Hobby Update, February 2020

Hi All,

Sorry to have been absent from the bloggisphere for so long, it was not my intention but life sometimes gets in the way. My hobby, such as it is, has become more of a background thing as I am trying to manage my son and his growing teen angst about things.

One of the hardest things about parenthood has been feeling unable to effectively help my children overcome the issues of what I see as my worst traits. Wanting my kids to feel better about themselves than I ever did/do. But anyway, as one of my friends put it "life is managed failure." It sounded more uplifting when he said it.

Enough with the downer part.

While I haven't done a whole lot, I have played a few sessions of WFRP. Our game master has his own blog, It always rains in Nuln, and wrote a nice piece talking about our party of deceased characters from when I joined the group that is still currently playing. You can read it here.

If you are interested in hearing our scintillating live play you can find it here. Just look for the Thousand Thrones.

I am still collecting bits and pieces of my Skaven force, trying to fill the odd gaps in what I will loosely call a collection. I also found the Skavenblight Scramblers models I'd buried and partially forgotten about, so I'll be adding them to the queue. If only I could find my Ratskins, year of the Rat queue would be complete.

I've also gotten a fire under my ass to get back to my Mighty Empires campaign. I know, I know, I've been talking about this for years. I made some progress on my map but realized it was at the wrong scale after finding and reading trough (again?) Charles Grant's Wargame Campaigns. I'm still trying to trace my old hex map into Worldographer and got it pretty well sorted before I realized it wouldn't work at the scale I built it at. I almost shelved it again, but I'm going to keep on plugging away now that I have a pretty clear picture of the path forward. I'll try and share that more moving forward.

As for actual paint on miniatures, I'm not sure what the hold up really is. I'm really struggling with feeling like I have the time and space to get cracking. Last years effort to move the hobby and try to be more engaged with the family while doing so didn't really work. I got the lighting in the garage sorted, but it is still a horrible mess in there. I'm still trying to dig things out.

I've also been thinking about trying different techniques to help me get a little faster in putting out models. If I can't lower the indecisiveness time, I can at least make the actual painting go smoother.

Anyhow. I'll try to do better and also get back to reading and commenting on other hobby blogs.

Paint 'em if you got 'em.

Peace out!

Fighting Burnout and getting a handle on the collection

Hi All,

As I blunder forward in the hobby I come across things that speak to concepts that gnaw at the back of my mind. Occasionally they come to the fore, only to subside as some other idea bubbles up. This past week two ideas came back up.

Fighting Burnout, restoring Mojo

Someone, I think it was Curis, posted a link to a blog I was not familiar with. The top article was about fighting burnout. The blog is called When Cannons Fade, the said post is here. In it the author develops the concept of having small groupings of miniatures and making a d20 table to keep it sufficiently random to keep your interest up. I like this idea as you can put stalled projects on the list. But I digress. The other part was a link to a youtube video talking about our tendency to be hoarders. I, for one, really need to stop buying the new shiny and/or the too good to pass up deals. I'm starting to buy things I already have and inadvertently getting a lot of doubles.

This leads into the next thought.

Getting a handle on the Collection

I have zero idea of how many models I have in total. I have vague recollections of things, but no precise idea of where they are in my shoddy storage system. I'm pretty sure I have doubles of a ton of stuff. I'm also pretty sure that over 75% of what I own is unpainted. In comes the concept of 100% painted. Now the idea of a general accounting of models painted versus bought/ in the leadpile is nothing new. Anthony, over at the Lead Collector, introduced me to the idea of focusing on trying to bring the ratio of unpainted down by posting about the 100% painted challenge. I think this also ties in a little bit with the "no unpainted models" thing. I need to hold my feet to the fire about painting, rather than buying so much stuff.

So, what's the plan?

Well, my hobbying is a little bit dictated by finishing the Old World Army Challenge and getting ready for Kublacon on Memorial Day weekend. So I think it looks like this.

1. Finish April OWAC submission
2. Finish terrain, extras for final OWAC Army shot.
3. Help my son get his Orlock gang ready for Kublacon
4. Paint up a Mordheim Witchhunter band?
5. Unit cards/ sheets for Genestealer/ Abdul gangs
6. Space Apes (Jokaero)?
7. Squats?

Anyway, you get the idea. Somewhere amongst all that hobbying is taking the time to catalog the collection an get painted unpainted ratios. If you have thought on how to organize a database I'd be glad to hear them. I'm thinking Excel type thing and adding linked sheets based on categories. I was thinking of starting with 40K as I have less of that.

When you should be painting, make heraldry.

Hi All,

Well, what with Track, practicing ropedart, and "Family" time in front of the TV I didn't get much of anything painted yesterday.

I did manage to noodle around on the Inkwell Ideas Coat of Arms creator to make the heraldry for those Knights of the Realm though.

It took me a fair amount of noodling around and my recollection of heraldic terms made it a little more trial and error, but I got something that seems to work. These are more or less in the order I've ranked them up and will paint them.

No names yet. The Buck's head is really front view but the software didn't have that. You can add your own vectors, but I just wanted these to be quick and dirty. The colors of the creatures are set by the colors of the decals I have. For the displayed eagle I thought white and blue would contrast well with the red eagle. The quartered Red and Blue is for the Viscomte. I used the seated lion because I didn't see the rampant lion. The blue lion is because I have two Lion shields. This guys head dress is some kind of bat winged almost lion thing, the first departure from the matchy, matchy thing I've done with the first three. Lastly the bull. This one was also supposed to be just the head, head on. Again, just making these quick and dirty. To me, although very simple, the black bull on plain white seems more visually appealing. Unfortunately I do not have a bull head dress so he will have the Dragon. I'll make up some reason why. Now I just have to think of what color to make it. Maybe just keep with black.

It's the Martin Luther King Jr holiday today, so no work for me, but a lot of errands to run. Hope you have a productive day.

Thanks for looking.

To the Strongest Hard copy, explosion graphic resources, track and malaise

Hi All

  Sorry for the wordy title, I've got a lot on my mind.

  My hard copy of To the Strongest came in over the weekend. Simon Miller had a special and threw in some laser cut chits. I've had the PDF's for awhile, but have been sitting on this game for too long. What I envision doing with it is playing out a War of the Roses campaign using the old Avalon Hill board game Kingmaker as a campaign map. My dream was to make it a play by blog, but I don't have period specific figures or recognizable personalities painted up. I'm also not sure if it would be better to try and have participants play on their own and report back or try to live play via video conference. I'm not sure if that would even appeal to people.

  Over on face book people were talking about ipad apps for putting muzzle flashes and explosions into their 40K battle report pictures. I don't own an ipad, but have done a fair bit of photo manipulating for my comic reports in both GIMP and Comic Life 3. Following is a list of resources from deviant art:

http://www.deviantart.com/art/muzzle-flash-stock-pack-2-189572285

http://hq-hq.deviantart.com/art/muzzle-flash-stock-pack-189571261

http://josiahreeves.deviantart.com/art/Explosion-Stock-Set-1-105411546

http://josiahreeves.deviantart.com/art/Explosion-Stock-Set-2-105411660

http://josiahreeves.deviantart.com/art/Explosion-Stock-Set-3-105411939

http://pixelchemist-stock.deviantart.com/art/Misc-Effects-001-70902206

http://frostbo.deviantart.com/art/Fire-effect-PNG-295096844

http://frostbo.deviantart.com/art/Explosion-Render-PNG-272872038

I felt like FrostBo in particular had a lot of good resources on his profile. Lots of useful Photoshop and GIMP brushes that I didn't list here.

The boy ran his first races of the season on Saturday. 3:10 800m and 6:29 1500m just about dead on his average for both races last season.

I've been even more quiet than usual on the bloggisphere as I'm feeling a tad nihilistic at the moment. I'm just trying to soldier on and not let the amount of work undone paralyze me. Right now I've lost my mojo for the painting challenge. I'll try to get it back but I think I'm done with trying to put out bulk units. It was never my forte and the thought of it right now is putting me off painting altogether.

Bye for now.

Do you ever consider going pro?

Hi All,

Just felt like having more of a chat today. I came across this article on Bell of Lost Souls.

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2015/05/hobby-the-cons-of-pro-painting.html

I forget what I was initially looking for but I gave it a read and found it quite interesting. I know that some of you do take commissions to subsidize your hobby, and some are full on professionals. So I just wanted to have a conversation about "Is painting for money/figures/goods and services really for you?"

I suspect that it's not really for me at this point. I have my focus issues/ times when I'd rather gouge my eyes out than paint. Plus I feel like I struggle to get my own projects going and don't do the best job at being a parent/spouse without the extra work.

Feel free to share your thoughts on why or why not being a "pro", or however you want to term it, is for you.

I'll try to have a little more content wise for you tomorrow.

Update (with Death Metal Cat)

I've been struggling with updates this week. Just trying to prepare some tax documents and schedule volunteering and dentist visits for the family.

It's cut into the painting time and has generally made me cranky:



I did finish reading "To the Strongest" and am excited about getting in some games of that. You can read about the game at The Big Red Bat Cave or purchase them at his shop.

I have the seed of an idea for a play by blog, but I need to do some ground work to see if it is feasible.

Toodles.

Update and holiday travel.

Hi All,

While I'm on pins and needles waiting to see my score and voting tally from the "Cold" round I figured I should let you all know what's been going on the last few days.

The finished cast.

 So I completed the axe. I think it looks pretty good. The main advice l would give is to let the mold cure. I followed the video I found and pulled the mold apart to early to try and reduce the flash. Just let it harden and trim it later. 24 Cigarettes also suggested putting a wire in the mold to help with axe handle rigidity.

$9 sculpting tools.

  I've only used two of the twelve tools from the set I got on sale, but they are already proving very useful. I spent most of my available time doing base work so that l could continue painting over the holidays. Although I missed my submission deadline for this week, I hope that I will be able to make up for that by not missing the next theme round and the next two weeks.

Cthulhu says "Drink this or l will eat your soul!"

I found the house woefully lacking in Rum, so I bought some Kraken. This is in keeping with my penchant for buying quirky bottles. I was fortunate to find another bottle at my parents local grocers. Skal!

Shaking off the digital rust

Hi All,

Long time no post. The run up to Halloween and the culmination of Zom(b)orctober had me a little out of sorts. Just one of my moods I guess, but I was just struggling with trying to keep up so I took a step back. So what I have for you are a few random things that have come across my plate and, hopefully, some direction for upcoming posts.

I've been acquiring bits and bobs and hope to have some good stuff to share with you soon on terrain making and what not. Hopefully some figures and bases will be here soon as well.

I've been trying to get another Cthulhu game together but schedules are not lining up right now. One of the players is not jazzed about the Basic Role Play (BRP) Sytem that Call of Cthulhu uses, so we are going to try FATE. I ended up buying a PDF of Present Day Cthulhu Powered by FATE, by Starbright Illustrations, from DrivethruRPG. I mainly wanted to see how the FATE principles might be applied directly to a Mythos game. Perhaps I could have figured it out myself, but they have some good background and monster stats that I can use as guidelines. Hopefully I'll get my act together soon and release the 7 or so hours of audio, and slightly less video, of our sessions from the first adventure. I like the Call of Cthulhu setting but am not so married to BRP that I'm unwilling to try a different system. I do feel that perhaps part of the clunkiness of BRP is more due to my lack of experience GMing it and having not played or GMed in decades.

We did play the first half of the intro Goblinquest scenario, I hope to finish it tonight. We got a little bogged down in dice rolling, I'll give you the report thoughts in a separate post. I think it may be mainly my son's short attention span.

I also rolled up two Warhammer Orc Warbands using Erny's awesome rules, Warlord. I think these could easily be extended to all the races of Warhammer. I hope to use these warbands as a jumping off point for the Tale of Painters thing, which I need to check in on.

6 Zombies and 5 orcs is all I got done last month, so lets hope I can get rolling on painting. I am planning to start prepping in earnest as Curt's challenge tends to get announced in mid November. Last year I was woefully unprepared.

Lastly I will get back to giving opinions etc about photographing miniatures. Hopefully you can get better performance out of your setup, the juries still out as to whether or not I really have improved my photography with what I've learned. And look for the 2nd issue of Wargame Bloggers Quarterly WBQ to be released into the wild soon. If you were a member of the G+ group, you'd already have it.

Here are some random pictures of stuff you may, or may not, find interesting.

A few pickup trucks for Hugh. Closest is a Chevy Silverado, my Toyota Tacoma and I think a Ram 2500

 Hugh was asking about Pickup trucks awhile back, here are two I parked in between. The top of my cab is about 6 ft off the ground, I have the jacked up TRD suspension. The two on either side are full size pickups, mine's a 3/4 ton, and you can see they are considerably larger.

A silly book I saw on the shelf at Barnes & Noble

Oh yeah, welcome to Roy Williamson of RW's hobby blog. I could have sworn we were already following eachother. It looks like he may have lost his blog and had to restart it. Anyway welcome aboard and go check him out and follow him. You may have been before.

Update and Goblinquest

As I may have alluded in the last post, I seem to be busy with kid activities of late. Today is another Flag Football game followed by two separate kid Halloween parties. This coupled with working out and the final week of my fat cutting program are combining to make me feel quite harried and downright cranky.

I haven't cut as much fat as last year, I'm only down to 12% as of last weigh in, but I seem to be gaining muscle and maintaining body weight. For some reason I've been obsessed with getting rid of my beer gut the last few years and, let me tell you, it's been tough. Who knew how hard it would be to roll back the lethargy and poor food choices of my 20's and 30's?

Now onto more hobby related stuff.

My son's school art project

I wanted to show you my son's art project from school because it blew me away. Aside from just liking it I was impressed when he told me how it was 3D and how he used yellow and purple to show the moonlight shining on the pumpkins. So perspective and object source lighting. I don't think I ever thought of such things at 8 years old. Credit to the Art teacher at school.

I also got super excited about Goblinquest, a game designed by Rab over at Rab's Geekly Digest. He says that the current version of the rules has been tweaked from those posted, but they seemed exciting and something I read through in a few minutes. I of course then got bogged down in trying to make the dungeon tiles from another set I already had. After a couple of hours I got it to work, but only had two sections. So I decided this morning to go ahead and buy the Inked adventures set that Rab had used. They are on sale at Drivethru RPG right now.

I'm going to try to get in some games this weekend and into next week. Not all the figures may be fully painted, but I'm going to try.

I have been spottily painting and still need to push myself to finish some figures. I should have been painting instead of dungeon finagling last night.

Too long without a post!

Right!

So many great plans and then I sort of got swallowed up by it all. Too many irons in the fire I guess.

So what am I actually doing?

I am painting and basing the few bits of Brethren and Treyine forces. As per my usual it starts of great and then I get bogged down. After reading Painting Matters: In Defense of Hobby Standards on Chicago Skirmish Wargames (I do actually read the blogs I follow, albeit a bit late). It may shock you to know that I had originally intended to never field incomplete troops. That quickly went out the window as I felt the pull to play games. I now see saw back and forth between trying to play and trying to paint and model. I'm trying, with varying degrees of success.

I also read about roads on Itinerant Hobbyist here who was place holding a post by Sound Officers Call here about how he made some roads out of cork ribbon. So I have duly bought a roll of 2.5" cork ribbon and 12" x 12" square of thin cork sheet. I intend to try my hand at roads and rivers with it. I had originally bought some thin craft foam, but this is thinner still.

Which brings me in a round about way to the next two things. My Photography guide and refurbishing and or making terrain. I don't want to let my shabby, unfinished stuff detract from what I'm trying to convey about photography so I've sort of paralyzed myself for the time being.

I already tried to write this post once and felt it was too much of a downer. Whiny, rambling etc. so I'll wrap this up.

I'll endeavor to use the draft and schedule feature to not go so long without another post. I'll try to keep to my usual style of what's on my mind, but try not to bore you with too many WIP, I still haven't finished, shots.

I hope to bring you some somewhat useful posts on pictures and video, as well as consult the hive mind on techniques for Chaos flesh Oldhammer style. Boyyy!

Here's another video by Rob Scallon. He makes me laugh.


And no Chico, I don't mean this:

One inappropriate place to find metal \m/

What's on the horizon.

Hi All,

Been back from vacation for a couple of days and just trying to get back into the swing of things. Here's a few pictures.

Looking North to Lake Tahoe from the head of the Desolation Wilderness trail near Echo Lake.

One of the parental Chipmunks that live in front of the cabin.

Three baby Chipmunks playing near their den outside the front window.

A Stellar's or 'Western' Blue Jay.

The house on the Eastern shore of Lake Tahoe, purportedly built by Adnan Khashoggi.

Site of some free pine bark for modelling terrain.

Back in the valley, 2 of the 3 Peacocks and a Peahen.

A cliff swallow peaking out. (Very lucky shot.)

So I only took 189 photos for this trip. As usual you get the scenic ones, as I am forbidden by SWMBO to show her or the kids.

Anyway we had a nice time.

I have to run off and prepare dinner as we have another online gaming session tonight on Roll20. Steve will be the GM tonight and we'll be playing Dungeon World. I had hoped to edit all my stuff from our Call of Cthulhu sessions already, but it hasn't happened.

I'm also intrigued by the concept of playing 10 games 10 times (the 10 x 10 challenge). We'll see if I have the gusto.

Oh! And check out the Google+ Oldhammer community. If you're into that sort of thing.

Well ain't that a kick in the...

Choose where you want to be kicked.

Well, a bit of bad news my friends. My see sawing Creatine Kinase levels have shot back up after only two days of weight lifting, so it's off to a specialist for me.

I'm trying to ignore my own mortality, as one is wont to do in this sort of situation, and focus on the hobby as best I can. I've only recently picked backup to reading the blogs, as I couldn't seem to manage it during the challenge.

I have to say that reading about Salute has been enjoyable, and I hope to be caught up with you all soon.

The big question I am asking myself today is, what exactly is the hold up for me in the hobby? Why do I find it difficult to sit down and paint, model or play games? I think part of the problem is that I have shifted back and forth about my stated aims. I'll only game with completed figures turned into gaming with paper counters, then back to fully painted figures. Then when I couldn't  manage that it was mostly painted figures. Now I am just waiting on figures I need to fight the next battle in Talomir and I'm just going to cut them off the sprue and throw them on the table.

I also think that there is a tad bit of guilt in the fact that my family, aside from my son, doesn't really share my hobby interest. So hobby time tends to be "don't bug me" time.

Well enough of the pity party, lets look at what we do have.

My son wrote down some rules for his own game using the Lord of the Rings RISK board and pieces. It doesn't totally make sense to me, but we had fun rolling the dice.

I've started reading Machinas, the wasteland racing game and I need to finish working on the Dungeon Crawl play test.

The other thing is to just sit down and paint, I haven't picked up a brush in almost a month and I need to get back to it.

I also need to get myself sorted for a giveaway. I've surpassed 100K views and 300 posts but was still tied up in the challenge so I missed doing it. I would like for it to be a tad grander than in the past but I'm not sure what I want to do. I can't decide if giving up unpainted figures or actually painting them up as part of the prize is better.

Welcomes, whining and Leia's Metal Bikini

Hi All,

  Last post I forgot to welcome two new followers to the blog:

ChicoDaSatanic of Oldhammer on a Budget. This is one of those blogs that you thought you were following but weren't and can't figure out why not. Very good stuff for Oldhammerers,  the recent Malal stuff is quite nice.

Zabadak of Zabadak's Zombie World. Lots of good zombie stuff, I especially like his terrain. I already follow him and thought he was already a follower. Nice to have you aboard.

Now for the whining. Bleh, I feel terrible. Last week my wife had some kind of flu which then turned into severe allergies and she lost her voice. I had one night of flu like symptoms but have not yet lost my voice, although I sound terrible and my throat hurts something awful. To top it off my wife is away on business so I'm solo with the kids. I'm keeping it together so far but it has been a challenge. I have a ton of painting to do but only managed a fraction since I was volunteering at the school today. My son is closing in on his 40th mile in the running program they have at school and I seem to be the only person willing to show up to help the kids log their efforts.

And lastly

While I absolutely hated Return of the Jedi, I do appreciate Leia's ensemble. For those who don't know there is a website called Leia's Metal Bikini, lots of pictures of Leia herself and the "Fans in costume" section is interesting.

Have a good one.

Retail therapy and what I won.

As you all may have noticed I have not been as timely as I would like in updating the blog and reading and commenting on all of your blogs. Part of it is that I am actually somewhat busier than usual and part is that a little of the wind has been taken out of my sails after my latest blood work. Although I feel more or less fine, and my kidney function is approaching normal, my Creatine Kinase levels are off the charts. I'm talking more than 10 times the normal upper limit. So I have been asked not to exercise for another 3 months. This has caused a fair amount of stress in the family as we don't really know what is going on and reading about it on the internet doesn't have much of bright side. But as far as I know I haven't had a heart attack or a crushing injury and don't have muscular dystrophy. I go back for more tests next week.

End sob story.

So I figured I would do the rounds of the local hobby shops for some retail therapy. For me right now that is the Hobby Bench. I went to the one on Bell Rd and 43rd Ave here in Phoenix. As per usual I spent way too much time drooling over kit. I had intended to buy some green stuff, but all they had was putty in a tube, and bought some Tamiya Clear Red and some Model Master matte varnish. I then went to Hobby Lobby, because I thought I had seen green stuff there before. Of course I couldn't find any, so I bought some Vallejo matte varnish and some more Anita's Earth Brown, since I use that for basing. The last stop was Best Buy to see if they had flash diffusers similar to what Dave D showed on his blog here. They didn't, so when I got home I ordered what I couldn't find from Amazon. I could have saved myself  a lot of time but I guess it distracted me from my worries.

The reason I'm buying all this varnish and photo accessories is that I'm trying to figure out my shiny figure issue and work towards taking better pictures.

And to wrap up my rambling, what I won from Joakim at the Miniatures Man.

The squares are 1" (25.4mm)

The whole Chainmail thing from Wizards of the Coast passed me by. When you say Chainmail I think of the old mass battle rules in the little brown book. The figures are pretty cool and seem to scale well with my other 28mm figures. The female Paladin is pretty huge, giving me a Brienne from Game of Thrones vibe.

I hope you all are well, and that I'll have something of interest to post again soon.

Merry Christmas

Hi All,

Just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, or whatever year end holidays you observe.

I will be gorging myself on too much food as we celebrate with my family and my wife's family together down in Stockton, CA. I hope you get most of what you wished for and are able to enjoy this time with family. I know I will.

And now for some thematically appropriate scantily clad women.

Holidays have begun.

Hi All,

Well I successfully finished my first entry into the challenge before boarding the plane and am now enjoying the holidays with my family. I sent my email to Curt today for the themed challenge tomorrow, so it will be a couple of days before I can post it here. I'll save my commentary until then.

As an aside, I noticed that I've been getting a few hits for people looking for "tits" or "big boobs". All I can say is welcome to the blog and I hope you aren't too disappointed.

And as for pictures of my figures. Please be patient, they're coming. For now I'll leave you with a picture of my 1000 point Ninja Army at night.

:p

Long time, no update

My last post was over a week ago, but it feels like ages. I wish I could say I've been productive, but I find myself flailing about more than usual as I try to wrap up various time sensitive year end projects.

These include:

• Making a calendar with pictures of the kids to give to family members
• Printing out mailing labels for the annual Holiday cards
• Going through the thousands of pictures from the Flag football season to get a few good ones
• Putting up the Christmas decorations

The calendar I've been making since not long after my daughter was born. Initially it was meant to be something mainly for my wife's grandmother and to satisfy my nerdy impulse to make a calendar that had all the Chinese lunar dates and holidays on it. I began to lose interest in doing it several years ago, but apparently no one in the family buys calendars any more. I've since pared it down a bit by only including the major holidays and luni-solar events, and I send it out for printing instead of doing it myself. The rest is fairly mundane and self explanatory.

I quickly lost my painting mojo with what felt like a whirlwind of activity. Really it was only a resumption of normal activity. School and extra curricular. So I have nothing to show for prep on the challenge or for the game I must play before going on holidays.

One thing I did do, however, was re-install vassal on my new Surface Pro 2. The Surface is Microsoft's latest tablet PC running Windows 8.1 and so far I have been enjoying it. Thus far I have used it for just about everything that I was using my 15.6" ASUS laptop annd my Kindle Fire for. I have GIMP installed and Netflix and Kindle for PC. I think I would agree with reviews that it is a tad unwieldy as a tablet, but it is an extremely convenient laptop.

But I digress. I put Vassal on there to see about playing games on it over the holidays. I may have mentioned before that I want to play out a sort of faux Great Patriotic War campaign using Blitzkrieg for strategic movement and play out the combats using Memoir '44, or rather M'44 stuff with Bob Corderey's latest rules. But I need to add stuff onto the modules so we shall see how that works.

Time to think about projects and how to achieve them. You also may have noticed, should you look at such things, that I've updated the games played to show a few games of Zombie Dice (very fun) and that last Rally Round the King (RRtK) battle I played back in October(?).

***

I started writing this over the weekend and it felt a bit rambling. I was going to rewrite it and try to make it coherent but in the meantime I've had a bit of bad news. I've somehow given myself hematuria. It's not painful but I wouldn't look it up if you are squeamish. I went for a run and when I got home experienced the symptoms, which quite frankly freaked me out. Apparently this can happen to long distance runners, which I don't consider myself. There is some evidence of kidney damage and perhaps muscle involvement, so it's not of the garden variety. So once again no exercise and a bunch of tests. The one bright side is I saw a new doctor at the practice and she is quite young and attractive.

Willpower ... and lack thereof

Hi All,

Well I've managed to remain strong in one aspect, I have resisted the very strong temptation to buy more figures. I've made the conscious decision to get cracking on that old Citadel lead, much of which is even primed, instead of buying a whole bunch of stuff and painting that. The only things I plan on buying are the entry figure for the challenge and some bases for the Conquest Normans I won from Mike at Trouble at T'Mill. Why? Because I'm going to use them for Oldhammer, silly.

As for board games though, I have shown the exact opposite of willpower. In my defense I had a 30% off coupon to Barnes & Noble and they were having a buy one get one 50% sale on games this weekend. So I got Axis & Allies 1941, Munchkin Deluxe and Munchkin Unnatural Axe. In addition I got 10% off each game for being a member. I rationalize these as sort of also being presents for the kids who like to play games. Sort of like Homer buying Marge a bowling ball for their anniversary.

Then in the mail today I received a catalog from Fantasy Flight. So much for pretense. They are having a sale until December 9th on select titles here. Age of Conan, which I bought last year (and still haven't played), is $25 and Fortress America, which I played with a friend in the 80's, is also $25. But the game that really caught my eye is Eldritch Horror.

I also haven't done any painting in a couple of days, but I did wash up some plastic zombies and survivors that are ~45mm. Sorry Curt, I'm sure you'll figure out how to score that.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, I've got a lot of distractions and in-laws looking over my shoulder.

Salve for recovering from the last post.

Since so many have complained about lasting damage from the last post, I thought it might be necessary to give the masses what the clamor for. Interestingly enough Speedos for women are quite Victorian by comparison to the male version. Perhaps that is what it is that bothers people so much. Granted I didn't give you David Beckham types, I gave guys that should probably not been wearing said style. Although c'mon, Rod Stewart was a sex symbol back in the day.

Well anyhow I hope that the following images stir feelings in you that you are completely comfortable with.

I'm feeling patriotic.

Just remember the Budgie is watching you!

photoshopcontest.com

And so is Zardoz!

Of Budgie Smugglers and Banana Hammocks.

After reading about Ray and Fran's weekend getaway to Nottingham I was introduced to the term "Budgie Smugglers". Now I could guess at what Fran was talking about but those of us in the Americas, although familiar with the concept, were unaware of this particular slang. Although I think Fran was just referring to form fitting undergarments the term refers to something we all know and love, the Speedo bathing suit.

Now someone had mentioned that in 'Merica we just call it a Speedo (I think it was Yank in Australia), but the actual slang is "Banana Hammock" (there's even a website). So, much like Coke or Xerox, the brand name has become a descriptor for the thing itself.

Hmm I wonder if Posties Rejects will come up with some other garment to help identify them at shows?

No missing someone at Salute in these bad boys.

And now some gratuitous pictures of said garment in action. Those of you with weak constitutions may wish to look away.

Make fun of my swim trunks, I F#$%ing dare you!

I won't say I look like Daniel Craig, but I wear a similar style of trunks to the pool/ beach. I used to wear what we call board shorts, but I'm not a surfer and the super long baggy fabric just holds water and is generally uncomfortable when out of the water.

An artists rendition of Fran and Ray's trip to Nottingham.

Getting ready to play Call of Duty?

And a message for you from Samuel L. Jackson if you are still using Captcha.