The trope I see most often about characters is that they have tragic backstories... everyone died in a fire, was killed by raiders, abandoned the character when they were a wee baby... some reason for them to head out on the road and become an adventurer.
The majority of the time I say "fuck that". A character who has a loving family and a secure home and still wants to go off and see the world is much more exciting to me. So, almost all of my characters have some sort of family somewhere. Some of them lost one parent or another, but that's never the reason they became an adventurer... I do have one went that route after he lost his wife, but that's it really.
Which is the long was of saying, these two halflings, Brandien Beestinger (baker and crossbow fighter) and Melody Longpond (sage and beast master ranger... and her peregrine falcon Essel), are the parents of Belben Beestinger (that's him, second from the left in the header image), my first ever DnD character.
Which is also super appropriate because tomorrow is the third anniversary of my first ever DnD game.
Given that he's an adventurer, descended from adventurers who are in turn descended from adventurers, at a certain point I did designs and characters for his Beestinger lineage.
Belben's direct family all have names inspired by Doctor Who companions (yes, I'm that kind of nerd)... Brandien translates to "Blue Hero" aka the TARDIS (hence his blue colour scheme), his mother Melody Longpond is a variation of River Song, his sisters are Rose, Marigold (standing in for Martha), Belladonna (Donna), Cara (Clara) and Pearl (the first name of the actress who played Bill Potts).
And part of the fun of designing his parents was figuring out how the genetics worked backwards. At least for me.
I will say that I've always been super happy with how Melody came out... both the white armour, which is mostly impractical but looks stylish as all fuck and the fact that I got a very peregrine falcon look for her bird companion thanks to cutting and layering actual photos. Less sure about the green trim on her bow to be honest... orange might have been more appropriate... but whadyagunnado?
Anyway...
Today is my 15th bloggiversary. Holy fuckballs. I mean we're definitely not in the heady days of 400-500 posts a year, I haven't broken 100 posts per annum since 2017, but we're still here.
It's also super weird to look back at some of that early stuff, where I didn't have a lot of routines and structures in place and I would just post about whatever whenever. Probably in the way I have used Twitter I guess. Random thought, tweet that shit.
However if I spend too much time looking at how many of the links in some of those old post are just broken or don't go anywhere sensible anymore, I will go insane.
In other news... which isn't really news, but still... I am not as scary as folks seem to believe I am. I mean, yes, but that's mostly for and about people I don't give two shits about. So, you know, other people. Yes, I have opinions... I have many, I hand them out on a regular basis, you only need to ask. Sometimes I give them away regardless. Do with them as you will. But if you think that means you can't bring your concerns to me or have a conversation about an issue, to that I say "look at your life, look at your choices" because you've made a wrong turn somewhere. But I love you anyway. And for the record, yes, you, you know who you are.
Now that we've got that out the way.
Chowder was more of a success this week... still a little too thin, but that was more about me putting more liquid in than it really needed... on the up side, it made 8 serves instead of the usual 7, which isn't a bad thing.
DnD was just Friday this week. I won't lie, one game a week isn't quite enough. Two games is better. Three is kind of my sweet spot I think. I know that four is too many. The Friday game was all roleplay once again. It kinda needed to be for logistical reasons, and some of it was just information transfer, but it had it's moments. And I did finally realise the root of the issues my character was having with the other character. The voice. Which sounds insane, I know this. But the character's voice was drilling straight into the part of my brain that instantly rebels against being condescended to or talked down to. And it also made perfect sense that my character would have the exact same response to that kind of voice.
Plus the two characters were just incapable of actually seeing each other and not the idea they had about who the other was. Sometimes it all gets real "persykological", to steal a word from Terry Pratchett.
We'll see what the next "chapter" holds.
In the Oven Repair Saga... the one thing I said to my land agent that was important in this whole rigmarole was that I wanted to be kept informed on where we were at. I mean, not that fucking hard, right. You find out a piece of news, you spend at most 90 seconds on an email, then you go on with your day. But I had to chase the job up again, only to find that yes, the repair has been approved and we're waiting on parts. When was it approved, fucked if I know. Sometime in the last two weeks, clearly. And I know it was probably going to take about two weeks for the parts to arrive during this time of strife. So how soon will it be fixed? Sometime in the next two weeks, possibly. Who can fucking say?
Again I say, in a much less forgiving tone of voice... "look at your life, look at your choices".
I just wanna fucking bake bread again. Like seriously. Bread... and sausage rolls... and maybe a cake... and a tuna morney... and a whole fuckton of roast potatoes.
The plan for this week is a reasonable sized batch of chilli. With mushrooms. Plus other hidden vegetables. And my chilli game is pretty decent.
Otherwise, we did the supermarket thing, came back here, did the YubTubs, then went for a wander across at the Village. Picked up a copy of Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse for under $10, so hopefully it's as good as I've heard it is.
And that was it really. A wander and then we called it a day.
Current mood:
1 comment:
Happy 15 years, yikes. Those were the days. Still enjoy checking in on your blog every now and again!
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