Dark Liquid

Well, I upgraded WordPress to the newly release 2.5 edition and so far I’m fairly impressed. It seems quite nice. However the widget system in it is sucky. Things like recent comments cause validation errors when no comments exist, etc, etc and I generally had to go around a bunch of things to fix it so things would validate. Of course, nothing is making me make everything validate, it’s just me being anal. But standards are standards, they are a ‘Good Thing™’ and if I don’t hold myself to them, no-one else will. It annoys me that wordpress  occasionally insists that I need a target=”_blank” on my links. Not valid markup and unwanted. I use rel=”external” and some javascript trickery to do the same thing without compromising the validity of the markup.

Now, apart from ranting about wordpress, I have done other things over this last week. Mostly just chilling out and not actually doing much, but on Thursday we decorated the living room. We got our friends over, drove around a bit for supplies and painted the whole room in a colour proclaiming to be ‘Soft Coffee’. What we actually wanted was Vellum, but at £22.98 per 2.5l, we opted for Soft Coffee which was more or less the same but at half the price for twice the amount. Once we got it on the wall and it dried, it turned out slightly browner than expected (the Vellum was, funnily enough, a vellum-esque colour, the yellow of faded parchment, something we specifically wanted for reason that will become apparent) but it was okay and given a few days to get used to it, I think it will work just fine for the purposes we have in mind.

The plan for decorating the living is thus:

1. Paint the colour of faded paper
2. Find a cool piece of text we’d like on our walls
3. Translate it to elvish
4. Write it using a cursive Tengwar-alphabet font
5. Make stencils
6. Paint writing on the wall as a kind of border
7. Stand back and admire our geekiness

For painting the letters, we got a paint of a colour going by the name of Dragon’s Blood, which is quite apt given its dark arterial hue. Lostprocess found a nice Gaelic house blessing and proceeded to translate it to elvish. Take note though, that none of us actually know elvish, and so it was done using a combination of various elvish grammar guides and dictionaries and is probably wrong. I’m sure some elvish guru will come along some time, read our walls and burst out laughing as he tells us we have ‘We juggle fish in a cloud with lesbian marmosets’ written on our wall. Oh well. For writing out the elvish we used the Tengwar reference at OmniGlot, we decided to use the Quenyan mode rather than Sindarian. There was probably a reason but I forget it now. After finding a very nice Tengwar font Lostprocess and I sat down to write it out (well, he did most of the work, I ‘supervised’) and after a good few hours we had a beautiful looking Gaelic to English to Elvish written in Tengwar blessing. Hopefully we’ll get it up on the walls today and it will look as awesome as I imagine it in my head.

Friday was spent in bed with Dru for the most part. We slept for most of the day, fooled around for the other bits and generally relaxed.

Saturday was a bit of a waste of time. We all got up early to head to Southampton with the intention being to wander around all day looking at what we imagined would be numerous alternative shops full of anime, manga, comics, sci-fi and fantasy paraphernalia, roleplaying books and equipment and anything else of interest. What ended up happening was I bought 3 pairs of jeans at M&S (which  we have here in Poole), finding Forbidden Planet had moved and that the Hidden Fortress has shutdown, hunting for Forbidden Planet, finally finding it and spending tons of time being bored in there because it was quite disappointing. I’m not really into manga or comics since they last so little time for me. I read and absorb visual information at a tremendous rate and so I consume a comic or manga in about 5-10 minutes which isn’t something I really wish to pay for. I’m also not interested in figurines or models particularly and their range of anime was quite poor. Most of the interesting stuff I either already had or they only had the last volume of. And they roleplay section, while larger than the depressingly small sections in any of my local stores, was pretty sparse. Generally, the day was a resounding ‘meh!’ and I think everyone felt a bit grumpy by the end of it. The only ‘good’ thing about the day was that I found out that I’m now a 36 inch waist which makes finding jeans long enough for me much easier.

Once we got home, we started genning up some level 20 D&D characters. Lostprocess has bought a Gargantuan Blue Dragon miniature at Forbidden Planet and thought it would be fun to do a one-shot battle/hunt for the dragon. We’ve never played a game where are characters have levelled past 10 nor have we played a game where we were up against an extremely tough opponent. We’ve always played games with ‘balanced’ encounters, while this one, even at level twenty, will be very tough with the dragon being at an encounter level almost 5 above our party level. However, with careful planning and tactics we should be able to pull it off, or at least have an enjoyable game trying. I’m genning up a level 20 human ranger specced for archery and dragon-slaying (naturally). We rarely use battle mats in our normal games, but Lost is wanting to change that because trying to deal with positions of people in our heads or with scribbles on paper isn’t very effective. This battle serves as a kind of test run.