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.
   

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:

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:

clean new template

This template has been a long time coming... at least in terms of the idea. I've been wanting something really clean and clear for a while now, but nothing I could find really rang my bell.

And after a couple of weeks of hardcore looking at seemingly every possible blog template out there, and even trying a bunch of them on a dummy test blog, I started wondering if I couldn't build something myself.

It was during that search that I stumbled first on a post on XOMISSE that had pretty much the exact kind of date format code I wanted. So I started playing around with that, and kept looking for more bits of code which lead me to Helplogger... and that was pretty much the Nirvana of all kinds of interesting bits of code that I could use to really personalise the simplest of all the Blogger default templates.

I'm pretty damn pleased with myself (and the helpful people who put the code I used online in the first place)... and I also decided that the header image is probably going to stick around for a while, it really just fits the new design.

So farewell to the old template, which has performed an admirable service for almost the last five years... and hello to my new template!

Current Mood:

blue traveller template

This wasn't where I was originally going for this year's winter template... my plan was to do an updated version of the green minifig template... and also to do a new version of the accessories template that I could use as my Twitter banner.

That would have been fine if the photos had worked out... but they just didn't... so instead this idea crept into my head during the week, and I like how it ended up.

It's LT with the Computer Programmer's laptop, the Fashionista's mobile phone, the camera I bought a whole set just to get, the Karate Master's gold trophy, the Sumo Wrestler's bronze trophy and the Soccer Player's silver trophy.

And even though I'm not a giant coffee drinker I had to sneak the coffee cup from The Lego Movie in there.

I also bumped up the font by a serious order of magnitude since I had all that empty blue space to fill.

Pretty sure that's not going to be a regular thing, but we'll see when Spring rolls around.

Current Mood:

lego spaceman template

The Autumnal blog template was inspired, loosely, by two people... the first of which was Ben Teoh's experiments in Lego minifig wall art, which led to me digging out almost all my old Lego Space figs with the intention of making artwork.

And the other was the Zoom Zoom image by Powerpig aka Chris McVeigh who is simply one of the best Lego photographers around and generally a major inspiration.

There was also a little bit of, if not actual inspiration, then at least I just had Lego spacemen floating around in the back of my mind due to The Lego Movie, even though it doesn't open here in Australia for some inexplicable reason until April.

The original photo above showed off the almost full range of spaceman colours (the blue ones are missing, although I only have a couple of those), but to be honest, I just wanted to feature Lego yellow this time around... so a quick edit later and I'm pretty pleased with the result.

Next time I'm either going to have to find something from our Sydney trip in a couple of weeks, or possible do updated versions of either the accessories template or the minifig template.

Current Mood:

lego traveller template

LT (or Little Traveller) has been my Lego related avatar for a while now, ever since my solo trip to Sydney last year, and I've been playing around with the idea of a template made up of what look like physical photos for a while.

Those two things came together in the Summer template using the photo I took on our most recent Sydney trip as an anchor image.

Granted this is just going to make me want to go to Sydney for the next three months... good job that's exactly what we're doing in the middle of March next year.

Current Mood:

lego toy soldier template

I'd intended to put something together for the Spring template on Sunday, but obviously my mind has been on other things the last few days.

But obviously when I spotted my Lego toy soldier minifigure when I was tidying up yesterday it sparked off a thought (part of which was the beginning of the lead up to Christmas), so I dug him out of the box this morning and threw together a little photoshoot this morning.

It's kinda weird that the choice of a grey background and moving him around to face the light essentially made him look like he was floating. Although I did completely cheat for the banner image itself and cut him away from the original background before dropping a similar grey background in behind him and his clones.

Current Mood:

blue benzo bot template

I was somewhat of two minds about the Winter template... I've gotten into the groove of doing something Lego related, and I did have something of an idea in that department.

But I also had this Benzo Bot image from the Bowden wander I did almost a year ago, and the full image is just the perfect size for a template. Plus I'd already dropped it into the template template, so it seemed like a perfect fit.

Oddly enough I do tend to gravitate a little towards blue templates for Winter...

Current Mood:

photo friday: minifig template

Following on from the previous Lego accessories template... I decided to try something minifig related for the Autumn template.

And while I kinda liked the original photo below... the green wasn't quite green enough and after some messing around I ended up with something that really makes Little Traveller stand out.

And in no particular order there's a minifig from each of the nine series.

The zombie from series 1, the mime from series 2, the gorilla suit from series 3, the geisha from series 4, the lizard man from series 5, the genie from series 6, the bunny man from series 7, the conquistador from series 8 and the cyclops from series 9.

Plus of course Little Traveller and Little Boyfriend.

I'm officially more than halfway through my Fringe shows for 2013... 11 done, 9 still to go.

And I'm slightly in that zone where it feels weird to be home... in fact on Wednesday night it felt like Monday night because I hadn't been home for a couple of nights.

I am still a little bit sleep deprived though... but that's partly my own fault because even on my nights off I'm staying up a little too late.

Street artist, Peter Drew, is back in town briefly and some great new works have been popping up around the place. One of these was a giant cube covering the top half of the statue of Queen Victoria in the middle of Victoria Square.

I'm guessing it was put there overnight and it only lasted until around 12:30 before two guys from the council in a cherry picker turned up to take it down. Highly disappointing really, it looked great, people were paying far more attention to it than they ever do the statue.

And while I now know that when Queen Victoria got a woollen cape last year it was officially sanctioned, the casual observer would have trouble telling the difference between why that was allowed to stay there but this cube was removed... and not terribly carefully either.

If it had been slightly smaller than it was, I might have asked to take it away... but it was massive. I hate to think what might have happened to it...

There are other bits and pieces from this week floating around in my head...

A conversation with one of the women at work about Sydney that caused me to think seriously for about five minutes about moving there... I've thought about it before, but never particularly seriously. The issue would be finding a job and somewhere to live... and I've never been the type of person who can just pick up and take off somewhere new. I mean I've only ever lived in four places in my whole life and I've been here for over ten years.

It's still a thought though... and one that I think will only get stronger in April when we go to Sydney. And work isn't making it any less of an attractive proposition.

We had a massively over catered morning tea on Thursday... so much so that there was enough left for morning tea again today. And a number of us were buzzing around on a sugar high for much of the rest of the day, myself included.

And I am enjoying these Doctor Blake Mysteries... although the solution often seems fairly obvious about a third of the way through.

Current Mood:

lego accessories template

Yes, okay... so my descent into Lego related madness would seem to be complete... the Summer template is nothing but Lego accessories!

I really would like to simplify the look of the blog... but can't find a template that does what I want it to do let alone one that does all that and looks good. I want something that is minimal and mostly based around typography for the design elements except for some kind of header image.

If only I was more skilled at CSS than I am, I'd put something together myself... but that's not going to happen.

So instead I'm trying a somewhat minimal header image. And I know that that sounds strange given how much stuff is actually in the photo above... but I think the white background helps.

Essentially this is what happens when I go through all eight series of Lego minifigures and pull out one of each kind of accessory (more or less... there are a bunch of things I didn't use).

And there are some other bits and pieces from some older Lego sets I still have.

Full points if anybody can actually identify everything in the image (which is hard, since some of the objects are only partially visible).

Current Mood:

sping green template

It's time for a little bit of Spring green around the joint...

Last Sunday's stroll around the Botanical Gardens was mostly to search for an image to use for the Spring template... but the downside to looking for Spring style images when it's still quite wintry is, you know, that it's still Winter.

Thank goodness for succulents... green, green succulents lit up to my favourite colour of chartreuse green with the aid of the sun.

Current Mood:

little traveller vs street art template

I realised yesterday when I went to Myer to buy two Lego Star Wars sets that my recent reconversion to an Adult Fan of Lego (or AFOL as they're sometimes called) is pretty much complete.

This is also backed up by the fact that as soon as I started thinking about what my Winter template was going to be, my first thought was doing something involving Little Traveller, my pseudo Lego homunculus...

Which of course led me to street art... so on Sunday I very gently got into my car and headed into the city to find some street art to photograph LT and his Lego camera against.

And if I'm focussing on street art, who better than (part of) a piece by Benzo... and so the new template image is based on this photo...

I also took some shots in the Topham Wall Street Art (more on that later) and decided that it was about time to update my Blogger/Twitter avatar (I've had it for over 6 years on the blog and 2.5 on Twitter)... so that new image is based on this photo...

Current Mood:

the name changing template

Would you believe that the Autumnal template photo was snapped in the entrance to Sportsgirl on Bourke Street Mall in Melbourne?

Actually, you probably would believe it... and it was.

I also worked out that since I changed over to this style of template I haven't featured a purple themed template... so this ticks that particular box too.

This template update not only brings a return to the previous font I used, but, more importantly, after six and a half years, it also brings a change to the name of the blog.

Yaniblog is now Yaniism!

The URL remains the same, just the name is changed and the way I'm using the tagline.

Embarrassingly, when I was updating the header image I realised that the tagline has actually been incorrect ever since I changed over to this template... whoops!

This brings the blog into line with both my Twitter account and Instagram feed, tying it all up into one neat little social media bundle.

I've also tweaked what shows up in the left hand navigation and cleared it up a little.

Current Mood:

beastman template

The first day of Summer brings with it a new template. Well, the beginning of every season does that really...

I had a bunch of choices for this template from the Sydney trip but in the end I just had to go with a detail from the Beastman piece on Cockatoo Island!

Plus I do love the colours and the contrast between the artwork and the rusty warehouse.

Current Mood:

brisbane waterfall template

Unsurprisingly, the Spring template is from our trip to Brisbane.

I do like a nice bit of green for the spring template... And there's nothing quite like water frozen in a photograph...

The photo in question is the big waterfall at the Roma Street Parklands... and I actually had the same photo as my desktop wallpaper at work last week.

Current Mood:

blue peak template

Something blue for the Winter template...

Usually I go with something slightly warmer for Winter... but this just seemed appropriate, and it was one of the better shots from the Samstag Museum the other week.

And lets just say that I'm presenting the new template and the photo it originated from as an offering to the Gods of Photography...

I spent $150 on enlargements yesterday (and then realised later that if I'd been willing to pick them up tomorrow I would only have spent $100... I'll remember that next time)... and there are plans afoot... which reminds me, I must remember to send an email/text message either tonight or tomorrow morning.

But if the plan comes together, I'll be yelling about it a lot... for now though... shhhhh...

Current Mood:

mr sloppy template

My ongoing obsession with Mr Sloppy continues unabated... so much so that the Autumn 2011 template is... you guessed it, Mr Sloppy!

Or at least part thereof...

The photo was an alternative version of this image from about a month ago...

Viva Senior Sloppy!

Current Mood: