Change is Coming...

 

When I created the Arcadia Prime blog in 2007, it was intended to be a home where I could post my Warhammer 40k Battle Reports, along with any other 40k-related posts I felt like writing. Yet soon I wanted to write about more than just battle reports.  I wanted to write hobby articles, showing my progress in painting miniatures, along with some tutorials.  My series on painting Imperial Guard camouflage has turned out to have some of my most popular posts.  But the more I strayed from the original "mission statement" of 40k Battle Reports, the more reluctant I was to post. 

Oral Cancer Awareness

I have not been blogging for a while now, and there's a good reason for it. My wife is currently undergoing radiation and chemotherapy treatments for oral cancer.  I could have stayed off the radar until life gets back to normal, never having mentioned it here.  But one of the primary causes of deaths due to oral cancer is due to late diagnosis, and at least part of that is due to lack of awareness.  So rather than keep quiet, I'm going to talk about it a bit.

The Best Laid Plans...

...oft go awry.  Or at least delayed.

Since early May of this year I've been neglecting 40k.  Or rather, its priority has been downgraded, temporarily. I haven't been painting, modeling, gaming, anything...and it is frustrating because there is so much I want to do. 

Cameras

 There are some updates I could be making, by my camera is on the fritz (dust on the sensor, which makes all the pictures look horrible). I was going to take a picture of the offending camera as proof but...you see the problem. So I put up a stock photo instead.

In the meantime, I'm still around, and I'm working on some updates behind the scenes. When I can include some pictures to make them more interesting, I'll put them up.

Where the heck have I been?

I've been out of the blogging loop for several months, but not without good reason. Earlier in the year my family had some health problems, and while we've gotten past them, it took up a lot of my time.

Second, and this is good news, I got to welcome my son into the world on July 5.

Both Mom and baby are doing great.

Since I now have two children...

...finding time to paint miniatures is even harder to come by.

Coupled with that, most of my free time over the past several months has been spent writing. Last year I discovered that Black Library accepts open submissions for novels and short stories, but only during a window from May 1 to July 31. See their FAQ. Anyway, I've had a bunch of ideas about 40k stories (who hasn't?), and decided to give it a try. So I've submitted proposals for two novels and one short story. If one of them is accepted, I'll hear in the next two months. If not, I won't hear anything at all. I have few illusions that one of my submissions will be accepted, but the fastest way to get rejected is not to submit anything at all. So here's hoping that the powers that be at Black Library like what I wrote...

Perhaps during the waiting period I can get back into painting. Sitting idle while waiting would be a mistake... As for actually gaming and fighting any battles...that's even harder.

My usual gaming opponent and good friend of mine, Jack Badelaire, has also been busy this year writing as well. Although he's a fan of Black Library's novels, he's going independent. Jack is very much into post-modern pulp fiction--that is, men's action/adventure novels, running the gamut from WWII commando stories to 70s and 80s pulp thrillers (check out his blog for more details). He's recently published the first issue of an e-journal called Hatchet Force Journal, which includes many articles on the subject including an interview with a prominent author in the field. It's a mere $0.99, so check it out.

Jack's also working on a pair of novels--one is a modern revenge thriller, the second is the first in a series of WWII novels based on British Commando raids in Europe. Both of these should be released on Amazon.com in the next few months.

* * *
Despite all these things taking up my time, I have a bunch of miniatures queued up on a shelf. Every time I walk past them I feel guilty. Sooner or later I'll find a few hours of free time, and I'll start painting. Someday I might even be able to get back into gaming...

Update

First I wanted to say thanks to suneokun over at Pathfinder for nominating my blog with the "Stylish Blog Award."

I apologize that I haven't been posted in a while--real life has taken over in a major way. Suffice it to say that my family has experienced some serious health problems over the past few months, and while everything is ok, the road to recovery can be a long one. As such I have had very little time to devote to the hobby recently.

Still, it is good to see that the blogosphere is moving along just fine, and when I've been able I've been reading the various blogs with interest. It's good to have a community of bloggers out there that are supportive of each other and our mutual interests.

It's been somewhat depressing to see that it's been well over a year now since I've been able to put up a battle report. I can't promise when the next one will go up, but it certainly isn't my intention to end my reporting now. But doing a report at this point is an ambitious undertaking, so I'll have to take what I can get and post what I can when I can. Until then, thanks for visiting.

The Miniatures Disease

It's been six months since I've bought any miniatures, a fact that shocks and awes me. Due to various other factors, I've had to put down my paintbrushes and do other things for three months.

But recently I've been able to get back into the game, albeit slowly. I've painted a pair of miniatures, and I'm approaching completion of my Brazen Claws company--a long term project.

When I spent those three months not painting, it was easy to forget about it--or rather, I'd think about 40k, but not too deeply. Yet as soon as I started painting again, I started thinking about it. New projects to work on, new ideas for armies.

I still have many projects to complete, and a mountain of miniatures still in boxes unpainted. But I can't help but think of new things I want to do. It's amazing how quickly the addiction consumes you once you get back into it.

• I still need to complete my Brazen Claws.
• I still need to complete my Ork Land Battleship.
• I still have my Space Hulk minis to paint
• And tons of other miniatures lying around....

And yet, I see a picture like this:

The new Shadow Spectres from Forgeworld, and I want to start making that new Eldar Army I've been dreaming of for a while.  The theme of the army is very ghost-like, and as such the Shadow Spectres would be a perfect fit.

And then the Grey Knights are coming out soon, which is exciting...

And to top it off, I still have lots of ideas for my Warhammer and LotR armies too...  Sigh.

Knight of the Raven

This past weekend I did something I haven't done in over three months: painted a miniature. Real life has been pretty busy recently, and I simply haven't had the time to sit down and paint since October. It feels good to be back. This doesn't mean that I'll be pounding out miniatures left and right again, but at least I'm back in the game a little bit.

I always thought that the Knights of the Raven chapter looked pretty cool. It seems clear to me (although it's stated in the canon that it's not definitive) that the Knights of the Raven are descended from the Raven Guard, which has always been a favorite of mine.

I had originally thought that their paint scheme was essentially the opposite of the Raven Guard, that is, white with black markings. But upon closer inspection, it's actually burnished silver with black markings. Pretty cool. So just for fun I decided to paint up a test miniature in this scheme.

Not the best work I've ever done, but passable, I think.

Sometimes real life gets in the way...

Things have been crazy the past few months. I'm currently caught in a vicious cycle of sickness--catching a cold from my daughter, only to reinfect her and vice versa. This has been coupled with some home improvement projects. All the family is moving in with my mother-in-law. And work has been busy too. All of this has conspired together to mean that I haven't had time to sit down and paint for ages... :( And there's no end in sight. Perhaps in a few months things will settle down, but until then, I'm stuck taking care of other things. There's no question I'll get back into it, but it'll take some time. Out.

Still here...

The past month or so has not been so friendly to me with regards to either blogging or playing 40k (or anything miniature related).

Fun-wise, I've done paintball twice in the past month:

You might think that a significant portion of my time would be taken up by playing this...

...but you would be wrong.

For the most part I've been busy with the backlog of chores and other jobs around the house that have piled up. Every time I think I'll get back into painting something, another distraction comes along. I still have hope though that in the near future I'll be able to find some time to do some painting.

One of my big chores is to reorganize all my storage--since my daughter has been born, baby stuff has been displacing everything else in the house, and the clutter has been piling up in a rather disorganized, space-inefficient manner. So I've had to move lots of crap around, while throwing away lots of stuff that I no longer need. In the midst of this I had to make a heartbreaking decision. My garage has long been the home of lots of my 40k scenery, including a bunch of cityfight terrain, featured in multiple battle reports, for example:

• Orks vs. Space Wolves Meeting Engagement
• Orks vs. Lanterns Meeting Engagement
• Eldar vs. Tau Meeting Engagement
• Eldar vs. Tyranids Meeting Engagement
• Imperial Guard vs. Tyranids Meeting Engagement
• Tyranids vs. Orks Coup de Main
• Brazen Claw vs. Orks Meeting Engagement

Well, the cityfight terrain has been sitting on valuable shelf space for years now, and so I had to make the decision to destroy the city. I hadn't had the chance to use it in years, and when I examined it, it was covered with a thick layer of dust, cobwebs, and other detritus.  While I liked the terrain, it was just way too bulky and underused so I couldn't justify keeping it.  Someday, when I have more room, I'll have to rebuild my terrain collection, and I think my terrain building ability has improved somewhat, so I'll probably be able to do a better job. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

I do have several blog articles that I've worked on sporadically, but none of them are finished yet. Chances are I'll be able to finish one or more of those and post those before I'm able to get back into painting.

So anyway...I'm posting this update to try to tell myself that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and that soon I'll be able to get back into painting etc.

Inaugurating a new blog

With the release of Warhammer 8th edition today, I thought I would use it for the inaugural date of my new fantasy-dedicated blog, Abandon All Hope (of ever finishing painting all my miniatures). 

The blog will be focused on the fantasy side, and I'll use it to post Warhammer battle reports, progress on the fantasy minis and/or projects I'm working on, and any general articles I decide to write.

We'll see how it goes.  If it ends up tanking, I may just reincorporate it back into this one, despite "Arcadia Prime" having no direct relevance to the fantasy side of things.  Either way, if things are to grow, they have to change over time.  So rather than become stagnant, I'm branching out and trying new things.

Where did all the Battle Reports go?

Back in the day, I had a website where I put up my battle reports.  I had some other information up there, including some campaign rules, some pictures of my armies, and some other stuff.  But the battle reports were the website's reason for being.

In October 2007 I started this blog, and the same thing applied--the primary reason for the blog was the battle reports, with the other stuff being secondary.  At the same time I didn't want to restrict myself solely to battle reports, hence the "...and more from the 41st Millenium (and some random other stuff)" in my subtitle.

Yet since I started doing battle reports, the statistics are as follows:

• 2001:  2
• 2002: 14
• 2003: 16
• 2004: 15
• 2005: 9
• 2006: 1
• 2007: 4
• 2008: 11
• 2009: 7
• 2010: 2 (so far)

Clearly my heyday was in the 2002-2004 timeframe.  I only managed to put up a single battle report in 2006, but it was my biggest:  The Assault on Morkandy Beach.  That year was something of an anomaly, as there were some major changes going on in my life, and I also was working on another big project that year, which took up a lot of my time.

I started getting back into things in 2008, with a dip in 2009, due to the birth of my daughter that February.  Now in 2010, the early part of the year was very busy at work, but now it's lightened a bit, hence the recent flurry of posts on my blog.  I do hope to get to more battle reports in the future, but right now I'm waiting for Badelaire to get to work on painting his new Space Wolves army so we can feature them in a battle report. :) 

Here's an example, his Space Wolf dreadnought.  Like many of his other Space Wolves, I think he did a great job assembling it--now he just needs to paint it!

So where am I going with this post?  Basically it's an admission that the scope of my blog has changed somewhat.  I still intend to post battle reports of the games I play whenever possible, but I'll also continue to post my works-in-progress, and the random other stuff that crosses my mind concerning 40k, and rarely stuff that only peripherally touches upon 40k. (e.g., posting videos re: paintball.  How is that related to 40k?  Well, my cousin Tyrant was considering modding his paintball marker to look like a bolter...)

Painting with a little one...

A little over a year ago I became a father when the latest servant of the Emperor entered the world.

Now, she's getting close to walking, and this has had an effect on my ability to paint undisturbed...

Clearly, she's interested in what Daddy's up to.  As you can see, she's already reading up on the rules.

I think we have a budding general in the works. The only question is, which army is she going to want to play?

So I decided to let her choose.  I set up some minis from a selection of armies, and lined them up.  The choices were, left to right:  Ultramarines, Orks, Blood Angels, Raven Guard, Imperial Guard, Brazen Claw, Tau, Chaos Space Marines, Salamanders, Tyranids.  I presented her the selection and turned her loose...

As she got close, she took a moment to ponder her choices.  I'm sure that paint scheme, army background, and tournament army lists factored heavily into her decision making...

And then she made her first choice--a common one for newly starting players:  Space Marines.  In this case,  the Brazen Claw.

But of course, like nearly all players, she wasn't satisfied with just one army, so her second choice was Imperial Guard.

I wasn't fast enough with the camera, but her third choice turned out to be Blood Angels.  Clearly she's been paying attention to the rumors about the new Codex.


The winning choices:

Comments Update

Unfortunately for the past few weeks my blog has been spammed with...well, spam, so I've been forced to disable anonymous comments from my blog. Hopefully commenting by registered users still works... In the meantime, sorry for the inconvenience.

The past month...

The past month has been very slow in terms of my 40k hobby, much of it being out of my control. First I got a cold which laid me up for a week. After having recovered, I was able to work a little bit on miniatures, but then I got hammered by sickness again that in all probability was the H1N1 virus. The whole family was sick for a week of hell. We're all essentially better now, but I still have a lingering cough that won't go away.

In the intervening week we've gotten a new living room set (a hand-me-down), painted the kitchen, gotten one car repaired and are in the process of looking to replace the other. Needless to say there hasn't been much time for 40k. Grrr...

I haven't played a game in months--I've been busy doing other things, and my usual opponent Badelaire has been busy taking graduate classes, so it just hasn't happened.

Hopefully in the next month or so that will change. In the meantime, however, I have managed a little bit of fun--I've had the opportunity to play paintball a couple of times. A ton of fun and a bit of exercise.
The audio is a little crazy--the sound of my gun is insanely loud, while everything else is pretty faint, so be prepared. There are also subtitles to the video, which help the video make a little more sense--if you mouseover the icon at lower right you can turn on the captions if they are off.

Busy busy busy...

Sorry about the lack of updates over the past few weeks--a bunch of things have been competing for my attention, for example...

The little one has been keeping my hands full:
I also had to put up with trillions upon trillions of these things, which kept me out of commission for about a week:

Still and all, I've managed to work on a few things, including this Shas'ui for my Ethereal's Bodyguard unit:

I've also been working on some LotR miniatures, but I don't have any pictures of those right yet.

I've also begun migrating my battle reports from being hosted on comcast directly into the blog. So far I've only done about a dozen or so, and it's been relatively easy since they are simple--just some text and pictures. Once I get up to battle report 33, however, things are going to get significantly more complicated...right now I'm not sure how I'm going to handle it.

More updates once I have something worthy of reporting...

The newest servant of the Emperor

My daughter Laurelin Mary, the newest servant of the Emperor, was born on 0123009.M03. (February 14, 2009, at 7:34am). She was 7 lbs 4 oz, and 19 in long. Before I know it she'll be leading the forces of the Imperium to victory on the field of battle. :)

Vacation...what vacation?

So I took the week of Thanksgiving off, but there was no relaxation for me. Last Monday was spent building shelves in my basement, allowing me to store tons of junk that had accumulated there, while the contractors installed a safer, less slippery carpet on my stairs. Tuesday I began the sad task of emptying my erstwhile game room, moving my miniatures from their cases down two floors to the basement, where they will have to languish for the foreseeable future.

Wednesday I began my painting project! Unfortunately, I wasn't painting miniatures:


Yes, my game room has begun its transformation into a future nursery, while my "game room" will for the foreseeable future be the garage (when my car isn't in it). My future daughter has begun the process of irrevocably changing my life. But there are positives: I will be indoctrinating her into wargaming and miniature painting at an early age. :)

So I apologize for the lack of updates for the past two weeks--despite the home repairs/renovations that have been going on, I have managed to work on a few things, so hopefully next week will be a "real" update of what I've been working on.

Arcadia Prime: One year on...

Actually, it's one year plus on...as I totally missed my anniversary of October 8. Well, I've had 90 posts in the intervening year, which isn't so bad. A very large percentage of them were "catching up" by reformatting and posting old battle reports, so I don't know that year two will be nearly as productive. If I can manage a post or so a week, I think that will be pretty good.

Since I started making battle reports, I've done 72 of them, and they've evolved with time--from simple one page descriptions with some pictures, to now with maps, pictures, briefings and debriefings, etc. I hope to keep improving them with time.

The coming year is going to be a busy one, not the least reason being is that I'm going to be a dad for the first time... But in between diaper changes and bottle feedings, I'll hopefully be able to devote some time to gaming and painting--it'll just take more planning ahead to make it work. Already my "game room" is being dismantled to make room for a nursery, but that means I'll just have to use the garage for gaming (the upside to this is that I'll be able to break out my 9' x 5' table again!).

So in terms of the blog, what will the next year bring? I have lots of projects going on behind the scenes:

• My Brazen Claws continue to expand, in preparation for the last battle of the Axis Columen Campaign, which will be an Apocalypse battle between my Brazen Claws and Badelaire's Necrons.
  
• I'm also working on finishing up a Necron terrain piece for that battle (expect a terrain article soon)
  
• A scratch built Battlefleet Gothic ship. I've had the idea in my head for a while, and I also have all the parts/bitz needed for it, I just need the time to sit down and do it!
  
• An idea for a new mini-codex that I've been thinking about for a while, which will include rules, some background, and some conversions.
  
• More battle reports, of course! Starting with battles 3 and 4 of the Axis Columen Campaign.
  
• The most ambitious idea yet--I've been thinking about making a "sourcebook" of sorts based on the Arcadia Sector, providing background of the setting for that games my gaming group plays in, including a compilation of battle reports, campaign ideas, hobby projects, etc. This idea was inspired by the truly amazing work that the boys at Bell of Lost Souls have done with their various minidexes and campaign supplements. I can't hope to match what they've accomplished, but it will be fun to try!
  

Other possible things down the road include:

• An Epic 40k battle report. I have miniatures for this game dating back to the days of Space Marine, and both Badelaire and I have been itching to give them a try.
  
• A Lord of the Rings battle report. Yes, it's not 40k, but I've played it a few times and liked the game, so I thought it might be fun to do a battle report for it.
  

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I'll try to keep it interesting...

Vacation...

I will be on vacation for the next week, so the next update will appear around May 6. Be back then!