. Just know that it's all good and positive. And let's move on.

This week was Toona Noodle Doo. It's not thrilling, it's just easy.

The Mini Media Reviews for this week were...

Bad Guys 2. Unlike the first one, which was a primer for Furrys with a Praise Kink, the sequel was... boring? And more than a little unfocused. Like I never completely understood why the "bad guy" was doing the thing they were doing. Not The Bad Guys... but the actual villain. I mean superficially I got it, but if that was all it was, it was a little weak.

Tomb Raider. Not the Angelina Jolie ones, the 2018 Alicia Vikander one. Now I fully understand that that movie is based on the rebooted games from the same period. But in that case, both that game and this movie are absolutely somebody's kink. Just a young woman being tortured (not literally, but not not literally) and moaning a lot. The problem is that the plot just feels like a shitty remake of the Angelina ones. Or at least it just made me want to rewatch those ones.

And then I rewatched Murder By Death. Still weird, still very racist, still fairly funny.

I also finished the poncho I've been working on for a while now. And for a change, I actually finished an article of crocheted clothing and didn't immediately frog the whole thing and start over. How useful it's actually going to be once we get to winter remains to be seen. But at least I like the finished product. And if I needed to make a change or two (like actually turn the "sleeves" into a tube), that's still doable.

There was no Friday Night DnD this week because Mr and Mrs were otherwise occupied. Which was also fine, because I'm not sure I had the mental bandwidth anyway.

Anyway...

Rain. Humid, humid rain. Which woke me up at 5am. Because it was loud and heavy. Currently we just have Wet Air. Hopefully that will lessen slightly if the big rain that's supposed to happen in the next hour and a half actually does it's thing.

Thankfully everything we needed to do today either happened indoors or else during the lulls in the rain. So that was helpful.

Otherwise it was just the supermarket.

And then some general Doing Of Things. Including applying for postal voting for Ma and I. Because fuck going on the day and fuck having to deal with what happened last time. No thank you. I mean, I barely care anyway, because the whole thing is essentially bullshit, but I'll do what's required. Just on my terms.

That was it really. 

character saturday: wilderness wanderer

I'm feeling in the need of some deeply caring gnomish Mom energy right now. So we're dipping back into Friday Night DnD History for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book with Quillamina Silverthread.

The end of game, unfrozen, off to wander the wastes Quill. Complete with the staff she picked up during the campaign. Which isn't magical at all from memory, just a memory of lost members of her circle.

Weirdly original Quill is one of the last of the "coloured by Photoshop" models and the one that it took a while before I was happy with the Hero Forge colour version. I do think I'm finally happy with this version though.

Anyway...

Can I just take a moment to scream existential dread into the void without needing to explain myself? Can I just do that real quick?

[sustained screaming into the void in the manner of existential dread]

Thank you. 

I had another go at Cowboy Rice Salad this week, using actual brown rice. Which I always forget takes forfuckingever to cook. But it was quite good. Even if I ended up doing the reheating trick for the majority of the week.

I also finished Ghost of Tsushima. Overall I was mostly pleased with the game, although a number of pain points exist for me that stop it being a truly excellent game. Part of that is around some of the way quests are laid out, and just how infuriating I found some of the characters.

The game is incredibly beautiful though. And worth playing.

In other Mini Media Reviews... 

I started out with Penguin Highway... which is a deeply, deeply weird movie... that is entirely too focused on a 10 year old boy obsessing over breasts. And less focused on, you know, the penguins.

Next up was And Then They Were None from 1974. The third version of that story that I've seen, and honestly, the worst. Even if it does star two Bond villains. The hotel location is gorgeous though.

Then it was time for Ballerina, a John Wick spin off movie. That wasn't written as a spin off, it was written as it's own thing... honestly, I think that the drama surrounding the making of the movie might be more interesting than the movie itself. It just really lacks something compared with the John Wick movies. Ana de Armas does her level best, but she can't save a fairly generic script. It also makes the mistake of trying to explain some of the stuff that the John Wick movies absolutely didn't attempt to and didn't need to.

Not terrible, just not great.

I did also discover that the 2001 movie Josie and the Pussycats is free on YouTube, so I absolutely took a journey back to the deeply, deeply early 2000's that is that movie. And, while everything about that movie is intensely, violently of it's era, but the story holds up surprisingly well.

Friday Night DnD was us finally ending an NPC that has been a pain in our collective asses. But also funny, because at this point, because of character turnover, there's only one character in the current party who actually knows who the hell the NPC is. Which did lead to a tiny bit of cognitive dissonance.

But she did mess with the wrong group of people and we happily handed her her ass.

Anyway...

Today was...  a series of things that happened.

My brain was a little fried this morning, so everything was like 15% harder than it needed to be.

character saturday: reaper realness

A redo of a redo of a redo for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book, Fenris of the Reaper Clan. And something of a minor redo in this case, mostly just a new face. And a minor name adjustment given that him having a surname rather than a clan name never really made a lot of sense.

I do (and did at the time) enjoy Fenris. I'm not 100% sure he would work at a normal table though, because I played him in 2020 during the brief period when the Thursday group were playing online. He kind of works better over chat, weirdly. Or at least that's the only way I've ever played him. But I very much enjoyed my time with him.

Anyway...

I'm going to be honest here, this is the second time I've tried making a baked pasta dish and both times the results have been slightly disappointing. I mean, good, edible, fine, but just not as good as... the unbaked version would have been. So next time I'm going to just do pasta normally and cut out the middleman. 

Okay... so, this week's Mini Media Review is... going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

We start with Nina and the Hedgehog's Secret... which was... fine. It was just... 75% less whimsical than I wanted it to be. I'll fully admit that I went into it not really knowing what the story was, so I only have myself to blame.

Next up, Abominable. Surprisingly sweet. I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, the story isn't breaking new ground, but for what it is, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I kind of knew going in that I wasn't going to enjoy the 2024 Nosferatu. I'd been knowing that since the first trailer. But I still had it on the list, because I did mostly enjoy The Northman, so... maybe I was wrong.

What I was was BORED. Deeply, annoyingly, ongoingly bored. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is horrifically either miscast or just stunningly out of his depth. Likewise Lily-Rose Depp is making some choices that the director clearly agreed with but I found incredibly irritating and performative.

And I love a Skarsgård. I do. And Bill absolutely disappeared into the titular role, but any creepiness or presence or horror he brings to the role is 100% undermined by the insane decision for his character to have a big stupid 70's porno moustache. And it doesn't need to be there. Sure, it might have been historically accurate, but it looks dumb as hell.

I think it also massively suffers from fact that the story is a redo of a redo of the Dracula story. So it just all comes off feeling lackluster. It's just style over substance.

Speaking of going in knowing it's not going to be what it needs to be... Paddington in Peru. Sure, it's the weakest script of the three. And while I don't blame her for taking a look at the script and passing on it, but Sally Hawkins is literally the glue that holds those first two movies together. And Emily Mortimer just doesn't have the acting chops to make that work. So... it was okay, but we should all collectively forget it exists.

Last up... Valmont. Which is another one of those "two movies that are functionally the same movie coming out at the same time" situations. But more literal in this case, because this is also a version of the source material for Dangerous Liaisons. There are some things that I think Valmont does in a more interesting way, and some of the casting choices give it a different edge. And Valmont is a much... kinder movie overall. Dangerous Liaisons is the much, much, much better movie overall. Valmont is more of a melodrama. Dangerous Liaisons is a deeply emotional chess game.

I also played a lot of Ghost of Tsushima this week. More on that when I'm done.

Friday Night DnD ended up being A Story In Two Parts, because DM Mr and I had a separate session before the main session. Which honestly went in about four different directions other than where I thought it was going to go.

And then my boy Whisper got to briefly guest star in the main session. I did make it easier for myself by sending Molly off into the bushes while he was around. Because I didn't really want to have to talk to myself...

I did have them wander off and have a moment between the two of them, and that conversation probably already lives in my brain without actively having it. But he was impressed and bemused by her. Which is always nice. When two of your characters like each other... hehe.

Anyway...

Today was the usual shopping thing.

But I wanted to do a run to Spotlight. Which turned out to be the Universe absolutely pointing me in the right direction. Because not only because the yarn I've been using for the poncho I need to finish up (and the reason for going) just happened to randomly turn up in those "mill ends" bags that I so enjoy. And so I got 400g of yarn for the price of 200g. Bonus.

We also tend to poke around the bedding department, where I saw a quilt cover set for literally $7. And a really nice one I considered buying. And then I found another one for $10 that I liked even more. So Ma got the $7 one, and we collectively spent $17 on bedding.

We also dropped in at Officeworks, so I finally have a fully functional TV remote. 

Definitely a worthwhile excursion.

character saturday: doppelganger danger

Sometimes the universe is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sometimes you design an NPC that is important to one of your characters and then a major plot point ends up revolving around that NPC. And possibly somebody else pretending to be that NPC. And you designed this week's DnD Character Colouring Book to be two versions of the character.

More on that in a minute though.

I do love how anybody looks in some version of the Crimson Gentleman uniform for my boy Whisper though. Of course, young Hark isn't officially a Gentleman yet... so he doesn't get the tie.

Anyway.

This week. Urgh.

So we start with cleaning for my Inspection. Not fully arduous, as usual I split it over a couple of days, and fortunately the weather was reasonable enough that it wasn't painful.

Tuesday I had the doctor's appointment about this flu that just won't go away. Which was also relatively painless, but I also assume that doctors have had so many people through their doors with this same thing that they're just going off the script at this point. I think we spent slightly more time teaching the med student who was sitting in how to actually measure somebody's height than really diving deeply into what was going on with me.

Okay, that's slightly unfair. And honestly says slightly more about the med student.

But the doctor gave me a script for some drugs and a referral for a bunch of tests. And did you know they do prescriptions by text message and QR code now? News to me. Handy, but weird. So I went and got the good drugs. And then wasted some time at the library before heading home to my nice clean house.

Yay.

I was slightly surprised to discover that the good drugs amounted to three tablets. So that's some nuking the aliens from space kinda antibiotics. On the plus side, they seem to have done... something. It's still not gone, but it's much improved.

I didn't go and get the tests done until Thursday morning. And that time the woman literally spent longer doing things on her computer than she did talking to me or sticking a swab up my nose. But at least I was in and out of their relatively quickly, and I could just call in at the end of my morning walk.

Circling back around... this week was quiche. Because it was simple. 

The Mini Media Reviews was the second and third season of His Dark Materials. I liked the second season more than the third. Mostly because the second season was more focused on the two kids, and the third had a lot of the adult characters who I just like less. I also think the second season is a vast improvement because the teamed the male writer who wrote the entire first season on his own with a different female writer on each episode. Now I don't know if that was one of those things where he wrong the general outline and the women came in and polished, or they wrote it and he polished or what. But the characters were much improved, not least of all Lyra.

Part of that as well was the actress progressing from being a 13/14 year old in the first season to 16/17 by the final season. She goes from a slightly precocious child to a young adult. 

But the whole thing is beautifully made and shot, and didn't get quite as Stealth Jesusy as, say, the Narnia stuff.

Friday was Chiro Day... and much needed, between all the coughing in the last month, a lot of crochet and a lot of video games, my neck and lower back were slightly screaming. Plus of course having done the full clean.

Then I went and poked around the library in town.

Friday Night DnD was... honestly, mop up. And it was very funny that my insane goblin girl Molly had a moment where she could very much have ended up as the new chieftess as a tribe of goblins. And sometimes having gore on your arms up to the elbows helps.

But then we cut back to my boy Whisper... and thanks to a Perception roll of 3, he's currently unsure whether the version of Herald that is in the room with him currently or the one that he saw outside is the real Herald. So that's going to be fun to resolve during the week. He'll be fine. Or he be dead.

Anyway...

Nothing much to report again today... just the usual supermarketry really.