character saturday: handicraft halfling

Today we have another backup character for DnD Character Colouring Book. One that I may or may not actually use in the current campaign. Because I now have Other Plans. Or at least Other Ideas.

But because we're lacking in an actual dedicated healer, of course my back up character for Friday Night DnD is a cleric. And of course she's a halfling. We been knowing how I feel about halflings.

Also, she definitely crochets. Because I put a crochet texture on that cowl, but also because a cleric for the halfling goddess of "hearth, home, hospitality, trust and handicraft" absolutely knows how to crochet.

She's one of the more modern of Cyrrollalee's clergy, going out into the world to cultivate "strong, respectful relationships with other goodly races". And also to find new locations where halflings could settle. Hence the Hearthfinder title.

Originally, as often happens, she had a different name... Poppy Greenleaf, which I ended up partially repurposing for the wife of one of the potential barbarian characters. I don't remember exactly why I then changed it. But I think I picked out Bridie before I realised that she would then be named after somebody I used to work with a long time ago. Which also absolutely works for who the character should be. Bright and bubbly and perky but still charming.

But as I said, there's a different idea stewing away in the back of my head currently. Hopefully we won't need it. But it's there.

Anyway...

This week was vaguely chaos.

Let's start with the boring things. Chicken and rice soup... a little dull overall, but decent.

Mini Media Reviews. Based on last week's trip to the movies, and a lack of anything from the library, I rewatched the animated How To Train Your Dragon and then How To Train Your Dragon 2. It's been a hot minutes, so I was kind of surprised at how dated the original HTTYD looked. It's still well made, but you can see the vast difference between the first and second movies in the quality of their animation and lighting even though they're only four years apart.

I was also quite surprised at how much of the live action movie actually is in the animated one. Or vice versa I guess. So I still don't quite know how we got to a movie that was half an hour longer. I will say that the animated movie moves at speed. Ten minutes in and we were already at Hiccup finding Toothless in the forest. And I'm pretty sure that the live action movie doesn't get to it anywhere near as fast.

I also think that I worked out the problem I was having with Astrid... since the animated version is less harsh to Hiccup overall, mostly because they barely exchange any lines before she changes her tune. So it's less of a hill up which to push shit, as they say.

And I can't wait for them to make the second movie into live action. Also, I was wrong about Emma Thompson in my review... I had misremembered that she was doing the voice, but it's Cate Blanchett, and should be her in the live action version also.

In crochet news... I'm poddling along on my "is this actually going to be a jacket this time or are you going to get annoyed again and frog it" project. Which I had to start over again when I realised it was never going to fit. It's doing okay at the moment.

Which isn't bad for a project that I did a bunch of calculations for and then have completely ignored all the measurements and have just been making it up as I go. Which is fine thus car because it's just a giant rectangle at this point.

Moving on to this week being chaos.

It all started on Tuesday when Ma called me to say that "her computer wasn't working". And if there's anything I love, it's attempting to do tech support over the phone. So after hitting my head against a brick wall, I gave up, jumped in the car and drove down to her place. After a 40 minute drive I discovered that her internet was out. I didn't even look at the computer.

But after looking at the outage map for the ISP, there was an little popup that said "you could be impacted by this widespread outage"... so I assumed it was a result of the wild weather we'd had the night before and told her to keep checking on it.

No luck there, but the more I looked at the outage map, the more I realised that that was a mostly pointless "fault" report that had been sitting there for two months, confusing people far and wide probably.

So I attempted calling the ISP on Ma's behalf, because she doesn't do well with those call centre calls. But of course, you can't do fuck all without having the actual account person there. Which is completely fair. And I said as much to the very nice Indian call centre woman I spoke to.

Which meant that Ma came down here so that she could do the things she had wanted to do on her laptop at my house where the internet was working and I could call the ISP and get things sorted.

And it honestly didn't take that long. I called, he poked the connection with a stick, said it wasn't them and had passed it up the chain. We put my name down on Ma's account as somebody who is authorised to make calls on her behalf (thank fuck) and by the time we'd gotten off the phone Ma had a message on her phone saying that the team up the chain had passed it on to, I think, the NBN people. And by the time she got back to her place her phone was full of messages saying "hey, we're coming out to fix this tomorrow".

Ten full points for getting this shit together quickly.

And by 8:30 the folllowing morning, they'd been to Ma's place, poked her NBN box just to be sure, then gone off to (and admittedly, this is where I lose some of the story because Ma doesn't really know what they did), I assume, the node to poke that with a stick.

The whole thing was fixed by about 9:30.

It just meant that I saw and spoke to Ma an awful lot last week. And took an unexpected drive.

Also there was no Friday Night DnD this week. Or next week. Because people who aren't me appear to have lives. Good for them. Or something.

Anyway...

Today wasn't hugely anything. Mostly because, as I said, I saw Ma quite a bit this week.

We did the supermarket thing. And then finally got around to taking a side trip to Haighs for Ma's birthday at the start of the month. Which we did right after the supermarket, so we got there basically as the doors opened.

That was it really though.

movies: how to train your dragon (2025)

The original How to Train Your Dragon movie is one of those movies that is Very Important To Me. So when they announced a live action remake I was slightly dubious. Given the drivel that the Mouse House pumps out.

But then I discovered that it was being directed by one of the two original directors, Dean DeBlois... and I was basically onboard.

Then the trailer came out and I fucking cried. I was all in.

And, I have to say that How to Train Your Dragon absolutely sits comfortably beside it's animated predecessor as a slightly more mature and complex retelling of the original.

And, oh how I cried. I cried during the closing narration for fuck's sake. The bit that is all happy and joyful. But I knew that crying was absolutely going to happen.

It's one of those interesting things where it's very nearly a completely faithful remake, but there are just, as DeBlois said in an interview, "good, subtle, and significant enhancements" to certain elements.

And in some spots that pulls it above the 2010 version, in other spots, it drops it below slightly, and sometimes it does both in the same scene.

First up though... Mason Thames. This entire movie, no pun intended, rides on his back. If he doesn't work, nothing works. He is, without doubt, exceptional in this. He brings all the personality Jay Baruchel brought to animated Hiccup, and fills him with even more emotion than the animators managed.

This version strengthens the relationship between Hiccup and his father Stoic (and nobody else could have been Stoic, so I'm so glad that Gerard Butler returned... the only returning cast member between the two as far as I'm aware). And they definitely give Stoic some more depth, give him moments to just exist in not understanding his child. Things that 2010 got across, but 2025 leans into.

And I wonder how much of that is a 55 year old DeBlois vs a 40 year old DeBlois. Also understanding exactly who all these characters are after three movies with them and coming back and getting to take a fresh crack at them all. 

The viking kids are good overall. Do they suffer ever so slightly from not being voiced by comedians? Slightly. At the same time the roles get expanded during some of the action scenes and they're all well cast. But, honestly, the supporting cast of Snotlout, Fishlegs, Ruffnut and Tuffnut were never my favourite characters in any of the movies.

Which brings us to Astrid. Played by Nico Parker. Firstly, I like that the movie explicitly created a relationship between Astrid and Stoic, even if it's more of a "tell don't show" relationship beyond a couple of small moments. I just feel like Parker was... a little... flat. I dunno how to describe it really. And maybe that's how the character was written... and maybe America Ferrera pulled off a miracle in 2010 by making Astrid more than the sum of her parts. Like I said, I can't put my finger on it. I'd need to see the movie again I think. She's good, don't get me wrong, there's just something that she didn't quite have that Thames had in spades. Maybe this version of Astrid feels harsher at the beginning, so her change feels too abrupt, I don't know.

On the "some changes are both positive and negative" front... making the tribe of vikings be composed of people from various places around the globe who specifically came to hunt dragons... great. Gives us the opportunity to cast people other than just white folks... completely on board.

But it also changes to vibe of the village a little. Instead of being people who have always lived on this little rock sticking out of the ocean and who are too stubborn to go live anywhere else just because there are dragons, now you have people who, potentially, sought out this place because of the dragons. It doesn't change anything explicitly in the movie, but it changes to feel of the place somewhat when I thought about it afterwards.

That may also be because I feel like we spend too much time with the adult characters at the start of the movie. I kind of don't need Snotlout's dad. I don't really need the woman with one leg who has no other personality traits as far I can see. I'm not sure I need the "blink and you'll miss it" scene that may or may not have been Astrid's parents, because they never have a scene with Astrid, so I'm basing that completely on something I read after the movie. It just pads out the start a little too much.

It's a 125 minute movie compared to 2010's 98 minutes. And a good chunk of that is in the final battle scene, but I also feel like the other half of that time is spend on characters that the movie really isn't about. I get the idea that we're expanding the world, I just wanted to get to the good stuff. And by good stuff, I mean Toothless.

The CGI Toothless is excellent. There are times when I felt like perhaps we get slightly less personality from him... but that might be more a case of the lighting and texture and live action of it all. It's been a minute since I've watched the 2010 version (that's absolutely on the docket for tonight's viewing), but it felt like there were certain scenes in that where his expressions had been easier to read because they weren't hidden by 2025's dust and lighting and fog and just being "real". But again I could be making comparisons between a single movie's worth of character vs three movies worth of character.

Because he looks amazing overall.

Speaking of the CGI... there were moments in the first half of the movie where I just kept thinking that nobody in a particular scene was actually outside in the world. Or they were, but that background was definitely not really there. Not that it doesn't look amazing, but there was just something that just pulled me out of it in certain spots.

I also specifically need to call out Lindsay Pugh, the costume designer. She did amazing work... especially on Hiccup's hoodie. I'm slightly obsessed with that particular garment. But everybody looked amazing. I will extend that kudos out to all the art designers and set decorators.

Likewise John Powell, who was the composer for the original three HTTYD movies and returns for this one. I've been listening to the soundtrack while typing this and absolutely love it. I specifically love the Meeting the Queen track for whatever the hell is going on at the start of it. Powell definitely improves on his original score from 2010.

The story, which I love, doesn't really change... not in any meaningful ways... and didn't need to. I still love that there are consequences in these stories. 

If I had to rank them, based on right now of not having seen 2010 in a hot minute... I think 2010 just edges this out. But we're talking a few degrees of separation. And I absolutely need to see 2025 again.

Which is why this also gets the same rating as 2010.

yani's rating: 5 toothless dragons out of 5 

character saturday: clever girl

For reasons that will become clear later... we're trying out a 2024 Dragonborn character for today's DnD Character Colouring Book.

Because Hero Forge does slightly struggle with making more interesting dragonborns. At least the way I like to make them. Not least of all because the dragonborn face hasn't gone through the Customiser process yet.

Ontrix happened when I was playing with potential ideas around fighters. And I quite like her overall vibe, even if I'm not 100% sure about Eldritch Knight as a subclass. It's also not often that I go for a dual wielder type character, in this case the short sword/dagger combo, and I like that particular weapon set quite a lot.

At any rate, any dragonborn character just sits in the archive so that I can potentially use them as a base for something else later on.

Anyway... 

First up, this week was Lasagne Soup. It's a good soup. I mean, it's basically just slightly runny pasta sauce with noodles already in it. But I like it regardless.

In crochet news... I finished another scarf, potentially as a gift for someone, but if that never ends up happening, it's one I'd probably be happy keeping for myself.

I also decided that my scarves need names... rather than just descriptions.

And more so that I remember later, we have Ketchup... the red scarf I made for myself last winter with the cosy thick yarn that I got for my 50th birthday... and Mustard... the dupe that I made for Fluffy with yarn he bought for that purpose.

Then we have the two I showed off last week... the pastel one I'm calling Nefler By The Pool (if you know, you know) and the other one I think is Sugar Snap, given that it was for Fluffy's Ma, using yarn from Fluffy's blanket, and he just started playing a goblin character of the same name on Friday night.

And mostly that was all because the one I made this week, using verigated black, white and grey yarn intersperced with stripes of a different verigated yarn that's officially called Jewel (think sapphire, emerald, ruby, amethyst and gold), that I'm calling Test Pattern. Because it's giving a non-zero amount of this.

I also did it in the same Moss Stitch as Sugar Snap, but vertically rather than horizontally. And not gunna lie... making a scarf vertically feels like much harder work. Not least of all because I changed yarn between the two a LOT. There might be a photo of Test Pattern when I'm done, because I have to weave all the ends in first.

This week's Mini Media Reviews...

Firstly... Fuck Little Women. Specifically fuck the 2019 version. To be fair, while I was aware of other versions (the 1933 and 1994 versions respectively), I was never actually interested enough in the story to bother with it.

And I was just fucking bored. Mostly with Saoirse Ronan as Jo. But slightly more with Jo in general. I also don't think the flicking back and forth in the timeline actually works. Because I was just fucking confused for the first ten minutes until I realised what was happening, and then the absolute flaw in possibly all of the adaptations was made worse because instead of just having to buy that these women in their 20's are supposed to be playing girls who are between like 13 and 20 at best. And then flicking back to them playing closer to their actual ages... it just... doesn't quite work.

Because when your movie doesn't make me like Florence Pugh, you're doing a movie wrong. I mean, I liked the grown up version, not the kid version.

The standouts were absolutely Pugh and Timothée Chalamet, and not just because I wanted to break Laurie in half in a good way.

Also, the movie trying to have it's 1868 cake AND it's 2019 cake... just doesn't work. You wanna fuck around with the idea that Jo doesn't need a man, don't give Jo a man. Don't force in the real life experience of the author and pass it off as the character. The movie absolutely can't afford to cash the "Jo loves this man" cheque that it's trying to. So by the end of it I was mostly just making snide comments to Fluffy over Discord and begging for it to be over.

I knew going in that Little Women wasn't really My Vibes. But it absolutely proved itself to be true very, very quickly. 

Conversely, I finished Penny Dreadful this week. 

Goddamn that's an amazing show. I absolutely wish they'd been given a fourth season, but at the same time, they managed to wrap the main storyline up in a satisfying way. It's very clear that they were leaving enough plot threads in the wind in order to make another season if they should be called on to do so, but, honestly, I kind of prefer when a series doesn't feel like it has to wrap up every single thread. Because you can imagine then that the characters go off on their own and have their own adventures.

But I absolutely cried more than once in the later half of the season, and got emotional over characters I never thought that I would back in Season One.

That show is exactly my dark and fucked up vibes from top to toe.

No Friday Night DnD this week. Which also meant no kitten cuddles.

Anyway...

Today we had A Plan. Granted it was a plan that I thought was going to morph into a slightly different plan, but ended up as the original plan.

We started with shopping, then, given that we got back to my place early enough, we skipped a few of the general steps we might do on a Saturday morning and instead headed off to the movies to watch the new live action version of How To Train Your Dragon. More on that later.

Did I want to murder the little coven of alternagoth teen girls who came as a pack, two of whom were carrying Toothless plushies from, I assume, Build A Bear? I mean, yes, they talked too much, had to go to the bathroom in pairs (possible the same two twice... I'm not sure) and were sitting directly across the aisle from us. But I shushed them once and that was mostly enough.

Afterwards we had a little bit of lunch and a wander and then called it a day. 

character saturday: shady lady

There have been certain character designs that I've gone back to and then done a reboot or a remake or a reimagine. Mostly just switching out the class and the gender.

Thus it was with Silence. He was a Shadow Sorcerer, now she's a Trickery Cleric of one of the elvish gods.

There really isn't much more to say.

Anyway.

This week's soup was potato and bacon. It was decent. If not exciting.

There really isn't a Mini Media Review this week.

I did crochet two scarves this week though. One in the usual ribbing style with the leftover yarn from Ma's cardigan, and one in Moss Stitch, which I quickly became obsessed with. The Moss Stitch scarf was using the leftover yarn from the Original Crochet Project, Fluffy's Blanket. Which was fitting, because Fluffy picked out the yarn from my stash when I asked him what colours his mum would like. And I was not surprised in the slightest that he picked the green and the grey. I then added the gold, because it seemed fitting.

Normally I would absolutely have made a repeating or symmetrical pattern for the Moss Stitch scarf, I specifically went for something else. And it made a remarkably solid fabric. So we'll be coming back to that for certain.

And after yet another failed attempt at a cardigan that I pulled the pin on after a few rows, I decided to finally attach all the granny squares made from leftover yarn from my hexagon cardigan. And I'll be honest, I have no fucking clue what I'm going to do with it once it's done. Because I feel like it's going to be too narrow and too long. But at least it will be done.

Friday Night DnD was... regularly interrupted by delightfully psycho kittens. Did I end up sitting there for part of the game holding one of those fluffy things on a string to stop the kittens having the zoomies all over the place.

The game itself was fine. It was really one of those filler sessions where we were mostly setting up the next major set piece.

Anyway...

Nothing overly exciting to report from today.

We did the supermarket thing, but because my back was being a little bit problematic, we didn't do anything else. 

character saturday: little green dufus

So, this week's DnD Character Colouring Book is another one that is classified as "fan art". And yes, this is also the second time that I've done a similar off-centre pose for a character involved with the Phandelver Above and Below campaign we're playing on Friday night.

This is also very much my interpretation of the character based solely on vibes and after a makeover. I am also fairly sure that the background and subclass I've picked here are wrong. But again, based purely on vibes.

And I'll explain exactly where this Little Guy fits into out adventures when we get to Friday's DnD roundup.

Anyway...

This week was yet another incarnation of my minestrone soup, using the leftover tomato soup from a couple of weeks before as a base, because I had one left and shoved it in the freezer. It was a good call honestly. A very tomato-ey and rich minestrone.

In, "I'm clearly a witch" news... on Saturday, while talking about a set of boyfriend twins we saw leaving the supermarket (I've seen them before, I'm fairly certain it's a gay couple that just looks entirely too similar to each other, but there's also a non-zero possibility they could just be siblings), I said a name out loud that I probably haven't specifically said so that the universe can hear me in... a while.

And thusly, because, as previously mentioned, I am clearly a witch, that person messaged me after having spoken to them/seen them for 12 years. Yes, J has appeared from out of the ether after over a decade. And it definitely has to be that long, because they still remembered me living on Childers Street, and I moved out of there in the beginning of 2014.

Getting a text out of the blue was definitely a surprise, but we set up a call for later that evening, which was just long enough for my brain to run through the usual "panic later" routine... and honestly, my brain eventually just came back with 404 File Not Found. Which was actually nice.

I did, however, remember part way through the phone call that J is both A Lot Of Work, and that I think he's something of a pathological exaggerator. Not a liar, you understand, I just feel like he embellishes his stories. Which circles back into being A Lot Of Work.

It was a pleasant enough phone call though, and at some point I'm sure we'll do a dinner, but it absolutely feels like a lot of water has passed under the proverbial bridge since then. And, honestly, the place in my brain that used to hold space of J now basically holds space for Fluffy. Which sounds terrible, I fully understand, but doesn't make it any less true.

In crochet news... I undid/frogged the entire shrug cardigan I mentioned last week... and started making a second thing, which was essentially just a big granny square. That I then gave up on by the end of the week and also frogged. Because that will happen when you try and make a square using different weights of yarn and the corners end up bowing out slightly. I very much liked the way the colours looked, but by the end it was just not sitting the way I wanted it to. So I pulled the whole thing apart and will ponder my next step while doing some other projects this week. 

This week's Mini Media Reviews are the last of the X-Men movies and the second season on Penny Dreadful.

Now, I absolutely don't understand why all of the reviews for X-Men: Dark Phoenix are terrible. Truly I don't. Because it's better than the last time they tried this storyline in The Last Stand. It's certainly infinitely better than Apocalypse. I do get that it very much feels like a massive left turn for where the previous movie was pointing the characters. But it also makes sense. So, yeah, I liked it a lot.

The second season of Penny Dreadful was both better than the first one and also just fully leaning into Gothic tragedy. I'm just hoping that it manages to stick the landing in the third season, given that the series was cancelled. But I'm also not expecting anybody to get a happy ending, the series being what it is.

It is absolutely my vibe and beautifully made though.

Which brings us to Friday Night DnD...

Firstly, more kitten cuddles which is lovely.

And then, because Fluffy's character had disappeared off into the night at the end the last game, he just ended up sitting there for most of the game while Mrs and I did some bits and pieces, mostly just housekeeping stuff because we all knew is was going to be a short session.

Right up until the point where my character went out during the night for a little bit of light B and E to gather some information. And on the way back happened to come across a certain shadowy figure doing it's own bit of breaking and entering at one of the stores in town. So, as a good, civic minded citizen, my boy absolutely stuck his nose in with the intent of stopping the robbery. Yeah, the hypocrisy was breathtaking.

I'll be honest, I was assuming I might run into Fluffy's character on my way back, and I did... except it was the wrong character. Fluffy took great delight in taking the unopened folder in front of him and swapping it out for a completely different folder. And debuting Sugar Snap, the goblin rogue, who will be with us until we break his former character out of the lair of some nasty goblins we were intending to head towards anyway.

I haven't bothered asking the why... because this is absolutely a Fluffy Plan, rather than potentially a thing that the DM did. Or, at the very least, it's some bullshit the two of them cooked up together. And I understand the timing to some degree. It just feels a little dumb because we were fully in the middle of a story dump for his previous character... so I guess I just don't get swapping characters in the middle of that.

But it is what it is.

And it will serve him right if we end up liking the new character more than the old character, even if he wants to change back to the old character. It would also have served him right if I'd just murdered his character in the middle of the night.

Anyway...

Today was Ma's birthday... which, I will fully admit, I absolutely forgot about until I happened to check my phone after she got here. But also, I gave her her present last week.

But we did the usual supermarket thing, and Ma had decided she wanted to do lunch at the same place we went for my birthday, The Republic Norwood.  And this time I had the schnitzel I should have had last time. Because it was pretty much excellent. Maybe more so because it had been raining heavily on and off all morning.

And that was it really.