character saturday: artificial paladin

So... I have a complicated relationship with AI generated art. I understand why artists find it problematic, and I agree with them. For further reading on the subject (based on a quick Google search)...

• AI Art and the Ethical Concerns of Artists 
• AI-Generated Art Controversy: The Future of Creativity or a Replacement for Human Talent?
• The Ethical Pros and Cons of AI Art Generation
• Why some artists see AI-generated art as a threat to their livelihood
• ‘It’s the opposite of art’: why illustrators are furious about AI

It very often makes nightmare images where people don't have the correct amount of fingers or have extra hands in places hands shouldn't be, or very much likes to, you know, blend things in weird ways or otherwise make you go... "no... none of that... kill it with fire".

It is also capable of making beautiful images. But it's hard to make a very specific, very detailed, very exact image right now. The generic idea of something, yes. A very specific, "I want exactly these elements, arranged in exactly this way" detailed in a "just so" way, then you go see an actual artist and commission something.

But, of course, I was going to try my favourite loveable lying little shit... my halfling paladin/rogue, Peregrin. Is it perfect? No, of course not. The armour is completely all over the place, the hair is entirely too blonde, it refused to give me an eyebrow piercing, the eyes are the wrong colour and I think the face should kind of be about half-way between these two options.

It's what happens when you ask for "art nouveau" on the left and "photo realistic" on the right... and when you use "jewel tones" as a descriptor. Also, there's a healthy portion of Magic The Gathering art in the DNA of the left image.

Do I like them? Absolutely.

Anyway...

A short run down for this week.

Speaking of halflings, Halfling Tomato Soup continues to be the best tomato soup recipe ever.

As of Tuesday, we can reset the "Yani Fall Down Go Boom" counter at 0. It's been a hot minute, but there we are.

I tripped over one of the many, many uneven paving stones on my morning walk and went down like the proverbial bag of potatoes. Mostly I was fine, although I skinned my knee quite spectacularly based on sliding across the rough pavers. So yay for that. Weirdly I didn't end up with the giant bruises I thought I would on the heel of my hands, so that's a plus. And I didn't break my fancy new headphones when they came flying off my head either.

 I then spent a large chunk of Tuesday's public holiday making a lot of very small jars of apple and plum (plus tomato, obviously) relish. It came out pretty good honestly. The issue now is distribution.

Otherwise, no Thursday Night DnD because of headaches and coughs and such.

Likewise, no Friday Night Not DnD because of head colds.

Pfft.

Anyway.

Today was basically just the supermarket. With the added bonus that I discovered that if you lose your ticket for the parking garage, it costs $25 to get your car out. Where did the ticket go? I hear you ask... If I knew that, I would not have needed to pay $25 to get a lost ticket ticket.

However, if I just happen to find it randomly in the next week I will be very unhappy.

And that's about it really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: complementary colours

Did we see Sofles lovely purple and yellow art already? Yes. Is it lovely enough that we can revisit it for some close up detail shots? Also yes.

Anyway...

I got a little philosophical about soup in my Insta post for this week's take on Halfling Everything Soup...

• Step 1. Make soup according to recipe
• Step 2. Modify recipe slightly to fit your tastes 
• Step 3. Make soup based on your vague memory of the recipe

Which is more or less what I did this week. I bought the ingredients as specified, more or less, but then didn't look at the recipe once. Because, honestly, it's "Everything Soup", so I can put whatever I want in it... and the recipe was always slightly tedious.

And, I stand by that for soup in general.

Otherwise, not much of note this week...

I rage-quit the book I was reading, so had to go to the library on Thursday. I'm currently two books away from reading more books in a year than I've read since I started tracking them on Goodreads. And it's only April. Libraries, man, they're the best.

There was no Thursday Night DnD. And no Friday Night Not DnD. But we're doing Friday Night Not DnD tonight, because of... reasons. I think Mr and Mrs had a thing, I don't honestly remember. It did make the whole week slightly weird tho. No anything on Thursday or Friday. But Friday was also Chiro Day. And I didn't make bread on Thursday but on Friday night instead. And today is Saturday but also Friday Night Not DnD Day.

Yeah. It's all very weird.

Anyway.

Today wasn't much of anything... or at least, not yet anyway.

Basically, just the supermarket and then that's your lot... at least until I need to do things before going out later. So there's that.

Current mood:

photo saturday: brewery art

Some big old brewery vats as this week's photos with various artist's work.

Anyway...

It's been a while since I made pea and ham soup... but the one I made this week was really quite good. I don't know whether it was the mint I added or the ricotta I used in place of cream... or the fact that I bought new mushroom based stock. Yeah, it sounded weird to me too... but it definitely added to the flavour.

In other news, Ma is vastly improved over last week... or as vastly improved as you get while still using a walking stick... but honestly, she probably should have been using a stick for a while, so if there's any positive that came out of last week, it's that she went from "I don't like sticks" to "Gimme that blue stick" without much of a fuss.

So that's a plus.

In other pointless news...

Thursday night DnD was good... although, let me just say, DnD adventure writers, stop putting "chase/races" in your adventures, when you hamstring the classes that can move faster than everyone else. That is not a "chase/race"... and it's irritating. Or better yet, don't call it a "chase/race". Because it's not. And it works both ways, when you do let people go the speed they're supposed to, the "chase" finishes after about a round. 

So, just stop doing it. It's dumb and it doesn't work within the rules.

I did get a fancy magic thing though, so that's nice.

Friday night Not DnD was also good... less challenging than the session a couple of weeks ago, but still enjoyable.

Anyway...

Today was basically the supermarket followed by a trip to Haighs for post-Easter broken egg... so nothing exciting, but I do now have Haighs in my fridge, so, yay.

Current mood:

photo saturday: port roker

We all love a good Pawn Roker...

There are still a few Wonderwalls images, but these were just general Port Adelaide images that I really liked, and that seemed to match, at least a little. It was also kind of amazing how quickly they packed all the stuff away when the pawn broker closed for the day. I didn't think that we were gone all that long, but suddenly the footpath was completely clear.

Back to actual street art next week.

Anyway...

Some minestrone soup this week... pretty good actually... lots of bacon, some Chinese cabbage that just kind of bulked it out a bit but didn't really affect the taste or the texture... and some bonus stock powder that really boosted the taste.

In other news...

It's been a rough week. I'm not going into details, I just want to mark this as a line in the sand. For future reasons. Ma wasn't well this week... and that just stresses me the fuck out because of reasons. I mean, she's feeling better, but still, it stresses me out.

Otherwise, not a lot of anything this week... no Thursday DnD, no Friday DnD... 

There has been some Horizon Forbidden West though.

Anyway...

Today was... see earlier comment about stress. But overall, perfectly fine. Just, you know, residual stress. We did the supermarket... we ran some errands... it wasn't much of anything.

So, yeah. That was this week.

Current mood:

photo saturday: cerulean humps

This week was... many things.

Oh, also, rounded things in tones of blue and purple from the Wonderwalls photos for this week.

And Soup Season began this week... I made a decent chicken chow-DAH.

This week was my rental inspection. So I basically cleaned across three days. Not for the whole day, because that way lies insanity and also broken Yani. So, first there was The Tidying, where I put things away, got rid of the things that needed to be gotten rid of, etc. Then there was The Kitchening... which generally involves pulling all the stuff off the kitchen counters, putting it elsewhere, cleaning said counters, then cleaning the stove, forgetting to clean the filter for the rangehood (m'eh, it's not like the appear to check) and then on Wednesday that was The Wettening. Which is basically cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming and then mopping the floors.

Did I do more than was absolutely necessary? Probably. Is cleaning for an inspection my opportunity to do a big clean I wouldn't otherwise give a shit about doing? Yes.

Do I always like the way the house looks after I've done cleaning for an inspection? Also yes.

I kinda preferred every single other land agent who tend to do their inspections somewhere between 9am and 1pm, rather than this land agent who seems to prefer the 2-4pm time slot.

But Thursday rolled around and after installing Horizon Forbidden West on the PS4, I shuffled down the road to the bakery and then went to the library to pick up the giant stack of books that had just happened to all come in at the same time, and read the non-library book I was already reading. The last couple of times the agent did the inspection just after the 2pm start time, and I realised that I could have just come home early... so I kept checking my email for the inspection report email. And, you guessed it, it didn't show up until about 3:30. So much for that plan. But the tiny postage stamp library is nice enough to hang out in.

Thursday Night DnD was decent. And we finally made it to the start of the hardcover adventure. I will say that it did kind of feel a little bit like "enforced fun", just because there were a bunch of "busywork things" on offer for the group, given that we've arrived in time for a festival with associated games and contests and whatnot.

Friday I rewarded myself for all the cleaning by starting Horizon Forbidden West. It's good... I mean I only played until I got to the first place you could save the game after the title finally game up. So, like three hours. And I'm enjoying being back in the world, although all the models for the characters from the first game just seem a tiny bit off... I know they changed Aloy up a bit, but everybody just kinda looks like their own celebrity impersonator. It's not enough to throw me out of the game, more of just a "huh, okay then".

Friday Night Not DnD was also good. The interesting thing is how the Hero Quest can take the exact same board and make each level feel somehow unique. This particular level had us going through magic teleportation doors and bouncing all over the map. Which was fun, if sometimes occasionally frustrating, especially given that getting to certain points meant rolling specific numbers.

But my character also lucked into finding the MacGuffin for the whole adventure in the first room she went into, and also just happened to have the magical vial of Plot Development necessary to do things with it.

Today was... different. Mostly because Ma didn't come down to go shopping with me because of reasons, so I was on my own. Which I don't hate, because I can just put on my headphones, crank my jams (by which I mean the 99% Invisible podcast) and just potter around.

Which basically gives me the rest of the day to myself. So maybe I might need to go fight some robot critters...

Current mood:

photo saturday: weird little guys

We can't forget paste-ups and stickers in the grand pantheon of street art. So, some weird little green buddies for today.

Anyway...

A relatively short one for today.

No Thursday Night DnD.

Friday was Chiro Day... which also included my monthly Wandering Around Looking At Things. This time that mostly meant taking photos of things in bookstores that

Friday Night Not DnD was good... I do enjoy that in the absence of actual roleplay or whatnot, we've basically started using what little story there is and making up our own story. Or, you know, mostly just amusing ourselves.

Anyway...

I think we've finally hit that break point between "Argh Summer" and "Oooh Autumn", so I bought soup ingredients today.

Woo.

And that was it really.

Like I said, a short one.

Current mood:

photo saturday: post-birthday lady walls

Some more walls. Surprising nobody.

Interestingly, these were more or less the first (on the left) and last (on the right) shots I took last week.

Also, two examples of the importance of having lighting in the right place when it comes to street art photos. But also, not wanting to spend a whole day waiting for the light to move around.

Anyway...

This week was my birthday. Obviously. But we covered that already.

There wasn't any Thursday Night DnD this week... because people were sick and we're at a Very Important Point of getting to the beginning of the story... so... we skipped this week.

Friday Night Not DnD was good... once again, we have a system down, so we're not getting hammered as much as we were in the earlier levels. I assume the game will take it's revenge soon enough.

It was also my Friday Night Birthday... so presents were had and tiny cupcakes were eaten.

Anyway....

Today was a non-zero amount of the supermarket, looking at very old recipe books and then taking a trip to Spotlight for reasons. Not thrilling, but perfectly fine.

So, a short one this week. Which is also perfectly fine.

Current mood:

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: