More food items should be labelled "gunpowder"

I'm drinking a lot of tea lately. Not out of any craving for caffeine, but to keep my hands warm enough to paint. My knuckles (actually, most of my joints) ache in cold weather, and it's particularly frustrating when I can't articulate my fingers enough to move a paintbrush. Wrapping my hands around a mug of tea seems to help, and it also means that I'm slowly making a dint in the tea stockpile. For today, I've opened up a box of Gunpowder green tea that futurelegend bought years ago... I suspect that when the apocalypse comes, I'll still have plenty of tea to wait out the long winter.

Today's work is a bit odd. I'm frantically trying to finish painting a large commission for a tournament this weekend. As usual, my hands are covered in streaks of ink, paint and glue. On breaks, I'm re-painting classic Japanese watercolours in Photoshop - trying to remove characters from the foreground, to use the backdrop separately. It seems strange that I'm using the most modern techniques on the oldest bits of artwork.

bishi_wannabe ran the first session of his Legend of the Five Rings game last night - using the basic Rokugan setting, but ditching the rules in favour of a mixture of Blue Rose (feats and classes) and some homebrew ideas from his Last Exile convention game. It looks like it'll be fun - six samurai balancing honour and glory, while forced to obey orders from an Empress they don't trust. The mechanics seem to work well so far - success brings Glory, failure brings Honour, and cowardice brings neither. The interaction between the two systems means there's a strong incentive to learn lessons (from failed endeavours) before trying to overcome really important obstacles.