it's my (49th) birthday

The downside to this whole "famous person who shares your birthday thing" is that eventually, if we're not counting Instagram and TikTok "stars", you run out of actual famous people. So we took a left this year. More on that in a second.

Today was... actually a pretty okay birthday. I mean, it wasn't exciting or flashy or involved, but it was okay.

I started off by getting woken up from a call from Ma, who would normally text, but for reasons best known to her, called me instead.

Then I headed down the road to go buy some wireless headphones as my birthday present. Also, can I just do an "old man yells at cloud" about the fact that things don't come with instructions anymore. I mean, if I can't do that on my birthday, when can I do it? Things should come with, at the least, basic instructions. But I worked the headphones out eventually.

I then used said headphones to walk to the shops and felt very Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century. Yeah, there's a dated reference. I had to go to the shops in order to get my free Birthday Boost and my free Birthday Scone and also, you know, some actual lunch.

So, you know, like I said, not exciting, but I like free things and I like it when retail people wish me Happy Birthday on my actual birthday.

This year's image is Nicky Doll (aka Karl Sanchez), a French drag queen and RuPaul's Drag Race alumni as well as being the host of Drag Race France since 2022.

Happy Birthday Nicky (also Karl). You're the latest addition to the list of famous faces who share my birthday... including, three-time featured Jamie Bell, Johan Paulik, Taylor Hanson, Michael Caine, Chris Klein, Albert Einstein, Corey Stoll, Daniel Gillies, Ansel Elgort, Demetrius Joyette, Stephen Curry, Antoni Porowski and Johnny Flynn.

Current mood:

photo saturday: wonderwalls pre-birthday saturday

Hey, look. It's that thing where I go places and take photographs. Remember when that was a thing. Yeah. We're having a brief resurgence.

Because last week was the Wonderwalls Street Art event down at Port Adelaide, and the last one I went to was 2019.

This was also one of my favorite pieces by artists PichiAvo. Their whole vibe is taking classical sculpture images against colourful words. Would it have been better if I had lined the shots up so that the arm went across properly? Sure. Didn't happen though.

But more on Wonderwalls later.

Anyway...

Next up, some Sofles yellow and purple art.

All behold, It is My Birthday Week. Because that's three days before my birthday, then my birthday on Tuesday, then three days after my birthday. Which brings us to next Friday. Mark your calendars appropriately.

Of course, having said that, do I actually care one fuck about my birthday this year? No, no I do not. Will I care next year when it's a birthday ending in a zero? Who can say. We'll see when we get there.

I've now read more books than I read in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 or 2022. So there's that.

Otherwise Thursday Night DnD was good. We were down a player, and the whole session ended up being about finding that player before he got married to a banshee bride. And, you know, also drawing under an off-hand joke I made several sessions ago about started a rumour in the tavern that said player was getting married.

Maybe next week we can get to the start of the actual hardcover adventure we're intending to play.

Friday Night Not DnD was also good. We almost got the bad guy for this level, but he teleported away at the last second, which is annoying. And then afterwards, as generally happens when we're all a little overtired and overstimulated, we played what should have been some very chill Love Letter and lost our minds several times.

Also I won. Because that's important to note.

Anyway...

This is my second favourite. this absolutely amazing piece by Smug One featuring Hot Boy and Squeezed Plums. Yes. Please. Although the sun was completely in the wrong position to get decent shots, but that happens a lot of the time with the Wonderwalls stuff. Either you need a completely overcast day, when your sky is just blah, or you need to pick your times based on the direction of the wall.

I paired this with a nice case of Urban. Because why not.

Today was... well, you've basically seen a bunch of today.

We did the supermarket. I want it to be soup season already please, I'm bored with deciding what to make for dinner. Although this week I did make a mostly average tuna morney. Edible, but not exciting.

Then we bundled into the car and, detouring through town in a way we don't normally detour through town, we drove all the way down to Port Adelaide.

I'd done some internet sleuthing, so I knew both that there were only about eight new Wonderwalls pieces around, but also that there were pieces from all the years we missed (well, when they actually did it). Also, annoyingly, the map I was looking at online wasn't as good as the printed map we found... after we'd finished and were having lunch. [le sigh]

But we did a bunch of short car hops going from place to place, rather than traipsing from one end of the Port to the other. And found everything I wanted to find. Would it have been better if we'd remembered to bring hats. Probably. But we did okay.

And when we'd done the whole look, we went back to where we'd started to have lunch at a little place called Swedish Tarts Cafe. Where they have, no surprise, Swedish tarts. But we had a pleasant lunch, bought some tarts to take away and split when we got back to my place, and then bundled back into the car and drove all the way back here.

So, a different Saturday. And I'll have photos for at least two or three weeks.

Current mood:

character saturday: swamp witch

Putting the NPC idea on hold for now, as I'm not really super happy with any of the other ones I've made... so instead we've got what happens when I dig into a certain idea for DnD Character Colouring Book.

And that idea being, basically, a swamp witch.

So, combining the half-hag Hexblood with the mould and fungus themed Spores Druid. I've tried making Hexbloods before, but never quite got their "eldercross" correct, especially given that the book description of a "living, garland-like part of a hexblood’s body extends from their temples and wraps behind the head" doesn't actually vibe with the official art that we have, where the eldercross extends from the back of their head and wraps in front of the head.

But I finally found a Hero Forge set of horns that fit the bill of the text description.

I also realised that Verna has basically a bad but happy Irish Mrs Doubtfire accent (because all of my attempts at an Irish accent end up bad) on Friday after listening to a podcast featuring Irish people talking.

Yes, I'm still obsessed with this particular skirt, which also featured in the last two weeks. At some point they're going to give it a makeover, and I just hope it still looks as good. Once again though, I still love combining the overskirt with different overshirts giving the whole thing a different look.

Also yes, that Crawling Claw familiar is one that I've featured the last time I tried a Hexblood. Why reinvent the wheel when you already did the thing back in January last year.

So, Verna goes on the list of "backup characters that will probably never see the light of day".

Anyway...

As of last Friday, I have now read the same number of books since January that I read in the whole of 2022. So that's a thing that happened.

Fast forward through to Thursday. Specifically Thursday Night DnD.

After everybody being a little punchy last week, we had a brief clearing of the air at the start of this game, which was good. I mean, I didn't say everything I may have originally wanted to say, because some of it actually didn't need to be said. But it was good that we got there.

We've also, basically, found our way to the very outskirts of the beginning of the adventure we're supposed to be playing. Because we've actually been off the map the entire time thus far. I mean, we still need to get to the starting city next week, but we're nearly there.

Friday Night Not DnD was good. I mean, it started off when we were sure it was going to be a total TPK, given that we started off with no gear and I opened the This Is Where All The Enemies Are door before we found said gear. We did make it through however. Although my elf very nearly died.

I think I've said this before, but it's amazing to me how different each "level" of this game feel, given that it's always the exact same floor layout, it's just the door locations and rooms that change.

It was also a shorter level, so we ended up playing Dungeon Mayhem afterwards. And the issue with coming out hard in the first game and taking another player out and then winning is that you then have a giant target on your back for the rest of the games. I won one and basically got knocked out either first or second in every other game.

Anyway...

Today was basically just the supermarket.

Next week should, weather permitting, be slightly more interesting.

Current mood:

character saturday: bang bang (my blacksmith shot me down)

This week's DnD Character Colouring Book is Part 2 of the NPC Heroes idea. And again, this is riffing on an idea I've had for quite a while, but with some alterations.

Basically Blacksmith as Barbarian. Although previous iterations of this idea have been female dwarves. This one is human mostly so I can give her the Dual Wielder feat and she can swing both hammers at once. She's also, very probably, Morgana's wife, or at least, there would be NPC on NPC romance rumblings in a campaign.

I do like the skirt/corset combination that makes it look like the "blacksmith apron" is one piece going from about her ribs down past her hips, but then belted. Does she usually actually do her blacksmithing work in a top that has no sleeves and it altogether less covering? Probably.

And yes, this was still me playing with stripy skirt materials.

Also, even though the Desert aspect of the Storm Herald Barbarian would make sense (fire, etc), I think she's probably a Sea aspect girl... mostly because I love the idea of those hammers having lightning flickering around them. Even thought fighting with two weapons interferes with the "bonus action" element of the subclass. It's something I'd care about if I was actually going to play her.

Anyway.

I had my fifth booster shot on Sunday. Which resulted in a sore muscle in my arm for the first half of the week and not much else.

This week was very much a "hide indoors with the aircon on" kind of week, so I did, basically that.

Thursday DnD was... well, I'll say this. I think we were all a little punchy due to the weather. So much so that I actually forgot to put my in-character necklace on. But otherwise, we closed the chapter on this little sub-mission and are moving on to the next thing.

Friday was... too much.

It was Chiro Day, which was fine. Did the thing, dropped the books I borrow last month back at the library, didn't borrow more since there was a pile of books waiting for me at my library. Came home, went back out to the library, came home again. All in stupidly hot weather.

And then, at about 1pm or so (I can't remember when exactly), the power went out. At a time when it was basically 37°C outside. And then stayed off for two hours.

Suffice to say, I lost my damn mind after the first... 45 minutes.

Not a fan, can't recommend, hard pass. At least back in the days when I had no air-con, I still had electricity to run the evaporative cooler.

Also, now that everything in my house runs on electricity, I could do precisely diddly and squat.

Friday Night Not-DnD was good. And still none of the "adventures" we're currently playing around in have been as tough as the very first one. And nobody has died since like the second adventure. It's still fun though. And somehow, even though it's all run on the exact same room layout and with with a limited range of monsters, each level feels distinctly different.

Anyway.

Today was rain. Well, it started that way. Getting rid of most of the heat from the previous week.

And then we Supermarketed and came back here. Ma had A Thing she was going to, so she took off relatively early, leaving me to try and get the cool air from outside into the apartment.

So, there's that about that.

Current mood:

character saturday: fish town girl

Today's DnD Character Colouring Book ticks a couple of boxes. Firstly Morgana is an interpretation of a mini a friend of mine has that came in a set of "harbor town/Cthulhu" themed minis, one of which was a "fishwife" character who I instantly saw and thought "this is a perfect warlock mini".

Fast forward four years. And mostly I started by playing around with the stripes on the skirt. But I ended up designing my memory of that mini and putting my own spin on it. And I really liked the results.

And then it kind of sparked a thought in my brain... for a party made up of town NPCs turned into PCs. Morgana is someone you'd find in the market place. I have a couple of the other NPCs designed, and it may not go on longer that maybe a small handful of characters. But it's a fun project while it lasts.

Anyway.

This week has been a lot of "hurry up and wait"... or rather, "wait and then hurry up".

So we'll just fast forward to Thursday. Mostly because I don't think there was anything of note earlier in the week. But mostly because on Thursday I got to go see Owlgirl and meet Baby Owlgirl for the first time.

*cue a sentence that is one long squee for about five minutes*

Owlet (because it takes less time than typing the other version) is the sweetest baby, happy, bouncy, having the most fun and I adore her. Also, it was good to see Owlgirl. I ended up being there for about three and a half hours, so there's that.

I took bread and presents and the last of the Christmas tomato relish, all of which was received with the appropriate amount of appreciation and whatnot.

It was also the single hottest day of the week and also potentially the hottest day of the year thus far (to which next week says "shut up and hold my beer"). Which was great when I had to drive clear across town in a car with aircon that no longer works. Yay.

Thursday Night DnD was good... we were down a player but we mostly did exploration and such.

Friday I did my errands... which mostly involves picking up stuff from the library, but I also stopped in to ask about my next booster shot, expecting it to be in a week or so, a little like last time... but no. Tomorrow at 3pm. Yay, but with less sarcasm.

Friday Night Not DnD was good. I know that we're probably going to hit a wall at some point where the gear we've amassed and our general power level right now is going to dip under the power level of the bad guys, and it will all end in tears and the general gloating of our GM. It's still fun.

Anyway...

Today consisted of Ma being late, the usual supermarketary and...  not much else. Which is fine.

That's it...

Current mood:

character saturday: frogger

Comedy poison frog cleric anyone? Actually I don't know to what level I'm capable of doing a "comedy" character. It's just not how I liked to play. But the idea of this little frog/Grung (the official frog-people race name) buddy has been floating around in my head for most of this week.

He's not necessarily on brand for what the Grung are supposed to look like, since they're very much inspired by the poison dart frogs, but I love me a red-eyed tree frog... so, we ended up with Dzi... or, as he's generally known, Dizzy. Who is 7 years old. Because a Grung is mature at 1 year old and dies at around 50. So he's a cleric of a trickery god, like his father before him, and his father before him.

The main reason I made a Grung a trickery cleric is that Grung had poisonous skin (hence the whole dart frog thing), and it seems like something a trickster would do to potentially poison you if he shakes your hand. On the downside, he also had to dunk himself in water once a day or he suffers a level of exhaustion. Thankfully clerics have the Create or Destroy Water spell. Is it practical? No. Does the overall concept amuse me? Yes.

Plus I like how he came out. I did change the colour of the spell effect and the feathers about 800 times.

Anyway...

There's not a whole lot else.

My ransacking of local libraries continues. I went and picked up six books on Friday morning. Granted three of those were graphic novels. But I'd also finished the stack of six I picked up a couple of weeks back. So there's that.

We skilled Thursday Night DnD this week... we had a missing party member and we're mid way through a sequence related to his backstory, and, honestly, I just couldn't be bothered.

Friday Night Not-DnD was good. We're developing a technique for dealing with various scenarios, so hopefully it doesn't come and bite us in the butt. And because those games don't last as long as we might be playing DnD, we have a round of Sushi Go! afterwards. Which I won. So the 83 games of that I've played online on Board Game Arena came in handy. Even if my win rate over there is about 50%.

Anyway...

Supermarket. I want it to be soup season, because I'm bored with making non-soup related food decisions.

That's it.

Current mood:

character saturday: valour vs thorns

Ten times the fun for this week's DnD Character Colouring Book. The two groups of NPCs I have a makeover to for our Wild Beyond the Witchlight campaign. Because it made no sense to me that these groups were just characters that had been action figures in the 80's. So fuck that noise. Now they're actually fey related folk.

And they also slotted into the backstory for one of the characters, or, at the very least, they were attached to a character from her backstory.

Most of them came together relatively quickly. Although I think Nyssa had the most "do-overs" before I was happy with her, and I do very much like her in her purple velvet.

Anyway...

I started walking in the mornings again. Mostly because my chiro told me to. And it's not like it's a grand hike, it's literally just "around the block", for the specific definition of "the block" and "around" I'm chosing to do.

I did also work out very quickly after the second day why I stopped. When my knee started complaining. But I kept it up all week. Even if on Thursday I did a smaller version of the block because I couldn't remember if I'd left the tap on in the sink.... and Friday it started spitting with rain, so I piked out early, which was a good choice because about 90 seconds after I got home it poured down with rain.

Because it's February, but the weather is behaving like it's June. What the hell.

Mostly it was good to be listening to podcasts again, honestly.

Oh, and brief sidebar. I'm currently halfway through my current Goodreads Reading Challenge for 2023. I did what I've done the last several years, listing 24 books as my target. And I've currently read 12 books this year already.

So there's that.

Thursday Night DnD was... fine. The problem mostly is that we're kind of twiddling our thumbs in this early section, because we're not actually into the published adventure yet. And I only say twiddling because I'm not really a big fan of the exploration thing we're doing right now.

But we'll get there.

Friday Night Not DnD was fun. And somehow the second level was easier than the first level. I'm sure that won't continue.

Anyway...

Today was just the supermarket trip.

Current mood:

character saturday: hot boy sorcerer

Welcome to Hot Boy Saturday. There really isn't a lot to this one. I'd seen somebody do the striped pants online and wanted to try it for myself. And it just turned into generic hot DnD boy. I also think that "entertainer" often ends up being my generic "hot boy background". I think this one is a juggler.

Also, have I mentioned that I really need to play another sorcerer.

I also didn't completely plan the more muted colour palette. But I do love it. And I feel like I've really gotten my eye in when it comes to making leather look good in Hero Forge.

Anyway...

Thursday Night DnD was... interesting. We met the new character who is taking over from the character we lost. I'm not a fan. I very much know that I wasn't supposed to be. The player in question and I often have some sort of relationship between our characters. We've never done "antagonistic", and that was very much what the dead character and my character had.

So I know that certain elements of this new character have been crafted to annoy my character. And that's fine. It needs to be throttled back a little, but we'll get there.

Also, we're still some time away from starting the published adventure, because DM Fluffy does insist on dangling plot hooks in front of us.

Friday was... many things.

To start off with, it was very hot. So fuck that in general. But it was also Chiro Day. And afterwards I decided to wander around the library in town, just because libraries are very much going to define my 2023. Also the fact that we're barely at the end of January and I've already read 9 books this year.

For the record, I finished 1 book in January 2016, 7 books in 2017, 2 books in 2018, 2 in 2019, 3 in 2020, 4 in 2021 and none in 2022. So... there's that.

Then we had Friday Night Not DnD. As a breather between my campaign and the one Mrs is going to run, we're playing HeroQuest, with Mr as the GM. It's not bad. I chose to play the Elf, who has a mix of magic and fighting. It's also weird. There are four characters you can play as... the Barbarian, the Wizard, the Elf and the Dwarf. So, much like early DnD, you're either a class or you're just your race.

So I'm the elf. Also the one female character, which didn't make as much of an impact as the fact the Elf has a little magic. But also because the Elf has no defined "class", my head cannon is that the Elf is a Thief. Which was partially helped by the fact that I ended up with the most gold.

Because it was a first game and we were learning what we were doing, it took a little longer than it might do once we really get used to it, but there was also a Small Child Interruption at about 11:30, so it was after 12:30 by the time we wrapped up and left. Which meant that it was almost 2am by the time I got home.

And I came home to find a giant fucking cockroach chilling on the wall over the kitchen window. So that led to a much longer cat and mouse... or perhaps cat and cockroach game, where I sprayed it with bug spray but then it disappeared behind shelves and I had to move things to try and find it and once I'd lost it there was no fucking way I was going to bed until I laid eyes on a corpse. And then I broke a glass bottle and had to also sweep that up. But finally I saw the little fucker trying to make a break for the door and I murderised it.

But getting home and dealing with that at 2am is much better than if I'd gotten home earlier and woken up at 3am to find a cockroach in bed with me. Urgh [shudder]. Gross.

Today the weather was all kinds of humid and yuck. And of course, as I say that it's started to rain.

So we did the supermarket and then came back here, and that was that really.

Current mood:

character saturday: elf mama

Well... something different (kinda) for DnD Character Colouring Book this week.

And that something also marks the end of me running the Friday Night DnD campaign for the last 260 days.

More on that in a second. But this is Meldis. And this is what happens when one of your players gives you the gift of a mother who left and an abusive father and you still manage to turn it around to give that character a happy ending.

There's also a fair amount of Photoshop fuckery in the skirt (by which I mean the entire skirt is fuckery)... the Hero Forge version doesn't actually have any pants.

 But I also had been sitting on this idea for the longest time. Just waiting for the reveal. And, as previously reported, it went off even better than I expected.

Good times.

Anyway...

This whole library thing continues to be great. It's interesting though, that left to my own devices I've been gravitating to books that have been written in languages other than English and then translated. I picked up two the last time I was at the library and another two this time.

I also am very much enjoying doing that thing I used to do and wandering the shelves, picking up books that look interesting to me on a whim. That doesn't mean I don't also have a giant list of "to borrow" books, but I'm digging the randomness of trying out new stories, things that I would never have bought, but will happily read.

I hit up both nearby libraries this week, in order to take back my previous books and grab new ones.

Thursday night DnD we kind of got our groove back a little, and are slightly closer to actually starting the written adventure... LOL. I mean, I said that we should have started in a different place, but people had opinions, so here we are.

Friday night DnD, like I said, was the last session of the campaign, and it honestly could have gone in two different directions. One where they wreck house and go seek bloody revenge on the hags, the other where the archfey makes them an offer that two of them definitely can't refuse. I was honestly expecting for them to do both things. But no, once the offer was made, they very much leaned in that direction.

And it was the right decision I think. It definitely led to a happy ending. Which is what you want at the end of a fairy tale.

Honestly, I'm like 50% relieved that it's over (mostly so I don't have to prep for a while) and 50% sad it's done.

We are taking a little DnD break for a few weeks to play a board game, and while Mrs preps the adventure she's going to run.

Anyway...

Today wasn't much more than our usual thing. Supermarket, etc. Although we did make a little trip to Haighs after.

So, that's that.

Current mood:

character saturday: savage killer

Sometimes there are ideas that lurk around in your head and refuse to leave. A body with the "skeleton body paint" is one of those ideas. So much so that I revisited it with a different character this week, but that one was less successful. Also, for the record, his skin is that colour because he's a Reborn (possibly he was burned and his body just has the colour of ash now) rather than any racial heritage.

The idea of both a Reborn lineage and a Zealot Barbarian mesh nicely in my head. And also a character who either has to apply body paint regularly or else has those markings as either tattoos or just as markings etched into their skin also appeals to me. The stupidity of a grumpy barbarian carefully applying paint every morning just appeals to my sense of the absurd.

And does the name mean "death" or "slaughter", yes, yes it does.

I also promise that one day I will play a character who is basically running around in their underwear for an entire campaign. Because why would I not.

Anyway.

Most of this week was me holing up in my air-conditioning and being horizontal once again.

I did go for a drive to the library on Monday morning, because the small one down the street doesn't open until 1pm most days and I was out of things to read. So off I went, only to realise that I hadn't brought my headphones and "Baby Yoga" was about to start. So that was... a thing I had to listen to.

I did grab a couple of books and then leg it home.

Thursday DnD was back... and, honestly given that we had a PC death at the end of the last game, the vibe for our return game was about right. As in very subdued. And a tiny bit... combative.

Also, I have very much realised that my character's defining trait can best be described as "not pleased at being Fate's bitch". And given that it seems that a number of gods have a stake in what we do thanks to a collective dream vision, that feeling has multiplied by a factor of about a billion.

We'll see what happens next.

I also went off to the tiny library at the end of the street to pick up a book I requisitioned last weekend. Because it showed up in two days. Whereas the last one took about two weeks.

There also wasn't Friday DnD this week because of small children and their ability to get sick. But it does give me a week to prep for what will basically be the final session. I just need to make a few decisions about what that's going to look like.

Fun times.

Anyway.

Today the weather was going to be hot, so we did the supermarket thing, wasted some time on a YouTube thing and then I sent Ma home before it got too hot.

That's about it really.

Current mood: