photo friday: grey man

Welcome to the new laptop. It's... fine. The phrase I keep using is that it's "worth the price"... which is less of a compliment than you might otherwise think. It's not great, but then again, it didn't have a huge price tag on it. Most of the issue I'm having is with Windows 11, because it seems like they're added a bunch of bullshit features that I can't really see anybody ever caring about or wanting to use, and they've removed a ton of features that were actually useful.

And the amount of times I've search up an issue in the past week, only to discover most of the answers online are "nah, there's no way to turn that off" or "nah, it doesn't do that any more" or "nah, there's no way around that". Which is frustrating.

Case in point. On the taskbar, there's a spot where it tells me I'm using the ENG US keyboard. Specifically the Australian one, obviously. But that's just there. And fucked if I can think of any time any single person in the world would really, really need to know that so much that it's on the fucking taskbar. But there's no way to remove it.

And, of course, there's so many little weird bits and pieces, either new stuff I don't have any clue what the fuck it does, or things that I'd set up the way I liked them some 8 years back, under a completely different operating system.

I just keep remembering to breathe.

Anyway.

Moving on to today's DnD Character Colouring Book...

We'll call this one a sketch. It's liable to change 50 times and become a completely different character by the time it hits the table. But there was a brief conversation on Friday night about What Happens Next, after I'm done running this current adventure, and based on that, this character kind of swam forth in my brain this afternoon.

And it's a wood elf, which I've never played. I've done a high elf, a dark elf and half-elves, but never a wood elf. He's also an acolyte of the most recent version of the God of Death (or perhaps, the most recent god to have that title is a better way to say it), and an order of monks who have some healing abilities. Which felt like it all just fit together nicely.

I did have a go at a Mercy Monk once before, and it's very probable that some of the proto backstory that was swirling around in my brain for that character might get transferred over to this one. There wasn't a lot, honestly, just a few little ideas. I do know where this character is from originally though, before he set out on his grand adventure.

It's also one of the most basic/least interesting costumes I've made in a good long white. I mean, I like the fact that now, with layering of clothes, I can put pants under the robes, but I also like that this is really, really basic. Canonically, there would be holes on the sides of the hood for his ears... and yes, he can see through the mask... I'm going with the age-old answer of "a wizard did it", at least until I come up with a better idea. I mean, I could just shade the eyes black, but I like the fully metal mask (which, yes, is just his face, with no expression, painted silver).

But honestly, this is the first in what will probably be a number of ideas. I mean, look at how many different rogues I made, and that was me being settled on a class. This could literally go anywhere from here.

Anyway.

This week was... a lot. Relatively speaking.

We started out with Tomato Soup... basically the first time that I've gone really off-script with the Halfling recipe I've made several times now. It came out fine, but honestly, not really all that much better or worse than the original.

Monday I spend a large chunk of the day setting up the new laptop, installing programs, uninstalling things, setting things up and essentially getting everything the way I wanted it. Or at least the first iteration of that. It's an ongoing process, that, honestly, is still ongoing.

Tuesday, the car was booked in for a service. So I headed down the road at about 7:30am, getting to the mechanic much earlier than I was expecting, but thankfully, he was in the store, he just hadn't opened yet. So I went off to meet Ma, who came down to pick me up and run some errands while we killed time waiting for the car.

Well, actually, the FIRST thing I did was accidentally headbutt the rear vision mirror while grabbing something on the floor of the passenger side, knocking it clearly off the window. And then had to drive to the mechanic with no rear vision mirror. On the plus side, there's no better possible time for me to have done it than right before driving to the mechanic.

First stop after Ma picked me up was North Adelaide for some breakfast. Which was oddly nostalgic. I mean, if one can be nostalgic about an empty, underground, supermarket carpark. The answer is yes, yes you can. Is it sensible in any way? No, no it is not.

But mostly it was just being back in the suburb, wandering through the little shopping centre that I've wandered through a million, billion times, seeing the things that were exactly the same as they were seven years ago, or whatever. So we had some breakfast at Cibo, had a bit of a wander and then headed down to Arndale, which we also haven't been to really at all since I moved out of North Adelaide. Because now it's on the opposite side of the city and, honestly, it's a bit of a hole.

They've made it look bright and shiny though, so that's a plus.

We basically did a wander around the whole place like we used to, picked up a couple of bits and pieces and waited for Mr Mechanic to call me. Which he did, but then we still had a couple of hour to kill. Which we did by going back to Northpark, where we used to do our weekly shop for about a thousand years, and wandering around the shops on both sides of the road, then stopping for lunch.

In the end we were still early getting to the mechanic, and then we basically had to sit around for another half an hour anyway, because the glue on the window/mirror still needed to dry.

Eventually though, the car was ready, I drove Ma back to her car and we went on our merry ways. With a brief stop off from me to grab a 2T external hard drive from Officeworks.

Wednesday was very dull, mostly because I spent a large chunk of the day copying files from the old laptop to the external drive. And that took ALL OF THE HOURS. Yes, it didn't help that at one point I was copying over like 20,000 files (I think that was all my iPhone and digital camera files to be honest), which took forever.

On the plus side, it hardly filled up any of the giant external drive, so yay.

Thursday was the public holiday for the funeral of the Queen... but we had it on Thursday because Victoria wanted to double stack it with their Friday public holiday... grrr. Not that it really matters because it was a one-off.

Thursday night DnD was good. We made it through relatively unscathed, I mean, my character took a giant arrow to the chest, but also, he ran into a room designed to lock you inside and heat up and took a grant total of like 4 points of damage from that, so, you know, he kinda had it coming.

On the plus side, we ended with him heavily flirting with a delightful elven bounty hunter... but also about the drink his body weight in alcohol in order to win a drinking competition. So we'll see how his evening progresses.

I mean, I think if push comes to shove he might pick the lady over the contest... but he also really wants to beat the current champions. Also, weirdly, he's very confirmed to me in the last couple of weeks that he's straight. Which is fine, I hadn't actually given it a ton of thought, but eventually my characters generally let me know how they're wired. And Dax is both straight, and predominantly attracted to elven women it seems. So there's that.

But I look forward to seeing how it all comes out next week.

Friday was Chiro day... so, usual trip into the city, with a wander around afterwards, poking my nose in basically the exact same shops I poke my nose into every time. But it was a nice wander in the sunshine.

Friday night DnD was cancelled. But we knew this, because Mr is on a work trip. So instead, Fluffy, Mrs and I had a board game night. And it was a good, chill night. With a good game. Which was very pleasant. Doubly so because I didn't have to prep for DnD.

Like I said, a lot of things.

Anyway.

Today was actually pretty good.

We did the usual supermarket thing this morning. Although one of the things you don't expect to see first thing in the morning on a Saturday is a bunch of people in their early 20's all dressed up in medieval garb. They looked amazing (well, most of them), and I told them so. Because that's what you do, you don't ignore them like everyone else seemed to be doing, you tell them how good they look.

Later research seems to indicate that they were probably heading down to Victor Harbor to the Viking Festival. Which I didn't even know was a thing. Also, turns out that there's a Medieval Festival in May, so might have to keep that one in mind.

The rest of the supermarket trip was much less interesting, although I'm trying out a new recipe for soup that I found this week. Which seems like it's a combination of the rice soup I've made a couple of times and my chicken CHOW-DAH. So it should be interesting.

After the usual unpackery, we went to IKEA to find something specific Ma wanted... and came back with a whole bunch of stuff we hadn't intended to get, because what's a trip to IKEA without doing that.

But a pleasant trip.

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