A mild diversion

From Michael Whitman and Magneto to Sun Tzu and Ryoko, though there are some thought digressions that only make sense to a heuristic computer, it's pretty smart at guessing someone you're thinking of.

Akinator

I even threw Hal 9000 at it.

...impressive.

For a complete balls out attempt I threw Fuse from Jin-Roh at it.

WOW.

Workbench: Terrain

Now with thick bocage and some wheat fields.

Mad Max!

Mad Max re-enactment for 3 days

I've always wanted to setup a Mad Max theme park. I figure the setup must be cheap what with the biggest decoration expense being wrecked cars and some old football armor for costumes.

This however, is almost as awesome.

Workbench: A bridge over the river paint

What started off as this... a silver surfer rendition of Col. Nicholson...

Became this!



Still, I'm disappointed. Particularly so with the ones that contain the bad primer job. They have become quite the struggle and mar what would otherwise be nice paint.

But with every iteration, the process gets easier and the product gets better I think. I'm also drifting from established British colors though I believe. This is in part effect that i've messed with the ink wash constitutions.
I'm favoring a dark ink and a thinned black ink. One for broad application and the other to fill in details.

Also, custom highlight colors are now the standard. The mini's look so much nicer in person with a few custom highlights. For the time invested (an extra minute each?) it seems to really make them work.

(Notice the Heineken bottle cap that still appears big, despite being in the background.)

Awesome Dungeon

This might be a bit premature given my current projects... but this picture clearly defines what the next one is going to be.

I mean, look at it. It's even modular. I don't even care that I rarely play anything remotely DnD related.

This is AWESOME.

RX8: First Failure

Battery fluid outside the battery is bad, mm'kay?

It's the battery that came with the car. So clocking in at 51k doesn't seem too bad. She left us stranded in the mall parking lot and gave plenty of warning that either the battery, alternator, or starter were on the way out. In fact, she'd been on this slow slide to failure for about a week. But since it was on warranty for another week or so, we opted to ride it right into the ground hoping for a failure sooner rather than later.

But since it was just the battery, I bit the bullet and just replaced it. I'd have known sooner if it wasn't for all the plastic crap covering the engine.
It has been deemed unecessary and has been removed.

Good as new!

Workbench: Platoon! +

It's like the movie... only it's British... and the helicopters are boats... and it's Dunkirk, not Vietnam.

Other than that, it's the same, right?




...starting to look like an army.

These last 4 were actually troublesome for me. It was the first push into mass painting techniques and it seems a bit much at 4 to a run. Mid way through, I thought these were the worst of the bunch as well and quite nearly threw in the towel and start over from scratch on them.
But I persevered, mixed a couple of mid tone paints just for them, and made them up to be the best of the group so far.

Biggest change on the last 3 was a new flocking mix. Taking a queue from my own lawn from time to time, I noticed that grass doesn't grow uniformally. So I'm trying to recreate that to some degree on the last 3, in addition to giving a bright green base paint to make it pop.

Skyline

workbench: Two of them?

More like 4, but the Strongbad reference is perhaps... dated? That episode is almost 10 years old. Wow, I completely digress.



The far left 2 are the new ones. There is some improvement in paint thickness and texture. Two of the soldiers are next togethor in the same pose, one has a popeye kind of grin. The other... pretty plain by the camera's perception (blackberry phone). These two were batch painted and clocked in at around an hour each. That's way too long I think, but then I don't have much basis of comparison.

And I'm not even done. I'll add some standing grass at some point. But that's just time consuming and I can do that a later date.

And speaking of which, I need to repair/update these trees.

The next painting subject will be 4 stands of infantry and see if I can shave off some of the repetitive/redundant painting steps. I think I can get away with a lot if I mix a new batch of thined inks for these guys as opposed to using a strong black, flesh wash, and thin black right now.
I can probably get away with one thin black/flesh mix.

workbench: A little less awful

Still sorting out painting techniques and basing.

Commando: First Paint

It's hard painting at this scale. This right here is a prototype and I will be formulating the paint/basing process in the future.

Complicating this is the heat/humidity. It's really difficult to get a good spray primer job that won't bubble in this atmosphere. And I failed to some degree on that front.

On the Work Bench

Just some primed to go churchills and zippos (here seen in their rarely photographed "Not on fire" state).


And got dang I want some chicken tonight.

The Greatest Raid

So I'm taking a relaxed pace to painting these British miniatures. It's mostly painting theory and experimenting with airbrushing and micro detailing. 15mm isn't exactly a scale I'm used to painting.

Why British you might ask? Commandos. Specifically, "The Greatest Raid" is pretty inspiring. Which I'm sure one of my brothers has heard of.



There is that and "A Bridge Too Far". Both the book and the movie I shared with Dad when I was like 13 left me with a lot of good memories. There is a lot of imagery and inspiration from a plan that looked good only on paper, the pluck of British armor commanders driving right into the hidden German guns, and the tactical failures that culminated into strategic ones that I can draw from and reminisce about.

Flames of War Rules

I've fully digested the rules and rather like some of the novel concepts contained within. For instance, it is assumed that any infantry of the time is more than capable of hitting a target in range and killing it with the weapons of the time. So in order to hit a target, you don't use a stat from the infantry firing to determine a hit, rather, you use the skill of the infantry being fired upon.

It represents the reality of 2 modern armies clashing against each other where upon one has soldiers confident and blooded enough to know that you should duck, hide, and use cover as opposed to a series of conscripts that stand around and confirm that they indeed "heard something" with their NCO and should perhaps find cover at some point.

A lot of the rules assume this disparity where talented soldiers are just plain hard to kill because they either walk off the flesh wounds, are entrenched, or aren't seen at all.

With that, I leave with a useful Monty Python sketch illustrating this core concept.

The Hobby of the Mind

So I went up to the local gaming shop of choice this weekend to browse upon a Flames of War tourney. I did not know this was happening. In fact, I went up to throw down some heavy metal thunder in the form of Battletech. This did not happen.

Though I was enamored with Flames of War carnage wrecking axis and allied army lists alike and instead watched and critiqued with the tourney organizer. One guy couldn't seem to get past turn 2 without littering the field with his own burning tanks. Another mopped up with a simple Tiger and high tier Panzer tank list (like, 6 vehicles total) that met an untimely end against a well played US Airborne.
All in all, It's a fairly solid miniature war game set against WW2. All the major nations are represented with a little color being added to every nation. Italians don't have any concurrent troop quality. British have a couple "do or die" style flair. The Russians can use political officers to "encourage morale".

Dad would have loved it. I had even considered picking him up a box set of Russian infantry before the reality of it set in. This would never happen. I could never share this with him like I might of in the past. And as that train of thought came crashing to reality it was so thoroughly heart rending as to give me emotional pause, and perhaps just go home and cry.

I miss him very much.

New Boy