two thousand and twenty four in review

Weirdly, the things that kind of stood out looking through this year's posts was replacing at least half a dozen electronic/homewares items due to the originals breaking. And it's not even like I bought them all at the same time.

Also, I crocheted a number of things this year and failed to document them on the blog (or really on any social media at all).

They include a Hexagon Cardigan, a shrug cardigan, two infinity scarves (one for me, one for Ma), one Granny Stitch scarf, three sets of arm warmers (two of which I gave away/were for somebody else), two dice bags (again, one for me, one for a Christmas present), a wind spinner (likewise for Christmas), a slight failure of a beanie and a snek plushie.

I'll cover this more in the book round-up post, but while I didn't reach the insane heights of last year, visits to the library were still super important this year. I did split my time a little more between books and DVDs though. 

Which meant my movie watching definitely increased. There might also be a post for that too.

Once again, not the most exciting of years.

January: Bought a new printer that was considerably cheaper than ink for my old printer. Started the Hexagon Cardigan Project the same week.

February: A rental inspection didn't happen because my agent was confused by the concept of keys. Then later it did. The HCP ran into a ribbing based speedbump.

March: My 50th Birthday happened. My red chairs became beige chairs.

April: Crocheted a scarf (in the same yarn) to avoid finishing the HCP.

May: Finally finished the HCP. Started an infinity scarf, screwed it up, frogged it and then got it right. Fully committed to borrowing DVDs from the library. Our Friday Night DnD party was intensely stupid. And Thursday Night DnD came to The End.

June: A rental inspection, Ma's birthday and my vacuum cleaner dying all in the same week.

July: Very cold. Crocheted the first set of arm warmers. Replaced my dying PS4.

August: Played a lot of Horizon Forbidden West. Finished it. Got a replacement TV thanks to Fluffy.

September: Replaced my busted vacuum. Rental inspection. Crocheted Ma a scarf in the same style as mine.

October: Our one Cinema Going Experience. Finally started a Teen Wolf rewatch. And started a slightly undefined crochet project, then frogged it and started over.

November: Finished both Teen Wolf and my crochet project, which ended up as a shrug cardigan. Crocheted myself a little snek just because.

December: Friday Night Board Game Christmas. Actual Christmas. Essentially finished the Friday Night DnD campaign bar the wrap-up.

two thousand and twenty three in review

Here we are... we made it all the way to the last day of 2023. Well done us.

This year started out with me having tweaked my back, and having gotten a library card again for the first time in two decades... so, suffice to say, reading featured really heavily in my overall year initially because I could do it while laying down, but later because I just kept going. But that's getting it's own post later.

Also, brief sidebar... Australia Post have started doing weird things to the images of the stamps they put online (understandable, I guess)... so that's less fun. I might need to revisit the whole stamp idea come the end of next year. Because that's not aesthetic.

After skimming through a year's worth of blog posts, there wasn't a huge amount of anything hugely exciting. So you'll have to deal with the stuff that did stand out to me. 

Also, my life is mostly boring... but the 35 of you who seem to stick around must enjoy it or something. Hi, but the way... thanks for being here. Otherwise I'm just basically prattling on into the void for my own amusement. And so that when I have a "when did that thing happen in my life", I can come here and look it up.

So... like I was saying... prattling into the void.

January: I finished the Friday Night DnD campaign I was running. We played Hero Quest as a breather between my campaign and the next campaign.

February: I started walking in the mornings again (I did extend the walk at some point, I can't find a post about it). I got to meet Baby Owlgirl. I got my fifth booster shot.

March: We went down to Port Adelaide to see Wonderwalls street art. Also, birthday. I ended the month with a rental inspection.

April: I started playing Horizon Forbidden West (sadly my PS4 is old and annoying and I haven't been able to finish it). Ma wasn't well. I reset the Fall Down Go Boom counter.

May: We finished the short Friday Night Hero Quest campaign and started a new DnD campaign.

June: Ma's birthday and a movie. I bought (big monster feet) slippers and an enormous fleece-lined, knee-length hoodie, amongst the best decisions I made all year.

July: We're counting this as the point that my back finally started to be officially on the mend after six months of giving me (a lot of) trouble. Another inspection.

August: I got to hold a very small baby through a whole game of DnD. What? Not a lot else happened.

September: I started learning to crochet, although was keeping it on the down-low. Which turned into The Secret Project. I got my sixth booster shot the same week.

October: Fluffy went on his Grand Adventure for three weeks. I missed his stupid face. There was too much Going To See Doctors And Getting Tests Done.

November: I updated my blog template again. I finished the Secret Project, but wasn't able to reveal it until after Christmas. I accidentally broke my "gentleman drought". Fluffy came home again.

December: Friday Night DnD became Friday Night Board Game Christmas. I got to reveal the Secret Project, finally. Christmas happened and was the coldest Christmas in 17 years.

And... that's a wrap.

rainbow character template revist

So, it took a little bit, and I may revisit some of them... but everybody got a face update... and I swapped a character out.

And now we have something of a sausage fest. Because there was only one female character in the previous template, but I'm not playing any female characters currently, and my half-orc (blue) had to join all my other loveable idiots.

Also, full disclosure, somebody on Reddit did the base model for the tabaxi (yellow), but I redid the colouring and decals.

What was fascinating is that some of the characters only got minor upgrades/changes... for example Leif (green), but other people became more completely themselves... like Pery (turquoise)... the charming little shit I always knew he was just bubbled up to the surface. Demyan (red) took a couple of goes... the first I leaned into "chiseled verging on gaunt" a little too much. Harland (purple) is... mostly there. I had a couple of goes at him, but he kept coming out the same way, so, you know, that's just his face now. If the smile posing worked like it used to, then a couple of them would be slightly different, but mostly, I'm okay with them all.

The breakdown for all the characters is pretty much the same as it was last time, interestingly, Harland had a somewhat fitting end to his campaign of basically telling the party that he was over it and just wanted to go home and spend a lot of the gold he got during his adventures to buy the fest hall his mother worked in and write a large number of very trashy soft porn/romance novels based on his experiences. Which he did.

But that brings us to Dax (blue)...

• Dax - half orc rogue and cleric of the Raven Queen
  As with many of the characters who have slammed against both the rock and the hard place that is the Thursday DnD Group... Dax became something slightly different than I originally intended. But better for it. Also, I do enjoy that the Thursday Group would understand a lot of my characters better if somebody just asked them the right questions. People keep asking "are we the bad guys"... and the answer is "no... you're not, because you're all bad at it... I do the things that need to be done so that you're not the bad guys". Also Dax is what happens when you hand your DM (Fluffy) a box filled with potentially very sharp things and say "do as you will". On the plus side, he hasn't killed off any family members... yet.
   

character saturday: 18th blogiversary realness

Happy Blogiversary to me! Tuesday was my 18th Blogiversary to be exact. So, yes, my blog is now 18 years old and can buy alcohol, gamble, vote and get an intimate piercing... then take a picture of it and send it to someone.

Yeah, that slightly got away from me.

But still, I've been banging away at this thing for the same length of time as an actual adult person. Scary that. Even if it is mostly just a once a week update and random DnD characters these days.

Speaking of same.

After last week I realised that other than my couple of wizard characters, I don't tend to fuck around with potential wizard designs, because it's not really my preferred arcane class, sorcerer all the way baby. So I started considering potential wizards for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book.

And although they lean into it less in 5e, a Gnomish Illusionist was a staple of previous editions. Also, I do love me a bitch who is extra. So that's how we ended up with Glim Glittergem (because nothing says extra like alliterative names) and his blue furred rabbit familiar, Horcusporcus, or Horcy for short. In a perfect world he might be wearing a top hat, but all the Hero Forge top hats are a little too goofy looking.

Anyway.

For some reason I've had a brain fart the last two weeks and ended up making soup that was a little too thin. But then it was pea and ham, so it was generally okay anyway.

Thursday Night DnD was... weird but good. Mostly weird because everyone was really timid about going into Obvious Bad Place... and I have the traits "I must know the answer to every secret, no door remains unopened in my presence" and "I care about the truth above all else, even if it doesn’t benefit anyone"... so, good times.

Also when you basically invent perfectly reasonable backstory in the moment based on things that happen. Although we also had to fight a fight we basically could have avoided because everyone else wanted to go right and I wanted to keep going left. Granted one of the players also got a cool magic item out of it, so not terrible.

I also just realised that given the magic item we found at the end of the last game which my character kept, he's now a big old nerd in glasses. Which I kind of dig.

Friday was also Chiro Day, which was good, because I was sorely in need of an adjustment, no pun intended.

Friday Night DnD definitely didn't go according to how I thought it would. But it was still good. It was a late night though, we left at 1am, and I didn't probably get to sleep until around 2am. And then woke up at 6. So, I'm gunna crash out super early tonight I think.

Anyway.

For the aforementioned reason, we didn't do anything beyond shopping today.

two thousand and twenty two in review

This year started off with me being a giant ball of stress.

Moving house. It sucks at the best of times. This wasn't the best of times.

But I got through it. And the new place is... adequate for requirements. It's certainly much quieter than the old place.

I also got to dip my toes back into DMing, and actually DMing a full hardcover adventure for the first time. Which was actually super satisfying.

There were a few post-moving projects, including changing all my DVD covers over to Penguin Book themed covers. And then there was a lot of pre DMing prep.

So, for what it's worth, here's this year's roundup.

January: This month was one long moving related freak out. Up until securing a new place. Then it was just packing. And then I got a new iPhone, because the old one was on the bring of failure.

February: I lost a DnD character and gained a new one. I moved house with the help of Ma and Fluffy. Then did all the things that come after a move. And we got Ma a new iPhone also.

March: We had a tiny, tiny earthquake. I spent too much time printing things at Officeworks. Birthday.

April: I unpacked the last of the moving company boxes. We finished the current Friday Night DnD adventure.

May: I started DMing for Friday Night DnD.

June: I redid my blog banner. Got my flu vax. I got a new drivers license.

July: Got my fourth vax booster.

August: I got sick (just regular, normal sick) for the first time since 2019. The Thursday Night DnD group finally finished our non-campaign campaign after a little over a year.

September: Thursday Night DnD started our new Critial Role campaign with DM Fluffy. I got a new laptop. And then had to make it behave.

October: I had to go and get a second new driving license (thanks Optus). Third anniversary of the Friday Night DnD game.

November: After something like 25 years, I rejoined the library. I had the first proper rental inspection since moving in (the mid year one was cancelled). I put my Christmas decorations up and tweaked my back in the process (although that didn't become apparent until later).

December: Like I said... tweaked my back. I've spent most of the month laying on the bed and seeing my Chiro more than usual. No Christmas Tree decorating at Ma's place this year tho. Boardgame Christmas still happened followed by Movie Night with Fluffy. Also Regular Christmas.

So there's that.

As far as movies go... this year wasn't great for movies. The highlights being The Tragedy of Macbeth (surprising no-one) and Everything Everywhere All At Once. The movie that annoyed me most this year was No Time To Die (and yes, it came out last year, I didn't see it until late March).... fuck that movie.

Current mood:

rainbow character template redux

So... this only actually occurred to me last weekend after I'd posted my dumpster fire cleric boy makeover.

It's been a minute (February 2020... ah memories... it was a different time) since I made the previous blog template image, and while I see it a lot, I don't often actually look at it, if that makes sense. But since I realised how much I hated the old version of the cleric once I had the new version, I knew the whole banner needed a refresh.

And I wanted to swap out some of the characters, make something that features more of the characters I've finished games with. Or, you know, characters that I'm feeling more than I was feeling some of the old ones. It did lead me to give one of the characters a bit of a mini-makeover, adding the cape to my tabaxi.

What hasn't changed other than the designs... with text lifted from the previous version.

• Whipmaster Demyan - human noble cleric of Loviatar, Goddess of Pain
  Demyan is my dumpster fire. He's a total disaster and I could not love him more. He's a noble, worships a Lawful Evil goddess, a Grave Domain cleric who will definitely let you go unconscious before he bothers to heal you, has the upmost of contempt for most people and as such considers himself above everyone else... in short he's a total prick. But he's also insightful as fuck and protective of children and people who have won his favour. He's also one of the first characters that appeared in my head after I invented an NPC in a game and he just never left, just sat there insisting that I make him into a character. His personality only appeared when I played in a game with way too many other people, about half of which I didn't especially like playing with for various reasons. So it was too much fun to not show my displeasure via my character (without being a dick about it). 
  
  
• Belben Beestinger - halfling arcane trickster rogue
  My very first character, Belben will always be my favourite. He's also the reason I'm obsessed with halflings and have played six different halflings so far. And although it doesn't show in who he is now, his original DNA came about because I was reading a lot of Dashiell Hammett books and wanted an investigator character. He's a member of the enormous Beestinger clan, grew up in a bakery (and that was before I learned how to make bread), has five older sisters (although he never feels like "the baby"). While he could rob you blind, he's not that kind of rogue, he's much more interested in your secrets. He can also walk into a room and totally "Sherlock Holmes" the shit out of it. And I will say that my decision to give him Winged Boots was the best decision I ever made. He's my little bumblebee. 
  
  
• Rain in the Night - tabaxi monk
  If all of my characters are some part of my personality turned all the way up to 15, Rain is my impulsiveness/impatience. He'll be fine up to a point and then he'll get bored and do the dumb thing. This is also aided by the fact that as a cheetah themed tabaxi (bipedal big-cat person) and a monk, he can, when necessary, run up to 270 feet inside six seconds (or 49km/h), which now includes along vertical surfaces and across water. I now tend to dig much deeper for character names, but he was literally named because I was making him at night during a big rainstorm.

The new faces...

• Leif Leatherbuckle - dwarf ranger
  I've talked about Leif's design before... he's a Beast Master ranger with an owl companion... although, just between you and me, I think I actually had more fun when I swapped over to the snow leopard companion. Or maybe it's just that I did more fighting with her in that form. He's also the first time I'd ever jumped into an ongoing story with a higher level class I hadn't really played before. It was also weird to have a different motivation than the rest of the party. The aim was the same, the reasoning was different. And it's still amazing to me that DM Fluffy and I made a whole group of NPCs that Leif was part of out of the fact I couldn't stop making potential replacement characters.
  
  
• Peregrin Swiftfoot - halfling paladin & rogue
  Pery really, really needed to be in the banner. My sweet, deceptive, charming little Oath of Redemption paladin and Swashbuckler rogue. He's one of those characters that still lingers. Not so much with me, but with one of the other players in the Thursday game who still hasn't forgiven me/Pery for walking away at the end of the game. It's been over two years at this point, and it still gets brought up on a regular basis. I've detailed the end of his in-game adventures before, but it makes me all kinds of happy knowing that he's just off in a small village somewhere living his very best life. And that I traumatised one of my fellow players... hahaha.
  
  
• Quillamina Silverthread - gnome druid
  I honestly don't remember what came first with Quill. I feel like I made a "sketch" of a character, a "what kind of character works for this subclass" kind of idea, mostly because the first version of her was just labelled "Star Circle Druid" rather than using her name. And the book with the final version of her subclass wasn't even officially out when I made her. I made her partially because gnome was one of the only two races I'd never played from the Players Handbook, and I really liked the sound of her subclass and was excited to play some of the higher levels.  Sadly, that wasn't to be with Quill either, and she bowed out of the game, letting Leif take her place. But, honestly, if ever where was a character who did what needed to be done, it was her. She didn't remain the soft character I originally envisioned, but then life was particularly hard on her during the campaign.
  
  
• Harland Honeypot - halfling bard
  The first character I ever designed live on the blog. Normally I would have done all that "off-screen", but I started talking about him and suddenly he tumbled out of my head mostly fully formed. I then refined those ideas into Harland. And as much as I love the mouthy little College of Eloquence fucker, Harland is where I realised why bards don't work for me. But we're coming to the end of the campaign that isn't really a campaign with him... and I think I know how it's going to wrap up for him. Given some of his experiences, and the ridiculous amount of gold he's currently carting around with him... his future plans occurred to me a week or so back and it seems only fitting. He just needs to live through the last couple of adventures.

Current mood:

two thousand and twenty one in review

I very nearly didn't do this. In the end, I only really decided to do it because a) tradition but also b) I would very, very, very much like to look back this time next year and breath a sigh of relief that my life has improved in a significant number of ways.

So... there's that. 

Don't expect a lot of introspection though, because, honestly, I don't have the mental bandwidth for that right now. 

I'm also not really in the mood to reminisce about a mostly shit year and one where when everything is potentially about to fall on it's ass in my life in the next month... or at best is going to be majorly fucking stressful. 

Urgh.

But enough of my mental baggage, 2021.

Almost nothing happened this year. Days passed, things happened. But nothing HAPPENED. You know.

Like last year, I would have gone insane if not for my friends. And having a routine that actually got me out of the house more than once a week.

January: Friday night DnD finished our almost year and a half Descent into Avernus campaign. Still sad, still amazing. 

February: I had a bout of dizziness that lasted a couple of weeks, involved a doctor's visit and then disappeared as quickly as it arrived. 

March: My birthday. For which no shits were given by me. I developed a DnD character basically live on the blog. We went to the movies for the first time in over a year. 

April: I shaved my head after threatening to do it about once a month since March 2020. It remains shaved. 

May: We started a "non-campaign" campaign for the Thursday night Dnd Group. 

June: I explored the DnD Cookbook. We started the new major Friday night DnD campaign. Critical Role Series 2 ended with a 7 hour game. 

July: A roof leak. Getting Ma on the internets. Having to isolate for two weeks and it taking five and a half hours for my first test and 10 minutes for the second and third. 

August: Roof/ceiling shenanigans continued, resulting in a hole cut in the ceiling. 

September: I got my first vax shot. And I ran a one shot game for Fluffy's birthday. The hole in the ceiling got patched. 

October: I got told my lease, which expires in February, isn't being renewed. I got my second vax shot. Friday Night DnD's two year anniversary. 

November: My shoulder stopped being fully functional for no well explained reason. They finally fixed the actual roof leak. 

December: The Christmas Tree went up (see also: Fuck Christmas). We did Board Game Christmas with Mr and Mrs again, followed by Movie Night with Fluffy. Christmas happened.

I did make a lot of additional DnD characters or sketches or ideas for use in place of actual photos this year. DnD was once again... very important in my life.

I didn't really do much in the way of movies this year... even older stuff.

What I will say is that Luca was great, Shang Chi was much better than I expected, Cruella SUCKED, as I knew it would, and Raya and the Last Dragon was uneven but 100% is a Disney movie with a lesbian lead/love story.

Current mood:

two thousand and twenty in review

I thought about starting this out by saying "well, we survived"... but given the state of the world, that seems very tone deaf.

So pretend I said something that conveyed that same message, but wasn't that tone deaf. That thing, I said that thing.

I will say that I've never appreciated living on the world's largest island quite as much as I did this year. And living in a city with a smaller population. And having a government that wasn't actually useless.

Don't get me wrong, fuck this dumpster fire of a year. But at the same time, we haven't had it that bad here.

And you need to be thankful where you can right now.

Sadly, the set of Chinese zodiac stamps I've been using for the last ten years also ran out last year (I was a little late to that particular party, so missed out on 2008 and 2009), so we've got... whatever that is up there. So that might be the thing for the next 12 years. Who knows. Also, postage now costs double what it did when I first used one of these stamps. Because, time.

Weirdly I thought this year's monthly round up was going to be blank for several months in the middle of the year. And, don't get me wrong, it's not exactly the height of thrilling. But this year was basically about small steps or small achievements. Honestly, that's just my life currently. And some of them don't have links because either the reference was a blink and you'll miss it, or it was already covered in a previous link.

So, this was my 2020...

January: I tried dyeing IKEA chair covers. There was much DnD. I went to the ENT doctor.

February: There was too much rain on one day. We finished our Wednesday night campaign after almost two years. I changed my blog header for the first time in six years. Fringe started. I dyed the IKEA chair covers for the third and final time.

March: It was my 46th birthday. Fringe ended. I had the last haircut I'd have for five and a half months. The wheels fell off the world. I finally made the Lego Batman set that had been lurking on top of my wardrobe. We switched over to Discord and Roll 20 for DnD for several months. Wednesday games at the comic book store stopped. I discovered Board Games Arena which helped keep me sane for the rest of the year.

April: One of the Friday DnD characters died. I literally left the house twice a week at most. Plus once a month for my chiro appointment. This continued for some time.

May: I did much colouring in (from March onwards really) thanks to Wizards of the Coast. Life continued in much the same pattern, we occasionally went to places other than the supermarket on a Saturday. A tradie finally turned up to look at my busted oven door.

June: One of my former Monday DnD boys joined the Wednesday group. We skipped over Ma's birthday. Our Friday group finally got to be in the same room together. Ma and I watched Onward, one of only two movies I reviewed this year.

July: After spending much of this year turning 3d character screenshots into character art, I posted some. I finally watched Into The Spider-verse. Critical Role returned. It was the third anniversary of my first DnD game and my fifteenth blogiversary. Fuck.

August: I had my first haircut in 169 days.

September: My oven door was finally fixed. It took 126 days. I made belated birthday sausage rolls for Ma.

October: HeroForge released the ability to colour their models. It was the one year anniversary for our first Friday night game. I went out and took photographs for the first time this year. It was the first time the Wednesday night DnD group all got together in person.

November: I had people come over to my house and play board games. We had the "it's a lockdown, sorry, now it's not a lockdown" lockdown.

December: We put the Christmas tree up. I fell down. We had Boardgame Christmas, followed by actual Christmas.

Yeah, my life is really boring.

I will just stop and say that I would have gone completely around the twist this year had it not been for my friends. And online board games and virtual DnD and Discord and video chat. And Ma. But mostly my friends. 

For as much as I occasionally complain about them, I would have been confined to my house, not speaking to anyone bar Ma and the people at the supermarket. And I would have gone loopy. You gave me things to look forward to, and points in my week so that I actually remembered what day of the week it was. So, thanks.

Also, the completely anonymous randoms I've played the 1280 virtual board games with in the last six months, you get a thumbs up from me also.

As far as movies go, well, you saw the two movies I listed above. Both what I would still call "new releases"... even if one of them was from 2018. And I never set foot in a movie theatre at all this year. In fact, it was 12 months ago last Monday.

But I have watched a lot more movies on SBS On Demand. Older movies, newer movies, foreign movies for the most part. A lot of Asian movies... Japanese, Chinese, Korean, all the Asian movies. The notable ones overall include:

• Alfie (1966)
• Fist of Fury (1972)
• The Young Master (1980)
• Police Story (1985)
• Let the Bullets Fly (2010)
• Little Big Soldier (2010)
• Sacrifice (2010)
• Colossal (2016)
• Train to Busan (2016)
• Loving Vincent (2017)
• The Villainess (2017)
• Alpha (2018)
• Believer (2018)
• The Great Battle (2018)
• Rampant (2018)

I also watched the extended two part version of Red Cliff from 2009. And I kinda wish I'd seen it before this year, because it's excellent. Fills in a lot of gaps, gives characters whole storylines. I also watched other Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee movies, but those on the list were the ones I really liked.

So that's about it for 2020. Take care of each other, look after yourselves, wear a damn mask (where and when appropriate), and let's kick 2021 in the crotch.

Current mood:

not my usual christmas message

It's not my usual Christmas message... but then it's not a usual Christmas.

I hope you and yours are safe and healthy this holiday season, and let's hope for a much saner 2021.

Current mood:

character saturday: imaginary family

We're dipping into the NPC (non-player character) box for this week's DnD character art.

The trope I see most often about characters is that they have tragic backstories... everyone died in a fire, was killed by raiders, abandoned the character when they were a wee baby... some reason for them to head out on the road and become an adventurer.

The majority of the time I say "fuck that". A character who has a loving family and a secure home and still wants to go off and see the world is much more exciting to me. So, almost all of my characters have some sort of family somewhere. Some of them lost one parent or another, but that's never the reason they became an adventurer... I do have one went that route after he lost his wife, but that's it really.

Which is the long was of saying, these two halflings, Brandien Beestinger (baker and crossbow fighter) and Melody Longpond (sage and beast master ranger... and her peregrine falcon Essel), are the parents of Belben Beestinger (that's him, second from the left in the header image), my first ever DnD character.

Which is also super appropriate because tomorrow is the third anniversary of my first ever DnD game.

Given that he's an adventurer, descended from adventurers who are in turn descended from adventurers, at a certain point I did designs and characters for his Beestinger lineage.

Belben's direct family all have names inspired by Doctor Who companions (yes, I'm that kind of nerd)... Brandien translates to "Blue Hero" aka the TARDIS (hence his blue colour scheme), his mother Melody Longpond is a variation of River Song, his sisters are Rose, Marigold (standing in for Martha), Belladonna (Donna), Cara (Clara) and Pearl (the first name of the actress who played Bill Potts).

And part of the fun of designing his parents was figuring out how the genetics worked backwards. At least for me.

I will say that I've always been super happy with how Melody came out... both the white armour, which is mostly impractical but looks stylish as all fuck and the fact that I got a very peregrine falcon look for her bird companion thanks to cutting and layering actual photos. Less sure about the green trim on her bow to be honest... orange might have been more appropriate... but whadyagunnado?

Anyway...

Today is my 15th bloggiversary. Holy fuckballs. I mean we're definitely not in the heady days of 400-500 posts a year, I haven't broken 100 posts per annum since 2017, but we're still here.

It's also super weird to look back at some of that early stuff, where I didn't have a lot of routines and structures in place and I would just post about whatever whenever. Probably in the way I have used Twitter I guess. Random thought, tweet that shit.

However if I spend too much time looking at how many of the links in some of those old post are just broken or don't go anywhere sensible anymore, I will go insane.

In other news... which isn't really news, but still... I am not as scary as folks seem to believe I am. I mean, yes, but that's mostly for and about people I don't give two shits about. So, you know, other people. Yes, I have opinions... I have many, I hand them out on a regular basis, you only need to ask. Sometimes I give them away regardless. Do with them as you will. But if you think that means you can't bring your concerns to me or have a conversation about an issue, to that I say "look at your life, look at your choices" because you've made a wrong turn somewhere. But I love you anyway. And for the record, yes, you, you know who you are.

Now that we've got that out the way.

Chowder was more of a success this week... still a little too thin, but that was more about me putting more liquid in than it really needed... on the up side, it made 8 serves instead of the usual 7, which isn't a bad thing.

DnD was just Friday this week. I won't lie, one game a week isn't quite enough. Two games is better. Three is kind of my sweet spot I think. I know that four is too many. The Friday game was all roleplay once again. It kinda needed to be for logistical reasons, and some of it was just information transfer, but it had it's moments. And I did finally realise the root of the issues my character was having with the other character. The voice. Which sounds insane, I know this. But the character's voice was drilling straight into the part of my brain that instantly rebels against being condescended to or talked down to. And it also made perfect sense that my character would have the exact same response to that kind of voice.

Plus the two characters were just incapable of actually seeing each other and not the idea they had about who the other was. Sometimes it all gets real "persykological", to steal a word from Terry Pratchett.

We'll see what the next "chapter" holds.

In the Oven Repair Saga... the one thing I said to my land agent that was important in this whole rigmarole was that I wanted to be kept informed on where we were at. I mean, not that fucking hard, right. You find out a piece of news, you spend at most 90 seconds on an email, then you go on with your day. But I had to chase the job up again, only to find that yes, the repair has been approved and we're waiting on parts. When was it approved, fucked if I know. Sometime in the last two weeks, clearly. And I know it was probably going to take about two weeks for the parts to arrive during this time of strife. So how soon will it be fixed? Sometime in the next two weeks, possibly. Who can fucking say?

Again I say, in a much less forgiving tone of voice...  "look at your life, look at your choices".

I just wanna fucking bake bread again. Like seriously. Bread... and sausage rolls... and maybe a cake... and a tuna morney... and a whole fuckton of roast potatoes.

The plan for this week is a reasonable sized batch of chilli. With mushrooms. Plus other hidden vegetables. And my chilli game is pretty decent.

Otherwise, we did the supermarket thing, came back here, did the YubTubs, then went for a wander across at the Village. Picked up a copy of Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse for under $10, so hopefully it's as good as I've heard it is.

And that was it really. A wander and then we called it a day.

Current mood:

rainbow character template

I've had this same blog template since the beginning of October 2014, and the header image itself was from June that same year. So it's been a hot minute (actually, it's more in the neighbourhood of 2,800,000 minutes).

And while I still love my Little Traveller, Lego isn't quite as big a part of my life right now.

But my DnD characters definitely are. And I've been playing with Hero Forge for my characters since the beginning, but then I discovered a tutorial about using their screenshot tool to then colour the images in Photoshop. Cue a whole new obsession.

After the first couple took me upwards of an hour and a half, I have it down to probably about 45 minutes now... depending on complexity.

I started playing around with coloured backgrounds, wallpaper for my laptop, that kind of thing. Which led me to the idea of adapting that design into a blog header, which then led to the blog header above. Which, while simple, I'm pretty proud of. And yes, I know that the green background doesn't have a correspondingly themed character, but there's reasons for that.

So, from left to right...

• Demyan - human noble cleric of Loviatar, Goddess of Pain
  Demyan is my dumpster fire. He's a total disaster and I could not love him more. He's a noble, worships a Lawful Evil goddess, a Grave Domain cleric who will definitely let you go unconscious before he bothers to heal you, has the upmost of contempt for most people and as such considers himself above everyone else... in short he's a total prick. But he's also insightful as fuck and protective of children and people who have won his favour. He's also one of the first characters that appeared in my head after I invented an NPC in a game and he just never left, just sat there insisting that I make him into a character. His personality only appeared when I played in a game with way too many other people, about half of which I didn't especially like playing with for various reasons. So it was too much fun to not show my displeasure via my character (without being a dick about it).
  
  
• Belben - halfling arcane trickster rogue
  My very first character, Belben will always be my favourite. He's also the reason I'm obsessed with halflings and have played five different halflings so far. And although it doesn't show in who he is now, his original DNA came about because I was reading a lot of Dashiell Hammett books and wanted an investigator character. He's a member of the enormous Beestinger clan, grew up in a bakery (and that was before I learned how to make bread), has five older sisters (although he never feels like "the baby"). While he could rob you blind, he's not that kind of rogue, he's much more interested in your secrets. He can also walk into a room and totally "Sherlock Holmes" the shit out of it. And I will say that my decision to give him Winged Boots was the best decision I ever made. He's my little bumblebee.
  
  
• Rain in the Night - tabaxi monk
  If all of my characters are some part of my personality turned all the way up to 15, Rain is my impulsiveness/impatience. He'll be fine up to a point and then he'll get bored and do the dumb thing. This is also aided by the fact that as a cheetah themed tabaxi (bipedal big-cat person) and a monk, he can, when necessary, run up to 270 feet inside six seconds (or 49km/h), which now includes along vertical surfaces and across water. I now tend to dig much deeper for character names, but he was literally named because I was making him at night during a big rainstorm.
  
  
• Khurg - champion orc fighter and barbarian
  Khurg is my big dumb boy. He's the character I've played mostly either when I've already played or run a particular adventure or I can't be bothered. Alternatively, sometimes I just want to play someone uncomplicated. I picked orc for him especially so that he was mechanically dumber than he could otherwise have been (since orcs have a -2 to their intelligence stat). He's also a character that partially showed up after me running a series of adventures that all had orc or ogre or other big dumb NPC characters. I also get to his character/voice by pushing my lower jaw forward and grunting... it just works. He's also the character that I had to include, even though he doesn't match his colour swatch, because everybody loves Khurg. And yes, he has "Friendly" embroidered into the front of his overalls... originally that was a piece of stone, but then I did a Christmas adventure and decided that one of Santa's helpers embroidered that for him.
  
  
• Oceanus - water genasi sailor and coastal druid
  Oceanus (Oh-see-ann-us... not any other variation of how you might pronounce that particular name, thank you very much) is Southern. My accept repertoire isn't enormous... I can do a decent accent from the American south though. And by decent, I mean often terrible, but a bad real world accent makes for a workable DnD accept. It also makes him often more laid back than I might otherwise play characters. He's also has a little bit of Big Dad Energy. I didn't want to play him that way, but maybe because I play him mostly with people roughly two decades younger than me, it's just what happens.
  
  
• Masika - former pirate fighter and storm sorcerer
  She was supposed to be my bad girl, my bitch, my character who didn't give a fuck and wasn't nice. But something happened to Masika when she travelled across the desert with a bunch of idiots, then continued to hang out with them for months and months and months. She ended up caring about them. And kind of ended up as either the bitchy older sister or occasionally the slightly exasperated and authoritative mother of the group. Well, except for the pretty but insane human girl PC she ended up fucking... their relationship has been weird and on-again, off-again, but still incredibly important to who both of those characters are now. She also has possibly the shortest temper of all my characters. If you fuck with what's hers, she will end up in spectacular fashion. She also once shaved her head after an altercation with an NPC. And in the most recent game we played, the reason we had to leave the city we'd been in before the start of the game was that Masika had an affair with a married noblewoman and needed to get out of town quick.
  
  
• Nightingale - drow elf bard violinist and dancer
  Surprisingly to the people who know how I play DnD, it took me 822 days to actually play a bard. Because, honestly, I think bards are incredibly boring. Or rather the scope of potential character concepts for them is very restrictive. And the subclasses aren't hugely varied in the way that they are for a rogue for example. So much so that taking any of three different subclasses wouldn't actually have changed my character concept in the slightest. Nightingale is also my first drow. Not for any particular reason, but personally I'd probably rather play a half-elf than a full elf. She also has a vague and non-specific Eastern European accent. And honestly, it took me a little while to work out who Nightingale actually was. Distilled down to her essence, she's a relapsing addict, she's someone who knows that she shouldn't Do Bad Things, but also knows that sometimes Doing Bad Things are the only way to get things done. Interestingly she's a character who will use sex and sexuality but isn't particularly interested in it (as opposed to, say, Masika), possibly because being a drow in the surface world, she's been fetishised and objectified by (mostly) men, but she comes from a culture where men have no real power.

And no the fact that the image is a little bit rainbow flag themed (or at least the 1978-1979 version with the turquoise stripe) isn't 100% coincidental, since a lot of my characters would probably identify as somewhere on the rainbow spectrum... but posting it just before Mardi Gras is just a happy accident.

Current mood:

two thousand and nineteen in review

2019 wasn't the most exciting year for me... it did have some roadbumps, but nothing devastating. Things did change a number of times during the year though. As they have all through the decade in fact.

Which is about the only reference to the 2010-2019 you're getting... other than for me to remark that today is my 10th year on Twitter. And I've been on Instagram for basically the whole decade also... but that started in October 2010.

And speaking of which, I managed to keep the #leftovertuesdays Instagram idea happening all year (I think I missed two weeks, one because I was sick and one from technical issues), where I posted old photos every Tuesday.

I also broke 4000 blog posts earlier this month... so that's my last decade and then some.

But 2019...

January: Business as usual, many much DnD. Adelaide broke a highest temperature record that I think we re-broke about three times recently during December.

February: Ma moved house (fortunately not far, unfortunately she was not organised in any way, shape or form). Went to a DnD friend's engagement party. Fringe started.

March: I turned 45, Fringe ended.

April: I went through all my books and got rid of a pile of them, which was pretty damn cathartic. I ran the first real DnD game for Ma.

May: I got sick, otherwise nada.

June: Ma's birthday. Burger Theory closed their city store... I didn't find out until August. I ran Ma a DnD game for her birthday. The Thursday DnD group that should never have worked played their last game together.

July: Ma had a car accident, she was fine, car not so much. She bought a "new" (secondhand) car.

August: Circumstances beyond my control (or at least beyond my finances currently) meant I ran my last Monday DnD game. I bought a kitchen table (for DnD... I've yet to actually use it for that). I learned how to make bread.

September: I came down with a case of Bell's Palsey and lost control of half of my face for the rest of the month. Septembers have not been treating me well for the last couple of years.

October: We finally got around to checking out the Wonderwalls street art at Port Adelaide. I got full feeling/function back in my face. I started playing the new DnD hardcover with a small, handpicked group (and make bread for the games).

November: One of my DnD friends invited me to a fortnightly boardgame night at his place. I went to a former workmate's 60th birthday party.

December: The least excited Christmas season ever, including tree trimming, goodie making and then actual Christmas.

Otherwise it was mostly the same old same old.

I finished a DnD "campaign" (I put it in inverted commas because it wasn't a real actual campaign), continued another (more on that in a second) and started two others, one of which fell apart, the other is perfect and brilliant.

As far as the continued campaign, we have had some AMAZING moments, and more than one session with nothing but total roleplay from one end to the other, where the only dice we roll during the game are against each other. And I will be incredibly sad when that campaign ends. However, looking back through the year and seeing how many weeks I mentioned "oh it didn't happen because reasons nobody bothered to tell me" or "we won't be playing again for weeks before the DM has some bullshit reason". I'm also annoyed that one of the players who should not have been allowed to come back and join us, has in fact come back and joined us. Don't get me wrong, his character has kept mine alive, but it's still annoying. As is the fact that yes, we tool November off because one of the players was getting married, but then we never restarted again in December because of the DM (and again, I didn't hear this from him)... so hopefully we get to finish the campaign in January.

We only saw 6 movies this year. Mostly because there were just long stretches of time where there was absolutely nothing we wanted to see. But Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame were the only two movies that got full marks. Everything else was fairly good as well.

Current Mood:

a naughty list kinda christmas

Current Mood:

two thousand and eighteen in review

Looking back through this year's posts, a few things became apparent.

Firstly, almost all my weeks are the same... DnD games on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, a monthly haircut and chiro visit, the weekly supermarket/shopping trip. And we didn't go to as many movies, or theatre shows this year either.

It doesn't perhaps make for as interesting a Year in Review as previous years, but 2018 definitely had it's moments.

January: Nothing much to report... a lot of Assassins Creed and not much out of the ordinary.

February: Fringe started.

March: Fringe continued, with a total of 18 shows. I turned 44.

April: I finished Assassins Creed Origins... and was slightly disappointed by the ending. We went to the 2018 Biennial of Australian Art.

May: I didn't realise that running a DnD game on that particular Monday would lead to seven months of running games for a recurring group once a week. And my Thursday group left the game store and started new characters in a new storyline.

June: Ma's 71st birthday. We went to the Waterhouse Natural Science Art show. I kissed a boy I shouldn't have kissed... but am glad I did, even if it broke my brain for a little while. We caught the Musée d'Orsay exhibition before it headed back to France.

July: I got laid in the most spectacular fashion at 3am on a Wednesday morning. I had my 13th bloggiversary. I attended my first ever AVCon, and ran three DnD games.

August: Minor plumbing related issues, one easily fixed, the other which took several attempts for some reason.

September: I sliced the end of my finger off.

October: We went to a Fork on the Road for the first time in what feels like forever (but is probably about 12 months). I had my final appointment with my doctor to change the dressing on my finger. We stopped by the Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year show.

November: I finished up Horizon Zero Dawn, which I haven't written anything about, but really enjoyed. My Thursday DnD group moved our games to Wednesday... for now anyway.

December: All the Christmas things that I was generally unenthusiastic about... tree stuff, chocolate stuff, actual Christmas Day stuff.

Unsurprisingly both the "kissing a boy" and the "slicing my finger off" are the two events this year that haven't completely healed (for want of a better term). The end of my finger is still a little odd... as is my relationship with The Boy, especially now The Boy has A Girl.

For the most part though, I have a routine. Which gets me out of the house and interacting with actual living humans. At least several days a week.

There's also a whole bunch of self reflection there, or would be, if I wanted to dig into it. But I pretty much know what it all is, and why it's there, so to be honest it can stay where it is and mind it's own business.

Like the review, I think my "favourite thing" list for this year is fairly short...

yani's favourite things 2018

More Dungeons and Dragons

Yeah, I've played somewhere in the neighbourhood of 150+ games of DnD this year. And maybe run about a third of those, maybe less.

Me running once a week started off as a way to avoid questionable DMs and players I didn't care for. What it turned into was a group of people (the numbers vary) who came back to my table for seven months. At least one of whom I think is only ever playing on my table.

It's made me a better DM, it's allowed me to give back some of the experiences I've had as a player to other players. It's also let me give some of those experiences back to the DMs who ran for me when I was new. And running for a recurring group has let me play around in the margins of various adventures, making plenty of time for character role play opportunities.

Outside of running, I've played around with who my characters are, I've actually done character voices in a couple of instances, and I feel like I've both knitted groups together and torn them apart (in-game groups that is).

Even the changes to Adventurer's League didn't put much of a dent in my enjoyment (or at least not for long, and it did allow me to have a good long whinge about stuff at possibly the perfect time)... I mean they're still incredibly stupid and I have no idea why the hell they need to be in place... but they're in place and they don't ruin the game, they just create more housekeeping outside of it.

Critical Role

This also comes under the general heading of DnD, and while I was aware of the first season of Critical Role before I started playing, it was only when they started their second campaign that I jumped in with both feet.

I mean what's not to love... professional voice actors (is that a pejorative, are they not just actors? I mean it's how they introduce the show, but still) playing DnD, heavy on the character building and role play (and voices).

Movies

It has been a lean year for movies... we only managed to see 12 things (technically 11, since one was a movie that came out last year).

Either we just never got around to seeing things while they were in the cinemas, or the reviews and word of mouth I heard after things came out made me reconsider wanting to see it.

Only three things ended up with a perfect score... Coco, Black Panther and Call Me By Your Name.

So that's all of 2018 done and dusted.

And as always, today (about an hour ago I think) marks my 9th Twitterversary.

Current Mood:

checking the naughty list

Current Mood:

thirteenth bloggiversary

This is a relatively quick post... It's also the first time I've done this semi-properly since about 2011.

Today is my blogiversary. My 13th blogiversary to be exact.

And tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the first time I went to play D&D, hence the dice photo and all the 13s.

So there's that.

Current Mood:

two thousand and seventeen in review

Here we are, at the end of 2017... it just feels weird, you know... more than any other recent year, 2017 seems to have flown by at tremendous speed... I mean there are perfectly good reasons for that, not least of which is that it's been a singularly weird year.

By all metrics 2017 should be worse than 2016, but I honestly don't feel like it has been for me.

Like last year I wanted to go through and put together a brief history of my year, along with a list of some of my favourite things from this year.

So, let's fire up the WABAC Machine and take a look, shall we...

January: Ma's shoulder was still messed up after her fall. I replied to a 22 year old letter from myself.

February: Good Game came to an end after 10 years. On reflection, it's still a dumb decision. My job at The Nut House finally got advertised. The modem I've had for several years passed away quietly in the night. Fringe started.

March: Fringe continued, culminating in 22 Fringe shows and 2 Festival shows. I turned 43. We found out that Ma's shoulder operation from last year was a flop and would require another try. I had an interview for the job.

April: I didn't get the job. I left work a week later.

May: I started growing a beard, at first through laziness, but then on purpose. I got new glasses, which look exactly the same as the old glasses. I checked out the Wonderwalls artwork at Port Adelaide. I posed nude for a group of artists. Ma had her second shoulder operation.

June: Ma's 70th birthday. We went to 3 Cabaret Festival shows. I threw my back out slightly, again.

July: I went to play Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. Ma started driving again.

August: I had iPhone drama. I went to see the folks from My Dad Wrote a Porno live.

September: Ma drove to my place for the first time in ten months. We saw yet another version of Macbeth. I played DnD at a convention, my character died. The modem I replaced in February died.

October: Nothing much of interest happened, although we did go to more theatre.

November: I DM'd my first game of DnD. We went to Fork on the Road for the first time since July last year.

December: The usual Christmas insanity happened... putting up the tree, making goodies, having Christmas at Ma's place. I played DnD at one of the DM's houses, as well as a charity game.

See, it should have been a shit year, I lost my job and spent over half the year unemployed. But Ma is definitely on the mend, and DnD became something major in my life (more on that in a sec).

Like last year, I didn't get laid a lot (am I surprised, no, not really), but unlike last year there were relatively few "major" health things that sprang up, beyond the occasional issue with my back and the recurring ear problems.

I also wore my glasses a whole lot less this year, not because my eyes got any better, in fact my prescription got stronger, but it now means I can't view things close up while wearing them as well (as opposed to far away, which is what they're for), and most everything I do is close up stuff.

I also feel like I didn't gain much weight this year, due in part to being out of the house three times a week, and not eating quite as much generally.

I've also been generally a lot calmer, part of which I attribute to the lack of work stresses.

Moving on to things I really liked this year...

yani's favourite things 2017

In no particular order...

Dungeons and Dragons

It should be pretty fucking obvious given the number of times I've mentioned it in the above rundown, but DnD became pretty important to me this year. It's something I've wanted to do since at least 2003. But I never had anyone to do it with.

That all changed when I discovered Adventurer's League, I've now played 68 games and DM'd 14 more. It also makes me leave the house three times a week and talk to actual real live people face to face and everything.

Acquisitions Incorporated: The C Team

Closely linked to the previous thing, The C Team is an offshoot of the long-running Acquisitions Incorporated DnD podcast/live show which premiered two days after my birthday (or 16 March) and has become a weekly ritual.

AI has always been yet another reason why DnD seemed like an amazing thing to do, but the main game episodes were always few and far between. Being a weekly show though, C Team really stoked that fire in a big bad way.

It also contains some of the best roleplaying I've seen, and has attracted some of the most amazing fan artists. Hell, I even broke an incredibly long creative writing drought to write some NSFW fan fiction.

One of the characters on the show is a grandmotherly monk, Rosie Beestinger, who canonically has a lot of biological and adopted children, and her player, Kate Welch gave the community free reign to come up with their own Beestinger children/grandchildren/etc.

The combination of this and me not working and finding a local AL group really got me through the door to play DnD.

To quote myself from the last C Team AMA on Reddit:

And a very big and specific thank you to Kate... Rosie's great grandson, Belben Beestinger (of the Silverymoon Beestingers, the ones with the bakery), is now a L8 Arcane Trickster Rogue with entirely too many magic items. I've met more people I now consider friends in the last six months than I had in the last ten years, and it was your generosity in allowing us to play Beestingers that finally got me so excited about playing that I got off my butt, out the door and into a game. I've also DM'd a bunch of games and love doing it. AI and the C Team got me almost all the way there, but playing a Beestinger was that last push I needed. Stay awesome.

Firewatch

Firewatch was an indy game I'd had my eye on for a while, although I don't remember when or where I first saw it... it may have popped up in either YouTube "Let's Play" videos or a list of the top games of 2016, but I didn't get around to playing it until 2017.

It's amazing. And I love it. It also has one of the most interesting ways into a game I think I've ever come across.

I'm also very excited about the game they announced recently, In The Valley Of Gods, although that won't be out until 2019.

Uncharted 4

I never got around to writing anything up for it, but I also played Uncharted 4 this year. In many ways it feels like a game that nestles neatly into the Assassin's Creed universe, even though it's from a completely different developer.

And yes, there were probably a ton of references that I missed given that this is the first Uncharted game I've ever played, but none of it got in the way of me really enjoying myself or the absolutely stunning visuals.

Movies

We're still not up to the "every other week" model of movies, but I did see 14 movies actually at the cinema this year (as opposed to last year's 10). Still not enough for it's own post anymore I don't think, but there were definitely some standouts.

In no particular order, Hidden Figures, Moana and Thor: Ragnarok (although if you wanted to push me, I'd probably rank them in that order).

They're all very different, but what they have in common is a great story and memorable characters.

So that's that... 2017, done, dusted and in the bag.

All I really want for 2018 is "good changes"... I have no idea what that looks like on the ground, but I just want things in general to be better this time next year.

And as always, tonight just before 5:30pm marks my Twitter anniversary, this one being my 8th.

Current Mood:

may your christmas sparkle and shine

Current Mood: