character saturday: changing faces

So... these four images are, unsurprisingly, all the same character. And a character with a long timeline, but a brief history.

Dus started out as Dusk, a young half-drow rogue I played in a test game once. As in, we were asked to test play a module that somebody from our branch of Adventurer's League had written. So, I threw together a quick character, which was the aforementioned rogue.

The module was kind of a mess, I ended up providing some pretty extensive feedback, and I believe that it got better after the next edit. Or at least better than it was.

But then one of the guys from AL wanted to run a homebrew game, which, honestly, I wasn't super enthused about, but I also wanted to support him, because he was a friend at the time (he's since slide off the face of the earth, but, you know, that's fine), so I redesigned Dusk, turning him into Dus and making him a changeling, which wasn't AL legal at the time.

Changelings can take on the appearance of anyone, but as part of their "culture", they tend to have two types of appearances, Personas and Masks. Masks are a temporary appearance that you taken on as needed, and might express a mood, whereas Personas are, as the name suggests, a more developed identity, crafted over time and used for a specific purpose. There might be a Persona for combat, another for negotiation, or one that deals with a skill. And one of the parts of the explanation that I like is that in changeling communities, there might only be one persona that's the healer for example, but that persona is shared by several different creatures who use it when they're on duty.

Which, honestly, feels much more like an NPC thing than a character thing.

These weren't really Dus's personas at the time. Dusky was, and in honor of the original version, this one was also raised as a weaver and created the drow persona to match his adopted dad, but the other two were personas I came up with when I was throwing around rogue ideas recently. Dustaniel du Prost is the persona I've nicknamed The Fool... the persona he throws on when it's in his interests to be underestimated or otherwise overlooked. Or when he needs to talk to fancy folks. And Pleasure is for when you absolutely need to have access to a woman designed to get people's attention.

There are two downsides to changelings though. The first being that you can only shift into a shape that you have clothing for. So, in the case of armour, you'd need to have access to armour that could change with you. Or you need to stay in a similar shape no matter the persona or mask.

Or have a very kind DM that gives you access to armour that shapeshifts with you.

And the second problem is... playing what amounts to three or four characters seems like it could be a giant pain in the ass. Or at the very least, a lot more work. I also can't work out whether you just do the reveal immediately, or whether you travel as a persona for a long time, only transforming when it makes sense to do so.

I mean, it's very much the "when do you do any kind of reveal for a D&D character?" question. To me, the answer is always "as long as humanly possible"... or at the very least, "at the right time".

So, will I ever play Dus... maybe. I'd just need to work out a way to do it that makes sense to me.

Anyway...

This week's soup was what happens when I make Halfling Everything Soup without at any point looking at the recipe. Because what's the point of Everything Soup if you can only make it with one specific set of ingredients.

But it was pretty good regardless.

Thursday night DnD was also pretty good. I mean, I'm running around with a single hitpoint and we're about to go into combat, but otherwise, you know, it was a good time. I also completely forgot that half-orcs have the ability to come back up after being knocked unconscious, because as I've said before, this is the only race from the Players Handbook I've never played before. And it's also why I have the singular hitpoint.

I also discovered that my boy Dax is very much a "if you run, I will chase you" kind of guy... which would be great, if I had better armour.

Friday night DnD was great. And also happened to be Fluffy's birthday, so double good.

But they managed to take out one of the hags, while also being split up and there only being two of them in the combat. And yes, I was a kind DM a few times, but they still managed it in the end. So now she's head and they can go through and clear out the rest of her lair, finding all the things they need.

I also got to have a great conversation between Fluffy's character and the hag at the start of the game, and pull a few of his strings in a way that I knew he very probably wouldn't bite on, but I wanted to make him think about the offer she made him for a hot minute. And then she got shoved in an oven and died ala Hansel and Gretel, so that literally went up in flames.

And I was able to drop some lore on Mrs's character and introduce some themes that will be relevant later... and then we finished the game with Mr's character being reunited with the twin brother who went missing when he was a child.

Because, and I cannot state this strongly enough, if you give me a hook in your backstory, I will absolutely use it. You want a long lost twin. Done, he was kidnapped by one of the antagonists. You want to be a fairy and of noble background. Done, I will absolutely reconfigure elements of the existing story that I didn't like anyway into something that relates to your background AND I will have a character tell you a story foreshadowing it in your very first game. You want to have one parent who left you and another who's neglectful. Done, and I will make you feel every inch of both of those elements and basically the more you give me to play with, the more I will use it to mess with you... and then secretly hope that in the end I can stick the landing of the emotional payoff.

But, yeah, Mr's character and his twin were reunited right at the end of the game... and I had that thing again where, as a DM (and also as a player, but honestly it tends to happen more as a DM), when I play a scene where an NPC would get emotional, I in turn get choked up. And I could feel it coming on as we did the reunion scene with the twins, and I could see Mr going a little the same way, so, yeah, we were basically at time anyway, so they hugged and then I pulled the pin.

It doesn't really matter though, because I can guarantee that it'll happen next session anyway. But that's not for two weeks, because Mr has a work thing next week.

Anyway...

Today was... a thing that happened.

So we did the usual supermarket thing, and then finally got around to doing a thing we've been talking about for entirely too long. Around the time my computer started slowly dying of "being fucking old".

I bought a new laptop.

I didn't overly research anything, I literally went into Good Guys, spoke to the very lovely older gentleman in the computer section, he was, as previously stated, lovely... as the people in the computer section of Good Guys somehow have a tendency to be... in a way that no other store really seems to manage. I told him what I needed the computer for, he said, this one. I said, I have no idea what that brand is, he said, it's basically IBM, I said, yes, that does in fact make me feel better. He said a lot of words that probably mean something to somebody who knows more about computers than I do. And I said, let's do it.

So we did it, and I brought him home and got it out of the box and put it on the kitchen counter and keep stroking the pretty silver brushed metal (yet somehow incredibly square) top of it when I get up...

And I'm now freaking out slightly. We went right through the excitement part and came out the other end with remarkable speed... not a record by any stretch of the imagination, but we're here now.

Not least of all because I just realised that the old laptop (this one, that I'm typing this on) had a 750GB hard drive... and this one has, if I'm reading the box correctly, 256GB... which is just a little bit more than the amount of space that I currently have left free on this laptop.

And it doesn't have a CD drive, so I'm going to need to jump through some hoops in order to get some form of Photoshop working on the new laptop, and while I do have two tiny external hard drives, I think perhaps, just maybe, that there is a case to be made for spending another $100 on a 1T external drive... just, you know... for funsies.

Yeah, I should have known it was all too good to be true. Especially now, having gone back and looked at how much mental trauma I went through buying THIS laptop all the way back in 2014, I should have somehow sensed there would be a problem.

Regret, thy name is limited budget and lack of planning,

It's fine. It'll be fine. It's going to be a total and utter pain in the ass to move stuff across and set it all up the way I want it to be (Step 1: Kill Windows S Mode, Step 2: Install better browsers, Step 3: Uninstall Edge, Step 4: Uninstall McAfee, Step 5: Install Norton, Step 6: Cry) and, honestly, I'm not rushing into it. Unlike last time, I have a functional, if horrifically slow current computer to fall back on.

That's it, that's all you're getting today... my brain is currently fried and I need to go and do something else other than think about laptops.

Current mood:

photo friday: street faces

It's been a bit of a stressful week this week...

Things started out well on Sunday with my "made up from out of my brain" chicken soup... and I now realise the secret to a good quality chicken soup... lots of black pepper. That and shredding the chicken with forks and fingers.

And I started Assassin's Creed Rogue... which I'm already going to suggest isn't going to be a particularly good or memorable game, and I'm only a couple of hours into it... it's essentially a continuation from Black Flag with a large amount of AC3 thrown in. Like literally thrown in... they've just taken the assets from both Black Flag and ACIII and put a slightly updated skin on some of them. Despite the fact that I really enjoyed Black Flag, I have to say that I'm kind of over the whole sailing ship thing now... and this looks like it's essentially more of the same. But I'll keep playing it anyway, it might improve once I get into the proper meat of the story.

Unfortunately Monday went downhill pretty damn quickly. There were a whole bunch of meetings I had to extricate myself from, which was much easier than I thought it was going to be, and I ended up with a perfectly valid excuse beyond "I really don't feel the need to be at these meetings". But when I got home on Monday night I turned on my laptop and that was when the real fun started. I don't know if I tried to get it to do something before it was ready or what the deal was, but it wouldn't load any of my desktop icons and kept flicking between the empty desktop and a blank grey screen. I tried rebooting, nothing... I tried unplugging my wireless mouse, mild improvement for a moment, then nothing... and Google was being no help with what was actually going wrong. Eventually I managed to find how to get to Safe Mode in Windows 8, but when I got into that menu I noticed a command for "Refresh your PC" which promised to revert my computer but keep all my files.

There really is no feeling of stomach sinking abject terror like the terror of technology that completely fails to work the way it's supposed to... I know it's one of the high level First World Problems... but it does generally make me want to throw up.

And that's how I spent the majority of Monday evening... I didn't eat anything because every time I thought about it I also wanted to throw up, and a large chunk of time was spent firstly waiting for my laptop to go through the refresh process and then secondly me trying to install all the programs the refresh process had removed. And then finding the settings for things like Firefox and Thunderbird in the backup data left behind by the refresh process so that I wasn't starting from a completely blank slate.

I still haven't reinstalled everything... like iTunes and Photoshop Elements for example... and I have a sense of complete and total dread every single time I boot up the laptop that it's going to fall over again. Doubly so because I have no fucking idea what actually happened to make it fall over in the first place. And for reasons that defy logic, there seem to be all these little things that my laptop was doing perfectly fine before that don't work the same way anymore. Weird and frustrating.

The tinfoil hat wearing portion of my brain is pretty damn sure that it all has way too much to do with the launch of Windows 10... It's a conspiracy I tells ya!

Anyway, on a normal week I would have spent the week pottering around getting the laptop back to normal... but not this week. Tuesday was Movie Night and then Thursday was Haircut Night.

My hair was seriously in need of a cut (and a colour) though... the grey is definitely starting to show on the sides, and I felt like I was just at that scruffy stage. But Tink sorted me out. We're still refining the overall cut for my current style, I think this one is more a developmental cut rather than a finished product... but overall it works okay. I did suggest to Tink that we take it from four weeks to three just because that last week my hair is generally a mess, so hopefully that will work better. Other than that we chatted about this, that and the other before I took myself home.

Oh and I managed to leave my umbrella on the bus on Thursday morning... I have no idea how, it was attached to the back of my bag (kind of) and I'd already dropped it and picked it back up again once, so I have no idea how I managed to drop it, not hear it fall or realise it was gone until it was too damn late. I wouldn't have minded if it hadn't been the decent mid-sized umbrella... partly because I have no idea where the hell I got that one from, and partly because all my other umbrellas are either much smaller and therefore infinitely useless or gigantic.

Fortunately I've been feeling better this week than I was last week, so at least I didn't have to contend with feeling sick on top of everything else.

I finished off the week with my monthly chiro visit and a nice dose of So You Think You Can Dance... and of course, next week is a whole new beast....

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laptop shopping saturday

Meet Chromia...

Oh, no, wait... that's the Autobot Chromia from Transformers... she is the namesake of my new computer though.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself...

It hasn't particularly been an easy day, but that's more been about mental and/or emotional frustration than anything else.

It all started in the usual way... although I broke my streak of heading downstairs just as Ma arrives. But it had to happen sooner or later.

I was ready to go though, so we pretty much turned around and headed out.

The supermarket portion of the morning was fairly standard... it ended up being one of those outings where it's 90% fresh produce and not all that much of anything else.

We also poked around a little at what was left in Easter goodies... in three different stores, and the only thing we found that was really a hardcore bargain was a Lindt basket with a mixture of bunnies and normal chocolates that had been the somewhat overinflated price of $35 and was marked down to $5... I have no idea what the hell I'm going to do with the little basket, which is red "leather"... but it's a cute shape.

Then we headed back here, performed the unpacking ritual, and then we headed out to look at computers.

Just as a minor update to the post last Monday about my old laptop dying, I tried every possible thing I could to get it to work properly, but I got nowhere.

Do you know what I really wish? Well, clearly not, but here it is... I really wish that you could go into anywhere that sold computers and say, yeah this, but add one of those, and take that off and give me more of that. And it was only a matter of plug and play modules... Want to swap the hard drive for a larger one? Done.

Unfortunately that's not how it works (and yes, I know that you can order bespoke computers but that's not what I mean), so it's a balancing act between what the thing costs, how much memory and storage it has, what the brand is, and even though it really shouldn't be a factor, what the thing looks like.

We headed off to Good Guys as our first port of call... which is always our first port of call for anything that comes with a power cord.

Unfortunately the very pleasant lesbian who used to be our go-to sales assistant when it came to things of a computing nature isn't there any more, mostly because she now sells vacuum cleaners somewhere else... so instead I had a brief conversation with the fairly attractive young man who was staffing the computer section before he left us to our own devices to make a decision.

A decision I wouldn't actually make for around another four hours. Okay, maybe not quite that long... but it was quite a while.

I was monumentally undecided... I kind of knew what I wanted, or at least what I wanted a new laptop to do, it just seemed that there wasn't all that much within my budget and with the specs I was looking for.

Ma had noted earlier that Harvey Norman (or Hardly Normal as it should be referred to) was having a sale, and even though I normally wouldn't buy anything from them, we figured that it might be worth a look, even if we ended up back at Good Guys anyway.

And we discovered that there's actually a Hardly Normal factory seconds shop not that far away from Good Guys... so we swung past there... they didn't have any laptops or computers of any kind to be honest, but we had a brief poke around, mostly at giant fridges for no real reason.

Then we headed into the city. Well, started too and then detoured over to Haighs factory outlet to investigate the broken Easter egg situation... because there really isn't anything better than broken Haighs Easter eggs. I can't explain it... they're just better... better even than whole Haighs Easter eggs somehow, even though whole Easter eggs become broken Easter eggs as soon as you, well, break them. But somehow there's something better about the broken ones.

Unfortunately it seems like the post Easter locusts had already been through the factory outlet, and although there were bags and bags of broken dark chocolate Easter eggs there wasn't a single bag of milk chocolate to be had in the whole place. Cue sad face.

So we headed into the city instead, found a car park in a pretty perfect spot for our purposes and headed into Hardly Normal.

And they had some interesting laptops, plus they had a deal where if you spent over $600 you got a free tablet... so it was all looking somewhat promising... but then I spoke to one of the sales staff and remembered exactly why I dislike Hardly Normal so very much. Pushy sales folk who try and convince you that what you want can't possibly be had for the amount of money you want to pay and that you'll need to spend significantly more.

Plus the free tablet was a piece of crap... not really surprising, given that it was only worth $98, but even so it was pretty ugly and not really very inspiring.

By this point in the day I was pretty much ready to go down to the food court in City Cross, find a table and bang my head against it repeatedly. I didn't... but I definitely felt like it was a better option.

We also swung through JB Hifi... who didn't really have all that much different from what I'd already seen, so we decided to head back to Good Guys.

Before we left the Mall we did stop off at the toasted cheese popup van, Combeeze, for the aforementioned toasted cheese. And it's pretty much exactly what it says right there on the box... or van... or combi or whatever. Tasty though, and a steal at $2 ($3 if you want ham and cheese).

Then it was off to Good Guys... again.

And somehow one of the laptops looked a lot better, spec-wise at least when we got back than it had before.

Which is pretty much where we came in... with my new laptop.

It's a HP Pavilion 15-n212TX (which seems like so much gobbledigook, but that's the model), with 750GB hard drive (which pretty much translates out to about 680GB or so of storage once all the operating system and what not is taken into account) and 8MB of RAM.

I also got a copy of Photoshop Elements... Photoshop was just too damn expensive, and hopefully I should be able to do 95% of what I used to do on my old copy of Photoshop on that... I just have to figure out the differences and how to make Elements do what I need it to do.

And that was pretty much all we did all day... look at laptops, then we came back here.

Setting up the laptop was incredibly easy, although they always ask the "What would you like to name this computer" was too early... fortunately I had a link to a list of Transformer names on my iPhone... and since every other electronic device I've ever owned (after the previous laptop) was named after a Transformer, why break the proverbial habit of a lifetime.

And I had a very pleasant surprise when I unboxed the laptop, because it looked about 100 times better than it did in the store. Granted that was partially because I never got a look at the back of it which was all silver and pretty... but the inside, which kind of looked a little too much like random black plastic looked a lot better. So whether I just wasn't paying enough attention or what I don't know.  But it was a pleasant surprise.

The silver back is pretty much why I went with Chromia for the name... plus it turned out to be one of the very few female Autobots, so that makes an interesting change.

It's going to take me a couple of days to completely get used to the keyboard. I'm already better with it than I was at the beginning of this post, although I apologise in advance for any typos over the next few days.

Now I just need to install all the appropriate software, make sure I've rescued all possible files from the old computer and remember what all my passwords and logins are for every website I've ever visited on the old computer. Plus tidying up the way I store things on this computer since I did end up with more than a few random folders on the old one.

But at least things can get back to normal now.

At least once I pack up the three computers I currently have scattered around the place.

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