photo saturday: bear barbarian

Because I've been doing a lot of what I like to call Character Sketches of late for my potential first 2024 character, this week's DnD Character Colouring Book Barbarian March has been through some iterations.

Originally the design was done for one of the former DnD Thursday friend, Samwise, while he was having Character Indecision. The original pose wasn't mine, but I did tweak it because the original wasn't quite working for me.

So I made a dual bladed wizard for Samwise. And then when he moved on to other ideas, because, honestly, I love him but he's a poster child for distraction, I ended up revisiting that character and turning it into yet another Aasimar Barbarian. But I was also reaching a limit on Aasimar. So I went back to my first loves. Halflings.

 I changed the whole head, and the weapon (because as much as I liked the spear/pike that the Aasimar version was holding, there's something about a big ass axe), and swapped the shoes out for the same leg wraps as Havok had. And there was a little Photoshop fuckery to increase the size of the head of the axe.

The roses that tied the initial character to Chauntea, tie this one to her halfling equivalent, Sheela Peryroyl.

And he's one of those characters who I don't necessarily have a handle on a specific backstory, but I absolutely have a handle on a general vibe and I don't think it would take much to turn that into a backstory.

His parents were druids or clerics (probably druids, honestly, given his background feat provides him with knowledge of a couple of druid cantrips and a spell) of Peryroyl, he grew up in a temple in the wilderness, and while he felt no specific pull to follow the family calling, he did feel drawn to the wilder aspects of the goddess, the wild untamed lands and wild beasts. He started acting as an escort and guard for various halfling worshippers who came to the temple and travelled to many places.

And that's basically just me thinking on my feet. I'm not sure that Chasing-Bear is his original surname, so I might need to come up with an origin for that. Or, just lean into it.

I've also done the 2014 version of the Wild Heart Barbarian, so I'm not sure that this would actually be my choice for a 2024 character, I'm just very much enjoying his whole vibe right now.

Anyway...

Was this week something of a hot mess? A little.

Mini Media Reviews to begin. I tried to start with The Boy And The Heron. I put it on on Saturday night...  and promptly succumbed to Ghibli Nap. I don't fully understand why, but a lot of Ghibli movies just start lulling me to sleep. And I realised about halfway through that I hadn't been paying attention for about ten minutes and had instead been reading the insides of my eyelids.

As soon as I turned it off and started doing other things, I was perfectly fine. So I gave up for the evening.

Next up was the 2019 version of Charlie's Angels. A movie that doesn't know how to either Charlie nor Angel properly. The script is laughably bad, there is literally no dramatic tension in working out who the bad guy is. Because it's so very clear from the first 5 minutes. The movie does try to pull a "it's not X, instead it's Y", but that also feels incredibly fucking obvious also.

In the 2000 movie inside of the first 3 minutes you know the names of all the women, you know what their history is, how they got to be who they are and what their whole deal is. In this movie... I know one of the characters was called Jane. Because it's the most boring name ever. I remember neither of the other characters. The movie wants to be both About Serious Things and also comedic. It fails at both. It's trying very hard to be Misogyny Is Bad: The Motion Picture, because the only "good" male characters are ineffectual idiots that contribute nothing to the plot.

Monday I managed to actually stay awake through The Boy And The Heron. Mostly because I was crocheting at the same time. More on that in a second.

Later in the week I watched Shin Ultraman. I haven't interacted with Ultraman previously, although I did watch the Shin Godzilla movie, which is part of the same collaborative project, if not the same cinematic universe. In much the same way that Shin Godzilla was a comedy without actually being a comedy, I didn't really understand the vibe this movie was going for. Especially since you have one character, Asami, who is absolutely an insane person. Not least of all because she keeps grabbing her own ass.

And because Friday was cancelled (more on that later), I did a double header of Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person and The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales. Both delightful in their own way.

HVSCSP is a dark comedy that is very French, but in a... suburban French way that I don't often come across in movies. If you'd told me this was a French Canadian movie I would have believed you, which isn't a dig at either country. Also, the male lead is definitely French Tom Holland, so I'm not mad about that. As much as I was slightly frustrated by the titular vampire for not wanting to bite people, I also realise that's the point of the movie. I did very much like the end though.

The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales is incredibly sweet. It's three animated stories that were originally intended to be half-hour TV specials, but were grouped together with a very loose framing device. Of the three stories, I think they potentially decrease as they go. I liked the first story very much, the second (and titular) story is sweet but a little repetitive, and the third one... well, that one would be good in December.

Monday I started working on a ribbing scarf for Fluffy that I told him I'd make him if he bought the yarn for it. He only did that about a month ago. So I was working on that on and off during the week. And started it on the same day that Fluffy went to get another tattoo that he didn't tell me about until he was literally in the chair. Which is an improvement on last time when he didn't tell me for literally weeks afterwards. Is there a requirement that he tells me? I mean, no... but also yes, so that I can both share in the excitement of upcoming tattoo and also live vicariously through him. And, also... not telling when it's MY BIRTHDAY WEEK... jail. Straight to jail.

Back to the scarf... It came out well. I still haven't 100% mastered the art of stitch it together in a way that looks good to me. And this should have. I married up all the stitches and did a ladder stitch between them all... and yet, it's still slightly on wonk somehow. And I did it three fucking times. The last was the best of the three, and yet still not 100%.

But now I have my Ketchup Red scarf and Fluffy will have his Mustard Yellow scarf... and if we go anywhere wearing them together (which mostly will be to Friday Night DnD), we will be Condiment Scarf Twins. Which I'm fine with.

I am planning to attempt a beanie with the remaining ball. The last attempt at a beanie was... questionable. I'm sure this attempt will also be... questionable. But at least then I've made him a beanie.

I also reorganised my books a little in order to get the books Fluffy gave me for my birthday, and all the other books that were currently sitting on top of other books, actually on a shelf properly. I ended up pulling out the three book safes that were mostly just taking up space.

There was no Friday Night DnD this week due to small people problems, but Fluffy and I also didn't do anything because he was sick... so DnD wouldn't have happened regardless.

Anyway...

Today wasn't much of anything. We did the usual Supermarket thing, came back here and I ended up putting on The Big Bad Fox. And that was that really.

photo saturday: berseker barbarian

Back in 2020 [makes sign against the Evil Eye], before one of the previous sourcebooks came out, I was dabbling in ideas and came up with Wrath, Path of the Beast Barbarian. Consider Havoc to be the 2025 evolution of that idea. And also today's entry for Week 3 of DnD Character Colouring Book Barbarian March.

I don't know exactly what the allure of an angry albino tiefling barbarian is, but I'm absolutely here for it.

Havoc's backstory is still a little vague... the original idea was some sort of mash up of The Count of Monte Cristo... but, honestly, when you start to pick apart the inciting incident to that story, it gets very complicated. So right now I'm not 100% sure what I'm doing with his backstory.

The other interesting thing about Havoc is that I could very easily switch up his subclass to any of the ones from the new PHB with very little tweaking.

Patience, his greatsword, is the result of a little bit of Photoshop fuckery, plus somewhere in that idea that is a catchphrase about "trying his patience" or "running out of patience" or something similar. I don't know exactly what it is yet, but it's in there somewhere.

I was also very proud of myself with his posing too. It's not hugely complex, but it came together just right.

Anyway...

This week's Mini Movie Reviews are definitely a mixed bag... I started out with Season 2 of American Gods, still loving Mad Sweeney but also definitely coming around on Technology Boy.

Next up, I took a little detour after having recommended the 2002 version of The Importance of Being Earnest to Fluffy, and watched it later that night. It's still very good.

And lastly I did Paris Police 1905, which I actually liked more than 1900 season. Whether that was because this was much less anti-Semitism and much more sex workers and homosexuals. Everything is still incredibly terrible for everybody concerned, but I enjoyed it more overall.

This week was My Birthday Week... but honestly, it essentially boiled down to Friday and today.

Friday I did my usual loop to Baker's Delight and Boost Juice to get my free stuff and make people in shops wish me Happy Birthday. So I came home with a nice cheese and chive scone and a King William Chocolate Boost.

Yes please and thank you for free stuff.

Fluffy got me both the Wolfsong book that was Very Important To Me in 2023, along with it's sequel, Ravensong, which I haven't gotten to yet, because it was, and I quote, "annoying me that you didn't have a copy of it".

And then there might have been a brief but deep conversation that followed.

Then it was off to Friday Night DnD. Small child of the Mr and Mrs house had felt compelled to make me "a card", which was very sweet. I also got another Dymocks voucher, so I'll put that to good use eventually.

Actual Friday Night DnD was... slightly less chaotic than I was expecting it to perhaps be. We dispatched the last of the bad guys and cashed in some quests, which was good.

It did lead to my boy perhaps revealing more of his backstory than I'd expected to this early.

We do now need to forcibly extract Mrs character's backstory... since she's the only one still sitting on secrets.

Anyway...

Today started like it always does, with the supermarket. Then we killed some time before heading out to Spotlight to actually do the thing we tried to do last week. This time successfully.

And then we went to The Republic Norwood for Birthday Lunch. I had the fried chicken burger, Ma had the fried halloumi burger. Should I have gone with my original plan to get a schnitzel? Very possibly. Did I only learn just now that they have a much more reasonably priced lunch menu that only exists from Monday to Friday? Also yes. 

Was it still very tasty? Absolutely. And the service was excellent.

photo saturday: barbarian barmaid

Welcome to Week 2 of DnD Character Colouring Book Barbarian March. So, in my explorations for potential new characters I've had to narrow down my race/species choices given that I've already played a drow, a gnome, a dwarf and a human in Friday Night DnD.

But also the only one that I've never played is the Aasimar. So there's been a lot of poking around that idea. Which brings us to Agnetha Aledaughter, or Aggie. Much like last week, she's an Aasimar Zealot Barbarian. I did originally have her as just a dwarf and a World Tree Barbarian, but then I stumbled across Hanseath, Dwarven god of carousing, brewery, and singing... who also happens to be a war god.

The single line in the info about him that sold me was... "Hanseath's herald was a celestial dwarf, this servant also being an unimaginably powerful barbarian."

So after about half a dozen versions, all of which required a lot of messing around in Photoshop, I circled back around to more or less where I started. Just the minor details changed. Weirdly, any time I took the muttonchop sideburns off her she looked wrong.

And the pewter tankard acts as her shield for the purposes of mechanics.

Anyway...

This week's Mini Media Reviews where accidentally good choices. Mostly I was looking for something to fill in the gaps until Season 2 of American Gods showed up.

First up was Three Star Bar (aka Three Star Bar in Nishi Ogikubo aka Nishiogikubo Mitsuboshi Youshudou). A short, six episode series where the episodes are only about half an hour long. But it's SO good. Turns out it's adapted from a manga, which makes perfect sense, and it made me cry. It's very much one of those "person stumbles into a store/bar exactly at the point they need to" stories.

But I really enjoyed it.

I followed that up with Paris Police 1900. Which was... much more intense. It's all based on real world people and events involved with the fallout from the Dreyfus Affair. Basically it's a lot of terrible people doing terrible things. There's a second season which takes place 5 years later, and I will probably watch that at some point. It's very well made, full of fantastic performances, but is occasionally hard to watch because of the aforementioned terrible people doing terrible things. Even the supposed hero isn't immune to that and becomes more of a schmuck as the show progresses.

I also tried watching the 1994 miniseries of The Stand. Which is nearly unwatchable. I got maybe 4 hours into the 6 hour miniseries and just noped out of the last part because I just couldn't do it anymore. I can't tell if the issue was King's writing, the direction or the actor, but it was bad.

We can also reset the Yani Fall Down counter. It's a long story, it's mostly dull... but it wasn't on my walk this time. It was because while I remembered that there is a section around the back of the apartment complex that it at a different level to the rest of it, I then forgot that fact 37 seconds later and fell up the step. Which is, admittedly, better than falling down the step. But also, fucking hell.

Thankfully this week was also Chiro Day... so at the very least everything that got shaken up got put back in the right place.

Friday Night DnD was a slight comedy of terrible rolls. But also managing to shank the miniboss of the area in one surprise round.

Do I regret giving our DM ammunition that allowed him to tie my backstory to a later story boss... slightly. But at the same time, I was much less tied into the villains in the previous campaign, so at least it's something different.

We're also essentially past the only bits of the story that I was previously aware of thanks to a couple of Adventurers League games back in the day.

However we do keep ending games with my character up to his nipples in trouble. Which I don't hate.

Anyway.

Today was not terribly exciting. The usual supermarket nonsense, then we made a brief run to Spotlight, but that was it really.

photo saturday: barbarian priestess

Welcome to a special edition of DnD Character Colouring Book... Barbarian March. I've been throwing so many barbarian concepts at the wall lately for the next campaign we play just to see what, if anything sticks. The issue mostly is that a lot of things stick for a little while, then fall off onto the floor once I come up the the next thing that sticks.

But given that I've made so many recently, I figured that I'd just run through a collection of them for the entire month of March. And, at this point, I could get most of the way through April also. We'll see about that though.

We start with Grimwarden Lily, who is what happens when I start out by thinking about a halfling and then pivot to the idea of an Aasimar who just happens to have halfling parents (because Aasimar don't need to be of human origin any more).

I was also slightly working with the idea of the old version of the Zealot barbarian, where spells that brought them back from the dead didn't need a material component (which I still think is a great concept). Now, instead, they just get to do a little bit of healing on themselves.

But that did get me to the idea of a halfling priestess who died, was brought back by her god in order to be his little divine champion. Which got me to the halfling god of the dead, Urogalan, who I absolutely want to use on a character eventually. Her mace I entirely cobbled together in Photoshop, because Urogalan is also a god of the earth. And because offerings to him sometimes take the form of uncut gems, it seemed appropriate.

I also came up with who she was before she died, the halfling version and her wife Poppy, who is a potter, and the student/apprentice of Lily's (previously Asphodel... because an Asphodel is a type of lily) mother, also a potter. I made a couple of versions of Poppy's outfit. Basically she wears a lot of big gingham check dresses in various colours.

Anyway...

Not a lot going on this week...

The mini media review is American Gods. I read the book back in 2018 and enjoyed it. Or at least I have positive memories of it. My actual review from back then is a little light on detail.

The first season of American Gods covers, so Google tells me, about the first 120 pages of a 600+ page book. But also a lot of that is character set up, so I don't really know (without encountering spoilers for things I've forgotten) if the three seasons cover all the book or not. But we'll see. Eventually, because these DVDs are taking their sweet time coming into the library.

A little like the book, it is occasionally all over the place, with flashbacks, flashsideways and the like. But I enjoyed the season. Favourite character is absolutely Mad Sweeney for reasons I can't completely articulate, but I can say is actually not because they stuck Pablo Schreiber in a ginger wig. He also has a lot of scenes this season with the character I probably care about least... Laura Moon. I have a vague idea that I didn't really care for her in the book either. Emily Browning is doing a fine job with what she's given, I just don't know that I care for the character itself.

Bonus points to Gillian Anderson, because Gillian Anderson always makes things better. And I can't really think of anybody else who could have played Mr Wednesday other than Ian McShane.

Friday Night DnD went in something of a different direction from the way I thought it might. Yes, my character was off to beat up the daughter of one of the other characters. My solution, like many things in life, keep talking as much and as fast as you can until you figure a way out. Or a way out just presents itself and you just latch onto it with both hands. In this case, the plan I came in with was slightly getting away from me, as often happens, but thankfully the DM also had A Plan. Which saved my ass.

But because I'd been The Focus for much of the first half of the game, my character happily Went To Bed to let the other two get some spotlight time. It is that weird balance with certain characters who absolutely would go off on their own and do their own thing versus staying together as a group and making things slightly simpler for your DM. The Friday group as a whole does seem to veer more towards the former rather than the latter to be fair. At least in the last couple of campaigns.

And now, my character getting involved in a threesome with the some of the folks whose base we're currently sneaking into in order to potentially dispatch their leader is about to pay off.

We'll see I guess.

Anyway...

Today was fairly simple. Supermarketry as usual. And then a mostly pointless errand out to Mitcham Shopping Centre that didn't do much except letting us go for a drive.

photo saturday: hi tech duo

Today's Character Colouring Book is both a slight sidestep and comes with something of a story. These are clearly not DnD characters... they're Cyberpunk characters, it says so, right up in the top right corner. Except anybody paying attention to the banner at the top of the blog, or my ongoing ramblings, might recognise the character on the left as my terrible, terrible human dumpster fire cleric, Demyan.

Because since the early days of the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, I always maintained that if I was going to play the game (which is unlikely), I would play the Corpo origin storyline, and would make a version of Demyan as my character. Because he fits so wonderfully into that idea of a Cyberpunk Corpo/Exec.

Then I got an email from Demiplane, where I've messed around with their various Tabletop RPG character makers before, saying they now had the Cyberpunk Red game. So, I went off to make me a Demyan.

It could not have been a more seamless fit, honestly. Every narrative option I was given, there was a clear parallel to Demyan. It all just worked.

When I mentioned this to Fluffy, we talked about his Demyan equivalent, Moss, because, honestly, these are two characters that neither of us can fully let go of. They live, rent free, in our collective heads for reasons that I'm not entirely sure of. Maybe it was because we never got a chance for them to have a proper narrative end. The campaign, such as it was, just kind of fizzled out and the last we left our boys, they were taking a long rest with their other two companions in the middle of a wizarding school for magical asshole teenagers deep underground, part way through an adventure.

So we never got to give them a "narrative wrap up", or really cover what might have happened next.

It's also interesting because there is a different version of Demyan that lives in Fluffy's head than the one who lives in mine. Which is, actually, fairly on brand. There's the Demyan that he projects into the world, and the Demyan that I was fully aware of as a much richer character that existed only inside his own head. I'm not saying he wasn't a complete asshole. He was. But he also had layers and nuance.

They are also the two characters that Fluffy and I end up talking about the most. It always comes back to them. There will be a song or a movie character or some piece of media that one of us sees and is very "Demyan/Moss coded", and we end up talking about them. 

So, of course, if there is a Cyberpunk version of Demyan, he absolutely has a Cyperpunk version of Moss in his life.

Moss, who was a tabaxi (catlike humanoid... see also my speedy floof boi, Rain), but in this universe we replace the black leopard aesthetic with African heritage, tattoos, cybernetic eyes and an outfit that comes with a holographic tail and ears. Plus a robot arm and robot leg, because Fluffy said that Moss would have "too many implants". Where did he get the astronaut boot? Nobody knows and he absolutely has no memory of getting it.

Also, funnily enough, it's not the first time I've used that exact same jacket and pants for a "modern" character for Fluffy.

What's also interesting is that I went with much more stretched out human style proportions rather than the usual Hero Forge proportions. Which makes Demyan look the 6'1" he actually is, although actual Demyan would have a much narrower/skinnier chest than HF allows.

Fluffy's response when I showed him the Cyberpunk Moss... "I would play the fuck out of that".

Their former DnD relationship does slot wonderfully over to a Cyberpunk world. Demyan being the Exec that works for a large, multinational corporation (the church of his evil DnD goddess) and is in a power struggle with an Exec from another division (the head of the Waterdeep branch of the church). So since this Moss is a hacker/netrunner, Demyan went "off the books" to employ him to find dirt on the other Exec, only to find that Moss finds said information, but is also full of his company's faulty cybernetic implants which are driving him slightly insane, so he hears the voices of rogue AIs or NET Ghosts that nobody else can hear (which accounts for OG Moss's Wild Magic sorcery and warlock patron). So, much to his chagrin, Demyan now has to keep Moss safe.

Thus, hijinks ensue.

Not that I think we'd ever play these characters in a Cyberpunk Red game... but at least they're there if we need them. Hence the story time.

Anyway...

There isn't a lot that happened this week...

Mini Media Reviews were a little all over the place. I started with Memoirs of a Snail, which Google lists as a "Drama/Tragicomedy", and I would 100% agree with. It's beautiful, but it's also deeply fucking depressing. But that does seem to be the directors personal wheelhouse. I have a very vague memory of watching Mary and Max and feeling much the same. Good though, but not for those days when your mental health is a little ragged.

Next up was Alpha Rift... well, kind of. It was so monumentally terrible that I lasted about 20 minutes before I noped out of it. Actually, it was the point that I realised that the incredibly annoying female sidekick was going to be sticking around that I called it quits. It felt like somebody's bad DnD fan fiction made on a shoestring budget with heavily improvised and unnatural dialogue.

Instead of that I ended up watching a documentary called Saucy!: Secrets of the British Sex Comedy, which was very interesting and occasionally a big tragic. 

I followed that up with Shaolin Soccer, which I'm not sure I liked as much as God of Cookery.

Then I rounded out the week by finally getting around to Season 2 of Romulus, which I watched back in 2021. Originally, I wanted to watch Season 1 again first, because they were both of SBS On Demand last year. But I waited a little too long and the first season is gone (for now). So I just watched the second and had to kind of piece together some of the characters and plot points from my memory.

It's still an excellent TV show. Full of deeply flawed characters who occasionally I want to slap the shit out of. But I still highly recommend it.

Otherwise there wasn't a Friday Night DnD this week, because people who aren't me get sick and stuff.

Anyway...

Today was hot. But weirdly, unlike other hot Saturdays, the supermarket wasn't packed super early. So it was just a casual wander around. And afterwards, we just came back here and hung out for a couple of hours before I went Ma back up the road.

photo saturday: what a big axe you have

There are times when half of an idea leads you to a fully formed character just dropping straight into your lap. Thus was the case with this week's DnD Character Colouring Book. It started off with just looking at potential paladin ideas. And I also realised that I don't use that nice axe as much as I perhaps could.

And then I went with the missing/blinded eye. And I think that's when it all started to take shape. The claw marks, the whole vibe started taking shape as a take on the Woodcutter from Little Red Riding Hood.

So we got Marrok Strongbones, a woodcutter and farmer whose family/home was attacked and killed by a wolf... dire wolf... werewolf... I'm not sure... one of those. Werewolf is the most fun, but they also have 71 hit points, so that feels a little less doable for even a Level 3 character. I am formulating how that could work in my head though... because the new werewolves don't have the immunity to everything but silvered weapons that the old versions had. Which seems a little silly, narratively. I'm sure it makes sense to them mechanically though. And who is to say that he killed the werewolf, just drove it off.

There are a few little details I like... the wolf teeth and fur on the bracers, the ragged remains of the lumberjack shirt around the waist. The whole face. Also using the breastplate from this year's Advent Calendar, even though I wasn't sure it was ever going to be useful.

Marrok is definitely on a shortlist as a potential character, but it would have to be the right kind of campaign. Something with some definite lycanthrope theming.

Anyway...

This week has been a literal and figurative hot mess.

Literal because it got to over 40 by Wednesday. Figurative, because even though the temperature dropped to a more reasonable high 20's on Thursday, I was also without electricity from just after 8am until just after 3pm. I knew it was going to happen, but I was both slightly too warm without any kind of air movement in the house and also hugely bored. Should I have done elsewhere for most of the day? Probably. But I was also hoping against hope that they actually finished earlier than the time they said they were going to.

If the weather had been like it is today, I might have been fine... but sadly, twas not the case. I made it through, obviously, and smashed through the book I was reading and a graphic novel, but I still slightly lost my mind.

Thursday was also doubly weird... and I'll let me from Thursday explain why...

This is Dennis… I rescued Dennis from the middle of the footpath so he wouldn’t get stepped on. I expected Dennis to fly away pretty much immediately. Dennis had other ideas and I spent the rest of my morning walk carrying Dennis on my finger like I was a fucking Disney princess. I tried to drop Dennis off at the park, but Dennis was having none of it. Dennis stayed on my finger until I got home where he was last seen sitting on the hood of my car. Godspeed Dennis, and thank you...

So, yes... just like past me says. Dennis is a Tailed Emperor Butterfly, and based on how raggedy the edges of his wings were, possibly quite an elderly butterfly as these things go.

I also hope that the many people who walked past me on my walk and didn't ask me about the butterfly or otherwise seem to notice, actually went home/to work/out in the world and said to numerous people in their regular lives "hey, you'll never guess what I saw this morning...".

Basically I hope I was somebody's (or many somebodies) Interesting Story Of The Day. Or everybody is terrible at noticing things and they had no idea why I was walking along with one hand in the air.

It was just one of those singularly strange but lovely experiences though. Also, I have no idea why I settled on the name Dennis... it just popped into my head.

There wasn't really much of any Mini Media Reviews this week. I'd picked up the second half of the first season of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime and... no. Just no. I wish they'd finished out the storyline from the first half on the other DVD set. It was only missing two episodes. But the after that a whole new storyline starts, and introduces the point at which I absolutely drew the line. That point was Milim Nava. IYKYK. I could put up with Random Boobs in the first part of the series. But just no to everything about that character.

So, thus far, I'm not really finding anime that doesn't either squick me out (this) or put me to sleep (Jojo and Violet Evergarden). I might just have to make the executive decision that anime is just not my jam. Or at least not anything I'm getting hold of from the library.

There was, however, the 8+ hour finale of Critical Role's third campaign. I've enjoyed this campaign a lot less than the previous one, but this was a decent send off. It will be interesting to see where they go next. They are being uncharacteristically cagey about future plans right now though, which is slightly frustrating.

Friday Night DnD was... slightly delayed, but... eventful. We gathered some additional information, we didn't have to fight a banshee, which is always good. But remember last week when I said that my character joining up with the Very Obvious Bad Guys while in pursuit of a threesome was going to come back and bite him in the ass. Yeah, it already happened. Well, is about to happen, because my boy is now supposed to go and beat up the barmaid who is both resisting their control and also happens to be the daughter of Oldy McOldbeard.

I have... A Plan though. Well, part of A Plan that may be dependent on dice rolls, but at the very least, it's something. Because as much as I kind of would love to just let things play out as they would do without him there, and just deal with the consequences... that doesn't feel quite like my boy. I dunno... like I said, while there is the start of A Plan, we'll see where things end up going after I think about it for the rest of the week.

Anyway...

This week we definitely made up for spending less at the supermarket. And then not really much of anything.

photo saturday: fairy princess

I'm currently batting two for two when it comes to making Other People's Characters. Today's DnD Character Colouring Book winds the clock back to when I was running The Wild Beyond The Witchlight. And Mrs never managed to make a Hero Forge model of her character that she liked. I did attempt something at the time, but looking back on it, it definitely wasn't quite there.

So, after having Mrs decide that the version I made of her character for the current campaign was to her liking and she order the physical model, I went back to the conversations I'd had with her at the time about what was going on with her character, and pulled out one of the models that she'd sent me.

And while I didn't strictly follow everything she'd said, I did go with the underlying themes and with the added benefit of hindsight (and the many new elements that have shown up on Hero Forge since then), crafted Princess (and, yes, again, not her real name... while I might share the models, I am going to avoid using the names of other people's characters).

In the end, a large proportion of the key to getting her to feel right was the simple white outfit. There's already so much colour going on that any additional colours you add just tended to swamp her. Black would also have worked, but they weren't right for her character.

So after several days of very minor tweaks, I showed it to Mrs last Friday and sent her the link during the week. And much like with her current character, she messaged me towards the end of the week to say she'd ordered this model too. Which, honestly, feels pretty good.

Anyway...

I spent a pleasant couple of hours on Sunday putting together the LEGO Polaroid OneStep SX-70 Camera that Fluffy got me for Christmas. I did think that I'd lost a piece along the way, but it turns out to have fallen under one of the chairs, and I only found it after I was done.

I think I possibly screwed up the internal mechanism a bit... I think it's supposed to do a think that makes the photos pop out, but mind doesn't for some reason. Mostly I'm fine with that, because it's just going to sit nicely on the shelf with all the other LEGO cameras. But also one of the sides came loose this morning after showing it to Fluffy last night and Ma this morning, so I might need to take it partially apart because of the bit that came loose, so I'll just poke around the innards while I'm doing that, see if I can spot what went wrong.

It was a fun build though. It's been a minute since I did a LEGO build, and one of the things I really liked about this one is that a lot of the inner mechanical pieces were in the same rainbow of colours on the front of the camera/film box.

This week's Mini Media Reviews is just one movie. The 2024 remake of The Crow. And while there were some minor character elements that I felt were a little more fleshed out and interesting than the 1994 version, at the end of the day, the whole thing just ended up being... dull. Which, honestly, is the ultimate sin here.

Otherwise I ended up kind of rolling through some of the B movies from the 50's and 60's that just sit on YouTube. Nothing earth shattering, and a lot of them ended up being things that I mostly watched in the background rather than something I was fully paying attention to.

Friday was Chiro Day... I ended up wandering around the library in town after doing my usual wanderings. The city library's range is... slightly weird. Or feels that way. But maybe I just spend entirely too much time wandering the stacks.

Friday Night DnD was... the longest foreplay before a threesome possibly in history. Or, possibly the longest foreplay full of many bad decisions. Because when you state that you're essentially playing a bisexual disaster, and the first two of the very clear and obvious Bad Guys in the small town you walk into are a man and a woman and you decide to fuck with them by smiling at them when everybody else is afraid of them...

And they come back into the bar the next night... and it becomes one of those evenings when you just kind of roll with things. Also, you realise that you're getting a lot of unintended information from just tagging along with these idiots.

So now my boy has "joined" the Bad Guys, which is absolutely not going to end badly for everyone. But he also had himself a decidedly average threesome.

But the end result of all that is that for most of the first two hours of last night's game, I was basically running off on my own because events just kept unfolding. I didn't hate it. But I also definitely got out of the way a little bit once our characters were all together again, so I wasn't intentionally sucking all the oxygen out of the room. And everyone else seemed to enjoy themselves.

Anyway...

Today was a slightly weird supermarket day. It didn't necessarily feel like it at the time, but we ended up spending a bunch less.

Afterwards we went Looking At Things. Mostly the things in question were trying to find Sodastream bottles that seem to have been discontinued, and also looking at potential new kettles for Ma. We came away with none of that. Honestly, we came away with not much of anything really.

But that happens sometimes.

photo saturday: lucky little guy

This week's DnD Character Colouring Book covers quite a bit of ground. Firstly an idea that has been floating around in both my brain and just in the DnD collective space for a hot minute. A halfling Divination wizard. So, basically, just finding all manner of new and unique ways to mess with dice rolls.

It did partially start with the idea of using one of the "star patterns" on a wizard robe/hat, since the ability to add patterns to hats is relatively new. It took me a while to work out what to do with the trim at the top of the robes though, until I accidentally made it all leather and realised that it worked really well that way.

Also, Theordoric is the first halfling where I've changed over the ear styles. Previously I was using the default Hero Forge halfling ears, which are pointy. And those are cute, but current DnD art direction has halflings with round ears. So after a little bit of a play around, I decided on a specific ear style for my halflings and may have changed all the halflings accordingly.

And, honestly, it makes more sense looking at them next to the gnomes. It just means I need to go in and finagle a different set of ears from the default.

Anyway...

This week was mostly taken up with my rental inspection.

As usual, I split the cleaning over two days. I just can't do it all on the same day any more. After all the cleaning on Monday, I reorganised a couple of shelves on the bookcase in order to make a space for the LEGO Polaroid camera I got for Christmas.

Tuesday was the usual mopping and such, but I managed to be done by about midday. Then Wednesday I cleared out and killed some time at the library.

But as usual, the best part of the inspection is coming home after it's all over.

This week's Mini Media Reviews started out with the first season of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure... and I made it through about four episodes before I was so bored I started to fall asleep. I just wasn't vibing with it. I find the art style kinda fugly and the whole thing is so incredibly overwrought. Also, those early episodes aren't at all what I was expecting... or rather what I'd been led to believe the show was about. I'm sure it would get there eventually... I just honestly couldn't be bothered waiting that long.

Fortunately I had the third and fourth seasons of The Umbrella Academy to watch instead. And, honestly, while I agree that the first two seasons are probably the very best ones, I also think they're all equally good. Each one has it's own charms, and all of them have unique issues. I really liked the final season, even though I wish they'd been given the full 10 episode run to round the story out. And, for the record, I was perfectly happy with the way it all ended.

Favourite character throughout the series, who never had a season where I didn't really dislike them... it has always been and remains Five. Best character, literally no notes.

Otherwise, Friday Night DnD didn't quite go the way any of us were really expecting. I'm starting to fully get a handle on my boy Whisper. And plot threads are starting to present themselves. It was a good session overall though.

Anyway...

Today was just the supermarket. Nothing exciting.

photo saturday: basic dnd food groups

This might become slightly traditional... the DnD Character Colouring Book the second week of any new campaign might just be my versions of my fellow party members. It certainly worked for the last campaign. I also realised this week that we ended up picking, essentially, the three most basic DnD Food Groups for this campaign. Human, elf and dwarf.

And no, those are not their actual names. I'm also pretty sure, in the case of The Oldest Dwarf Ever, that his background and class aren't right either, but he does feel slightly like the World's Oldest Urchin, and while he's definitely a monk, the Long Death subclass just seemed to comedically fit.

What I will say is that Celesti was the result of a post-game workshopping of a mini that Mrs was unhappy with (even if I was handicapped by it being on a mobile that wasn't mine), but then I did my own version of it last Saturday. And she was so happy with it when I sent her the mini, she ordered that version with no changes. Which I take as a win, since when I was running Witchlight, she never ended up with a mini design she was happy with.

What I will say is that I really like the face on Oldy. And the I feel like I'm in a groove both with posing and the Face Customiser. Especially when looking back at some of the very old minis.

Anyway...

Tuna Pasta Salad this week... and it was good.

In Mini Media Reviews... Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy. Favourite character absolutely remains Number Five. I don't see that changing. And I care less and less about Luther and Diago as times goes on. And speaking of time, the (mild spoilers for a show from 2020) time travel to 1960's of it all certainly expanded the scope of the show if not necessarily the core idea. Weirdly, even though it was the same number of episodes, and several of them felt shorter or were shorter than their first season counterparts, Season 2 felt much longer. Mostly, I think, because each character was dealing with their own external storyline instead of (mostly) internal storylines about the interfamily dynamic.

The only other thing I watched was the 2019 Hellboy. Which was, for the most part, just straight up terrible. And looked so much worse than it's predecessor from 15 years ago. Because 2019 relies on CG for the most part, whereas 2004 do so much stuff practically.

Which is a shame, because Neil Marshall also made Dog Soldiers back in the day. So I don't know what happened. I do know that at least part of it is absolutely miscasting David Harbour as Hellboy, because he manages to be completely without charm throughout. But I also lay blame on Andrew Crosby for writing a script that was predominately forgettable.

Friday Night DnD was good... we're still finding our feet, and being level 1 is always somewhat of a struggle based on limited resources and abilities. Also we're very obviously still in the opening act, and have barely touched on the wider plot. Plus our characters have known each other for like three/four days.

So we're clearly on the Struggle Bus. We'll get there though.

Anyway...

Today wasn't anything exciting. We did the supermarket and all that entails, and then we just took a wander off to Cheap As Chips mostly for The Looking At Things. I mean, we had things we were looking for, they just didn't have any of those things. Then we did the very short wander in the little shopping centre across the way... forgetting that it doesn't really have anything interesting. We were going to call off at a market we saw on the way there, but then I went a different way back, so we ended up calling off at the dinky little Target on Unley Road... which is mostly dinky and barely has anything. But it was nice just to have a wander.

photo saturday: dapper man

This week's DnD Character Colouring Book is the start of the new Friday Campaign. And the return of Whisper. Both versions of Whisper.

Because one of the weird things about a lot of the DnD I've played is that with the exception of a few story requirements, the characters spend... six months, maybe a year, in the same damn outfit. While also being shot at, stabbed, magically set on fire, camping in the great outdoors, being sprayed with acid, falling off things, being tied up, travelling through a variety of environments... and doing it all in the same pair of pants and same shirt that you started the adventure in. Sometimes you'll get new armor or a magic item that is also a piece of clothing. But for a lot of character, even that doesn't necessarily happen.

And this had been wandering through my head for another character recently, but I decided that, given how fancy Whisper normally dresses, he would probably have an outfit for the travelling we were doing at the start of the adventure. So, this above is his travel outfit. Complete with perhaps a couple of days of unshaven scruff.

It was also fun because this was how I debuted him, but I also got to do the reveal before the end of the first session...

To Whisper as a Fancy Lad. And, really, it's only the shirt and boots (and hat) that got changed from the previous outfit. It does give a very different vibe though.

More on the first session later though.

Anyway...

This week I made a pretty good quiche and entirely forgettable potato salad. Which is disappointing, because usually I'm pretty good with potato salad.

Also this week, some Mini Media Reviews...

So, when I first saw the trailer for Transformers One, I was like "what actual hot hot garbage is this?", because it looked, in a word, terrible. And you know what... I was wrong. It's not actually terrible. If I had to rank it in the oeuvre of Transformers movies, it goes after Bumblebee (which is at the top) and the original Michael Bay movie (because it's not perfect, but I still really like it), but before all the other sequels.

It's heart is in the right place, even if I absolutely see this as sitting inside it's own continuity separate from everything else. I don't know that I would have paid money to see it. But borrowing it from the library worked just fine.

Next up is the absolute dumpster fire that is Wolf Pack. This show should have been a slam dunk. A show about werewolves, with the same show runner as Teen Wolf, and with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Rodrigo Santoro in the Responsible Adult roles.

But it is just... a mess. The story is bananas, the four lead teen actors are doing as good as they can with the material, but the writing is not on their side. Likewise for everybody really. There are some of the minor characters that are questionable actors, but mostly it's the writing. Also, I'm all for not having gay characters in things always be perfect, but literally every gay character in this is a thundering asshole.

And almost every adult character who isn't SMG or Santoro is, likewise, a thundering asshole.

I also need Makeup Department Head, Shawna Maharaj, to explain why, at various times, all the women in the show had foundation that was absolutely the wrong colour for their skin tone. Was it a post production colour correction thing? Did somebody not order in the right shade? What happened? Because it was so blatantly obvious in one episode that I couldn't focus on anything else.

Actually, I did wonder what they were doing to the women at various points, because while the men had, you know, skin texture and detail, the women looked either like they're been dipped in full coverage liquid latex or had some sort of post production smoothing done to them.

Also, I very much appreciate Teen Wolf completing a storyline inside of a season. Because Wolf Pack did not do that. And was them promptly cancelled because, I assume, it was terrible.

It was slightly surreal though, watching a show in which wildfires in California are a major plot point while actual wildfires rampage through California.

Last and absolutely best... Season 1 of The Umbrella Academy. I know, I know, I'm late to the party. But I got here eventually. And I absolutely loved it. I mean, it's completely messed up, and often I wanted to punch various characters (honestly, mostly Luther... occasionally Diego), but mostly I just loved everything about it.

Favourite character, absolutely Number Five. The combination of the way he's written and Aidan Gallagher's performance... love, love, love. But everybody is doing good work. I have the second season ready to start tonight too.

So, as I said, Friday Night DnD was the start of the new campaign. Which is always a little strange, because you never quite know how a party will come together. And this is the first time since back in Adventurers League at Greenlight that Fluffy, Mrs and I have been a party together. We played Hero Quest back in 2023, but it's very much not the same.

Stupidly, both Fluffy and I chose to make characters who don't talk much. I mean, my previous character did All The Talking. I did have slightly more of an idea of who this character was before I hit the table though, so a definite step up from Hali.

And most of it stuck the landing. He felt like the character.

Granted, he is very nearly the only one who survived the ambush that started out the adventure, and I already got too dip into some fun foreshadowing stuff while Whisper was the only one conscious. Which also, fortunately, worked.

It was a fun session though.

Anyway.

Not a lot to report. Mostly because the weekend weather has been tending to warmer for a while, so there isn't much point in doing any longer excursions.

So we just did the supermarket, came back here for a while and then I sent Ma on her way. Nothing thrilling.

photo saturday: he is the night

There have, at this point, been ten versions of Bo Bafflestone over six posts, including this one.

• My Boys from August 14 2021
  
• Graph Paper Grief from October 23 2021
  
• Three Stages of Bo from October 30 2021
• Bafflestone Redux from July 30 2022
• My Gnome Boy from November 25 2023

And today's DnD Character Colouring Book is the 2024 PHB reboot. Which partially came about when I realised that Here Forge had updated the blade prosthetic to that the pants tucked into it nicely and didn't just cover it over in a really dumb way.

But given that there isn't the Drakewarden Ranger in the new PHB, I decided to flesh out the middle Emo version from the previous incarnations. And decided on a Gloom Stalker/Assassin combo. Whether or not that would be fun to play over just a straight Ranger or straight Rogue remains to be seen, but I also don't know that this is a character I would end up playing. I do like to just keep him alive within the context of the world though.

Anyway...

I finally managed to make a pasta salad that wasn't a struggle to get through this week. Turns out the answer was Thousand Island dressing. And not using yoghurt.

This week's Mini Media Reviews is a Tale of Two... somethings. I don't know where I was going with that. But I started with Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham.

Which I wasn't sure exactly where we were going... because the font of the title is a little bit like the video game Doom. But it turns out this is "Batman: Cthulhu Edition"... And I'm absolutely here for the 1920/30's of it all. There were some points where it didn't completely gel, and, honestly, I'm mostly bored with any Ra's al Ghul storyline. But overall I liked the various versions of Batman characters in this genre.

Paired with that though was possible the best thing I've seen in a hot minute.

The Interview with the Vampire series.

I read the book back in the day, I saw the movie in theatres, I'm here for the story generally. Although I did find that when I tried to go back and reread the book I couldn't do it after having read some of the later ones.

But I adore everything that they did with this series. Moving the historical timeline forward to the 1910's, making Louis and Claudia black/creole, making the 1970's original interview canon, but also making this interview be set in 2021 as a follow up, weaving in references to some of the later storylines without taking away from any of them, just seeding them in when appropriate.

I will say that I would, at some point, like a version of this story where they cast Armand correctly according to his book description, but I also fully acknowledge the inherent issues with "a beautiful adolescent boy, 5’6, with curly auburn hair, large brown eyes and slender fingers" when casting something and given what's required of the actor in this part. But it would have been fascinating.

That's only a minor quibble though, because no version has gotten it right (although Queen of the Damned got the closest, but even then they hired a minor Australian actor and reduced his role to a glorified extra with a couple of lines).

But disregarding that, it's basically 10/10. Even though there are times you want to punch everybody in the face... but that's just the story really.

They are making a third season (and probably a fourth) that will cover The Vampire Lestat. And I'm absolutely here for it. I'll be honest, given where the books go later, they can do The Queen of the Damned and kind of give up after that. Just drag in the good plotlines from some of the later things.

Friday was Chiro Day. Which fortunately was just a minor tuneup. I wandered around a little afterwards and decided that I'm going to wait and buy the new PHB later... there's no real rush, I have access to all the information, and maybe I'll wait until they make the first round of corrections.

Then Friday Night DnD ended up being Session Zero for the next campaign. Which mostly consisted of each of us having a little side conversation with Mr, who is running this one, while the other two entertained themselves in another room. It will be interesting to start the campaign next week and finally meet each other's characters.

It was a very atypical evening for us though, but pleasant.

Anyway...

Today was the usual supermarket wanderings followed by a quick trip out to Spotlight for new bedding for Ma. And a rummage through the left over stuff from Christmas. Which was mostly underwhelming.

And that's it really.

photo saturday: adventing 2024, part five

Well... the 2024 Hero Forge Advent Calendar mostly left with a whimper not a bang. Firstly, we don't need any more shields at this point. We have shields. The breastplate is kind of weird, but decent enough. The book would be okay if we had a version without the dumb letters/compass rose on it.

And the less said about those slippers the better. They are literally cursed.

But honestly, at the end of 31 days, there are like four or five items that I would bother using in the future. Honestly, the whole month was a little bit of a dumpster fire. I mean, yay for new, free items. And great that their artists get to design a bunch of random things for the month.

It's just that this is much more of a disaster than previous years. It's not just that a lot of the items are stuff I wouldn't necessarily use... when when they're an item that I could have considered using, they were just an uglier version of that item.

Disappointing really.

Anyway...

This week has somehow felt forever days long. I don't know if that's because I spent a lot of time writing things for the blog, or because I saw Fluffy twice this week, or just because, you know, New Years.

I made what I'm called "loaded potato salad" this week, basically just potato salad with bacon and some extra stuff. It was enough to get me through the week tho.

I already covered NYE/NYD... but this kind of feels like the right spot for both a Mini Media Review, but also my Best Of Media 2024 list. Which I couldn't really justify a whole post for.

This week, in addition to Teen Wolf: The Movie and Big Business, I watched Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Invitation to a Murder.

Hellboy was... trying too hard. I know it's based on a graphic novel, and I might search that out at some stage, but, honestly, the movie was trying too damn hard to be spooky and creepy. So much so that it mostly succeeded in putting me to sleep. And Jack Kesy didn't really work for me as Hellboy. Partially, I think, because they just slapped the Ron Pearlman makeup on him, but he felt too small. And I liked Jefferson White as Character We've Never Heard Of Before more than Hellboy.

It was kind of like watching a fan-film or a student film. Big swing, big miss.

By comparison, Invitation to a Murder is... kind of a mess, knows that it's kind of a mess, leans into being messy and was 100% more enjoyable.

Weirdly Mischa Barton kept giving me slight Kirsten Dunst vibes, but I also think that it was because I haven't really seen her in anything for about 15 years. So she's just a 38 woman now as opposed to the early 20's she was then.

The movie is completely ridiculous, but I still very much enjoyed it.

As far as The Best Things I Watched In 2024... in more or less descending order

• The Wild Robot
• Boy Kills World
• Bullet Train
• Love and Monsters
• Paddington/Paddington 2
• Bumblebee

I'm also going to add the entirety of Westworld as an Honorable Mention, even if it was occasionally doing too much. And because the final season will probably never happen.

Friday Night DnD was The End Of The Campaign. Which meant that we did about 52 sessions across 84 weeks. Which makes sense given various bouts of travel, sickness and what-have-you.

Mostly we mopped up the final details from last week, and moved on to our "what happens next". And, honestly, I didn't have any grand ideas, but this is very much a character that is going to continue on in the background, just doing his thing.

Anyway...

Given that it was going to be relatively warm today, we really just did the supermarket thing.

my 2024 in books

In 2023 I read 198 books. In 2024 I read 123 books. So about 60% of the previous total. But still more than I read from 2020-2022 combined.

I feel like there were probably less "really good" books this year. Partially because there were just generally more last year, partially because I think I probably took a few more chances this year, partly because I think I'd had a lot of potentially good book on my radar for a few years, and went through a lot of that list in 2023.

So, once again, because I can, and with the assistance of Goodreads... the images that go along with this post are all the books I read in 2024... in reverse chronological order.

Did I also pull data from Goodreads and make my own spreadsheet again like last year. You bet your sweet ass I did.

The majority of my books were from the library once again, clocking in at 112 titles (91%). The split this year was also a little more in favour of books over graphic novels, (55% to 45% respectively).

And the ratio of queer books stayed about the same, with just under a quarter of everything having queer theming.

But, as I mentioned, my average rating was a little lower, topping out just under 3 out of 5. Which makes sense to me. And once again most of my ratings where either "Liked it" or "Really liked it", so the math checks out.

I did abandon about the same number of books as last year with a total of 8, which means, percentage-wise there were more (even if they don't show up as part of the overall numbers). And yes, there were a few "Hate Completes"... actually most of the 16 books (13%) that I rated 1 out of 5 come under that category. A few of those were fine in the reading, but just left a bad taste in my mouth by the end.

Both non-fiction and manga were still minor entries again this year (6% and 7% respectively).

The overall average page count was also up, to around 260 pages, which may just be because of the number of graphic novels last year vs this year. I still tried to stick to my "below 400 pages" vibe. Honestly, "below 350" is actually more where I like to stay. But a lot of the books that did go over turn out to be graphic novels.

As far as theming goes, I stuck pretty closely to the Urban Fantasy vibes of last year. Beyond that and some of the instances of working my way through a graphic novel series, there was a lot of stand alone stuff this year. And quite a bit of detective fiction of one form or another.

August and December had the highest title counts, mostly due to revisiting Scott Pilgrim in December and some other graphic novels in August.

Which brings us to the best stuff I read in 2024. Starting, as usual, with the honorable mentions. Most of which come from the 4 stars reviews...

The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths & Magic and Monster of the Week by F.T. Lukens, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (I need to get back to the series), Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Wranglestone by Darren Charlton (ignore the sequel, it's complete trash), The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi (which I said I would be recommending to people and them promptly completely forgot about) and Different for Boys by Patrick Ness.

Then, once again, in mostly chronological order... my Top Reads in 2024...

Horrorstör
Grady Hendrix

Horrorstor is a book that is at least 50% successful at what it's doing BECAUSE of how it looks and how it's laid out. It's an IKEA catalogue. This is a surprise to nobody, because the book is set in a store that is Definitely Legally Distinct From IKEA by being a store that, in the universe of the book, is basically an IKEA clone.

I need to revisit Hendrix. I do love the overall experiment here, where graphic design is doing as much work as the prose.

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone & Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect
Benjamin Stevenson

I don't even want to talk about why it's good... I just want you, the person who might be looking at Goodreads reviews before choosing to read a book to go and read it. Because it's excellent.

Stevenson absolutely sticks the landing, in fact he sticks the entire "second book". Even if this one is much more meta just due to the nature of the story. And this one is a writer writing about a writer writing about other writers and writing. And manages to not become so "inside baseball" that it loses the reader.

If I was a person who picked a single book as the Best Thing I Read This Year, then these two books would be that single book. Of the two, the first one is stronger overall, but I'm very excited that the first books I'm reading in 2025 is the third book in this series.

Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road
Kyle Buchanan

How the hell this movie actually got made, let alone made into such an amazing piece of cinema is a story that it if itself was a movie, people would go "well, that's a bit far fetched, isn't it?".

Yep, non-fiction on my Books of the Year list. Who saw that coming? Mostly I kept this on the list because the overall story is so fucking strange and I appreciate the fact that this book exists and has documented the literal fever dream that was the process of making this movie.

Thornhedge
T. Kingfisher

What if Sleeping Beauty was the villain? And what if the wicked fairy was the hero?

Short, simple, to the point. It does what it says on the tin.

The Wild Robot
Peter Brown

The book is about a lot of things. On the surface it's about a robot trapped on an island with no idea of where she should be who befriends the inhabitants. It's about kindness being a survival skill (to paraphrase the director of the movie). It's about found family and adopted families.

Yes, this is a direct result of the movie. I love them both in very different ways though. And I'm just in love with Brown's writing. There is a style there that goes beyond the intended audience that just works for me. And yes, this is a book written for "middle-grade" children (11-13), I absolutely do not care. This also might have taken the top spot this year if I had to choose just one. I also read the sequel, The Wild Robot Escapes, and that books solves the "it just stops" problem that this book has. I think this is a stronger book though. But you could count the two books as a single entry for the purposes of this list.

movies: teen wolf - the movie

Before we talk about Teen Wolf: The Movie, a little background.

I'm a huge, unabashed fan of Teen Wolf (the series). I just am. It's melodramatic and often spottily written. It makes narrative leaps that it doesn't always clue the audience into, it's often a camp-tastic mess. And I love it anyway.

I love it for the shirtless boys and for them always swinging for the fences, no matter how well they actually manage to hit the ball. When it's good, it's outstanding... when it's bad, well, it's still watchable if completely insane.

If I had to rank the individual seasons (or technically half-seasons, because there are a lot of those) from the series, it would be, as I said when I finished the series...

6A, 3B, 5, 6B, 3A... and then 1, 2 and 4 is some random interchangeable order. If I'm counting the two split seasons as a whole, then I think the ranking is 6, 5, 3, 2, 1, 4 maybe. Again, the last three are a little switchable.

Given that, I feel like Teen Wolf: The Movie possibly sits in that pocket between between what I consider the "good series" (3, 5 and 6) and the ones that can more more of a struggle (1, 2 and 4). Because parts of this are very good, other parts make literally no sense for both internal and external reasons.

Let's start with some of the external reasons first. Also, there will be spoilers.

Firstly, I feel like I was in pretty much the right position to enjoy this movie as much as possible, having just rewatched the whole series. Most of the plot points and characters are fresh in my mind and I've seen all of their shenanigans very recently. If you were coming back to this after not having watched the show for seven years, I don't know how you'd fare.

Also, minor point, but the movie does a weird little time hop thing because the actors were already in their mid to late 20's at the end of the series, playing kids just out of high school. The movie premiered seven years after the final season. In the world of the movie, 15 years have gone past. Meaning, technically, the movie takes place in 2032. Or the final season supposedly took place in 2008 (I disagree with this based on phone technology alone). It feels like maybe the movie makes a subtle reference to it being "the near future" via the character of Lydia, but also, it just does not matter and the movie does not care to expand on it. That will be a recurring theme.

The Teen Wolf wiki seems to indicate that the 2008 timeline theory is the correct one, which seems dumb to me.

Secondly, Dylan O'Brien is not in the movie. Clearly, he's a big movie star now, being among the most successful (and, let's be real, one of the best) actors of the core cast, and he decided he didn't want to do this. Whether he just didn't like the part they'd written for him, whether he just had too many other things on his schedule at the time (he had two movies come out in 2022 when this was filming) or what, he's never said as far as I know.

But Stiles is the beating heart of most of the series. And while his absence is felt it also makes sense within the context of both the movie and the last half-season where O'Brien was also mostly absent due to a serious injury.

Thirdly, the original script for this movie absolutely featured the character of Kira, played by Arden Cho. But when Cho was then offered "half the per-episode salary proposed to her three [female series regular cast members] counterparts", she declined to come back, and somebody clearly did a Copy Paste on the script, replacing Kira's name with "Hikari" (played by Amy Workman). Hikari is barely a character, is namechecked only once and the entire character is so VERY clearly Kira.

I'll also be honest, I don't completely understand why they're paying people for a movie based on a "per-epsiode salary" from the series. Maybe there was a clause in their series contracts about a movie, but that just seems shitty and dumb overall. Either pay the actors properly and consistently, or don't just Copy Paste over a character whose actor refuses to show up.

They also put this character ON THE MOVIE POSTER. What are we even doing here?

Also, this is a 160 minute movie. Compare that to a regular 10-12 episode "season arc" of 410-492 minutes. And then trying to cover a series cast of about 15 characters in that movie time means that there are characters who essentially just don't do anything or have any kind of storyline.

Colton Haynes, as Jackson, is basically turned into a comedy sidekick for Holland Roden's Lydia. I also do wonder if he was originally supposed to be Third Wheel to the more compelling story of Lydia and Stiles before O'Brien backed out of the project. It very much feels like they wrote a script quickly after the movie was greenlit (they announced it in September 2021 and started filming in March 2022) and then when people didn't want to return they did a somewhat hasty rewrite.

Dylan Sprayberry and Khylin Rhambo, whose characters were best friends in the series, don't even talk to each other I don't think. They may not even be in a scene together.

But everybody outside of Scott (Tyler Posey), Allison (Crystal Reed) and Derek (Tyler Hoechlin) are woefully under-served by this movie's plot.

And I get it, you want to serve your main couple and the character with the strongest arc/link to the newest "major" character. The downside being, for me, that I was absolutely never a Scallison fan. I was a Scira man (Scott and Kira... also, these ship names are terrible), or, to be fair, I was absolutely a Scisaac (Scott/Isaac non-canonical ship) man, or, in the actual narrative of the show, I was a Allisaac (Allison/Isaac) man. But Daniel Sharman also doesn't show up as Isaac (he also seems to have been busy doing other things) either.

I also get that having him in the movie does complicate the Scallison storyline. But then Kira would also have done that, and the movie was definitely going to throw that in.

The character with the best arc in the movie is absolutely Derek, mostly because of the relationship with his son, Eli, played by a floppy haired Vincent Mattis. Derek has never really been my favourite character, and the show definitely didn't really know what to do with him at times, but I like what they did with him here.

This is kind of the other point where the absence of O'Brien is felt. Because Eli is 100% Stiles coded from top to toe. Because of course the fandom that was Sterek (Stiles/Derek) would be on board for Derek having to deal with his son acting exactly like his non-canonical boyfriend.

Doubly so because the movie never bothers to even mention a mother. For all intents and purposes Derek gave birth to this child via immaculate conception. Or, as I will maintain in my own headcanon, this is Derek and Stiles' son via magical mumbojumbo. At a bare minimum, given that they've been gone from Beacon Hills for 15 years and this kid is 15 years old, then this child was conceived either during or directly after the final season of the show. By a mother who then handed over the child and vanished.

Movie absolutely does not care about Eli's mother or lack of same.

As far as the actual plot goes, bringing back one of the strongest antagonists from Season 3B was an excellent idea. That does slightly fall apart when you also don't bring back Cho. Because she's literally the other narrative half of that season. Bringing back Allison, sure, I get it, given that she died in that season. That's supposedly your main characters first love, the romantic ideal, etc. Except they were always slightly toxic for each other and were better apart, but sure.

The movie also does a thing that the series did entirely too much and gives us a very incestuous friend-group. At this point, Scott had been in a relationship during the series with three of the four major female characters, and kissed the fourth once. So now Malia (Shelley Hennig), who previously had hooked up with Stiles and Scott is now in a fuckbuddy relationship with Deputy Parrish (Ryan Kelley), who previously had a thing with Lydia who also had a thing with Stiles than never completely got started on-screen and has ended off-screen in the intervening years, who was, as previously mention, in some kind of relationship with Malia.

Find some new people to fuck you guys. Seriously. Or, you know, don't... just keep swapping partners when the music stops. Live your lives.

Speaking of fuck. Because this movie was going out via streaming instead of on cable, the folks from Beacon Hills can now swear. Which basically amount to, as IMDB's Parents Guide kindly reports... a "half dozen uses of 'f**k' and 's**t', as well as some other milder swears". Which, honestly, I might not really have even noticed if I'd been watching it alone.

Also, butts. The show itself had a penchant for showing us handsome young men with their shirts off for large chunks of time, and the movie gives us... two female butts and a male butt. The butts in question being Malia, Parrish and Allison. The first two make sense given that it's right before an off-screen sex scene, Allison's feels a little... unnecessary, honestly. Narratively I get it, but also, why are you making Reed show her ass.

It's also almost comedic how little skin Posey shows. And I know why. He's now COVERED in tattoos and clearly they either didn't want to slather him in makeup or he didn't want to sit in the chair for that long. But even at certain points where he should just be wearing shorts, he has a pair of full length running leggings on under them. And a long-sleeve jacket on for pretty the whole time. There is one tiny scene where he pulls up part of his shirt to show a wound, and that's it.

I will also say that there is the tiniest bit of gay-erasure in the movie. While Jackson shows up, his partner of now 16-17 years in the show's timeline, Ethan (Charlie Carver), does not (although is name-checked). However Mason, who is canonically also queer, gets flattened down to essentially "sheriff's deputy" as his only character trait. And there's no reference to either his previous love interest or a new love interest. Boo I say. I like Mason, he was always a good character. He's massively underused in the movie.

Like much of the series though, the movie has plot holes you could drive a truck through. Why does Character X who was supposed to be dead show up again with no explanation? Why did Character Y have that MacGuffin? Has nothing supernatural been happening in this town the last 15 years? Who the hell is Eli's mother? Who, exactly, made the preserved vegetables that production design added to Derek's basement? Does Derek garden now? Or is this the fictitious wife/mother? Why would you not want your mother to know you're back in town and then meet at her house? Did Scott's mother actually become a doctor?

Just a million tiny questions that the movie never bothers to address directly that could very easily have been covered.

Honestly, this should have been a mini-series. Like 3-4 90 minute episodes. So that the whole thing could just breathe and do the business it needed to do and not rush through the story.

Having said literally ALL of that. I didn't hate it. It was massively flawed, yes. Some of it actively does not work or contradicts bits that do. But the bits of it that I liked, I really liked. 

Most of the stuff with Derek and Eli was great. I loved seeing Aaron Hendry back as the Nogitsune (and I didn't realise that he played that role as well as the homicidal orderly in that season of the show originally), he does fantastic work. Likewise just seeing everybody that did come back, even if they're only back for 10 minutes of actual screen time and have almost no lines.

I just enjoy this world, flawed though it absolutely is, and I very much enjoyed getting to spend just a tiny bit more time there, even if it wasn't perfect.

But sadly, I don't give half-scores in my reviews. It's full numbers or it's nothing... so I'm actually going to round-down because of the behind the scenes fuckery that clearly was going on in the production offices.

yani's rating: 2 '1980 robin's egg blue CJ5 Jeeps' out of 5