character saturday: rune boy

Here he is. Chane Leger, the boy who started this whole current reboot project for the Icewind Dale Rangers. The old version used a lot of the old chunky armor, and it just wasn't doing it. So we have this version instead.

Do I think that wearing that much metal on your body/face in an environment where there's a lot of snow and ice and cold is a bad plan? Possibly. I suspect there is probably a lot of frost that forms on the chainmail in front of his face. I do like the helmet though. I just wish we had a better lantern. But the snowball is cute enough.

Also, Chane definitely has both red hair, some kind of beard, and a terrible French accent. Because the only French accent that I can do is terrible.

Anyway...

I made possibly the best chicken soup this week. Even though I forgot to get the chicken out of the freezer until lunchtime on Monday. I did the usual thing and just broke up some various leftover pasta (some various widths of spaghetti, some fettuccine) into small pieces and used that.

This week's Mini Media Reviews. I started with the mini series Leonardo. Decent, not stunning. And honestly, if this is based at all on historical accounts of da Vinci, then it seems like he might have been kind of an asshole. It's also a "murder mystery" based on completely made up stuff about a work of art that is lost to history. Also, Freddy Highmore is an executive producer on this... and also stars in it... in a role that he just seems completely miscast in. Mostly because putting Highmore in a fake beard and leather pants just looks... weird.

I followed that up with a season and a half of Alex Rider. I read all the books when I was in my early 20's, I quite enjoyed Stormbreaker (and just now remembering that that movie is 20 years old this year). This is a much more... realistic. Less James Bond and more Jason Bourne perhaps. Now, I know I've read the two books these first two seasons are based on, but as I said, not for at least 20 years, maybe closer to 25. So I don't really remember where the original plot goes. But it does feel a little bit like they're... not padding out the universe, but at the very least stretching out the available story to fit the eight 45 minute episode season. It's also slightly interesting that they chose to go to the second book for the first season and then pivoted back to the first book for the second season. So they pull some of the details of how Alex becomes a spy from the first book and bolt it onto the first season. Then fill in some of the second season with what basically amounts to Alex's PTSD. They also add in a best friend for Alex who is... honestly he's the nerdy, slightly pointless, best friend from every British show about teens. It's giving Sid from Skins.

It's not bad though.

I also finished God of War this week. I really, really enjoyed it. Sure, I already knew the ending. And in my brain I'd had some of the sequel game that I'd seen played mixed up with the first game, but I liked it a lot. So much so that I ordered the sequel from the library. And it turns out, my local library had a copy of the shelf. Bonus. Well... except that it seems like it won't load the last little bit from the disc for some reason. Bollocks.

Monday required another visit from my landlord. Because one of my taps just decided that it didn't need to turn off properly because the washer was completely shredded. Thankfully it didn't take that long for him to fix it once he got here.

Friday Night DnD... we basically did a big prolonged fight scene the whole session with a brief break in the middle. The second half of which was us fighting a large collection of goo balls that shat out little fleshy pyramids that tried to eat our faces. Good times. Thankfully we had a handy Water Elemental that literally saved our asses. It was a good session overall. Plus we levelled up. Woo.

Anyway.

Today was a fairly average supermarket adventure.

Then afterwards we took a little side trip to Big W to look at their fitted sheets. So there's that about that.

character saturday: hidden half-orc

Another Icewind Dale Ranger for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book. This time, the half-orc Gloomstalker Ranger, Snow. Because if you haven't seen the sun in a long time, why not be the subclass designed to work in low light.

Snow was one of the ones that I remade a while ago. At some point I was just scrolling past and decided that I was tired of looking at the old version. It may have been after that particular mask came out. It is also fun being able to make an entirely white stealthy character because they're running around in snow.

The idea with Snow was also that him being a half-orc was going to be a reveal. He's help out the party with some encounter and then take his mask off. Not a giant reveal, I grant you.

Anyway.

This week had a lot going on. Let's start with the easy stuff.

 I started soup season. Because I'm tired of inventing things to make. So I went back to minestrone. Well, my version of minestrone. Damn good though.

This week's Mini Media Reviews started with finishing up the last season of Snowpiercer. Damn it's a good show. I mean, occasionally frustrating, but so well done. But it's basically a show where the problems all stem from Entitled Straight White Men. Story literally checks out.

I also watched the National Theatre Live version of The Importance of Being Earnest. I'm very familiar with the story, but this is the first time I've seen the full and complete version, which was 3 hours long. Generally it was very good. Excellent costumes and sets, there were some directing choices I was less set on.

I also watched Ron's Gone Wrong. Which was actually both different than I expected but also better than I thought it was going to be. It is a little bit "hey kids, stop being so into social media and take your face out your phone". Actually, it's a lot that. It's very on the nose. But it also manages to be pretty good.

Last up was the first season of The Knick. Which was rough. Good, but rough. Which is to be expected when you're watching a show set in 1900 about doctors... because doctors knew what the fuck they were doing, and also full of racism and several other isms and more drug use than I was expecting.

So, the rest of the week was... a collection of things.

I made the LEGO Toothless on Sunday, while watching Earnest. And honestly, it took me longer than the 3 hours of Earnest. 

But before that I wanted to move the Wall-E LEGO from my bedside table to the living room, which meant I needed to put something else away in it's box in the wardrobe. During which I managed to step back off the two step stepladder that I have and break the glass in one of the big pieces of art in the bedroom. Not really a good start to sitting down to build LEGO. Much fucking around with broken glass was required. On the plus side, I neither injured myself nor the art. Well, I got a minor cut from the glass after the fact, but that was fixed with a band aid.

So Monday I needed to go and run some errands, and it turned out that Frame Connection, where Ma and I went a number of times in the Before Times, was just down the same street. I got a quote for the glass, did my other errand and then stopped off at the tyre store on the Parade and set "hey, I have a really embarrassing problem, I can't work out how to put the air in my tyres". The very nice man took my car keys, disappeared in the car for a couple of minutes, came back and told me that the tyres were supposed to be at 32 PSI, and they were at 12. Yep, story checks out. So thank you Mr Tyre Man.

Tuesday the landlord came to fix the bedroom window. So, at least that's done. Thursday I went back to order the glass. I had expected that it would take a couple of days. No, they did it on the spot. Gotta love that.

Also this week I attempted to start The Witcher 3. For a variety of reasons I just did not click with it. Part of that was the game just did various things that annoyed me, part of it was the combat was needlessly complicated right off the bat, and the movement... I have never before been made nauseous by a game. The movement in this made me start feeling sick. And once the game dumped me out of the tutorial and into the game itself, I played for maybe 3 minutes before nopeing the hell out of it and deleting the game.

Instead I installed God of War. And I'm loving the hell out of that. Which is slightly weird because the personalities of Kratos and Geralt are not miles apart. But Geralt just annoyed me from the jump.

I do know a number of the reveals from God of War though, just from being a person who exists on the internet. Plus being a person who knows things about Norse mythology. Or some combination of the two.

Friday Night DnD was more dungeon exploration. And pressing the big red button only to find that the button is going to kill us. We have survived thus far though.

Anyway.

Today had a non zero amount of ignoring the election. Because Ma and I did postal voting.

Otherwise it was just the usual supermarket stuff. And then taking a quick trip to Spotlight just for looking at things. Nothing hugely exciting. 

character saturday: leadership realness

Happy Birthday to me. I am now as old as there are weeks in the year. Do with that what you will.

Now, we've done the Icewind Dale Rangers before. But I accidentally gave a bunch of them a makeover. I went into Hero Forge with the intent of doing something else altogether, and got distracted by the very old model of one of them. I'd already given a couple of them a makeover, but never posted those and realised how shitty some of the other ones looked.

My favourite of the bunch though was the leader of the Rangers, Dreth. Partially because I always liked him as an NPC during that game, he was also the only one I didn't make up, but rather the one that DM Fluffy made up.

I'd done a partial makeover of him, but still didn't love the finished one. Weirdly, taking his hat off and putting a slight smile on his face make me instantly fall in love with him.

Anyway...

Let's start with Mini Media Reviews for this week. The theme of the week? Snowpiercer. All Snowpiercer, all week. And I still have half of the final season to go this weekend.

And damn it's good. Like really, really good. It's also incredibly intense at times. But the writing and the performances are fantastic. It takes a very special kind of show to have me wishing a character would be killed off in the first season and then have that same character being literally my favourite character in the show by the fourth season.

I'll be sad to get to the end to be honest. But I hope it ends on both a "finished" note (as in, the show was planned to run four seasons, it ran four seasons and ended, rather than it just randomly got cancelled after a season ended) and also a satisfying note. Even if that last bit is achieved by a "some amount of time later" flash forward in the last 10 minutes.

This week I also made tuna mornay. Not the spiciest of versions, but tasty.

Friday I went out to get my Birthday Boost Juice, because I love getting strangers to wish me Happy Birthday. It's a very niche kink. I also picked up Untitled Goose Game and basically knocked the game over in one sitting.

Friday Night DnD was also Birthday Night DnD. Fluffy showed up at my place with a present, but honestly, the bag the present came in was almost more exciting that the present itself. Which says everything about the bag and nothing about the present. The bag was a Toothless bag, just his big dumb face, which is currently hanging from a doorknob across the room where I can see it.

The actual present was The Witcher 3 and God of War. Fluffy was quick to point out they were preowned versions, which is totally fine. Now whether or not I'll vibe with them, who can say. I am going to start with Witcher, partially because I've watched someone play a good chunk of the first third or so of God of War. Which also makes me glad I knocked Goose Game on the head earlier in the day.

It was fascinating that when I opened the present from Mr and Mrs... it was the Toothless Lego set. Which I absolutely did not expect. But just funny that both of the presents had a Toothless themed element.

Also cheesecake. 

The actual game was more exploration of the dungeon complex we were in last week. We're also finally starting to get to the weirder elements of the adventure, which is good.

Anyway...

Today wasn't particularly exciting. Mostly because I honestly wasn't really all that bothered. We did the supermarket thing, I got my Birthday Scone from Baker's Delight. We didn't really have any other plans, and I'll be honest, I wasn't really bothered about going out to lunch or anything because that would have required killing at least a couple of hours.

character saturday: devoted dragonborn

It's been a hot minute since Zzilar, aka Two-zies ("two z's, at the front" as he usually introduces himself), has featured in a DnD Character Colouring Book. Way back in the Photoshop colour days. This version does look a little older and a little more regal if I'm honest.

Does it say something about my brain right now that I'm posting paladins? Do with that what you will.

Anyway...

I worked out that the correct alternative to "pasta bake" is just a variation on my lasagne soup. So that was this week.

My Mini Media Reviews for this week start with Your Name. A strange one, but I did have a little bit of a teary moment at the end.

I followed that up with my second attempt to get through the French version of The Count of Monte Cristo. Not because the move is 3 hours long, but because the last time I tried the disc had huge scratches and became unwatchable. This time the disc had a very minor scratch... and the same problem occurred. In roughly the same spot in the movie. So clearly those discs are just cursed. But I did mange to find a way to finish watching it (thanks Reddit). The ending feels a little... soft. But overall it's quite good. So long as you can let go of the fact that they're clearly using modern prosthetics for some of the "disguised as somebody else" scenes while the movie is trying to tell you that those are hard masks. But overall I liked it.

And rounding out the week was the first season of Snowpiercer. The TV show. And I quite enjoyed it. Will definitely be watching the rest of the series.

Friday was Chiro Day... and then Friday Night DnD happened. We're on a dungeon crawl. We finished out on the verge of totally fucking up a sassy medusa. Good times.

Anyway...

Today was the usual supermarket followed by a wild goose chase. Well, more a Looking For Things In Places Where Things Were Not.

Because it turns out there are only a few places that sell the foil covers you put over the steering wheel. And none of those places were the ones we went to. So there's that.