Steen's home of the certainly strange
Doc and I have been playing Massive Darkness over the holidays.
And there was a kitty to help me play the game!
She really liked the sounds the dice made.
We’re trying to finalize our house rules that we think we want, and have been doing some play testing, etc. We’ll see how it goes!
At long last, I’ve been able to combine the two great passions of my life: climbing and Morrowind! Frankly, I’m surprised it took me this long.
Anywhoo, I do like mountaineering and climbing IRL, and I’ve always been super impressed at the fitness level of my Morrowind character. Like, it is difficult to even *walk* up one mountain in a day, and yet she jumps up multiple mountains almost every day. That is ridiculous. So I like to imagine that she would be super buff, woody, and fit from jumping up mountains all the time. Her jumping muscles would be especially well developed!
I like to think that Turedus Talanian is amazed and perhaps somewhat envious of Steen’s amazing muscles, whilst Master Aryon is just completely unperturbed by the whole thing. Partly because I imagine it would take a lot to ruffle his feathers, but also partly because Aryon sees Steen all the time so it is old hat for him.
I also thought it would be a good sub-joke if Steen got so huge that she couldn’t fit into her old pants anymore, so she would start walking around wearing… essentially a leotard I guess. But I’m not sure if that part of the joke really reads well here, hence why I decided to spell it out.
At long last, I have finished knitting the Pac Man Peysa!
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!
As you might recall, I told Doc that I would knit a sweater for him if he designed one. While the sweaters I had been knitting for myself were more traditional-looking Icelandic sweaters (lopapeysa), Doc of course designed a Pac-Man Peysa! He used http://knittingpatterns.is/ to do it, which is a super fun tool for designing Icelandic sweaters (although it is ancient and runs on Microsoft Silverlight)
Of course, the pattern had a lot of difficulties in it, since it was designed by somebody who had never knitted before (that is to say, Doc). I didn’t think about that, but it really made a difference to how things worked out. After I complained, Doc would make modifications based on my feedback and it would be much easier to implement.
I had initially thought that it was important to be super faithful to Doc’s design; but when I would bring up a part of the pattern that was not ideal for knitting, it would turn out that he didn’t even particularly want it that way – he just designed it like that because he didn’t know it would make it more difficult. So the pattern went through many many changes, and the final pattern is something we collaborated on.
It was still difficult in many ways, like having all the different color ghosts (instead of one color of ghost which would have been much easier), but that is something we weren’t willing to compromise. That’s almost the whole point of the sweater! And I’d say it was worth it.
If you want to download the pattern we generated from knittingpattern.is, it is here:
Note that the pattern doesn’t indicate the accurate number of stitches in the sleeve pattern, because it doesn’t show the increases. However the instructions do accurately say to increase every 6 rows. Use your judgement, and don’t do an increase in the middle of Pac-Man’s face or something, that sort of thing, and it will still work out fine.
Here’s some more photos of Doc wearing it:
And here are some of the in-progress photos to reminisce over:
