Why do we celebrate birthdays?

I've been thinking. We (almost everyone all over the world) celebrate the day we are born. But why do we do that? I really have no good answer.
Usually we celebrate achievements. To quote Dr. Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory "being expelled from a birth canal was not considered one". However for some reason we celebrate the day we were born. Every year.
I can understand why people would celebrate on the actual day we are born and give gifts to the parents. Especially the mother of the baby has achieved something great on that specific day. The baby has not. And definitely not something that needs to be celebrated on that day every year.
So why do we do it? Is it a celebration to show that "yay, I survived yet another year in this hostile environment"?
Some people don't like to celebrate their birthday because they don't want to get older, but that's just stupid. You get older all the time. Every second you're one second older than you were the previous second for example. The only way to stop growing older is to die.

Another pound-o-dice from Chessex

So I went and bought myself another pound of Chessex dice. Unlike last time I just took one photo and I'm just going to write really quickly what I got and maybe make a short comment or two.
D3 = 1 (the white "D6" with round corners and numbers)
D4 = 3 (one translucent purple)
D6 = 18 (one pipped 20mm, 8 pipped 16mm (two are glittery red), 3 pipped 12mm (one is frosted "white"), and 6 standard sized numbered)
D8 = 4 (all of them the same blue speckled colour)
D10 = 23 (four dark grey speckled, three green speckled with gold numbers, three green/yellow speckled with white numbers, three opaque red with blue numbers, two opaque grey with blue numbers, two purple speckled)
D% = 3 (one has purple speckles and numbers, and match the 7-dice set you get with every pound of dice)
D12 = 6 (two dark blue/light blue speckled)
D20 = 31 (eleven of them are brown with some red speckles, seven are half black and half grey, three are half brown and half black, and two are half grey and half green with gold numbers)
My 7-dice set was white with yellow/orange speckles and green numbers
All in all I got 96 dice in this pound.

Funny thing about this pound of dice was that it weighed 490 grams. 1 pound = 453.59 grams.So that's (if I calculated correctly) 1 pound and 1.28 ounces. I can live with that. Even if I also could live with a bit less brown D20s...

I guess after this I'm set for life. So no more pound of dice for me. Although, if I win a lot of money I could get the 30 pound box of dice I saw on Chessex' website. That would be legendary!

Changed the name of the blog

Since I post more random stuff than actual photo related stuff I decided to change the name of the blog from "Adventures in Photography" to "What's on my mind".

What I got in my Chessex Pound-O-Dice

 Yesterday I received my Pound-O-Dice from Chessex, so today I thought I'd take photos of all the dice and write about them. First I got the 7-dice set that's included in all the bags. Mine was the one with black speckles and numbers.

 These are the D4's.
The three in the back row all have the numbers along the edges. The orange looks frosted, and the green looks like a mix of translucent and swirly, and the blue looks like it's marble.
The middle one in the middle row is blue/purple and if you hold it up against a light source you can almost see through it.
The three in the front row don't show the correct colours in this photo. There are two translucent blue and one translucent yellow.


Then we have the D6's. First the numbered ones. The translucent red one in the left photo is 16mm. All the others are the standard 15mm. The red one with a smaller 6 is frosted.

The D6's with pips came in five different sizes. The big blue one is 22mm, the big black one is 18mm, the small white one is 14mm, the small red and purple ones are 12mm and the eight in the middle are the standard 16mm. The pink one is kind of like velvet and the one next to it is a translucent amber colour.

The only interesting looking D8 is the one at the top left of the eight. It's the same blue/purple as the D4 I mentioned earlier.
Oh and the pink one is misprinted. The opposing sides don't add up to 9. Some of the sides add up to 11 and some up to 7.
Edit: After looking closer to the pink one I think it's a countdown dice. Never heard of an 8-sided countdown dice before.

Nothing that exciting among the D10's. The one at the top of the pile is translucent but I can't decide if it's a dark pink or light red. It's pretty either way.
The white with red speckles and numbers looks like it belongs in the 7-dice set that's included. I got one D20 just like it too. You can see that they are factory seconds because of the paint.
Only got four percentile dice, but how often do you have a use for more than one?

Only two D12's. The white one is a millimetre or so bigger and looks almost like a pearl. Also the white one has a different order for its numbers. The opposing sides are still adding up to 13 though so there shouldn't be anything wrong with it.

Last but not least the D20's. Some of them it's hard to tell the difference between the 6 and the 9 because the line underneath is almost worn off.

The two white ones at the bottom are 20-sided D10's. However like the pink D8 the opposing sides do not add up to the correct number.

All together I got exactly 100 dice. Split like this:
D4 = 9
D6 = 33 (17 numbered and 16 pipped)
D8 = 9 (8 regular and 1 countdown)
D10 = 16
D% = 4
D12 = 2
D20 = 18
20-sided D10 = 2
7-dice set

At the same time as I ordered the pound of dice I also ordered a 7-dice set of mini dice (on Amazon.co.uk they are listed as: "Big Cherry Poly Dice Set, MINI, Toxic Purple, 7 Polyhedron Dice"). I took a photo of them with the set that came in the pound of dice to show the size difference. Not only are they a nice colour, they are so cute so I thought I'd include the photo here.

Dice tray made from a photo frame

I think we all have had the problem with dice falling off the table so I thought a cheap photo frame might be made into a dice tray.
The frame I chose was a cheap 18cm x 18cm frame I got for about 20SEK (in today's exchange rate that's around £2 or $3US).

 I removed the glass and the backboard as well as all the small metal pins that held the glass in place.

I removed the "stand" and glued some ugly looking light blue felt onto the backboard.

 Then I turned the frame over and glued the backboard onto the edge that the front of the glass rests against.

 Works very well.

Sure it's not the prettiest dice tray out there, but it does its job. Total cost was around 30SEK (about £3 or $4.50US).

Made myself a dice bag

I've played a lot of role-playing games and board games in my life and I've gathered quite a lot of dice from them. Yesterday I had this idea that maybe I could make a dice bag for all my dice. I went online and found lots of inspiration from DIY projects.
Today I scavanged my apartment for cloth. I found an old, black, bed sheet that I thought would make a great outside and I found an old flannel shirt with holes on the elbows that I don't know why I haven't thrown away but it served me well for the lining.
I decided to do a "round bottomed" dice bag so I used a saucer to make a round piece since I don't have a compass (I have the kind of compass that points North, but that's not really helpful here). After calculating the circumference I decided on the height of the bag and cut out one rectangle from each cloth. To make it easy to fit a string I just sewed a strip of cloth to the outside and left the ends of it open. For a string I used some red ribbon I had left over.
After putting it all together I ended up with this:

It's much too big for the dice I have in it now, but I might gather more in the future. Also for next time I know to make a smaller one and maybe I can use this one for something else.

Fireworks at midnight 2012-2013

Here are some of the more successful photos I took of the fireworks at midnight.