Return of the Knitting

Hello, crafty and sundry!

It’s a huge relief for November to be over. Even if I won NaNoWriMo on the 19th, and wrote ‘The End’ on the 21st, the rest of the month has totally been a cooling down period. I’ve refrained from thoughts of writing beyond my daily efforts (my private blog and my 750words.com entry), and just let myself veg out in Dragon Age:Inquisition and knitting. eXtreme knitting, if I’m honest — my efforts have ganked my shoulders all out of alignment. But as you can see, the progress on this part of the cardigan is coming along swimmingly. There’s still a million rows to go, but I’m starting to feel like I’m making good progress on it at this point.

I had to stop at one point because of something that was annoying me — increases and decreases. You see, for left-handed people, we have to flip them around. Where a right-handed person would do SSK (slip slip knit) for a right-leaning decrease, it becomes a left-leaning decrease for a lefty (as pictured here). I was also trying to figure out which increases and decreases looked best. I didn’t get too too far into experimenting. In part, it’s because I was not having any luck finding a comprehensive list of increases and decreases, and in part because doing that bit of work assured me that the four techniques I have there work well enough for most of what I need to do. I’m still hoping to find and create a comprehensive list, but I don’t think I’ll be doing that unless I get some help from my designer friend Miriam. Which means pawing back down my wall because I know she gave a pretty good list a few months back, ha ha.

Past that, I’m still hardcore rocking out playing Dragon Age:Inquisition as mentioned above. I decided to play a Qunari, because why not. I’m mainly liking the game. There’s lots to do, from exploring to crafting to gardening, and most of my complaints are niggling things that I can hope they fix in patches. For example, the mini-map is a transparent circle with symbols on it, which is… feh. You have to pull up the main map to verify terrain and such, and that bothers me and most of my old-school gaming friends. We also agree that it’s WAY annoying that you can only have one bind for movement keys. Really, how hard is it to have WASD -and- the four direction pad able to move you? I also have some minor complaints about camera controls, but like the aforementioned — it’s a niggle rather than a game-stopper (only place I’ve hit game-stopping because of cameras and controls is the Elder Scrolls franchise, which is ridiculously bad and pretty much unplayable).

It’s also the Steam Black Friday/Cyber Monday/whatever sale, which is so far less tempting than the Summer Sale was. I picked up some games that were like, pence apiece for future consideration. I tend to fixate on one or two games at a time, and not explore around. So it surprised me that I booted up Talisman: Digital Edition. My husband is a fan of the game from way way back, so he was happy to gift it to me some time ago. I guess I had fun my first tinker with it? He booted his copy up on his laptop and we spent an hour or so complaining about the game back and forth, which really, is a lot of fun. All hail the RNG, the stinker that he/she/zer/it is! I’ll probably give it another go later, and I know that the husband would like to actually play a game with me in future. We tend to both solo our things in the same room rather than game together-together, so that’ll be a nice treat. I think.

Anyways, back to knitting!

<3