Thanks to all who entered. Asslessman, please email me your particulars. You can find it in my contact info. I have decided on a color scheme for the birds of prey. I'm thinking of going Wrath of Khan green with a bit of brown/ rust to pick out details.
Sorry I have to rush off now. Had some weird connectivity issues from last night into this morning and it's put me behind schedule.
While I had meant to read "And a Bottle of Rum" and give you updates as we wound down the giveaway, I have been consumed by trying to get back into working out, practicing martial arts, and home projects that I have been putting off for too long.
As it was Father's day and my birthday two weeks ago, I indulged myself in several books. From John Curry I bought Naval Wargaming and Practical Wargaming through Amazon and Operation Warboard through Lulu.
I also ordered Wargaming World War Two from Amazon. Written by Justin Tonna from The Wargaming Addict. He also has done a bunch of video walk throughs of a couple of THW rule sets on his site.
And after reading about it on the Solo Wargaming Yahoo Group I ponied up $6.95 for the PDF of this book. You can never have too many ideas for solo gaming.
I wish I could say that I will now knuckle down and read but I have a new pressing issue to deal with. My son tearily reported last night that kids are spanking him in the bathroom at the robot camp I signed him up for. I'm going to talk to the instructor about it today. Wondering if I'm gonna have to go all Bad Santa on a kid (or his parents).
Amended :
I forgot to welcome two new followers.
Smapdi Ness, you don't seem to have a blog. When and if you do just let me know and I'll post a link.
Well, next week is the 2nd anniversary of the blog so I thought I'd give away a copy of THW's And a Bottle of Rum.
This is a game of swash buckling pirate adventures on the Spanish main.
Rules of the giveaway:
1.) Be a follower of the blog.
2.) Leave a comment as an entry to the draw.
3.) If you pimp this post and leave a link here (so I can check it) I'll give you a second entry.
4.) I will post the winner on the morning of Friday June 28th (my time).
Another point about this giveaway is this is one of the first that I've done where I actually bought the rules first myself. I mainly got this title because I liked what I saw in terms of ship battles and thought it was something I could use for my 18th century Imagi-nation project.
I will endeavor to read these and give you guys a mini review. That way I can digest it in chunks and maybe get some games in as well.
So don't be shy, come get yer hands on some pirate booty!
Six Irregular DY06 Generic Standard Attack Fighter
Twelve dime store plastic ships that will be fun to paint up.
So under the terms of the giveaway I won $10 worth of miniatures. After much agonizing I couldn't resist some faux Klingon vessels. Doug was really cool and threw in the flight stands, fighters and plastic ships. Should help me get up and running with some space battles soon.
And yes. There is a lot languishing on the desk, thank you very much. More painting, less talking.
I feel like I'm falling behind on all the great stuff that is going on with various blogs right now, so I thought I'd write a short post about what I've been doing and some upcoming plans.
First off my wife and kids got me Munchkin Bites and Munchkin Cthulhu for my Birthday.
We just played Bites and it was fun. The puns are pretty goofy. I thought my wife and kids would like it because they like the whole Evolution/ Twilight war between the Vampires and Werewolves thing. My son won easily, with coaching, while my wife and I floundered around doing nothing.
I bought myself The Walking Dead and Rocksmith video games. I had read a review of the old walking dead game somewhere after reading that the new one was not very good. The old one is tense and filled with hard choices.
The Rocksmith one is interesting in that I get to plug my guitar, and bass, into the Xbox and play along with popular songs. The interface is similar to Guitar Hero/ Rockband in that the strings are color coded and the notes cascade toward you. Forgetting where your hand is on the neck can become problematic. Right now I've only played two songs in dummy mode and it reminds me of playing "easy" in the other games. You play select notes while the song is blazing away and it doesn't feel like anything they give you is actually on the beat. Hopefully it will get better as I go along.
I still have a gift card from Amazon burning a hole in my pocket, I'v got my eye on a Charles Grant title and some other things.
I also received my prize from Doug over at Doug's land of the Dead, but it is so cool it deserves its own post.
If I were to do a post line up it might be:
Doug's Prize: What I won.
Thoughts about ACW on the eve of Gettysburg.
SWC Bloggiversary giveaway.
(Line up subject to change as the next thing takes my fancy)
PS- I may be doing another complete overhaul of the blog design. But that is for another post as well.
So I decided, in an attempt to make the blog a little bit more user friendly that I would change the format.
Of course in the process it wiped out my background etc. So... I'll be puttering around here in the coming days fixing things back up.
Hopefully this format (Sidebar) will be the best of both worlds. People will be able to comment easily and still be able to see a list of other posts that they may be interested in.
As always you can select the view that you like the best in the upper left of the menu bar.
Also make sure to get in on the ATZ-FFO crowdfunding. Three days left to go and only $242 left to reach the stretch goal of 6 extra 15mm figures. While I did pledge I am not eligible for the stretch goals, I'd just hate to see people miss out when it's so close.
Also thanks to Armand who posts on TMP for linking to my previous post. I should probably post links on TMP more as it really increases traffic. I got 1224 hits in one day, which I think is the most ever. The only down side is I may be getting a rep as that guy who is obsessed with boobs in gaming.
Big stuff in the works in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes peeled.
Over at Old School Gamers on facebook there have been a few posts going up about the impracticality of boob armor.
Interestingly, to me anyway, the arguments all seem to run along the lines of the functional impracticality of said armor rather than the sexualisation/objectification of the female depicted.
You can check out the Tor.com article It’s Time to Retire “Boob Plate” Armor. Because It Would Kill You. here.
Now personally, as a sex starved adolescent, I grew up on a steady diet of fantasy art like this:
And of course this:
Not this:
Or this:
So I think that the female fantasy figures that were sculpted in the 80's and 90's were following this paradigm. As a dirty young man, who is now a dirty old man, it didn't particularly bother me or strike the "too unreal for fantasy" nerve. Although I have never been one to question fantasy, or sci-fi for that matter, too carefully. It is not in my nature to try and poke holes in an adventure or campaign, but just go with whatever the story entails.
But I digress. I think there are really two main questions. What is the way to sculpt a feminine figure without over sexualization, and what influence do women and girls have on the miniature market?
I'm not a sculptor or particularly talented artist, and as can be seen by my various posts showcasing boobs I'm pretty adolescent in my outlook about nekkid women but I do have an opinion on this.
First and foremost I have a strong opinion about fantasy. I don't demand it to be real. If it were realism I was looking for my rpg character would be a coopers apprentice trying not to die of exposure or malnutrition, not a Half-Orc Warrior with a giant axe running around beating ass.
In my fantasy I want to look like this:
Not this:
Sorry dude. Just trying to make a point.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want my fantasy women to look a little bit like a Frazetta inspired wet dream. That being said, I think there are limits. I think for figures we need to be able to obviously see the difference between male and female. The most obvious way is for the female figures to have breasts. I suppose I could paint a vaguely unisex looking figure in shades of pink and say it is female, but that seems almost as bad as just having unrealistic boob armor.
Two women who I follow paint female figures very well and I hope that they might chime in and give their perspective. As a solo gamer I am doubly insulated from the women of the hobby and therefore don't have an inside view of the subject. The two women are Anne of O'Leary miniatures and Elaine from Atomic Floozy. They both are good painters Anne's style is perhaps more flirty, if you will, and Elaine is a gamer who tries to field all female forces. Tamsin of Wargaming Girl also comes to mind but I can't think of anything but male figures that she has done, being a hard core wargamer. I don't mean to call you ladies out you just happen to be women whose efforts I respect was curious what opinion, if any you had on the subject.
I've already gone on longer than intended so I'll try to wrap this up. The last thought is what I would like to use for gaming with my daughter. Personally I want to give her empowering role models, not sexpots. There's nothing wrong with being sexy but it can go too far. As an example lets look at some figures from Hasslefree of Kalee I came across today.
Pretty much the same vibe for me as the last one. I may be a hypocrite, but that's how I feel.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe we dudes need to get over the Sears underwear/ National Geographic mentality about our miniatures while still being able to acknowledge our fantasy art roots.
If you are a 15mm Zombie gamer you should not let this one pass you by.
Two Hour Wargames is doing a crowd funding of a project for minis and supplements to ATZ-FFO that has only 10 Days and $155 to go. You can find it here.
Full disclosure, I bought in to the $40 - But I play 28mm! Any Help? This option includes the two card decks and the scenario PDF for those of us who don't use 15mm.
If you want to see examples of ATZ-FFO game play you can't go wrong with Colgar6 or Vampifan. There are a host of others as well, but these are the two that leap to my mind.
In short, make a pledge so I can get my damn cards! ;)
Also THW has just released their new Pirate rules "And a Bottle of Rum". I so want to buy these, but the guilt of having a stack of unread THW titles is causing me to hold back. Also a lack of terrain or figures at the moment.
I won the prize over at Doug's Land of the Dead and will receive $10 worth of figures of my choice and get to have something from his Sci-Fi campaign at Starbase Alpha Romeo Charlie, named after me. Pretty sweet.
Hopefully my luck will hold for some of the other giveaways going on at the moment.
Here is the Weiner reference. For those of you who don't know, he's the guy who resigned from congress after texting pictures of his johnson to some chick. The Post is a worthless rag, and I never read it when I lived in NYC, but they always had the best headlines.
And welcome to two new followers:
Matthew Raevis I don't see a blog listed in your friend connect.
