character saturday: call her mama

Interestingly, I've posted much less of Mama Lullaby than I thought I might have. And the version I did post is pretty similar to this one, just with some minor face tweaks. I think that's probably a post Face Customiser make over. Mostly because I really like the outfit. Even if she doesn't have her signature embroidered coat with many pockets full of treats.

Also, her magic effect got updated from the Hero Forge version to just Photoshop fuckery.

I'll be honest, I think there might be a newer pair of boots that would work better than the ones she has on, but I'm not fiddling around with a new version. I will go look at updating the books though. And... fixed.

And it was her birthday two weeks ago... because she's one of the original group of characters that I went through had gave actual birthdays to.

Anyway...

This week's soup was plain old Chicken Noodle.... which I always very much enjoy, because it is so simple. And also because I not only use spaghetti for the noodles, but always add cayenne pepper so it has a bit of a kick to it. Always good for fighting off a cold. Or the last lingering remains of one anyway.

It's been an eclectic mix for Mini Media Reviews this week.

Starting off with Children of the Sea, quite a good anime, even though it didn't necessarily completely stick the landing. Which, I'll be honest, has been my experience with a large number of anime titles.

I followed that up with The Bride!, exclamation point very much included. I actually enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I was going to for various reasons. That is, at any rate, after the first 10 minutes caused me to wonder what fever dream I'd stumbled into. I can see this one coming back around, honestly, after the current obsession with Frankenstein quiets down.

Next up, a movie that appears to have like three titles all squashed together... High Speed! Free! Starting Days (aka Starting Summer if IMDB is to be believed), again, with included exclamation points. This is my first entry into the "Free" universe, mostly because I can't get hold of the first season of the TV show from the library. But I quite liked it... more than I thought I would. Even though, as I said right after I finished it, that it was "50% gay longing, 30% homosexual angst and 20% swimming". Oh, the angst. Oh, the longing. Oh, the thinly disguised homosexuals.

I need to get my hands on the TV show.

Rounding out that day was Kokuho, a movie about the men who play women's roles in Kabuki theatre. Because of course some ruler or other got bent out of shape about women in the theatre, even though Kabuki was started as an all-female dance troupe, if Wikipedia is to be believed. It was an interesting movie... very long (just shy of three hours) and quite slow and languid at times. And, I'll admit, much less gay than I thought it might have been. But still very, very good.

And lastly, the second season of The Musketeers. Which, I will say, is somewhat of an improvement over the first season. I still don't care much for their Milady, but otherwise it was quite good. I think possibly because they're mostly out from under the shadow of the original book.

Friday Night DnD was... well, very nearly a TPK. It could have gone real, real bad. But also there was new kitten to play with... well, less full on kitten and more little cat. But still adorable kittenness.

Anyway...

Today was much the usual... just supermarket stuff really. 

After Ma left I did wander down to The Parade to look at a couple of places that might have had sneakers. I mean, they had sneakers, just not ones that were either the types I wanted or the price I wanted to pay. So that's probably going to require a drive down to Harbour Town... maybe tomorrow.

We'll see. 

 

 

character saturday: proto captain

You know when we're close to starting a new campaign,when I start overthinking and iterating on character ideas. Which is why we have yet another version of Captain Finn Halyward. Because I suddenly realised that we would be starting as Level 3 and then very shortly progressing on to Level 10 to begin the actual adventure.

And it makes very little sense that my boy would have the same outfit for that prolonged a period of time. So a Level 3 version was required. And I leaned into the idea that the Level 3 version had just come back for a prolonged period on an island after having been shipwrecked and came back to civilisation with very little to his name.

It did mean that I needed to fuck around with the tattoo... and I'm not 1000% content with it. The problem is mostly that it's not quite what I want, and the things closer to what I do want only currently exist as photos of actual tattoos and thus not useful for my purposes. We'll just call that one a placeholder for now. But I may very well go back in this afternoon and fiddle around with it some more.

[cue me getting distracted for a good twenty minutes looking at things]

Yeah... that might need some concerted time and effort.

Anyway...

Soup this week as Lasagne Soup without the lasagne noodles. So basically it just kind of ended up as... pasta? We'll still call it soup. It was pretty good overall.

In Mini Media Reviews... I finished the first season of Preacher... I think that might be one of the ones that I don't bother continuing. It wasn't quite my thing.

Next up, Victor Frankenstein... which wasn't 100% what I was expecting, but pretty good. The fact that it ended up being [mild spoiler] the event that happens before the actual event we already know about but basically identical was a little... dumb. They also didn't pull the trigger on a story beat that I thought it was building towards.

But Radcliffe is excellent, as is McAvoy.

Then, we had something a little different... The Man Who Fell To Earth. I don't specifically remember what triggered me to borrow it. Whether it was mentioned in something I was listening to/watching or it just showed up on the library list... but I figured, why the hell not.

My takeaways? Firstly, everyone involved was doing a hell of a lot of drugs during every single element of this movie. Secondly, the first half is interesting, if confusing and the second half is pretty fucking boring and terrible. Also, seeing David Bowie fully naked and the overwhelming emotion being "well that whole scene is a bit sad" wasn't really on my bingo card for the movie. I didn't love it.

Then we had the second season of Classroom of the Elite. After I watched the first one a couple of weeks ago. Now the first season was entirely too much pervy jiggle physics and for my liking. And the story was a bit... m'eh. The second season is... problematic in it's own unique way. The writing is a hell of a lot better generally. It feels less superficial. Possibly because the main female character from the first season is essentially relegated to the background.

However when the main storyline is mostly about psychologically tormenting a girl by allowing others to torture her in various ways until she's broken enough to be useful to you... it makes it hard to watch at times. I also still have difficulty believing some of these clearly 35 year old men are supposed to be high school students.

And lastly, because Friday Night DnD got cancelled at the last minute, I grabbed an extra movie from the library in the city, and finished out the week with Children of the Sea. It started out really well... a slightly different visual style from a lot of other anime that I've watched... but the ending got... real fucking weird. Not a bad watch, but a little too esoteric for a Friday evening.

Otherwise, not much to report. I had an appointment in town on Wednesday, Friday was Chiro Day. 

Anyway...

Yesterday was pleasant, sunny and warm, today has been rainy and cold the whole day. So we did the supermarket and pretty much called it a day.

character saturday: updated luck

So... I started reading a book last week (that I later abandoned), which made me think about Lucky... and i realised that I'd updated Lucky at least once before on the site, but never reposted him. And I just kinda god the itch to revise him. Even though he's one of those characters that isn't going to see the light of day.

Weirdly, the overhaul gave me a little bit more of an edge than he previously had. The shadows under his eyes possibly shouldn't be there, but I kind of like the way they came out. Likewise I decided after reading through his backstory that he would probably have cut off all that long luxurious hair when he left the Feywild as an form of protest. Himself. With a dagger. And probably no mirror. 

I also fully admit that the bow string definitely defies all the laws of physics and definitely would not work that way, I probably should have run it across the top of his arm. But that looked goofy too. Let's just pretend that the angle is correct.

But I like having an updated version of him, even if, as I said, he'll never see table time.

Anyway.

First up.... had a fucking cold all week. Thankfully one that I mostly managed to murder with cold and flu tablets, but I've just got a mild case of the sniffles left over.

This week's soup was Chicken Pot Pie Soup... yeah, I know, the name is both accurate and dumb. And honestly, the finished product wasn't that far off from various chowders I've made. I did make more than I'd intended, and also some of the veg ended up a little firmer than I would like just because of the way it cooked. But a good result overall. And yes, with less liquid this is definitely one that could be turned into pie filling.

Mini Media Reviews for this week goeth thusly...

Dracula: A Love Tale (or just Dracula, depending on where you are) from 2025 is... a mess. It's a movie that is so fucking obviously stealing Bram Stoker's Dracula's homework from 1992. I will say that it's very strange in parts, things are absolutely never explained (Why are the little gargoyles there? Why do they turn into children at the end?), the movie is also unaware that it's like 30% a comedy. Or maybe it doesn't realise that it's very stupid. Possibly both. Caleb Landry Jones is amazing whenever Dracula is under heavy prosthetic makeup and terrible any time it's just him. It just does not work.

Next up was Shangri-La Frontier.Well, the first half of the first season anyway. I hate when they do that with anime. Stop splitting the season into two releases. On the plus side, it was reasonably enjoyable and much less pervy than some of the other things that I've watched. On the down side, it's a little repetitive (given that they're 20 minute episodes and most of them include at least a portion of the ending of the previous episode at the start), and some of the voice acting is Doing Too Much. There's at least one character who literally makes my ears hurt every time they talk. I did get the second half of the season in, so I'll finish that at least.

I rounded out the week working through the first season of Preacher, but I'm not done with that yet. I have thoughts, but I'll reserve those for next week.

This week was one where I'd ordered in a large number of things from the library and about half of them just showed up on the same day, most of them movies and such... so we'll see how we go this week.

Friday Night DnD was a brief sojourn back to Whisper's crew, then the start of the final arc with Molly's crew.

Anyway...

Nothing hugely different for today... just the usual supermarket wander, followed by doing what basically amounts to admin for Ma.

And then sending her on her merry way. Because while I did have an errand to run, turns out they didn't have the thing I needed, so why bother.