Rebuilding another collection

Inmy younger days, I was an avid comic book reader. I had a subscription to Marvel, as well as a comicbook called Trumf. Not affiliated with the orange terror who will destroy the world.

Anyway, when I got married I made the unforgivable mistake of throwing those things out. Can you imagine my horror all these years later. However, since I am not longer a poor student, I have been rebuilding over the past three years or so.

I am no longer a Marvel fan, so I don’t purchase any of those comics. I am a big fan of the French and Belgian comic books like Asterix and Blueberry. My asterix collection is now complete, although I should probably replace the more worn out ones. Therefore, I have turned my attention towards Blueberry.

These comics are works of pure art. Coincidentially, they were one of the reasons why, as a kid, got so into the american history and culture, which later brought me there as a graduate student.

My local book pusher sells these collections of three comics, making it super easy to collection the entire series. They didn’t have the first set, but it turns out that the second one contains my absolute favorite comic, so who can complain.

Walking

I have been sick more or less since late October. This means that I haven’t been able to run like I wanted to, but I have had the ability to go for some nice walks around where I live.

Climate change has meant that we don’t get the same winters around here, like we used to. This means that whenever we do get snow, I have to go for a long walk and enjoy what could be the last snow I will ever experience.

Yesterday we got some snow. Not a lot, but enough to merit a nice walk. I took some photos to preserve the memory.

Wassup with 2025?

So, it is that time of year. Or maybe not anymore since we have passed New year’s Eve, but I can still ramble a little bit about what I hope to do this year.

In terms of D&D I don’t think there’s a lot to look forward to. WotC does not seem to be ready to release something awesome, so I guess they won’t be a candidate for my hard earned cash. I would rather spend it on fan based work such as some of all the great Greyhawk stuff being published at the moment.

As for novels, I have no idea what is coming. Most likely nothing at all. I will probably start reading some Warhammer 40K. Right now, I have Eisenhorn in my shoppingcart, so hopefully that will be a good read.

I hope to start DMing a bit this year. I am working on a Baltron’s Beacon conversion as well as a Dragonlance campaign that might be ready in 2045.

Anyway, short but pointless post, but at least I wrote something.

2024 according to Goodreads

I feel like I have cheated since there are some comic books on the list. However, the Cleric Quintet counts as one book even though it is five, so I do feel a little vindicated.

Getting my writing on

A couple of weeks ago, I dropped off the face of the social media earth. I finally kicked the habit of endless doom scrolling, which killed my ability to think fairly straight.

A benefit has been that I have started writing my Fistandantilus campaign again. So far, I have covered Skullcap and I have started on Ulgaard. Hopefully, I will be able to run this in my gaming group at one point in a not too distant future.

I am giving a slight 5E flavor, not beacuse Wizards of the Coast are worth supporting, but simply because it is the system we use in our group. If I end up putting it online, I will probably remove any 5E references so people can use whatever system they like.

More from the machine god

I use the free version of ChatGPT, so I get a limited amount of queries, which prevents me from making the desired changes to my images. I am not super happy with the results here, but as I get better at prompting I hope to make them more to my liking.

Does this make me an artist? By no stretch of the imagination! I have zero talent, I just know how to query an application. In a way, it’s pretty sad.

AI generated pictures

I was messing around with ChatGPT because I needed som epictures for a moduæe I am writing. Instead of stealing the usual art works from internet, I figured I would see what AI could do for me.

Now, I use the free version, so I don’t get a lot quesries, but I think if I could ask the AI to make specific changes, such as skin color, facial hair etc it could generate some pretty good content.

Here are the images the AI generated. I think they are ok, but I would have liked to be able to modify them quite a bit, so they would better represent the intenden charaters.

Christmas Jazz

Because the this will be the last Christmas before the apocalypse, we will start a little early.