Etsy Spotlight: TheWindFish

I've been doing it again.  Yes, that.  Browsing Etsy when I should be doing other things.

But really, it's not my fault.  It keeps suggesting fabulous video game related items, and I keep favoriting them!

I love simple expressions of fan love, and when I found the little shop called TheWindFish, it was just so whimsical and charming that I couldn't help but browse all the things.

The shop is owned by Janelle, and she is simply amazing!  Her simplistic jewelry designs are very cute, affordable, and make the fangirl in me squee just a little bit.

In particular:

The Lord of the Rings, available here.

She makes a set of four with the entire poem.

From Dragon Age: Origins, available here.

Alistair's saying to his love interest.

If you remember my previous post about video game relationships, then you know that Alistair has a special place in my fangirl heart.  But not so much as the calibration-loving turian who said this to my FemShep in Mass Effect:

So guess which one I bought?

This Garrus Vakarian-inspired bracelet is available here.

I love everything about this bracelet, but the thin cord for the band just wasn't going to survive the harsh use I put my jewelry through.

Luckily for me, the Harry Potter Knitting and Crochet House Cup offered a non-Ravelry craft option for the Defense Against the Dark Arts homework: craft something that has a final hardening step.

So, I replaced the band of the bracelet with hemp, and super-glued the knots to make them solid.

Professors, I received a charming bracelet in the mail, but I looked at the cheap Muggle band to which the focal bead was attached and knew I could use a fortify spell to turn the simple blue string into three-ply hemp. Additionally, I applied some of Mendigann’s Magical Glue to the frayed knots in order to set them into shape and harden them against continual usage. Thank you for your time!

My turn in photo:

I'm especially proud of my 'best defense' saying, which is totally accurate.

I doubt this will be the last time I make a band for this charm, but I like my first attempt!

Although TheWindFish is on a short hiatus at the moment, be sure to check out Janelle's store for many gamer, nerd, and/or custom designs!

Craft on!

Dragon Age Diaries: The Templar

Justinian 30, 9:30 Dragon

Maker, I hope Duncan knows what he's doing.  He promised to return today or tomorrow, and if you ask me, it can't be too soon.  Only three new recruits seems a small number, and the wardens may not even see that many through the Joining.  More importantly, our warden-commander should be here, especially since King Cailan seems eager to battle.  I hope he continues to wait for Duncan.  The inactivity is making him seem rash.

There's plenty of work, though.  Regular patrols to keep the darkspawn pushed back from Ostagar as the armies continue to ready and assemble.  Just today I went out with Brynk and Ash, just to the edge of the wilds.  Scouting business, and all.  One of the other wardens claims he saw a woman when he was checking the swamp the other day.  Of course some of the more experienced wardens called him crazy.  I don't know.  The witches of the wilds is a tale I'd be willing to believe.  The Circle certainly believes the stories.

Ser Jory keeps approaching the wardens.  He's worried about the Joining, and has no one to allay his fear.  The other gray wardens have taken to ignoring him, and Daveth has grown impatient.  I suppose I do feel sorry for Ser Jory; it is easier to stomach the duties of a warden when there is no close family.

Daveth keeps to himself.  He has a small, needle-like dagger he takes to spinning around in his fingers.  Duncan told me that he'd caught him pick-pocketing in Denerim.  Another use of the right of conscription.  Never trust a cutpurse, if you ask me.  But for all that, though, his views on the Blight are firm, and he wishes to fight.

Best not to speak of the recruits, though.  The Joining will determine who will be a gray warden...and who will not.

Ah...here comes the Reverend Mother, with a particularly determined look in her eye.  I wonder what new menial task she has devised to twist the knife.  She can't get over how Duncan got me out of Chantry service just in time, but far be it from me to tell her that these past six months have been some of the best I've ever known.

And there's the sound of the scouts' horns--that must be Duncan.  Best finish this task quickly; if I know Duncan, he'll direct whatever new recruit he's dug up to me.  First impressions, I suppose.

...which apparently shouldn't include a shouting match with a mage.  Apologies aside, I can't say I'm entirely impressed with Duncan's choice.  I'm not sure which is rarer--that the recruit is a dwarf, or that she's female.  Not many women choose to be a gray warden, it seems.  We tend to be seen as a brotherhood, almost.

Her name is Lay-lin...Laylynn?  I should have asked how to spell it.  There's a couple of rusty swords strapped to her back, so either a warrior or a rogue, most likely.  I haven't met many dwarves in my lifetime; only a couple ever came to Redcliffe when I was a boy, and none bothered with the Chantry.  Their beliefs are different; they revere the Stone as their creator or deity.

There aren't even any stories or rumors about dwarves that I know of.  I'd guess them to be blunt and surly at times, but not this one.  Rather, she's startled.  All the time.

Of course, I imagine I had the same wild look in my eyes when I first came here, too.  It was only to be expected, though, coming from the Chantry.  Being trained to chop a possessed mage's head off while praying to Andraste is a far cry from guiding recruits through the wilds in search of darkspawn.

But enough of that. We've gathered Ser Jory and Daveth, and now all we need is some darkspawn blood.  Let the junior warden responsibilities begin.

P.S.  Laillyn.  I had it mostly right.

Dragon Age Diaries: The Hero

Day 30, Month of the Kingsway

I had put this off as long as possible.  I didn't wish to return to Orzammar at all, but the Gray Warden treaties I hold in trust require that we ask for aid from all peoples.  Alistair has said that all must honor their place in these treaties, and I've taken him at his word.

But what good have any of the dwarves dwelling in Orzammar ever done me?

However, my business with the Dalish elves concluded far sooner than I had liked--at least they were polite to outsiders, if initially mistrustful.  And given the choice between paying Flemeth a visit at Morrigan's behest or going back to the mountains, too much needed to be done in Orzammar for me to keep ignoring it.

Even the bounty hunter and his hired band were a welcome distraction from the gate that loomed in the distance, but that fight was not lengthy.

If Wynne or Alistair noticed a change in my behavior, neither said anything.  Charl gave my face an extra lick, his short tail wagging as we searched the bodies of the bandits.  I found no bones for him this time, but it didn't deter him from sniffing around.

With my mabari at my side, and my two human companions trailing behind, we approached the gates.  It took all of three seconds for the gatekeeper to say the words.

"Filthy brand."

I'm sure I winced; my face tightened like I did, but I had the Gray Warden treaties, and I had eyes on me.  I didn't rise to the bait.  The human there on behalf of Loghain took issue with me, regardless.  But even if the gatekeeper had no respect for my person, he did have respect for the seal on those aged documents.

I kept my anger sheathed.  I have my own thoughts about Loghain, but in front of a dwarf was no place to voice them.  Especially a dwarf mired in politics of his own.

You would have thought that the blood still drying on my armor would have warned Imrek not to trifle with me or my party.  I was wrong.  He died quickly.

Entering the Commons was familiar, yet still strange.  The weight of the earth so close over my head should have comforted me, for I had missed it.  And yet...

I felt a burning sensation on my face--I had all but forgotten about my brand.  Maybe I'd had a false sense of security all along, but now I felt it was a blazing beacon, standing out to all my kind.  A heavy, unpleasant feeling seemed to creep beneath my armor, clinging to me.  There were going to be looks.  Challenges.  Slurs and curses.

The friends with me would see them and hear them.  Nothing I could do would stop that, but oh, I wanted to stop it.  I should have stayed at the camp, polishing armor, or practicing with my blades.  Part of me knew that this task would have been easier if I had made Alistair the warden in charge, but traditional dwarves are naturally suspicious of outsiders.

They fear the outside influence upon their precious caste system.  Because everybody knows that the fortune or misfortune of your birth holds value.  And because I am a female born of another casteless female, I was never allowed to choose a different fate for myself.  Work on my back, work for Beraht, or starve.  I had thought those were my choices.

But Duncan gave me a different choice.

I was handed a chalice with a delayed death sentence inside.  And still I drank deep.

The wardens don't tell you much about the Joining.  I know why, now.

Death tastes bitter, for those who might read this.  And the aftertaste is terrifying--the nightmares are frequent, despite Alistair's words.

More than once, I have desired to dig my fingers into my flesh and simply rend it from me.  The itchy, uncomfortable feeling of frustration kindles rage, and the pain feels good.  The pain reminds me that I am strong.  Only the strong survive, and here I am.

I dread it.

I dread the warm, suffocating air, the burning tang of the lava flows...the dark, warm colors that always seem to have some derivative of brown tinting them.  There is no welcome in Orzammar.  There's the in-fighting, the politics, and the castes.

I know better than to have any expectations of my fellow kind.  The instant the gates of Orzammar closed behind me, it was as if the last three months spent on the surface had been a dream, and I had awakened to find that I was as insignificant and powerless as I had been raised to be.

And then, to be immediately found by Rica, my sister...I wasn't sure if I should be happy, or wary.  Pleased to see her, certainly.  Wary of what she thought of me now.

Her first words were reassuring, and true.  Of course I am happy for her--she has been able to provide for herself, and for Mother.  And now my new nephew.  But in the back of my mind the suspicion lurks--did Bhelen choose my sister as his concubine because he knew I might be back?  Did he suspect that the increase of darkspawn meant there was a new Blight?

The machinations reported to be behind his hopeful ascent to the throne seem too well-timed.  But I can't breathe a word of that to Rica; she seems so sure of her and her son's destiny.  And I won't put her in danger.  This is all a game of shifting balances and loyalties, and I don't know how to play it.  But there's Wynne.  And Alistair.  Waiting for me to lead them to victory.  And I can't explain this to them.

For the first time...I am alone.

Achievement: Dragonslayer

Yes, you read that right.

After today's hymn-singing, laundry folding, house tidying (or in between those things), I played more Dragon Age: Origin.

I called down a High Dragon from the mountain top, and in only two attempts, 'smote it's ruin upon the mountainside'.

Hah!

I tried to catch an image with the achievement still up on the screen, but I was too shocked at my success (and unfamiliar with the controls--I blame the differences in the Steam version of LotRO) to get it right.

So, I made up for it by posing with the stone-faced (in my head they're gleeful and mostly just glad they didn't get eaten) characters who brought the beast down.

From foreground to background:  Morrigan, Alistair, Wynne, and my warden.

And now if anybody could tell me how to replicate this outcome with Flemeth, I'd be doing really well!  Not being able to take Morrigan to that particular clambake is proving impossible for me.  

For the time being, my Dwarf commoner has reluctantly returned to Orzammar.  I wasn't even inside the city before I got called a filthy brand.

...sigh...

(But this it the stuff good fanfics are made of!)

Ooh, fanfic?  I mean...um...why would I start a new fanfiction?   Ain't nobody got time for that!

Video Game Reflection: Relationships

True story: I am not used to video games having relationship angles in them.

Except for the Sims.  But that's all the game is about without extra expansions, so I disqualify it.

No, I'm talking about typical hero/quest/adventure video games.  Action and adventure; swords, battle axes, shapeshifting, using the Force, whatever.

Let me back up and explain that my first ever "true" video game was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  Everything before that (other than Mixed-Up Fairy Tales) was educational.

Anybody remember any of these games?

My brothers and I still have the abandonware today.

Featuring the Shady Glen television station.

Starring paint-slinging robots and math puzzles galore.

Then for Christmas, we got a new computer to replace the brick of an IBM (which only took 3.5" floppy disks (which really weren't floppy compared to the larger 5" disks the old school computers ran on)) that was my first home computer.  That shiny new machine had a CD-ROM drive and Windows 95--it was a thing of beauty!

It also game with a small binder of game discs, which included Myst by Broderbund.

The first realistic 3D game environment I'd ever encountered.

And that was how I got my love of puzzle games, and a glimpse into how games could look (as long as the game didn't have people in it--the first Myst game only had one actual person, and because of the mechanics, you couldn't move in all directions around him).

This was followed by some early internet chatrooms, which introduced me to the wider concept of MMORPGs.  The first one I ever tried was Runescape, and I made it my mission to be the best miner, smelter, and blacksmith ever without raising my combat level (as much as possible; you had to be certain levels to mine in special locations).  

I was the great ore stealer; people would assume that li'l old level 22 me would lose at the ore deposits (because the game awarded the ores to the highest mining level, which was also affected by equipment) when they were level 80+.  Mwahaha!  

Apparently, I'm an early internet troll.

But imagine what it was like for me when in college, somebody gave me an N64 emulator and a bunch of different game images to play on them.  (College was in 2002, in case  you're wondering.)

I went from thinking that 3D characters looked like this:

To this:

And then of course, to this:

This is probably how I got my thing for blond elves.

Around that time, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring came out in theaters.  Besides being the deciding factor in my choice of college major, the trilogy was accompanied by the Gamecube RPG game The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age.

Do you see where this is going?

Couple that with what I was learning about tabletop games, and then the release of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the brand-new Wii system...well.

Now we get the gist of where my desire to play hack'n'slash characters comes from.

However, though the relationship between Link and Princess Zelda is always heavily implied (discounting all of the other ladies in the games such as Midna and Ilia), there's no real "romance" opportunities.  I thought games were supposed to be linear, for the most part, with tons of tiny side quests for bonuses and loot.

Then I entered my Dungeons and Dragons Online phase in grad school.  (There may have been some Serious Sam mixed in--I warned you about me and hack'n'slash!)  This opened my eyes to cool customizable characters.  My friends and I spent real money buying the pretty armor from the store, in whatever colors we wanted.  To me, that was the most advanced character creation I'd ever seen.

(Here I'm discounting the creation of Minecraft skins in Paint, which I've also done.)

This is Deevius and I posing in a clothing/armor shop.

But it didn't stay that way...

Another friend, who is a fellow Lord of the Rings geek, had heard that the online MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online was going free-to-play (this was a couple years ago) and we should check it out.

...yeah...

I never go into these things alone; I of course told my other geek friends what I was doing (the same ones that used to Serious Sam with me, and DDO with me) and lo and behold...we now have our own kinship and game together once a week.  (I in fact bought us all each two expansions during the Black Friday sale this year at the Turbine store.)

Now, I'd heard of other MMORPGs that have relationship options with NPCs, I think from Mike the coworker.  While LotRO does not have that mechanic in place, Deevius, DSCA and I have already divvied up the elf lords we're going to snuggle if that should ever be a possibility.

I mean, DSCA already has Elladan's pants...

Ahem.  I digress.

Around the time I began to play LotRO, I also started dating the Panda.  He was impressed that I had my own Wii.  I was impressed that a boy wanted to talk to me.  (At our small college, geek and/or nerd girls are a minority, and were somewhat frowned upon in my day.  This resulted in me bringing my Wii and television to all the on-campus parties I could.  I educated even the most sheltered of people with Mario Party 8 and Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix.)

A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

We married the summer of the year I began playing LotRO and he moved all of his gaming equipment into our house.  Now, the Panda is an only child, and he would save his money to buy each of the Nintendo gaming systems as it came out.

So, my sparse video game life suddenly exploded.

I didn't know what to do first!  (I still don't know!)

The Panda favors games such as Halo, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect, and Destiny (to name a few of the lasting ones).

He brought with him a PlayStation 3--to me, a mythical device that replaced my DVD player and could also use Netflix and Amazon Video.  At first, I had no use for it; I couldn't even figure out how to play movies.

But then the Panda started playing through the Mass Effect trilogy...and suddenly I didn't care that I didn't know how to use a PS3.  I watched him interact with the characters and make decisions.

And then I watched him romance Miranda.

Well.  Two can play that game.

Yes, I do mean literally.

I would spend the nights he was at work playing the Mass Effect games as (of course) FemShep.  The first time Kaidan made a move on her, I didn't see it coming and I turned him down flat.  (The only options in ME1 are Kaidan and Liara.)  I was too busy mastering the mechanics of a type of game I'd never played before to complicate FemShep's life with another person.

Also, thanks in part to my roleplaying game background, I had already begun to put together a probably backstory for my FemShep (other than her Spacer, Hero chosen requirement).  Her inspiration came a tiny bit from Honor Harrington, David Weber's character and the subject of over a dozen space navy books (toward the end they get a little ridiculous).

Anyway, Velvet Shepard's backstory included at least one failed shipboard romance, likely early in her Alliance career.  It was likely very hurtful, and possibly detrimental to her career, and it could have taken some interference from higher-ups for her to get out of that situation.  (Details unclear--read my fanfic.)  Needless to say, she resolved never to date within the Alliance chain of command ever again.

So my Shepard went on her way, trying and failing to be a good Infiltrator (I do not have the steady hands to use a sniper rifle at all).  My go-to team for ME1 was Wrex and Garrus.  I loved their interplay, and BioWare did a fantastic job creating a well-rounded, interesting universe.

When I find a new fandom/universe and it really, really grabs my attention I go all-out.  That means reading wikis, articles, walkthroughs, and anything else I can get my hands on.  The Lord of the Rings was the last fandom I got really entangled in.

I knew that ME2 was going to be very different from ME1, and not just because of the expanded party options (ten people?  Seriously??).  My FemShep was waking up in a changed universe, presumed dead and brought back to life by the enemy.  The first familiar face she ever saw was Garrus'.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

I had already decided (based on the Panda's playthrough) that if I was going to get sidetracked by a romance, I wanted it to be with Garrus.  This didn't stop me, however, from nearly running right into Jacob's arms accidentally.  I didn't just turn him down flat, I dropped him like a hot potato (because I wasn't aware that I had picked him up--oops).

When asked why I chose Garrus, I wasn't sure why (the character is an alien) at first.  But as I did more and more of his conversation interactions, I noticed how charming and awkward he was.

Just like the Panda.

Hm.  Could be a fluke.

Well, last night I spent some time playing Dragon Age: Origin with the Panda's shared Steam library.

(Side note: this is the one time I have ever been ahead of him in a game!  I know what's coming!  My glee cannot be contained!)

Another BioWare game, Dragon Age is a medieval RPG game, but the plot is so fascinating, it's almost like a disaster you can't look away from.

Anyway, there's another awkward character, and as a female gray warden with any shred of sympathy, you could also find him charming and bashful.  Yeah, I'm talking about Alistair.

What's not to love about a man that says things like that?

The Panda finds it amusing that all my romance choices are essentially him in the games.  I think he's proud.  (I hope he's proud, at least...)

What can I say?  Bumbling charm is what does it for me.  And I don't mind the corniness because of the sincerity.

In one of the cut scenes, Alistair says something like: "Have I told you that I love you today?  Well, it doesn't matter, because it bears repeating: I love you."

My warden answered: "I love you, too."

Alistair:  "See, was that so hard?"

I had to play this part twice, and both times I yelled at Alistair for quoting the Panda.

But enough of me and my video game history.  I didn't have a craft project to share, so I thought I'd talk a little about what I did in game yesterday night, and early this morning.

Later!