character saturday: halfling clerics

I'm obsessed with halflings. Of all my characters, the largest percentage are halflings (I mean, not by much, but it is where I gravitate). I just love the little fuckers.

And I wanted a halfling cleric, so what's the most sensible option? Make two and play the one you're feeling the most at the time I hear you say. Absolutely.

In the end I chose Littlefoot (on the left), the War domain cleric, who goes by her surname and is essentially a halfling policewoman, mother of twins and the definition of big Mum energy. I always describe her without her helmet as having a very plain face, a nose that has been broken at least three times and a sensible haircut. She's also the character who proved why pulling a strange lever in the creepy temple is totally a bad plan, because her head literally got chopped off. I mean she's fine, because death is never really the end in DnD, but I also haven't played her since then.

Otho on the other hand... I love his design, I love the freckles and the scar and at least some of the back story I came up with. He might need a little bit of a rework before I actually play him though. Or else I just need to tweak some details. And work out if I actually like the Knowledge domain. Or if I need to rejuggle things and make him a Grave domain cleric. Which honestly fits his concept so much better.

Also, yes, totally the same pose on both of them.

Every time I make chilli I always make what can only be described as a metric fuckton. I mean that's great, but there was a lot of chilli. And it was pretty good. Many beans, two kinds of mince. All the spices. And great with rice, mashed potato, pasta and your basic corn chips.

And I totally turned into an infomercial right there for no damn reason. Sorry about that.

This week's DnD was Wednesday and Friday... and honestly, we nearly had two total party wipes. I mean, it was kind of exciting, but also terrifying. The Friday game was weird, just because one third of our party wasn't there, because we're between characters with him. But we meet the new one next Friday, which will be interesting.

It's also super weird when you know your character is kind of in love with another character but you're pretty damn sure the player doesn't have any clue. I mean it's great, and I kinda want to get to the end of the adventure before it comes out. I also don't want to fuck up the great relationship they have either, because it is definitely awesome. And there are just these role play moments between them that I totally love.

Anyway.

I also went through a box of tchotchkes of various descriptions, a box I haven't been through possibly in... four years. Maybe. But I found some stuff I had totally forgotten about, some stuff that I knew I had but didn't know where the fuck I'd put it and some stuff that definitely needs to find a proper place outside of the box.

Friday was Chiro day, so I did the city trip thing... so there was that.

Today Ma was getting her hair did, so I did the shopping thing on my own. On the menu for this week is... fucked if I know... some kinda vegetable soup, honestly. I don't have a full on plan.

Then I came back, unpacked until Ma turned up, we futzed around here for a bit, then took a trip to Spotlight for no really real reason, then called it a day.

Current mood:

movies: spider-man - into the spider-verse

If I'd seen Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse when it came out in 2018, it would immediately have gone to the top of my list for movies I saw that year.

Which is why, a year and a half on, I'm doing a review.

Damn this is an exceptional movie.

Visually, this is like nothing else I've ever seen. Just the colours and the animation style... styles honestly. The use of text boxes and on-screen onomatopoeia... brilliant.

The slight comic book blurring took me a while to get used to, but otherwise, this movie is an absolute feast for your eyes.

And the fact that Miles goes from 12 fps to 24 fps throughout the movie as he comes to grips with his powers... perfection.

Then we get to the story... and of course the man responsible for both Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 and The Lego Movie was the driving force for this. It's clearly got his fingerprints all over it. Amazing characters who you care about and who have real emotions and an emotional arc throughout the movie. Yep, that's pure Phil Lord right there. You magnificent bastard!

Because that's the heart of this movie. Not just making a single version of Spider-Man that you relate to and care about... no, doing it a minimum of four times... then adding in even more Spider-Persons and making you still care. Giving them relationships that you care about. Making the relationships vital to the direction of the story without becoming overly sentimental or saccharine.

And the call back joke that could have gotten super old super quickly but absolutely does not. In fact the final time it occurs, it's actually an emotional moment.

This is also a stellar cast... I'll be honest, beyond two voices, I didn't recognise anybody, which I kind of like for this kind of movie. There doesn't need to be recognisable voices here. It needs to have voices that work for the characters. And boy oh boy do they work. But at the same time, if you can slip Lily Tomlin in there at just the correct moment, absolutely do that.

While everyone is excellent, I do need to call out Shameik Moore as Miles Morales,Jake Johnson as Peter B Parker and Hailee Steinfeld for giving their characters life and heart and a weight.

I don't often comment on the music in things, and I'll be honest, at a certain point in the movie I absolutely stopped noticing it (which is what happens in all movies unless it's a musical... I am listening to it while writing this though)... plus out of the 20 or so artists, I recognise about four of them... but the music is not what I would have expected from a Spider-Man movie and at the same time it fits beautifully with this world and this Spider-Man.

So while I'm so very late to this party, if you're even later and have somehow missed this, absolutely go back and check it out. Thank me later.

yani's rating: 5 goobers out of 5

character saturday: imaginary family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway...

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

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

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

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

Now that we've got that out the way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current mood:

character saturday: boots the house down

Part two of my DnD character HeroForge/Photoshop art.

This time I'm putting Alby, the very odd human Celestial warlock (which is honestly amongst my least favourite classes tbh) and who is entirely based around the idea of a healing potion warlock, with his pseudodragon familiar, Leaf, up against Tranquillity, my voluptuous tielfling wild magic sorceress (sorcerers are amongst my favourite classes though)... given that they both have the exact same lower robes and boots. But come out very differently, partly due to body shape, but partly due to colouring.

I haven't played either of them yet... Alby was supposed to be my next character, but then the world caught fire and that never happened. And Tranquility was the first time I really built the character in HeroForge before I even had a proper concept. I just wanted to play around with colour and body shapes and tiefling horns, and then there she was.

Neither of them especially feel like characters I want to play in online games, so they'll just have to sit in the wings and wait for right now.

Moving on...

Yeah, I spent some of the weekend and a little of the beginning of the week still inside my head as per last week, but it got better as the week wore on. It also helped that I knew that I was in my head. It's certainly better than not being aware of same.

This week's soup was... less successful. I made chowder, only I think I sliced a lot of the ingredients too small, then possibly cooked it for too long for the size of said ingredients. So it was all a bit mush. Which I fixed by blending the whole thing... which was fine, but blended soup is always much less interesting and exciting.

And we had two DnD sessions this week... Wednesday and Friday, which will be the new normal for a little bit. Wednesday was pretty good, although we came a little too close to a total party wipe. So that was fun. For a specific meaning of fun.

Friday's game was basically 100% roleplay, which I love. But when one of your party puts it to your character whether or not their character sticks around... because for reasons I can't totally articulate, this character has worked my last nerve since about 5 minutes after I met them. And look, I wanted to say yes... but I just couldn't get past my characters objections. So we're looking for a new party member as of next week.

Fun times. Again, for a specific meaning of fun.

Also in DnD news, Critical Role is back, playing their first game since the middle of March. My Tuesday nights haven't been the same since, so it was nice to have that element of normalcy back... I mean they're all sitting between 5 and 20 feet from each other in the studio, so it's not totally the same, but it's better than nothing.

I mean it's not like they've been totally absent from YouTube or the world in general, but not as these characters, so it's nice to dive back into their world.

Otherwise, this felt like a long week. I don't know why exactly, but yeah, it just dragged.

Today was decent.

We did the supermarket thing. I'm having a second go at chowder this week. Without leek, which was the main issue last week. So we'll see how that works out.

Then we came back here, did the usual YubTub malarkey, Ma futzed around with the hat she knitted me, because the changes we've been attempting (and by 'we' I mean she) to make to the... wait, what's the rim of a beanie called? You know, the bit that surrounds the hole that you put your head in... anyway, that bit. This is the second time it's been changed, and it just isn't working. So we're going back to the original, because fuck it.

After that, we headed off to Cheap as Chips because Ma wanted a couple of rugs for her place. It turned out to be a pretty successful trip, I picked up some little notebooks and a bowl, because bowls are awesome... and I found a little storage case. Because dice. Because a percentage of everything is always about dice.

I had no idea now many dice sets I own, but it had 18 compartments, which I figure would be more than enough.

Turns out I have exactly 17 sets, plus a bunch of extra d6's. So that was awesome. And now all my dice are grouped by colour/set and I can see them all, because the box is clear. I mean it takes up like five times the room of my pretty little pencil case, and about twice as much as my wooden dice box. But it's awesome.

So that was it really.

Current mood:

character saturday: in and out of my head

I've officially run out of usable 'featured photo' photos. Well, no, that's not true. I still have about 30-something photos, but they're ones from the last seven years that, at this point, I just don't have a match up for or just don't excite me. FWP, I know.

Instead, since I've been producing a lot of character art for my DnD characters, by taking HeroForge screenshots into Photoshop and cutting and colouring the living shit out of them. And in some regards I've started almost creating them backwards, putting together a HeroForge character and then turning them into an actual character. If I couldn't make a convincing facsimile of a DnD blue dragon, I didn't want to make a blue dragonborn character.

Because of course I like my dragonborn to have characteristics of the dragons they're descended from. Even though they don't have to.

So, I present my 5'4" teenage human wolf totem barbarian (hence the yellow eyes), Fenris with his shiny new battleaxe (because I love playing against type, and big beefy barbarians are boring)... and the 7'2" blue dragonborn paladin warlock, Marux (which I'm choosing to pronounce as Maroo, because I can pronounce made up words however I like) with his somewhat sentient metal eyeball sword, Nym... a sword who only exists because I had a moment of 'genius' during the colouring process when I realised that the pommel was a sphere and I could do something with that. I then turned it onto a character detail that I would absolutely not have come up with otherwise. Which are those ridiculous character creation moments that I love.

With both of these, I created a version, coloured it, lived with it for a bit, then realised I wasn't happy, redid the model and then subsequently redid the colour. Three times now for Fenris since I decided to change his weapon.

Will we see more of these portraits? Who can say. I do know that I have enough images to last until November (or January if I include NPC designs), some of which haven't yet seen the light of the gaming table.

Moving on...

This week's chicken soup was... decent. I make a decent chicken soup. Sometimes better than others, but generally decent. The secret ingredient is always chorizo. Granted that's generally the secret ingredient in all my soups, but still.

In other news, I got super into my own head this week. Yay. By which I mean, not yay. I'm aware, mostly of the whys and wherefores, but that didn't stop it from happening. And a couple of badly timed external things just made it worse.

It did colour the week in increasingly more saturated colour as we progressed though.

So there's that.

When I started this week there were four DnD sessions on the docket. However, in a fact that is surprisingly completely unrelated to the previous one, yet still coloured/flavoured by it, by the end of the week that number was two. Monday and Tuesday happened. Monday was the last Monday session. Or the last Monday session for now/in the current adventure. Tuesday was the debut of Marux, and the same group as the Monday group, but with an additional interstate visitor (because online). And while the adventure was too damn easy, it was a good session overall.

Wednesday and Friday didn't happen. Other people pulled out, so I came down with a severe case of 'no-fucks-given-itis' and removed myself from the equation.

I'll have to deal with that later, but that's a problem for future me, not right now me.

Today wasn't much of anything, as previous today's have been of late.

Firstly supermarket. I'm going back to the chowder this week... but without chicken, probably. Most likely because I'll forget to check my freezer, and I didn't buy any. I wasn't intending to add chicken anyway, so that'll work out fine.

Then back here for all the usual stuff... which then got sidetracked because Ma was attempting to make corrections to the beanie she knitted me because it turned out too small... which in turn made it even smaller. So that wasn't exactly a productive use of time.

And that was it really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: royal beasts

Let's see...

We might revert to a very old standard this week... because I'm not really in the mood to be particularly chatty... the dot point list.

And so...

• This week's tomato and beef soup was successful, I threw a little BBQ sauce in it, which picked up the flavour.
• Monday's DnD was... well rehearsed and scripted. I needed to say a thing, and unusually I wrote it all out. Usually when that happens it becomes an in-game letter. Not sure it was the best approach to be honest.
• I ran Wednesday's DnD... it was... acceptable. I ran it hardcore, because that group walks all over everything else, and it was fine.
• Friday's DnD was... I don't quite know how to finish that sentence. It may have been designed with a specific outcome in mind, however the more I sit with it, the more it's having the opposite effect.
• My land agent as an organisation needs to get their house in order, my land agent individually is okay, but if a problem in your process has been pointed out and you haven't corrected it, you need to sort your shit.
• In related news, I still don't have a functional oven door.
• Friday was Chiro Day. I got on the bus to town. I went to the chiro. I came home.
• The supermarket was supermarket shaped. We're having generally bad luck with checkout operators of late, since none of them seem to be able to effectively pack a bag.
• I'm making some form of chicken soup this week. I'll probably shred the chicken, I haven't done that in a bit.
• After the supermarket we didn't do fuck all.

That's it.

Current mood:

movies: onward

So, it's June and this is my first 2020 movie review. And we didn't even see this in the theatre.

But, onward to Onward.

Pixar, man... always right in the feels. And in the feels in a way I kind of didn't expect.

I wasn't at all surprised to discover that Pixar worked with Wizards of the Coast on this movie, and "borrowed" references to the gelatinous cube (and supposedly the beholder, but I have no memory of there being a beholder in the movie). Because this movie draws on Dungeons and Dragons a LOT.

From fantasy creatures, to quests, to an in universe "historical role playing game" that sounds like a simplified verison of DnD, it's all there. I'll be honest, to a distracting degree on occasion.

On top of that, it's a hero's journey story. They even specifically go to a tavern to start their quest.

And as I say at every new Pixar release, everybody say it with me now, this is a gorgeous movie. A combination a modern city (with fantasy trappings... the castle crenellations on the tops of the skyscrapers was probably my favourite touch) and some gorgeous natural wilderness. There wasn't really enough wildlife to be honest... thinking about it now, that seems a little weird. Or maybe it was all in the background and I just didn't notice.

I do have to give a shoutout to the sound designer who put a horse neigh sound under the sound of the van engine every time it started up. Because the van is the noble steed in this story.

I'm going to avoid specific spoilers, but this might still be too spoilery for some people, be warned.

While the end of this movie got me right in the feels, it was also partially emotionally unsatisfying. For me anyway. I get how it was emotionally effecting for the main character, and I got emotional based on that. But it was also reliant on a lot of information we didn't have for the duration of the movie. So it feels like it comes out of nowhere.

I just found myself wanting the ending the movie had spent the entire run time setting up and then took away from me at the last minute. Sure, that might also have felt unsatisfying for different reasons. But it felt like a bit of a bait and switch. It might have also been more satisfying if the movie didn't go out of it's way to say "look, we're putting this literal wall between these characters so that he can't do this thing"... for no real reason. If you want that, extend the final fight, have him miss his opportunity that way, don't just put up arbitrary obstructions.

What I did like though, was the role of the mother in this movie. It would have been very easy to fall into the usual Disney formula where the kids go off and have a big adventure, and we don't see the mother until the very end. Adding her in as an active storyline with a throughline certainly helped.

I could have done without the mother's boyfriend storyline. Sure, keep the character, but it was mostly a pointless plot point. It honestly doesn't go anywhere, and it makes me think less of the mother. I kind of wish that they'd finished the movie with the mother and the manticore having hooked up (ie put in a lesbian character who is integral to the plot and has more than like two lines). Because they did that thing they do yet again. A blink and you'll miss it gay reference. And I know now that the character only referred to her "girlfriend" because the actress involved asked to change it from husband, so it's not even like the filmmakers did anything. But just stop already.

Likewise there was some of the general awkward and cringe in the beginning of the movie that I wished they'd skipped (awkward high school boy is awkward and says dumb shit, is embarrassed by his own brain and also brother, cue cringe). Fortunately it didn't last long enough to really be a major problem.

Although making the "curse" at the end of the movie take it's form by ripping apart the high school, while excessively on the nose, is also a great story decision. Because as everyone knows, high school is a monster that must be defeated in single combat.

I'll also say that there were some very obvious "Chekhov's gun" tropes. Mention something at least twice and obviously it's going to show up before the end of the movie. And somewhat random settings that show up at the start of the movie out of nowhere will probably reoccur before the end.

Having said all of that, it's one I will definitely rewatch and try and pick up all the references I missed the first time through.

yani's rating: 4 feral unicorns out of 5

photo saturday: bricking it

I have so few decent photos left...

This week's soup was of the chowder variety... but I let it catch on the bottom, so the whole thing ended up slightly darker than it otherwise would have been, and all kinda smelled like burning. I mean it tasted great, but it smelled of burning. At least when it was freshly made.

I also cleaned out my fridge before I made soup... I can highly recommend it as a mental exercise. Clean our fridge, feel better about life. Granted that also involved me taking out the shelves and cleaning them, so undertake at your own discretion.

This week's DnD was the usual three games... however, break out the champagne, Friday's game was the first time we've played face to face since... the end of March... and the first time since we were all in the same room since the week of my birthday. Just having Fluffy come over and driving to the game was weird. And not least of all because the last time we did it he got to my place while the sun was still up and we usually got to their place around sunset. Now it's just pitch black before he even gets here.

We also had a game you can only really have when you're all in the same room. We kind of advanced the plot but mostly it was interpersonal stuff. And I finally got to give my character the sexy makeover/haircut I've been wanting to give her since we arrived in Hell.

Yes, I'm that person that gives their dark elves a sexy hell-based makeover. But not in like a creepy way.

The Wednesday game was good... my character got super excited about arm wrestling, because it made more sense to him than, say, bribing people for information, which he also learned about... and was unsurprisingly bad at.

Otherwise, I followed up on my busted oven this week. And discovered that my land agent, as an organisation, it totally and utterly useless. Because they never bothered to tell me that my land agent was now a totally different guy... yes, I'd dealt with him previously, but when my land agent was presumably still the other woman, I dealt with and was in contact with other people in their office. But because of this, the website they use to log maintenance requests has, for a while, had two entries for my address. One where I've been putting jobs and a second one which I ignore.

But when I tried to contact them previously, nobody said "hey, don't contact this person, contact this person", or the previous agent didn't say to the new agent "hey, deal with this", therefore potentially uncovering the problem. No, the problem was only discovered now.

So my actual agent didn't know fuck all about the status of the job about my oven. After two weeks of me presuming that wheels were in motion. After a number of weeks of the same. So I've now not had a functional oven for a month and a half because my land agent can't pull their head out of their own ass.

*Le sigh*.

If the landlord decides to try and replace my giant oven instead of just spending the few hundred bucks on repairing it (especially if they try and replace it with a smaller, cheaper oven), then fuck everything.

Of course, at present, all I want to do is make things that go in the oven. Like bread and tuna mornay and cake and roast potatoes and suchlike.

So today rolled around. Like it does.

The supermarket have started pulling up some of the "stand here while ordering from the deli counter" stickers/tape/decals from the floor. I'm unsure how I feel about that.

I'm aiming for something approaching beef stew this week. I mean it's very much going to be "put beef and vegetables in a pot and cook until later" style of thing.

We did the shopping, had a completely useless checkout operator, and came back here.

From there we actually went out to Big W for the first time since... March? And we picked up Onward, the Disney Pixar movie that we should have gone to see in cinemas around the time of my birthday, before the end of the world. More on that later.

Then we took a trip to Spotlight, because Ma is kind of obsessed with knitting and/or crotchet right now. So she looked at wool again, I wandered aimlessly. And then we came back here, grabbed some lunch from the Village and sat down to watch Onward.

And that was that really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: hydro colours

Some more DnD colouring pages for today... this time the artwork is by Hydro74 (a very good year, obviously), colouring by me. I adore Hydro's work, the first time I remember seeing it was for the alt cover of the Xanathar's Guide to Everything book (and the only reason I don't have a copy with that cover is because I'm an idiot and didn't preorder) and it was love at first sight.

So I went with a 60's/70's psychedelic lich and a blue dragon (even though I think that's actually a red maybe given the frills and horns), because blue dragons. And also because blue dragons really don't seem to get all that much love. I can think of adventures where I've encountered (or run) gold, black, green, red, and white dragons... maybe also silver... but no blues. Weird.

Granted there is also a dearth of adventures set in the desert... plenty of mountains and snow, a lot of forest, some jungle, but almost no desert. And given that it appears the new hardcover (which always gets "leaked"... and if that's the case is it really a leak... and shouldn't they just get in front of that and announce it early?) is set in the snow and ice, no luck there either.

Anyway...

This week's DnD was... basically non-existent. Monday was so cancelled we didn't even do something else to fill in the space where DnD would normally be. Wednesday we had a late player cancellation, and a distinct lack of preparation time and desire to run something else. So I ended up just playing board games online with two of the players. Which was pleasant enough.

Friday night's game was... short. Frustratingly so. I understand when you say you want to finish the game by a certain time because of perfectly reasonable reasons. I understand why you have responsibilities you have to fulfil before you can start the game. But when you say at 7:30 that you're ten minutes away and then don't appear for just shy of an hour, that irks me. So instead of a two and a half hour game we only manage an hour and a half.

However, it's also intriguing to me that one of the other characters (and the player) is mystified by my character's reactions to them. I won't say that it's perfectly obvious, but there are a set of reasons, each one resulting from a choice his character made, which my character sees as black marks against them. Including one in Friday night's game. Which then led to a ridiculous conversation between his character and the other character about my character... and advice was given that will be a Very Bad Idea if it's acted upon.

And given that player, he's totally going to act on it.

I mean, all he has to do is ask my character what the problem is... but he won't.

We'll see what happens.

I made faux-nestrone soup this week (you know, fake minestrone), it was decent, but I just wasn't feeling it on Friday... which is fine. Otherwise... the weather was nicer this week (well, freezing cold at night, but sunny during the day) and I was able to have the door open, get some of that winter sun up in my life.

Until today when everything went to crap. Weather wise anyway.

Ma had her hair-did today (that's a thing that people did in the before-times, when you didn't have to flee from strangers)... so I was on my own with the shopping. Which was all good.

Did the shopping, came home, did the unpacking, poddled around til Ma arrived, and then because of shitful weather, we just hung out here. Did the YubTubs thing... also Ma had been looking through her cookbooks for an old family recipe and found a bunch of recipe books, some very old vintage handwritten ones, the oldest of which was from maybe the 30's... it could be earlier, I honestly have no idea. And one of those ones that were clearly originally typewritten books full of recipes gathered from various people (I know we had one that was collected from parents at my school and full of horrid 70's or 80's recipes)... sadly this one was lacking a cover, so we have no provenance for it... but given the names, it seemed like it came from some eastern European social group, again, probably the 70's... and wow.

Not a good wow. I did a good half an hour on the recipes, because either the people involved didn't understand how recipes work (one, titled Egg and Cheese pie, had a list of ingredients... egg was not listed... it only appeared suddenly in the middle of the method), and others didn't appear to understand food. It was hilarious yet horrifying.

That was that really.

Current mood:

photo saturday: colour tones

I've been sitting here staring at a blank page for the last 16 YouTube videos... And I just had some handmade toast. I mean technically all toast is handmade, kinda... you don't buy toast at the supermarket. But this was toast made with the first loaf of bread I've made since, like, Easter.

Yeah, this is what happens when I sit and stare at a blank page... you get babble.

Anyway...

I made a fuckton of chilli this week. It was pretty damn good, I grated a bunch of vegetables and added those in, which added some veggy goodness without changing the texture of the chilli. There was a lot of it though.

This week's DnD was in the Monday, Wednesday, Friday groove... with Friday actually being boardgames instead. The only real difference to any of the games other than that was the fact that one of my former Monday boys, the previously mentioned Canadia, joined the Wednesday crowd. I think he had fun, or at least I hope so. We'll see if he actually shows up again this coming Wednesday.

Friday was supposed to be our first game back in-person since the world caught fire, but at the last minute, as in the morning of, there was a change of plans and we decided to go back to online, and then we didn't end up actually playing DnD. So technically it all worked out I guess.

It was certainly better than going to actual effort and us not playing. I say "actual effort", but as the top of this post indicates, I had already made bread at that point. I risked opening my busted ass oven door in order to make bread for a game that didn't happen. And it nearly didn't close again. Of course it didn't close after I'd opened it to get the tray out, close it after getting the tray out, opened it to put the bread in and then was closing it with the oven at temperature and the bread in situ. Grrrr.

I mean I managed it, but yeah, that's it... not touching the door til they come and fix it properly. And if I don't hear from them about it about midway through this week, I'll send them yet another email. Like how hard is it to keep someone informed about a maintenance request? I mean, that's part of your job, right? Urgh.

Anyway... massive distraction while I messed around with Photoshop for a not insignificant amount of time.

But that brings us to today... which was... not much of anything honestly.

We did the supermarket thing... I'm making "random soup with chorizo and tomato" this week... I'll make it up as I go I guess. More so than usual I mean.

Then it was back here, the usual stuff... Ma wanted to go to Spotlight, I needed to go to Officeworks, so we did that. We didn't linger in either place honestly.

On the way back we decided to go grab some pizza, then came back to my place to eat.

And that was it really.

Current mood: