Jarric

Couldn't get inspired yesterday, and I couldn't get my head around the form of knots. I did a couple of pages of scribbles of knots that didn't work, but nothing came of them. It occurs to me now that I should maybe have done some shapes that appear to work but don't (I cannot recall the word for what I'm trying to describe here). Today felt a bit better. No clever play on the prompt, just a raven:

I was just being a bit obscure . It's the four suits from a tarot deck - swords, wands, cups, and pentacles. And thank you! Love the vessel in a vessel; great choice! That's a nice tribute. I couldn't figure out what the hell to do yesterday, and I looked at knots as a unit of speed but couldn't find a way to make it work. I love the creativity. I initially read the first sentence as "A group of cows? A murder", and wondered what on earth cows were murdering

Well it's definitely not the former... I think it should be fine - the world championships were 3 days back to back and I survived that. I'm definitely stronger than I was then, though I'm a bit worried that I'm not as fit. My main concern is that I've never run a Spartan race before, so even though I've run a lot of OCRs there's a bit of fear of the unknown there.

Ok, I've been posting, but I've not really done a proper update in a few days. The end of the week was pretty busy, just getting through our month end. I'm cautiously optimistic that things will calm down for the next week or two (fingers crossed at least). It was also a busy week out of work. I had a snooker match on Wednesday night, a Pathfinder game on Thursday night (our Rise of the Runelords campaign), and went to Hopalong's for a barbeque on Friday night. Friday was great night, it was really good to go to a proper social gathering and see people for a change. I had a few beers, and a few cigarettes. In fact, in hindsight it was quite a boozy week too, given that all three of those events were drinking ones on some level. Yesterday I had a lie in, which was well welcomed after a week of busy work, late nights, and alcohol. We lounged around the house a bit, went out in the rain to go clothes shopping, and then did some additional lounging at home. I'm also starting to mentally prepare for next weekend at the moment. On Saturday I'll be running my first ever Spartan race. On Sunday I'll be running my second Spartan race. And my third Spartan race. It's starting to feel a little daunting! Update counter: 19/28 (3/7, 6/7, 4/7, 6/7)

Day three - vessel. Looking on Instagram, I feel like a few people went for a similar take on this:

Yeah, it's really hard to get a good group without scheduling issues, particularly when you start messing with multiple timezones. You'll find one in the end I'm sure.

A bit happier with this one, with a slightly obscure take on the prompt.

It's a Faber-Castell 0.5mm artist pen. You can get a bit of variation in thickness by different pressure, but not much. I've got some smaller ones, I just should have either used them or made the whole picture bigger. This is cool! Crystal shading is confusing at best. This is inspired!

Not super happy with this, but I didn't have much time today and I wanted to have something to show for day 1. Crystal: Think I need a thinner pen for drawing things this small - something to bear in mind for next time.

I love this, so cool! I want to meet this little fella!

I really need to play that - too many games and not enough time! Greek mythology has some of the best stories too. Yeah, that's true, it's nice to have a bit of pressure on combat, without it just being save or die spells thrown at you.

If anyone is thinking of doing Inktober this year, or just wants to do a little bit of drawing, we have a group for that:

With Inktober starting tomorrow, I thought it would be a nice idea to put together a group where people can share their drawings and discuss ideas. For those of you who don't know what Inktober is, it's pretty simple. Here's the description stolen directly from the Inktober website: 1) Make a drawing in ink (you can do a pencil under-drawing if you want). 2) Post it* 3) Hashtag it with #inktober and #inktober2021 4) Repeat Note: you can do it daily, or go the half-marathon route and post every other day, or just do the 5K and post once a week. What ever you decide, just be consistent with it. Inktober is about growing and improving and forming positive habits, so the more you’re consistent the better. That's it! Now go make something beautiful. Inktober provide a list of drawing prompts for the month, which look a bit like this: There are also a load of alternative prompt lists online, so if you'd rather do one of those, go for it! The point is to get people drawing regularly, so please do join us and post your creations.

I love that - I'm definitely stealing that phrase.

She's really good! I think the head is ok, it's just that the head size and how high it is give a impression that she's leaning forwards. For the elbows I think it's the angle - where they are her forearms would have to be running along her back parallel to the floor. It might look more natural with the elbows in the same place but with a more open angle, as though her hands were clasped behind her back? Does that make sense? This: 〈 instead of this: < No no, this is an excellent idea This is soo good! I love it!

Disagree - I'm quite happy for my steak to still be mooing. I also like steak tartare, which is actually raw.

The one that upsets me at the moment is chocolate/snack bars with the word 'protein' stamped on the front of them. When you look at the ingredients, you find their either 10% protein and, 50% sugar, 40% other, or 10% protein, 50% saturated fat, 40% other. If protein is not the predominant macro, it's not a protein bar, is it? Also the practice of saying something has '20% less fat' because it's been made 20% smaller - that just takes the mick.

Yesterday was a good day. I lounged about a bit first thing reading about slavery in Ancient Greece, and then reading about the role of women in Ancient Greece, but of which were fascinating articles. Eventually I got up and went for my run, and just about had time to squeeze in 3 miles before getting ready for work. Work was busy - something that's set to continue until we get past the end of the month. In the evening we reheated a Bolognese we'd frozen a couple of months ago, and headed out to D&D - our Pathfinder 2e game. We had a new guy joining us, and he slotted right in to the group really well. We're starting to get a bit of a party dynamic going between the characters as well which is nice to see, and it turned out to be a really fun session. Feeling very squishy as level 1 characters though, even a few kobolds are a serious threat right now. Update counter: 16/24 (3/7, 6/7, 4/7, 3/3)

Thanks man! Well about a week ago a couple of petrol stations in the UK ran out of fuel because there aren't enough lorry drivers for fuel to be distributed. That's thanks to us sending all of the foreign lorry drivers home after Brexit, because as a nation we have made some exceptionally stupid decisions in the last few years. Then the press reported that there were fuel shortages. Then a government minister spoke to the media saying that everything was fine, and that there was "no need for any panic buying". So of course that put the idea in millions of people's heads that they did need to panic buy, and now rather than shortages at a couple of petrol stations it's a nationwide problem. And even for those of us who don't immediately need fuel, traffic is at a standstill as people queue at petrol stations. Hope the grogginess clears up soon!

That sounds horrifying I can't really put my finger on why though - I add butter to everything else.

I am fully of the opinion that cereal companies put down the serving sizes for very young children - I always weigh out 2-3 servings in order to have a half decent breakfast. I suppose the other possibility is that you're supposed to have a bowl of cereal, and a yoghurt, and a piece of fruit, in order to achieve an entire breakfast. Yasha beat me to it, but I was going to say were those sugar free tic tacs? They're not allowed to call them that here - we're slightly tighter on how food companies can lie to people here (though it's still pretty bad here too).

I think the general wisdom of oiling a steak is that you use the least amount of oil, because you've only got the little bit that clings to the meat and not a load extra in a pan. That's how I'd usually cook steak. The benefit of putting oil in a pan in general is that you can get the oil nice and hot before adding what you're cooking. That's good for quite a lot of veg, because veg tends to be more absorbent and will take on the flavour of oil if left to sit in cold oil. Meat doesn't absorb oil as much, so you don't want the outside to be covered in tons of the stuff. There night be more to it, I've not looked into the argument in any detail.

Yesterday was a good day. I did not want to wake up in the morning, and when I did I was seriously groggy. Still, I went into Crossfit, and hit a set of 5 deadlifts at 140kg (~308#), only slightly below my recent 5RM of 145kg (~219#). That was followed by a 7-minute AMRAP of 3 chest to bar pullups, 3 hang power cleans at 50kg, and 3 front squats at 50kg. Work was very busy and more than a little stressful. In the evening we went to Tesco. I was expecting to have a nightmare getting there as our local Tesco has a petrol station, and people are panic buying petrol like it's going out of fashion. Fortunately I was able to slip past the petrol queue fairly quickly, and the actual supermarket car park was dead. I guess that everyone else was avoiding going because of the fuel queue, so actually we had a really relaxed shopping experience. When we got home WW cooked some very lovely Bombay cauliflower with chickpeas and rice, we ate late, and went to bed fairly early. Update counter: 15/23 (3/7, 6/7, 4/7, 2/2)

It's nice being in a position to hold the knowledge that others want

Have I not updated since Friday? Bugger. I think I might know why - Friday was a busy day at work, and as soon as work finished I bought Diablo II: Resurrected. I played the hell out of Diablo II when it first came out (pun intended). I remember having friends round and we'd play co-op over LAN - remember LAN? Remember having computers physically wired together, with no internet connection? Or we'd play with one person controlling the character and the other just hitting the potions. Or I'd play on my own, late into the night. It was a good game. Anyway, so now they've re-released it with new graphics and I can see it becoming a very welcome time sink. When I'm not playing Northgard, which is also very good. I did a few other things this weekend in between playing Diablo. On Saturday I went climbing first thing, did some D&D prep, and in the evening I went out for a few drinks with The Captain. I haven't seen him in a good long while, and we went back to a load of our old haunts we haven't been to in years, so that was a lot of fun. On Sunday morning I was feeling a little worse for wear, but still went climbing again. I don't often climb twice in one weekend, and the second session was really tough, but I think that's more to do with the waves of nausea than the amount of climbing. In the afternoon we had Ranger D&D. It felt so good to back after a few months off, and to listen to the players theorise about what the hell is going on and whether they should do anything about it. I love hearing players theories, somehow they always seem to find the right thread and then follow it in totally the wrong direction - it's very pleasing. Update counter: 14/22 (3/7, 6/7, 4/7, 1/1)