character saturday: adventuring buddies

So... because I thought the thoughts and wrote the words last week... I ended up doing a second version of these characters, but more fully "in world" this time. With classes and shit.

Initially I made Palax a Storm Sorcerer... but, I've been there and done that, actually to the highest of levels.. and relooking at the sorcerer options, I kept coming back to the Draconic Sorcerer (which I've also played with, but not very much). Which brought my brain back around to Blue Dragon... even though I haven't spoken to him in... something approaching 15 years at this point, there's still a little pocket in the back of my brain he lives in.

And given that the sorcerer description includes this text...

Most often, sorcerers with this origin trace their descent back to a mighty sorcerer of ancient times who made a bargain with a dragon... 

Any given sorcerer could be the first of a new bloodline, as a result of a pact or some other exceptional circumstance. 

Yeah, we're going to chalk Blue Dragon and my several years of mental trauma as "exceptional circumstances". So while I haven't thought about the specifics of the in-game pact or his history, it makes more sense to me than Storm Sorcerer did. Plus blue dragons are also known as storm dragons... so...

Jolly is a cleric of Fluffy's (current) favourite domain/the god his first ever character worshipped. Because it just made sense.

I also enjoyed combining the regular "Hero Forge colouring" combined with some later post-processing additions/alterations including the holy symbol, lightning and waistcoat pattern.

These two are 100% going to turn up as NPCs in something I run at some point... whether or not Fluffy is also at the table.

Moving on sideways somewhat... this week was minestrone soup... and by which I mean "that recipe in my head that I think of as minestrone, while never really having looked at an accurate minestrone recipe". But it's tasty and filling, and that's what I needed this week.

Also, do you remember last week when I said that I may have lost my remaining marbles over the previous year and a half had it not been for my current crop of friends. Yeah, that is 100% a true and accurate statement, as I spent all day, every day (with a brief exception) inside my house this week, self isolating away and really started to lose it several times. Like, forgot what day it was on multiple occasions lost it... cried at a video about a nice lady making a reproduction of an Edwardian dress lost it... 

But lets wind back to Monday... when I needed to go and get my second test done. After last week's five and a half hours of mental car-based trauma, I decided that I would get to the testing place before they even opened, get into the line first thing, be one of the first through the doors hopefully.

So, let's just compare Monday and Wednesday's trips, shall we...

Yeah... there might have been like 10 more minutes in it once I was actually in the carpark waiting to get the swab embedded in my brain again, but basically I was back home by about 7:45 give or take.

Granted, it also meant I got up at 5:30am and drove to the airport in the dark and watched the sun rise over an Aldi, but otherwise, it was a good plan. And I got my second results back by 9:30 the following morning... negative once again.

Which is why I'm doing the same damn thing this Monday for my final test. And then potentially having the busiest week possible given that other things have had to be pushed back for the last two weeks. But we'll deal with that when it gets here.

I will say that despite occasional internal freakouts, due at least in some small part from looking at too much news/information, they have downgraded the severity of the Village as a hotspot, although, honestly, the difference between downgrading from Tier 1 to Tier 2 after a week and a half is... basically pointless in any practical sense for the people involved... but made me feel a little better, even as they specifically mentioned the bakery as a place of interest.

There is a larger rant about contact tracing, times, locations and places... but that's not for the internet, that's for me to have with people I know once I can see them face to face again. Because I'm sure there are reasons for all of it, it just seems like really dumb reasons that aren't helpful.

I am also super aware that things could be much, much worse, and I could be in any of the other places in Australia where things are getting slightly crazy right now. So I am absolutely counting my blessings... but at the same time asking the questions that I have no way to actually get answered.

But moving on.

Oh, one tiny ray of sunshine that happened today when I went downstairs to bring my shopping upstairs. I got to check the mailbox, which I haven't done since Monday, and at some point this week one set of the dice I ordered showed up. Now the dice packet has a date on it that it's any of the dates of the original shipping information... but is still from May. So I honestly have no idea if this is the original set of dice finally showing up after two and a half months OR if this is the replacement set of dice that just have a weird date on them for no well explained reason.

It did give me a reason... excuse... justification... I don't know... but it did mean that I dumped all my dice out of my storage box and washed them in very hot soapy water.

There was no DnD this week... for all the obvious reasons... but weirdly I just reread a few of my posts from back in March last year and how quickly and without fuss we just transferred over to online games and didn't complain or drop any games. And now... yes, I know that now we have experienced online games and their flaws... and the Friday game I would much rather have the session with my graph paper husband and son when we're all face to face... but the Thursday group... yeah, maybe a conversation should be had there.

I feel like I say that a lot... and sometimes do and sometimes don't follow through... I will say that I'd like them to expend maybe a touch more effort if we do have another big lockdown situation.

Have I mentioned I lost my mind a little this week?

Anyway...

Today was... actually today was basically the same as the last ten days... except Ma delivered me my groceries and I got to check the mailbox.

Also, making a super specific shopping list is... weird somehow. I mean, sensible, but also required me to do more thinking than if I was just making a list for myself. Oh, you need that thing... that thing that comes in 26 varieties... which one specific variety do you want and how do you convey that information most effectively. I mean, it all worked... the only thing she couldn't get was because it wasn't there, so I wouldn't have gotten it either.

Can I get some collective finger crossing for Monday/Tuesday by the way? Or just think the good vibes in my general direction, that'd be great.

Current mood:

character saturday: buddies

You know how when you're a kid, you can walk up to some other kid in the playground and just ask if they want to be best friends, and then you are best friends for the next... however long you're at the playground... and then you leave and never see them again.

I mean, not me... I don't think I ever did that, that sounds like torture... but it's a thing that people say and that people allegedly do. And I'm going somewhere with this, I promise, it's been a weird week, so bare with me.

As you get older, finding new friends at all is hard, and finding a "best friend" is... basically impossible. Thankfully, I can credit DnD for bringing me a whole new crop of friends in my fourth decade, without whom I may have lost all of my remaining marbles over the last year and a half.

Most notably amongst these is the aforementioned (in previous posts), Fluffy. Essentially as soon as I met him I was like "he's my kind of people", a thought which has been proved true time and time again.

And he follows in some excellent footsteps... Ludo (but without the crippling narcissism), Lownee (but without the Ludo handicap), J (but without the leaving the country and never coming back) and Owlgirl (but without the not getting to see her that much).

It's been a thought in the back of my head for a while that for whatever value the term "best friend" has, he's essentially tagged with all the appropriate designations. Which makes me happy.

Which brings me around to the DnD Character Colouring Book image for this week.

The other day Fluffy mentioned that he was trying to make himself in Hero Forge and that it was difficult... which I will always take as a challenge... turns out the versions of him we both made weren't that dissimilar (same hair, same basic colour scheme). Of course, then I needed to DnD-ify him... because he's basically a halfling... or at least lives in the same part of my brain.

And when the subject of my DnD equivalent came up, he said he always thought of me as a dragonborn... I suspect not least of all because the first character of mine he ever met was my big silver dragonborn, Zzilar.

That led me to look at the different dragon types and their personalities... and then I discovered this about brass dragons...

They loved to talk, to the exclusion of most else. They loved to engage friends and foes alike in hours of long-winded conversation.

And this blog isn't subtitled "garrulous" for no reason. So it had to be a brass dragonborn. I mean... if it was a full dragon, then no, because fuck their love for warm climates/deserts for their lairs... but I can cope with the dragonborn version.

Obviously, they're also wearing real world clothes because we weren't actually making playable characters... plus we never had a conversation about classes... but I'd suggest sorcerer for me, cleric for him. And I thought they needed culturally appropriate pseudonyms this afternoon when I was finishing off the image... and while these might not stick, they do amuse me.

They may or may not show up as NPCs in something at some point... because, you know... waste not want not.

Moving on...

I gave the Halfling Tomato Soup another crack this week... not following the recipe quite so strictly... and it worked out really well. That is now my go-to tomato soup recipe until the end of time.

It was Tuesday where the wheels feel off my week/life/universe.

So there had been outbreak rumblings on Monday, then Tuesday it was announced we were going back into lockdown for a week, and then Wednesday morning I just happened to look at the list of places where people had been... only to discover that Burnside Village was on the list. On Sunday. Between about 1-2pm... and, friends, is exactly when our Valiant Hero (ie me) went to the Village on Sunday to visit the bakery and get a pie.

Fuck, fuck, fuckkity fucking balling cocks.

So.... after wandering around the house for a bit and swearing, then having breakfast and making a couple of phone calls, I got in the car and set off on A Grand Adventure.

Thankfully folks had advised me to very much avoid the testing centre in the parklands, given that there were upwards of 8 hour waiting times. So instead I decided to head to the airport, since I'd been told that it was "pretty empty"... granted that was a couple of days before and not when everyone and their donkey were going to get tested.

Let me shortcut a lot of the description of my day with an image...

Yes... five and a half hours of sitting in my car... driving once every so often, turning the car off, watching the cars on the other side of the road move towards the finish line, seeing pretty much all of the delivery/transport companies and their warehouses and needing to pee from about the 2pm make onwards. Also, I managed to get wedged between the same two four-wheel drives for the entire journey (obviously), which made seeing much in front or behind myself impossible for chunks of the time.

And then at the end, a solid 30 seconds for the actual test where the very nice lady shoved a stick up my nose and also swabbed my tongue.

The feeling of actually being able to drive at a speed faster than a crawl once I left was, frankly, exhilarating.

I mean, I will say that things might have gone quicker if a) there were more than four staff doing tests and/or b) they had reorganised the carpark so that said staff were doing their testing side by side rather than in two columns and/or c) they had people doing the actual testing and then other people bagging things up and doing whatever seemed to be taking all the time between tests.

Having said that, however, my hat is off to not only the folk doing the testing, but the folk working at various points on the line (even the traffic control folk on the roundabout who I muttered about more than once), and everyone else who provided the 17,000+ tests that happened on Wednesday (up from our average of about 7000-8000 the week before... which has gone up to about 23,000 the last couple of days).

Long story long... my first test came back negative, but I now need to have two more tests done... one on Monday and one the following Tuesday. And I need to stay in my house for two weeks.

So... 

Fuck.

I mean, it's not the most problematic of things... this week, we all had to be in the house anyway because Lockdown. It just made today super weird.

Well... also possibly Thursday and Friday... because, honestly, I wasn't feeling in the online DnD mood... and I definitely wasn't feeling in the mood to play my halfling bard at all.

So no DnD this week.

Thankfully Ma offered to do my shopping for me, since I can't do it myself... so she brought things down and dropped them off yesterday morning... which felt weird anyway, because Friday shopping, not Saturday shopping. Even if I wasn't doing it myself.

And Mrs organised a parcel of brownies to be delivered which arrived on Friday also. Friday was also the day I got my test results back... so, all around, Friday was a "good" day.

Today was just... weird. And by weird, I mean, the same as the last several days. By which I also mean... nothing happened. Plus I've been swathed in all the blankets, because it's bloody cold and for the most part, why turn the heater on when it's just me.

One of the downsides to all of this is that this Thursday was supposed to be the day that the plumbers came out to look at the roof/leak. So now that's on hiatus for a couple weeks... and once again this weekend we're having all the weather. Woo. Or, you know, not.

Honestly, I should be fine... but, you know, if you could think good thoughts in my general direction, that'd also be appreciated.

Current mood:

character saturday: faces faces faces

I will freely admit, that I'm going the low effort approach today as a) I'm exhausted and b) everything else wasn't low effort.

So instead, in the general theme of "not really a Hero Forge advert, but feels like one"... my favourite character making website just added the ability to put makeup and non-3d beards on characters. And I may have gone a little nuts yesterday.

We have played characters, unplayed characters, other people's characters, NPCs and other background characters and just for fun characters. In no specific order. And some of whom have shown up in different variations previously.

I will say that now that I have the option to put some black eyeliner on a character, I will need to come up with reasons NOT to, rather than reasons to add it. Plus a nice smoky eye.

Moving along...

This week has been... Second Hand Stressful.

So, after all the Get Ma on the Internet palaver of last Saturday, it turns out that the modem she has is... for no well explained reason that I can understand, but I'm dealing with second hand information and basically have to go off what she tells me... a "Telstra only" modem. I mean, fuck that noise both specifically and in general. Which means when the ISP tried to complete the transfer to them, they couldn't go the last step.

Which, in turn, stressed her out because they've already fucked her around extensively after she moved (Telstra that is), and she's done with their shit. But basically she contacted the ISP, explained things, and ordered a modem from them. It then took the rest of the week to get to her (she says that they suggested it would be there earlier... I think either the phone monkey was making wild assumptions or Ma misheard... both are eagerly likely).

And that meant that when it finally arrived at lunch time on Friday, everything I'd said to her last Saturday went completely out of her head which led to some slightly stressful phone conversations... and me thinking that perhaps I would need to head down to her place on Monday, which would have been fine, but then meant I had to do a lot of help desk sans full access to the internet.

Thankfully it mostly could all be rolled over to be "someone else's problem", in that it was more "call a people, make a people do a thing" for Ma.

So between that, keeping track of the package tracking for Ma just because it was one less thing to a) talk her through doing and b) something I could do and thinking that there was potential help desk on the horizon made the whole week a little stressy.

Add to that...

Water leaking from the cornice in the place it leaked not long after I moved in. And a forecast for rain all week, up to an including heavy showers, potential hail and strong winds on Friday.

That led to reporting it to the land agent, who then reported it to the Strata, who then contacted a plumber, who then called me on Friday when it was hammering with rain... and will come and investigate next Thursday. Because, of course.

It also meant that every night I unplugged my whole TV rig from that corner, because there's a powerpoint about a foot away from where the water was leaking.

On the up side... because there is one. The water dripped on Sunday, and again on Tuesday (I think, all the days this week have kind of blurred into one giant BLAH)... and then didn't leak again the rest of the week... even through the heavy rain last night.

Not that I'm telling the land agent or the strata that... I will tell the plumber (also, why a fucking plumber... I need a roofer or otherwise an expert in roof things... not a plumber... it's not plumbing, it's just water... whatever) that it may be partly due to the gutter being blocked, partly due to wind or rain coming from another direction... but all of that is supposition... basically I want someone to come sort the shit out and declare it appropriately fixed.

Suffice to say that I spent the whole week with my fingers crossed that I wasn't going to wake up or come home to discover an indoor vertical river between a powerpoint and a very large bookcase.

Hence, the general miasma of stress that permeated my whole week.

Soup this week was my version of the Dwarven Potato and Leek from a couple of weeks ago... maybe not the very, very best version of that soup I've ever made, but very good.

Thursday night's DnD was... a fitting finale to last week and my turn at DMing. And weirdly, I'd decided to build in a few story beats that ended up being very fitting for multiple characters without speaking to those players beforehand.

So, good job me I guess. It will be slightly weird to go back to playing next week, but also a lot less involved, so that's great.

Friday night's DnD was... unique. And I say that mostly because never before have I played DnD in the middle of a blackout by candlelight. Thankfully Mr and Mrs have ALL the candles, so when the power went out part way through the game, we took a time out, added a more than lots number of candles to the table and carried on with the game.

Yes, it was occasionally more difficult than necessary to read my dice, my character sheet and my spell descriptions. But it was also really cool. And appropriate since we're playing in a world that's always dark.

We met silly kobolds, I got a very pretty ring, we picked up a, frankly, stupid but still catchy party nickname and ended the adventure on the doorstep on my character's home and her seeing her "graph paper husband and son"... so that'll be an interesting session next week. Especially as DM Fluffy needs to play said husband and son. And I have very high expectations for this particular interaction, since said family has been living in my head for a while now.

I mean, it'll be fine either way... but... you know.

I will say that the drive to take Fluffy home has less fun than usual due to ALL THE RAIN, windy roads and car windows fogging up... blah. I mean, we survived, it was just, once again, stressful.

Sidebar... Tomorrow is my blog's 16th bloggiversary... Sweet Sixteen and all that. Wooo... I guess... even if it's mostly part diary, part me screaming into the void these days. Especially these days.

Moving on...

Today was... exhausting.

We did the supermarket thing... I'm going with the Halfling Tomato Soup again this week... because, honestly, I just need comfort soup... and tomato soup plus halfling soup equals comfort soup.

I also finally got the last of the ingredients for one of the other DnD recipes that I've been slowly collating for... about three weeks. Every time I think I've gotten everything I check the recipe again and realise I was mistaken. I mean, it would have helped if I'd written down the things I'd needed at any point. But no.

Then we came back here... and The Internet Simplified For Parent 2.0 class commenced. And it's not like we went through THAT many things... and she got most of it... and she'll be fine, but it'll just take a little while until she gets used to new systems and things.

My brain stopped working at a certain point though honestly... fortunately Ma's brain had stopped working several minutes beforehand, so we called it quits about there.

Current mood:

character saturday: the bird and the beefcake

We're back in the land of DnD Character Colouring Book character creation this week. And I didn't realise how thematically similar they were in some ways until I put together these images and realised that the background colours could essentially be the same.

Plus the fact that they both have alliterative names... which isn't something I gravitate towards, except in the case of dwarves... dwarves should always lean into alliterative names in my opinion.

Leif Leatherbuckle is the latest in a long line of potential back up characters for our Friday game. Others on the list included a human fighter, a tabaxi ranger, a half-orc monk and a gnomish artificer. All male, interestingly, because that just feels right as a contrast. Leif is a mountain dwarf, a race I've never played. And I've never played a male dwarf at all. I've come up with character ideas for ones, but they've never seen the table.

Plus it means that I can lean into the idea of a Strength based ranger who throws axes and hammers.

And since they improved the Beast Master ranger (and rangers in general) in the most recent sourcebook, it's a class I definitely want to have a play with at some point. Weirdly though, most of the Beast Masters I've come across always seem to have animal companions instead of birds, and while the idea of a dwarf with a boar or a giant badger or a giant wolf spider or just a wolf is interesting, we're already a bunch of tiny gnomes travelling with a talking polar bear, so another big land bound beast didn't seem right.

So a big old snowy owl seemed like the better option. Because I love owls, the entire game is set in the dark because reasons and in the snow, for the same reasons.

I'm not 100% positive on the names yet... particularly the owl, but for now I like it... and especially because Ari is short for Arianrhod, a Celtic goddess of the moon and the north star. Which ties into the character I'm playing now. 

Brief sidebar: I do very much wish they would add more designs for the owls in Hero Forge... or at the very least a version without the ear tufts that work work as like a snowy owl and a barn owl or whatever.

What is weird to me is that originally Leif was supposed to be a redhead. I loves me a redheaded dwarf. But it just didn't work with the rest of the colour scheme somehow... he wanted to have dark hair. I don't really know that much about his backstory... beyond the fact that Fluffy and I were recently talking about the fact that since I'm playing a female druid from a group of female druids, there must be male ranger counterparts to them who stay in the shadows and just get on with things, whereas the druids are more known in the region.

So Leif is one of those rangers. From the same town as my druid in theory, but, honestly, I think he would just end up being the ranger for whatever area is the closest is to where my druid would be if she died. We'll see what happens though. I don't intend her to die, but stranger things have happened.

In contrast, Riley Rose is a himbo. I conceived of him as a himbo, I built him as a himbo, he was born in my brain when two different unrelated videos I watched on YouTube both mentioned himbos in the same two day period. He's a sweet, handsome, muscular, stupid human farm boy who worships Chauntea, the goddess of agriculture, and just wants to protect people and do good.

He's a paladin of the Oath of Glory... which is, in my opinion, the most himbo subclass of the most himbo class. I love paladins, don't get me wrong, but they are the class most likely to be very strong, very pretty and very dumb by default. I also feel like he's the seventh son of a seventh son, or something equally "prophetic" or "mythic" or otherwise like a fairy tale.

And of course he has a shield with a big painted rose on it, one of the two symbols of Chauntea. Plus his grandfather's spearhead on a brand new shaft. Also, people don't use spears enough in DnD.

Moving on...

Going back to basics with a fairly simple chicken soup was the correct way to recover after the previous week's disaster. Even if I may have underestimated the amount of vegetables I needed, so it was perhaps a little thin. Tasty though.

I also booked my first vaccine appointment... and having seen that the place I wanted to have it saying they had appointments in the next two days, I thought I was golden. Turns out those appointment weren't for me... and the earliest one was the 15th. That's not so bad I thought... and extra week, but at least it's soon. So I booked it. Only to finally notice on the final confirmation page that the appointment is for 15 September. I can't blame the booking site that much, I did vague out a little, and honestly the difference between a 7 and 9 is... yeah, never mind... I didn't read the thing fully and made assumptions.

And we all know what happens when you assume... you make an ass out of you and umption. Or at least that's what Samuel L Jackson told me in a movie once.

Anyway.

I was back in the DM's seat for our Thursday game... dealing with all of the fallout from the previous game where somebody died. And we're a wordy group at the best of times but there was more than one instance where I just sat back and let them go. And as I commented at one point, the amount of emotional constipation amongst the characters without my character there. It does help that the adventure locks them in a library basement and lets them get on with things. Interestingly, it has also allowed my character to get all emotionally constipated and go off on his own, since he's not there while I'm running the game.

The other great thing was they investigated all the rooms that don't really matter and didn't investigate the ones that do super early in the game and uncovered things I didn't want them to before it was time. They also dived into the mechanic I thought could be annoying or off putting with both feet, so that's always a bonus.

Friday night's game was pretty good actually. I mean, it's always a problem when you accidentally capture the bad guy and have to decide what to do next rather than just fighting them. And then they escaped. Maybe, probably. I mean I might have avalanched them in a little, but it's very likely they'll show up again later. So, fun times.

And now we need to go and find out if my character's husband is indeed trapped in a mine with a bunch of kobolds or safe at home with our son. Because fuck you DM Fluffykins. On the plus side, in either scenario, he's going to need to roleplay my graph paper husband sooner rather than later, so... joke's on him I guess maybe? I dunno, but I'm looking forward to that quite a bit.

Plus I got to use my super special Circle of Stars druid transformation not once but twice this week, and while I flavoured some of it, he flavoured the rest of it in a way I really liked. And, honestly, my character was entirely too pleased with herself after the transformations... because who wouldn't be when it's taken her 40+ years to get to this point in her druidic career.

Today was...

Today was "I have a headache", that's what today was.

We did the supermarket thing as per usual. Came home, did the usual unpackery and YubTubs. I also made a whole fuckton of pickled onions, one small jar to give to Ma, one giant jar to keep for myself.

Then we got to the portion of the day where Ma wanted assistance in getting on the internets at home. Which, as anyone with half a brain will know, is a much longer conversation, especially given she hasn't connected her laptop to the internet (ie brought it down to my place) in a hot minute.

And because she hadn't warned me that this was a conversation we were absolutely going to have this week, I hadn't done the mental prep to think of all the things I needed to think about. So, as I described to her, there's a box in my head marked "The Internet" that I've been putting things into for at least twenty years with no real rhyme or reason and only loosely categorised. And now I need to take only the relevant things out of that box, present them to her in a way that she'll actually be able to take in and remember and not give her all of it at once. And also remember how stuff works, because some of the things I do/have just work that way because I've slowly modified them as I've gone along and don't remember the how or the why or the wherefore for some of it. And some of it I didn't even realise that it works differently to the way it works for me.

So now my brain is broken.

On the upside, if all things go to plan, Ma will be connected early in the week and everything will just work the way it's supposed to. For the love of all the gods in every pantheon... pray for me. Pray that it all works like it's supposed to and is smooth like the silk.

I'll keep you posted.

A large chunk of the day was, obviously, consumed with all that, so that's it really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: dark skies

So...

It's been a hot minute since I've been following a recipe and screwed it up to the point of complete failure. The last one I can think of was when I tried a different bread recipe and put one and a half tablespoons of salt in instead of teaspoons. But at least that was understandable at the time because I only had half a functional face... so I was a little distracted.

But back to the current fuckup.

I attempted to make the chili recipe from the DnD cookbook. I say attempted because it was a disaster from start to finish. Part of the problem was also that I was making an additional one third to the recipe, so there was mental maths. But I had the same tablespoons for teaspoon problem as the above. I put far too many kidney beans, or alternatively the recipe just has too many kidney beans in it. And I put additional veggies in... and too much stock. So at the end it was both too sloppy, too beany and just tasted off.

In short, a disaster. And an inedible disaster at that.

So fuck that recipe. That's being consigned to the void until the heat death of the universe.

It also meant I had to improvise a menu for the rest of the week based on things I happened to have in the house, since I hadn't planned for anything other than chili for the week generally.

I survived.

It did give me a little bit of a sad for the first part of the week, exacerbated by local news of additional (admittedly minor) restrictions and whatnot.

Moving on.

We're back to actual photos this week... with dark skies and what not, because the weather right now.

Thursday DnD was moved to Wednesday this week for reasons... and we had a character death. I mean, a little like my cooking disaster this week, it was a collection of individual mistakes, so while there's not blame to be spread, there is definitely character guilt to share around, so that'll be interesting for future games, especially since I'm running the following adventure.

*evil maniacal laughter*

Ahem... anyway. It was a good game, my character was, as the youths say, shooketh... it's going to have repercussions for future games... and, you know CHARACTER DRAMA. So there's that.

Being the start of the month, Thursday was Cut Your Own Hair day again... and while it's very weird, I guess it also makes sense, that cutting all my hair off when it was super long was actually WAY easier than trimming it back from about an inch to half an inch or whatever it is now... some variation on a theme thereof anyway.

Friday was firstly Chiro Day... and the receptionist scared me when she turned around to reveal her facemask with a pair of big red embroidered lips on it... I wasn't expecting it and threw me off so much I misspelt my own first name... so there's that. But otherwise I got all my spine bits adjusted as appropriate.

For reasons I don't completely understand, mixing the exact same (for all intends and purposes) ingredients together on the regular results in vastly different bread from week to week. This week was quite a small loaf relatively speaking, but pleasant enough.

And our Friday night DnD game went very well. We fought some beasties, didn't get eaten by yetis and my character got to tell a story I didn't think she was going to be able to tell either at all or not for a while... so that's always nice.

Today was... m'eh. But acceptable m'eh. We did the supermarket, I'm abandoning recipes this week and making my own soup, because fuck playing by other people's rules in a food preparation context.

Then we came back here and because going anywhere is too much of a pain in the ass right now, we didn't and just did the YubTubs until Ma toddled off home.

So there's that.

Current mood:

movies: luca

Let me just start this off by saying that Luca is an amazing movie. But at the same time, fuck you Disney for not releasing this into cinemas. Not allowing this movie to be seen full sized on a movie screen is a crime against cinema.

You can tell that parts of this movie are a love letter to, well, the Italian Riviera first and foremost, but also to Studio Ghibli movies. The skies in this movie are absolutely Ghibli skies... and the town in the movie is called Portorosso... giving a tip of the hat to my personal favourite Ghibli movie, Porco Rosso, also set on the Riviera. It also reminded me, visually, of both Call Me By Your Name and The Talented Mr Ripley, which is unsurprising since they both take place on the Italian coast.

It's also, oddly enough, a movie set in the 1950's. I mean, you wouldn't know beyond a couple of movie posters in the background, because the movie itself is timeless. Also, the music is pretty 50's (he says as he types this review while listening to the soundtrack). Italian 50's music... but very 50's.

I wasn't sure if I was going to love the movie during the first 15 minutes or so... because, well, the first 15 minutes are basically a riff on The Little Mermaid. Just with the titular Luca taking the place of Ariel. And, for all intents and purposes, the other main character, Alberto, filling in the Prince Eric role, by which I mean being the catalyst that gets Luca up on land.

Once they are on land though, it becomes it's own thing.

Let me do my usual trick and gush about the visuals in this movie. I've already said that this movie has Ghibli skies... actually, it has Ghibli grass too... which is a massive compliment. It's clear that they pulled in all of the Pixar expertise from previous movies... because everything about this movie is visually STUNNING. The town, the underwater sequences, the very Ghibli inspired dream sequence... the food.

There's less food in this movie than there was in Ratatouille, but without any doubt the food in this movie is leap and bounds more beautiful. And when there's basil on top of a dish of pasta and you know it's definitely basil because of the little creases in the leaves and you know that it's also covered in oil because it's shiny... when you can taste it just by looking at it. That's amazing looking food.

I may have also had a moment over the other main character, Giulia, because she wears a knitted hat. A cable knitted hat. Where you can see the individual stiches. I mean, I had a moment. Add to that moment that when I learned after the movie that she's basically dressed identically to Tombo in Kiki's Delivery Service (sans the hat), which is a Ghibli movie I also love.

It's not really surprising to me that the writer/director of this movie, Enrico Casarosa, also wrote and directed the La Luna short a decade ago... they share a sweetness and a visual style that I adore... and that makes me really glad they gave him a movie to make his own.

Now, let's circle around to the story.

Casarosa's sweetness shines through here, and, if the little bits I've seen about the making of the movie in the last 24 hours are any indication, it seems like the story is based around similar experiences he had with a childhood friend. I mean, clearly Enrico isn't a "sea monster" (as far as we're aware anyway), but the friendship between Luca and Alberto is what makes this movie a stand out.

It was also one of the best representations I've seen for a "disabled" character in a movie... a character with one arm, who just says that it's the way he came into the world (and that's the one and only time it's talked about), it's not a massive plot point about him not having the arm or how he deals without it and it's also not the only defining thing about his character, it's just yet another thing to add to the list along with fisherman, father, fabulous moustache owner and respected member of the community.

And while I get why they wanted to have dangers to Luca and Alberto's adventures coming from both the land and the sea, the weakest parts of the story for me are the douchebag teenager in the village (because why none of the adults have told him to shut up and sit down I don't get... I'm assuming in my head canon that he's the son of the mayor or the richest person in town or something... he's clearly borrowing clout he doesn't have himself) and Luca's parents from the ocean. Mostly because both antagonists are played very broadly for the laughs and Luca's parents are kind of stereotypes (although, at least he has one of each, this is a Disney movie after all).

While we're on the subject... I'm still not sure how I feel about Luca's colour scheme when he's in his sea monster form... something about it was a little too much for me... maybe it's the fact that his face is blue and green, his hair his kind of purple and his eyes are red and yellow. Too many colours going on. Whereas Alberto is blue and purple with green and yellow eyes. That worked better for me. But honestly, I'd rather have had them shoot for the fences and use all the pencils in the pencil box than not have that riot of colours in other places.

Now, we come to the proverbial elephant... well, possibly the proverbial sea monster in the room.

Is the movie Luca queer? Is it queerbaiting? Has Disney accidentally made a movie by a straight writer/director that resonates massively with a queer audience by talking about a fundamental human/sea monster experience of feeling like you don't belong and finding a person who expands your world more than you thought possible who then also leads you to people who love you for who you are and that found family is very often more important than the family that you're born into. And then released it during US Pride month.

Short version. No to the first, no to the second, FUCK YES THEY DID to the third.

But... and this is a very big but. While it's perfectly reasonably to read this as a queer movie and absolutely ship the two Nonnas (you'll know what I mean if you've seen it), it isn't a love story... even accidentally. It's about two boys who don't fit in because they're different no matter where they go learning to show the world exactly who they are and finding that the world loves them because they're good people and doesn't care about the ways that they're different.

And at the same time, that doesn't have to be read as a queer story. Stories about boys who care for each other, aren't afraid to show affection with each other, both physically and emotionally, and support each other are important in their own right, irrespective of anybody's current or future sexual orientation. And I want those movies to exist in the world without everybody pointing at every single one of them and screaming "GAY" like they're an extra in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie.

Because movies like this are important for little boys to watch. Little queer boys and little straight boys both. Because finding the weirdos who are your kind of weirdo and love you for it is an important thing to have in your life. For everyone.

It should be unsurprising to anyone who's ever read one of my Pixar movie reviews... I absolutely cried at the end of this movie. Even though I knew how the movie was going to end, I still cried. Because while I knew the destination, I didn't know exactly how they were going to get us there.

And I'll be honest, Luca is kind of all about the journey. A sweet, sweet Summer journey I'm very enthusiastic to take again.

yani's rating: 4 goatfish out of 5

character saturday: going three-d

So... the best way to describe this is as a "group project". This is the mini for Quill, my druid in Friday's DnD games. Designed by me using Hero Forge, 3D printed for me by one of the Thursday DnD boys, and given a first go at a paint job, and then refined and finished off by Mrs from the Friday group.

And then photographed by me... at a scale you'd never, ever be able to see the mini itself, because it's tiny... 30mm tall more or less.

There is a second mini, which I tried to photograph, but it just didn't work because it's darkly painted and covered in glitter... it looks amazing in person though, and exactly what I wanted.

I'm honestly in awe of anyone who can paint miniatures... it takes a degree of skill, talent and eyesight I simply don't have.

Anyway.

I made possibly the best tomato soup I've made thus far, and unsurprisingly, it's a halfling recipe from the DnD cookbook. I also made the prettiest looking (and tastiest) toasted cheese sandwich ever. So, I will absolutely be going back to the recipe at some point.

And having cheese toasties all week wasn't the worst thing in the world either... even if that first one was the best by far.

Thursday was an odd DnD session... if only because it was an episode of When Worlds Collide. Since we're doing a rotating DM thing, Fluffy (Friday's DM) offered to come and meet the reprobates I play with. Which was fun... having a new energy in the room... and also seeing him interacting with the rest of the group was interesting.

And it was also a much more chill session all around, which basically just depends on the mood of the room on any given day. Not just that room specifically, but just DnD tables as a whole in my experience.

Then before Friday's game, Fluffy had asked whether I wanted to watch Luca with him. And I did. So we did. More on that later.

Friday night's game was very much a case of "And Then". We were basically going from A to B, exploring a little along the way. Which is stuff you gotta do at the beginning of a campaign and something I enjoy in and of itself. Lots of mysteries for us to come back and solve later.

Today we did some actual stuff.

I'm attempting the chilli from the DnD cookbook, although, honestly, fuck the background fluff for that particular recipe, but I still wanna try it.

So I got the ingredients for that... increased my spice rack by about a third... which just goes to show you how anaemic my spice rack is currently.

After the supermarket and coming back here for the YubTubs, we headed off to Mitcham Shopping Centre to poke around Cheap as Chips and also visit the Portuguese custard tart shop that Mrs told us about yesterday. So damn good.

But we just picked up a few bits of things otherwise... I finally got another silicon whisk and actually found another storage box for my dice... basically the duplicate of the one I have now. Definitely not sure how I'm going to put it to use, but I couldn't leave it on the shelf, especially as it was the last one there.

And that was it really.

Current mood:

character saturday: excited flame

So we have Character Inception for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book... a fictional character made up by a fictional character.

My current bard character, Harland Honeypot's tiefling muse, Nancy Drew adult's only stand-in, archaeologist and rogue, Euphoria Phlox. And I'm more amused because while I knew that Phlox was the name of a type of purple, and the name of a type of flower, it also comes from the Greek word for flame. Which works as a tiefling.

I've said before that I love when a name accidentally becomes more relevant. Like when Peregrin's name turned out to be a combination "in the original halfling" of Pery, meaning "flower, love, loyal, romance" and Gren, meaning "baker, cook, feast, green, plenty"... at least according to books from previous editions of DnD. And, honestly, combining most translations of both words together makes sense for the character he ended up being.

Anyway...

I included a little mini "minor illusion" version of this model in the Harland model, but I kinda wanted to show off the full version. Plus, I'm otherwise running out of images of any kind.

I think probably in the reality of his books, Harland would probably write her with a much more low cut or otherwise slightly revealing top... but with a (purple) leather jacket to go over the top. My original concept was doing her with purple skin... but honestly, that just looked weird when I was putting the model together. Plus I feel like he would be able to find a lot more "sexy" adjectives for skin in human tones as opposed to purple tones. Plus that way all the accessories including her neckerchief, belt buckle and crossbow bolt fletching can all be purple.

Moving on...

This week's soup was not from the DnD cookbook and it was... acceptable. It was beef and vegetable with tomato... and not anywhere near as good as the version I made the other week. But, like I said, acceptable.

Thursday's DnD was... frustrating. For very specific and personal reasons that I'm not going to bother going into... suffice to say... just occasionally, and for a limited period of time... I kinda hate my friends. Urgh. It's fine, I know it's a series of factors, and I'll live. But just sometimes...

Anyway...

Friday was much better. We met our "sidekick"... an overly timid polar bear that I accidentally named Pepper because a) everybody else's potential names were slightly ridiculous and b) I rolled on a table of imaginary plant names and came up with Royal Pepper as a plant name... so, we just shortened it to the second part.

And I met more of my character's druid circle pals.... and they were alive this time... although, I will say, thus far I've met two, found one dead, discovered that a second one died a couple of months ago and one might have gone crazy and be the problem. So, out of a group of ten druids, she's at 20% dead and 20% met.

Plus we met Lassie. Well, not actually... but basically a dog ran up to us when we entered one of the towns and made Lassie whining at us until we followed it home to discover that, in fact, one of it's owners had gotten himself lost down a non-literal well, and we need to go and see if we can find him.

So, thus far, we're a party of three gnomes, a polar bear and a husky. We have not, as yet, walked into a bar. But it's only a matter of time.

Also, it was Mr's pre-birthday Friday, so I made olive bread (which I don't normally make because Mrs doesn't like olives) and Fluffy also gave everyone a present of a blind bag semi-prescious stone d6... and while they were both blind bags and we picked them in a totally random order as well, but of the four dice, they all worked really well for who ended up with them... for example, I'm playing a druid and I got one with a tree. So everybody was really happy, which is always good.

Today wasn't much of anything really.

We did supermarketing. I'm planning on making halfling tomato soup this week from the DnD cookbook. So we'll see how I feel about that by the end of the week.

Then, we came back here and did the unpackery and feel down a YubTubs hole... because, honestly, it's too cold to go out for no specific reason. And we didn't have a reason. So we didn't.

Thus endeth this week.

Current mood:

character saturday: family ties

And so it begins...

I'll circle back around to this, but Friday DnD started our new campaign this week. And for the first time in a proper campaign, I'm going in with a character with an actual family. Not a found family or a nebulous case of "parents and siblings". A husband and a son.

So, this week's DnD Character Colouring Book is Quillamina Silverthread (in her "at home" gown"), her husband Wrenn Bafflestone and their boy, Kipper.

I hadn't thought until just now that I decided to put Quill in blue, a primary colour, but the boys are both in secondary colours, orange and green respectively. Not sure if that was an unconscious choice because primary vs secondary characters... or I was just trying not to have them all in the same/similar colours.

Anyway...

Dwarven potato and leek soup this week. From the Heroes Feast DnD Cookbook once again. And while I've made many, many, many pots of potato and (something) soup in the recent past, this may be one of the thickest soups I've made in a while. And pretty good overall. Definitely something I'll revisit in some way, shape or form.

Tuesday I watched all seven hours of the final episode of the second Critical Role campaign. It's the very definition of being sad that it's over and happy that it happened. And very much proof of how amazing DnD can be when you have a great DM and the players really lean into their characters.

And I absolutely cried.

Thursday's DnD was great. Good character moments... and I discovered things about my character that are definitely a problem, but that gives me something to work through. And not something I've explored before. So that's fun.

But, as I said, we started a new campaign in the Friday DnD game.

The introduction of Session Zeros for this game, which means that we've all had an experience in the world before we came together as a group, have added an interesting dynamic. And it seems as though Fluffy, in his role as DM has seemed to have decided to bolt my backstory to the main narrative at this point. Which is not great for some of the characters connected to my backstory right now.

It definitely gives my character a reason to join up with the group though, which I appreciate. Because, on the surface, I hadn't found one on my own throughout that session.

It's also interesting because this is the first time in... well, a while anyway... where I feel like my choices about a character's personality has come more from the accent I'm choosing to use. The only other time I feel like this happened was with my elven wizard with the hideous French accent... and he just wouldn't shut up. But this is very different experience. And she's turning into a much calmer and thoughtful character because I'm using a softly spoken "Southern US" accent.

Which is kind of fascinating.

I am very interested to see where this particular group of characters goes throughout this story though. And how Quill's goal of going back to her routine and her life pans out in the end.

Today was good.

We did the supermarket thing... I decided to put the DnD cookbook to one side for this week and just make up my own soup this time. Then maybe dip back in next week for either the Halfling Tomato Soup or the Gnomish Lamb Stew... since the characters I'm playing on the regular at the moment are a halfling and a gnome. So there's that.

I had also promised Ma I'd make her sausage rolls for her birthday (because neither of us thought of it in time last week), so we got the supplies for that also.

We also took a side trip to Kmart to investigate sparkly silver nail polish for DnD purposes. Yes, actually.

And then we came back here, put a movie on and I made sausage rolls. Now with fresh thyme and some lemon zest, just, because why the fuck not.

Then, as they say, that was that. I sent Ma on home with half of the leftover sausage rolls and called it a day.

Current mood:

character saturday: arrows and ice

And so we reach the last of the Disney Princess Adventurers in DnD Character Colouring Book.

Merida is basically already a DnD character to be honest... but I decided to make her an Arcane Archer, imbuing her arrows with magic... as well as giving her the Sharpshooter feat... because, well, Merida. And she's already an Outlander, finding food to feed her and her mother in the wilderness and finding her way in the world.

If I hadn't already gone with a Ranger for Snow White, I would have made Merida a Beast Master with a bear companion, because that makes sense too.

And as much as I would have liked Elsa to have been one of the characters for last week when Fluffy forced me to watch Frozen 2... she's here now... day late and a dollar short.

I absolutely took liberties with her costume... because, well... the cold never bothered her anyway. And given that she runs across a frozen ocean barefoot in the second movie, clearly that's a thing.

So that's why she has the the Elemental Adept (cold damage) feat... which doesn't give her resistance to cold unfortunately, but does mean she does a little more damage with cold/ice spells and doesn't care if the thing she's attacking is resistant to cold.

She's a hermit for obvious reasons, and Wizard just made the most sense... as did the fact that wizards have access to the most cold damage spells in the game, and those spells are mostly the School of Evocation.

So that's the end of that little diversion.

I did do a deep dive into the DnD Heroes' Feast cookbook this week... with Halfling Everything Soup (basically chicken and vegetable, but very tasty), Dwarven Flat Bread (decent, but not sure I completely got the hang of it),Halfling Oatmeal Sweet Nibbles (cookies)... which were amazing still warm from the oven... and were descended on as through by wild animals by the Thursday DnD crew.

Rolling back a second...

Thursday should have been excellent... I made cookies, we were finishing the second half of the first adventure in the series we're doing... and all of that was fine. What wasn't fine was when I powered on through a yellow light and had a little bit of a bumper bump with the guy in front of me who stopped sooner than I expected.

Thankfully all that really happened was his towbar pierced my bumper in a way that's hardly worth bothering about. So at least that was a bonus. But not a great way to start my Thursday night excursion.

Friday was Chiro Day... and technically also Haircut Day... in so much as I reshaved my head for this month.

And then we had our Session Zero for the new campaign... which mostly consisted of eating bread stuffed with cheese, chatting about what our expectations are for the new campaign... and then I retired to Mrs' study to read graphic novels while the others did their intro to the adventure. And then we played the first board game from the folks at Critical Role, Uk'otoa, which is a super fun game.

Today was the usual.

I'm attempting another recipe from the DnD cookbook this week... which is basically potato and leek soup, which I can make anyway, but I'm interested to try a different take on the genre.

But we did the supermarket thing... came back here, did the usual and then took a little trip to Haighs. Because, why not.

Current mood: