047: New Notebook! Woo!
Short one this week: I’ve got movers scheduled for the 15th, so a lot of time now is packing even harder, running car loads an hour away to the New House, and messing around with DIY fixes/discovering new shit I need to get the contractors to fix.
(I’ve been defeated most recently by the outlets, the one bit of electrical work I taught myself to do at my first house. These ones are all crammed into smaller boxes, and half the time they’re somehow half-sealed behind the drywall like futzing Fortunado, him of the thousand injuries to the Montressors.)
But on the other hand:
Things are coming along nicely in terms of the overall rehab. I wish they were going for less money, but…it’ll be a good home, I think.
New Notebook! New Notebook!
Tail end of last year, so close to this year it might as well have been, I started just keeping a physical notebook on me for jotting down…yes…notes. It started as part of my cooking work, since being on your phone all the time was frowned upon, even if it was note-taking or math-doing, but also…I dunno. In the same way that I write creative stuff longhand and then type it up later, I just like working analog for the first draft/initial ideas.
Anyway: celebrate with me the joy of having filled one notebook to the brim and needing to start another.
The cheap little leather holder lets me keep two pens and some emergency labels with the book, but also keeps it juuuuuust protected enough from the field of dishevelment that surrounds me.
Toys In Under the Wire
Me being me, even in the midst of packing, I managed to slap together/finish some customs, a redirection of nervous energy that almost certainly doesn’t indicate undiagnosed ADHD.
A greenshirt/OG-13 style version of GI Joe Classified Shooter was something I wanted to do for a while, and…found out that Jim Shooter, the character’s namesake, died the same week. Quite literally finished her one night, woke up the next day to see the news. My fault? My therapist would tell me no.
Anyway.
Shooter is entirely a kitbash. Shoes, holster, belt, gloves, head, and guns of the Night Force Shooter that was released a year or two ago, the body from the Action Sniper figure, and the hat and scarf from Classified Stalker v.1 for a little extra visual pizazz. Pretty happy with this one, outside of possibly concluding the complicated legacy of Jim Shooter by making it.
Turtles of Greyskull was one of my favorite lines of the last year, a pitch perfect mash-up of Masters of the Universe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that really highlighted how versatile those MotU Origins bucks are.
Doing mutant hooligans Rocksteady and Bebop as Two-Bad was great, but I wanted them as their own guys. And so!
Bebop is the Bebop Arm, head, and vest from 2-Bopsteady, a MotWWEU John Cena arm and torso, and the lower body of Netflix He-Man; I can’t quite remember if that’s his belt or nah, though.
Rocksteady was a lot harder, somehow, taking a lot of fine-tuning to get right with the materials on hand. But he’s a head and arm from 2-Bopsteady, an arm from Cartoon Collection Stratos, torso from WWE Superstars Bray Wyatt with a painted neck, bandolier from ToG Leonardo, pants from WWE Superstars Mr. T (having used most of Mr. T and Leonardo for a Mr. TMNT figure for my friend Chris), and boots from WWE Superstars Ted DiBiase. Whew!
Still need to find them weapons, obvs. But this was another project that came out super clean, especially considering the circumstances.
Dungeon Master!? Me!!?
For the first time since…2011? 2012? I’m running a TTRPG game. Three of my friends enthusiastically agreed to let me run a game of the new Daggerheart system, and we did our session 0; character generation, VTT troubleshooting, and a little tutorial combat. Roll20 did not run very well for us AT ALL, and I’m not enthused about how adding maps and tokens is going to go on that one.
For my own failings: many! Shaky grasp of the rules, I feel like I railroad with NPCs sometimes, or forget to weave narrative through combat outside of describing combat actions.
But the party themselves are fun; everyone’s new to the system (it being a new system), but everyone showed up to play and had really fun character concepts.
Next up will be an adaptation of an adventure from Roll and Play Press’ One-Shot Wonders, possibly the first time since Resident Evil 2: The Board Game I’ve used one of the eight million and five tabletop game Kickstarters I’ve backed.
Fun stuff! Fun system, too! Ideally, I’ll keep running one-shots in either the same system, or work my way through the various books I own (Orbital Blues seems like a lot of fun).
Writing? Video Games?
Yeah, no, those are happening too. The writing, less than I’d like (good stuff when it happens, though), but I’m about 28 hours into Death Stranding 2 and maybe halfway through Chapter 3? Gonna be chewing over that game for the rest of the year, I’m sure.
(And the irony that I’ve been relaxing after doing hour-each-way moving hauls by playing, uh, Death Stranding is not lost on me.)