Trips away, trips future, gaming ?

I did the traveling thing last weekend.

Good to see the mum and sister and one of the Double D boys again. Thoroughly enjoyed that bit of the weekend.

Me bringing the bluray up and us watching a couple of films on the Saturday is becoming a tradition too. This weekend it was Star Wars The Last Jedi and the first Fantastic Beasts film. I'm fearing for Star Wars now ... I still enjoy watching The Last Jedi, mostly due to watching Rey's emergence and definitely for the fun character which is Rose. But it really feels like they are scraping the bottom of a creativity barrel in Star Wars now. Solo was a mixed bag of good and contrived bad and Last Jedi was going down the Alien Covenant / Prometheus path in what it was doing to the established This Is Star Wars stuff.

On the other hand, I thought Fantastic Beasts was an amazing film on first watching and that feeling continued through to the second watching. It has a delightful humour running through the film, Eddie Redmayne's performance is inspired and it has a nice little mystery plot waiting to burst out as soon as the introductions are done. The sequel should be fantastic.

I did, of course, pick up loot.

The marshmallows are lush, the brownie was gorgeous and the Creme Egg (yes that is an Easter Egg) is cursed in that it is still in my mum's fridge.

I am regretting my life choices though. I left this in the shop :

And the shop is now 200 miles away.

A good trip. I'm looking forward to downtime next weekend though, ahead of a switch in what job I'm doing which will see me immediately have a couple of days out of the office next week.

Yes. They are letting me out of the office again ....

But that's work and it isn't marshmallows.

They are definitely tasty. And too good to scoff down in one session. I have a couple at a time, savour them and then the remainder go into that tin with a fairly well sealable lid to keep them fresh.

Oh ... trips future also includes me being highly likely to head up to Chester for a meet up of the Roll4it crew. I already avidly follow what they're up to, especially Maggie Krohn, FuzzyFreaks and Enter Elysium (links over on the right hand column !). They've brought a good bunch of people together who make very watchable content and it'd be good to say hi. And then maybe visit something touristy around the Chester area the next day.

Indeed one phrase I never thought I'd hear myself say again is "AWESOME Love you Maggie" (some readers will know why !) yet that is one phrase that came out today. I like doing those photo edits for people and other assorted doodle level of thing. I don't have much talent as an artist but I do like making ideas come to fruition through photo editing. It's awesome when the creations get a happy reaction from the people they're intended for. That makes it so much more worth it making the Thing.

Here are a couple of the latest :

The credit has to go to the original artists as all I did was do a couple of recolours on the Mag Gran on the left and I gave the one on the right a wink.

Yet these did not just get a "That's great Sleepy, love it !", the Mag Gran is now one of her chosen emotes and the Mag Wink became the icon for her Discord server for about 5 minutes (the icon is now a festive UFO).

Seeing the creations actually put to use makes me very happy.

I was going to talk about gaming too .... Maybe another day because there's a lot in that list. It's the first day of another Steam sale and I already have a couple of games in the basket :

Bomber Crew - a cartoonish simulator of a WW2 bomber and its crew. (link to Enter Elysium playlist)
Glass Masquerade - a glass mosaic puzzle game which looked amazing when Katherine Of Sky (link to playlist) showed it off.

And then there's Skyrim .... which I might acquire on Special Edition for £15. I'm also considering resetting my Elite pilot again back to zero. That's the pattern I had way back in the original Elite, where I'd get to Dangerous or Deadly, get bored and start again. I find it more fun to build up and consistently change things than to grind through doing exactly the same routines.

There is that thing though with the games where sometimes, the game is more fun to watch someone else play than it is to play it yourself. Games like Blood Bowl, which is on the wishlist ...

More about the gaming soon ! And the Lego. I owe you a couple of Lego posts, I still have the Ladies of NASA kits to build and then there's Star Wars Advent approaching ....

Cya soon.