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.
 

A look back at my 2012

The first two months were pretty uneventful. Pretty much all I did was start this blog in January.
Then in March several different people told me if I really want to get a job I need to get a driver's license. So at the end of March I spent a lot of my savings and started doing just that. I finally had the license at the end of June, so approximately three months to get that.
Then when I still didn't get any job offers people kept telling me I had to have a car to be interesting on the job market so I spent even more of my savings to buy a cheap car at the end of July.
Just to keep score:
Job offers without a driver's license = 0
Job offers with a driver's license = 0
Job offers with a driver's license and a car = 0
So yeah, that helped... It helped wasting almost all of my savings on nothing. Yay...
Anyhow, after that nothing much has happened. Not even the end of the world happened like that moron said and that everyone spread as if it was real. For all of us who actually bothered to read about the Mayan long count calender it came as no surprise at all. That calender lasts for at least another five million years or so before it starts over and goes on forever. Kind of like how we count months, years, decades, centuries, millenia and so on.
What else happened this year? I got back to pretty much my high school weight again. That's about the only positive thing that I can think of...

My plans for the new year. Get a job... As if that will happen.

Where I lay my head is home?

On Sunday, October 21, I have lived in my current apartment for 5475 days (approx. 15 years). That's one whole day longer than I've lived in any other apartment/house. The weird thing though is that I still don't feel like it's my home.
Even if I would move soon I will not get more than one or perhaps two chances to beat this record. If I can't feel at home after 15 years, how big is the chance that I will find another place where I do feel at home?
I actually hope I can move out really soon. I need to get a job though. That's the biggest problem.

I don't know where I wanted to go with this rant, I just felt so sad that I've lived here longer than anywhere else and can't shake the feeling that I don't belong.