Season's Greetings

 Hi All,

Once again not a whole lot to report. I'm just trying to navigate the holidays and not gain a hundred pounds. Things are pretty good and we're visiting family so that we don't lose anymore time with loved ones. We're masking, testing and have done everything we can think of to keep our elderly relatives safe.

You may disagree, but I'm faced with the fact that I may not have many more holidays with them.

Ok, enough bummer stuff. 

Happy Holidays to you all!

While I haven't gotten much actual hobby done I have been able to get in some games and make the new composite banner displayed above. I'm not really a graphic artist, so I'm sure it's full of glaring errors to the professional eye, but I'm reasonably happy with it.

I also made a version that I ran through the comicifier for a new banner for my comics.

I decided not to do it for the blog banner because I like the clean version too.

Along with eating too much and drinking Snoop Dogg wine, we've played a few games.

We've been playing lots of Mahjong.

And we played a few games of Bears vs. Babies,  but we don't quite have the hang of it yet.

We also played Dungeon yesterday, but I forgot to take pictures.

Hopefully I can get the Battle Companies game pictures processed and into a comic soon. I might try making a video slide show out of the comic once I get it done.

Give your loved ones a hug and game like there's no tomorrow.

A new Comic from photo method

Hi All,

So I've learned a new method for making comics from a photo. I watched a video from the Photoshop Training Channel on Youtube and I liked the results.

To try it out I took my favorite picture from Monolith Con last year and tried the new process on it.

Above you can see (From L to R) original photo (tweaked in light room), Old comic method (Poster Edges Filter and Exposure Adjustment Layer +0.33), and the PTC method.

This is the Layers panel showing my workflow. It was interesting using the Smart Object feature, I don't know how long it's been around, but it was my first time really using it. Very useful. The Color and Lines Layers are just duplicates of Layer 0 that were renamed and then the various filters applied. Lines and Color are essentially the same. The Threshold filter is adjusted to make it line art and then the Layer Mode is set to make only the lines show (Multiply).

I was able to use this file as a Template to create the Termintor:Apotheosis comic by editing the Layer 0, click on it to open it up and then paste in a new image. The one thing I haven't figured out yet is how to get rid of the rescaling of the original image. I had rescaled the Dragon rider a little just to follow the tutorial. I seemed unable to get rid of that scaling once back in the main image. I'm not totally sure why that is.

Just a note. The Vibrance adjustment is what made it really pop. A great way to easily pump up the color in your image.

I hope you found this useful and/or informative.

Thanks for looking.

Blogging and Banners

Hi All,

We seem to be at the time of year where I realize I've let things slip. It seems like usually in the hobby I get frustrated sometime around February or March and my productivity and posting go way down. This year appears to be no exception.

In the OWAC I had to declare a Mulligan for March as I just hadn't quite gotten the figures for that month finished. They were close, but I kept on seeing glaring errors that I just couldn't ignore that were fiddly and things that kept me from calling the figures finished.

I also just hit a mojo rut. I have a lot of varied things to paint but I just got stuck and stopped sitting at the painting desk. One of the things that is causing a mojo block is the banner for the Zombies. It's been awhile since I've made a banner one post is here. I did finish those banners and they are still on my Orcs. As you can see, I'm not a very good drawer, but I was fairly good at using GIMP to give me custom banners made from elements of the line drawings provided by GW.

Fast forward about three and half years. I'm using photoshop and I can't seem to do it. Frankly I'm baffled. The resolution is squirrely, the size seems to be way off when I eventually print it out. So I'm going back to GIMP to get things in shape.

I've been working on getting this month's OWAC submission finished and going back over the previous submissions and fixing a few errors and putting matte varnish and some flock on.

I'll also be working on some other upcoming projects, like my renegade warband and Rogue trader Imperial Army.

Welcome to donjondo, thanks for following.

Sorry about the lack of pictures in this post, not much to show except piles of partially or completely unfinished stuff.

Umber Hulks and assorted terrain projects

Hi All,

I wanted to start today's post by welcoming Remco to the blog. I usually leave the welcomes for last and almost always forget. Your name is very familiar, but I can't seem to think of your blog. Blogger profiles don't seem to include that any more.

On to the projects.

Finally broke out those Nozulr's Umber Hulks I ordered from miniature market. I'm going to paint them up for the Ambull Safari. Still need to work out some kinks in the scenario.

While I was photographing the Umber Hulks, this cardboard river section looked back at me accusingly. You may recall I had started these back circa 1990 and then restarted them a relatively short while ago. Gamer ADD is a struggle.

Last night my son and I were looking at the WFB 3rd Ed rule book and Slaves to Darkness. He stopped on the Mighty Fortress picture in 3rd Ed again, reminding me we are supposed to play a siege. I want to take some measurements of the pieces to try and make additional sections to match. It may be beyond my skill set.

In blogging news, you may have noticed that you stopped receiving notifications for comments to your own blog. This apparently started near the end of June. This morning I received an email from noreply+blogger asking me if I wanted to subscribe to comment notification or unsubcribe to my own blog. I looked it up in support and it appears legit. I checked my email settings and my gmail account was listed to get blog comment updates, so I'm not sure why it took this long to ask me if I wanted to continue my subscription. Just an FYI.

Happy Hobbying!

How I made my Photo Gallery page

Hi All,

One of the things that you may have noticed is that I've been working on a photo gallery to display all the figures I've painted over the last year. I knew there were many ways to do it and I tried a few that were hit and miss.

First I tried this one from Georgia Lou Studios seemed interesting, but all the code had been removed and the easier method didn't seem to work anymore either.

Then I tried this one from Xommise.com. It had a few problems. The {box-sizing} tag appeared to effect the boxes around the page tabs. If you follow the instructions and put the CSS inside your <skin> for your blog, it will effect the entire thing. You can put the CSS just into the post or page and it will just effect that, not the whole thing globally.

It also had a problem with portrait images breaking the whole format of the gallery. Same if you have a long caption to display. All of a sudden things no longer stack correctly and it looks like garbage.

After that I tried this one using tables:

It does work and her code to do it is here. There is one caveat though. For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to work to just plug in the image link <img src=" "> directly yourself. I may have made the mistake of switching between Compose Mode and HTML Mode, but I don't think so. For me this method of using the Insert Image from Blog would have meant scrolling through the hundreds of photos I've posted in 7 years to find what I want. Not really an optimal use of my time. So because of this I didn't use it.

What I did learn from this, in an almost throw away remark, was that you should never switch back to Compose Mode after you have been coding your gallery in HTML mode. I learned the hard way that it completely breaks what you were doing and copying and pasting the code into a new HTML window will not save it. I had to do it a second time from scratch.

What I ended up using was a Dynamic Drive gallery from here.

I'll try to show you step by step what I did in pictures and then, if I have time, follow it up with a short video.

Let's remove Spam Comments

Hi All,

I made another quick video to help you remove annoying spam comments from your blog. Unlike the G+ ones, you can't report the profile and get them blocked. Somebody pointed out that this could be open for abuse and get legitimate profiles blocked.

Anyhow, here's how to do it through your blogger dashboard and clear it off your blog relatively painlessly.


I recorded this one using my gaming headset. It appears I need a pop filter and perhaps need to have my sinuses checked, as I snort a lot. Sorry about that.

Hope it's useful to you.

Obligatory Year End Post Pt.2 - Achievements in Oldhammer

So, while the painting itself was pretty lackluster, I feel like I accomplished quite a bit on the actual Oldhammering side.

I started by resurrecting the Oldhammer Opponent Finder in April. It still may not really help all that much in actually getting you games, but I think it is reassuring to see others who share your interests and helps to build a sense of community.

Next was the Oldhammer in the New World T-Shirt.

I was very happy with how it turned out and how well it was received. Hopefully I can come up with another good idea for the coming year. If possible I'd like to raise some funds for swag for the next event.

Then it was actually going to, not one, but two Oldhammer Events. Brian's Birthday Bash and Oldhammer Weekend USA 2016. We Oldhammered hardcore and had a lot of fun doing it.

Then of course it was the publishing of the Oldhammer in the New World Zine.

I feel that this was almost as much an accomplishment as the T-Shirt and I'm very proud of it as well. I'm working on the next issue and need more content if you want to submit some. The theme is Rogue Trader.

The final Oldhammer accomplishment was meeting up with Dai from The Lost, The Damned and The Stunted and getting in a game while visiting family in NoCal. I think the world is a better place when we get together and share the things we enjoy. I'll be gaming with him again.

So, now that I look back on it, Oldhammer-wise 2016 was a resounding success.

I'll try to come up with a cogent post and plan for how I'm going to tackle 2017.

Brushes at the ready!

Obligatory Year End Post Pt.1 - Painted in 2016

Well, it seems like that time of year when bloggers look back at the year gone by and ponder what the year ahead holds.

As of writing this I have 72 published posts this year, the lowest full year total since I started blogging.

So let's remind ourselves of what was painted.

Figures Painted

The Merchant of Venus XII

I've broken him again in the interim so my staff repair is still not satisfactory.

The Leman Russ and Anti-Tank Squig Gretchin

As per usual it was overshadowed by much better submissions in the bonus round. I hate the photography on this one, I should probably reshoot it.

20mm Ogres and 28mm Giant Rat

No the best picture, but it gets the idea across in one shot. Still haven't had a chance to use these in anger.

Dahn Alt Rump

No real complaints here, I liked this one. I need to finish the rest of my Imperial Cops. I think I want to change their name to Team Terra, Galactic Police.

Otherworld Warlock

He was fun to paint, although I recall spending a lot of time blending his skin only to have it look like it was color blocked in one color only. He is one of the figures I chipped up transporting.

Abdul Goldberg

Probably the figure I'm the most proud of for 2016 for sure if not all time. I also thought I photographed him particularly well. Unfortunately he suffered some pretty major chips in the Oldhammer transport fiasco.

Chaos Warriors

This reminds me that these guys still need varnish and final basing, as well as a proper photo shoot.

Reaper Cthulhu

Another one that needs varnish and better pictures.

Don's Boar Boyz

They look ok. Still not happy with the pace with which I painted them. He's said something about selling off his armies, not sure if these are part of what he's sold.

I also finished up Gropez the Halfling Barbarian, 4 more Goblin Fanatics, 5 gobbo Wulf Boyz, and 10 space chickens with the Clukkatrix for Oldhammer Weekend. They all need their own pictures and perhaps some touch ups from travelling damage.

So it looks like 49 figures, 1 Vehicle and 1 Elder God.

This post turned out much longer than I intended, so I'll stop here and talk about the other hobby things I did in 2016 in my next post.

Cheers.

Finished Ogres and Rat from last Saturday

Hi All,

They are up on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge VI here. As usual I am posting all the same pictures here on the blog.

In the main I like how these came out. I used the Reaper Golden skin tone set, but only the shade and mid colors, followed by a wash with the shade. Looks okay but I think it needed some dark lining for some of the transition areas. I didn't see it at the time.

I'm also not liking the yellow skirt with his skin color as much. The greens were a couple of new colors I bought at the craft store.

I really liked the faces on these two. I thought the picture was sharper than it is.

This giant rat was a fun sculpt. The various spaces between his legs and under his head were a little tricky to paint though.

I don't like how his fur came out but the flesh and boils are nice. This figure proved to be rather popular on the challenge.

So here are the four 20mm scale Ogres from Splintered Light and the 28mm scale Giant Rat from Reaper.

Here's a shot of how I'm trying to play with off camera flashes to get better lighting. I feel like all my shots are under exposed so I'm trying to figure out different ways to light them up. These shots still needed some level adjustments in GIMP, so they're not where I want them to be yet.

I'd like to welcome Kitrock aka Robert Kurcina to the blog. I don't see a blog link in your Google friend profile so let me know if you have one and I'll link it.

And on a final note I've started seeing a slow bleed off of followers over the last couple of days. About 7 so far. I'm wondering if this is what some of you were talking about. I have resisted G+ integration of comments and circles on the blog because they insist on forcing so much integration. I personally like to compartmentalize my life and am not particularly interested in bombarding my non hobby friends with pictures of little men. Call me weird.

Zero points this week, and what's up with Blogger?

Hi All,

Well, after burning the midnight oil to get my Bonus theme entry in, I came up with a big goose egg this week.

As you can see, not only am I off my weekly goal of 77 points, I'm also failing at my secondary goal of no weeks with zero output. I'm close to finishing a couple of things but mostly I've just been flailing about starting new projects. So pretty much the usual around here.

If you haven't had a chance yet, do yourself a favor and go over to the bonus round blog. Make sure to vote for your favorites [mine, ;)] before 11:45pm Regina time on Saturday night Jan. 23rd.

Now that it's been confirmed that we won't be counting bonus points in the Sci-Fi duel I probably won't be doing too many more bonus rounds. Honestly I was trying to stay out of them altogether this year as it's an added layer of stress that I don't need.

I don't know if y'all have noticed, but my blog started looking wonky sometime around the time I posted up my Leman Russ and Squig Katapult crewman. The back ground went white so I changed it to this weird abstract one and some of the link text is now a a color that I can't see. I'm not sure what happened.

Maybe "Web Services" and "I am Psychiatry" paid me back? Probably not, but who doesn't like an internet conspiracy theory.

Hopefully  I can boot strap my way back into productivity. My jaw hurts less today and I may even let people hit me tonight. I'll let you know how it goes.

Do web bots dream of Spam?

Hi All,

  Overnight I got spammed by "Web Services" and "I am Psychiatry". I'm sure most of you already know how to do this, but in case your new to blogging, there is an easy way to get rid of Spam comments.

Inside your blogger dashboard you can go to the comments tab and see all of the comments in chronological order. It tells you who made it, you can read the comment and it shows you what post it's on.

All you have to do is hover over the comment and some options will appear near the bottom. Spam is on the right of the group that pops up. It removes the offending comment and , hopefully, reports the user to blogger. It only took me a couple of minutes to trash 20 or so comments.

***Explicit Language Advisory***

So a hale and hearty Fuck You to "Web Services" and "I am Psychiatry"!

***End Strong Language***

I'm hoping to get something in to the painting challenge today. Sorry Dave. I've been trying to put together something Sci-Fi for the epic fail bonus round and screwed it up slightly. I'm not sure if I can recover. So I'm left with many incomplete projects and a lot of anger.

See you round the interwebs.

Post Christmas, pre New Year update

Hi All,

Well the year is winding down and so is my holiday trip. In anticipation of being on the move again I've curtailed painting for now and chosen to do some long overdue page updates.

You can see what may be my final entry of 2015 on the Painting Challenge blog here. I'll probably post the pictures here as well tomorrow.

I've also updated the Figures/Models completed page and the Painting Challenge page. I realized while doing this that I neglected to take glamour shots of the stuff I was working on during the Summer for Oldhammer Weekend USA. When I get a minute to breath and can get my photo stuff set up at home I'll rectify that.

I'm also trying to decide if I want to change that page to a photo gallery or just link to the appropriate post. Any thoughts from followers?

The games played page need to get sorted, and lets not mention the projects page. It's in need of a complete overhaul.

We did manage to bodge together a gladiator game using Munera Sine Missione, Exagoni Libero, which is actually an older version of Munera Sine Missione. I totally misinterpreted quite a bit of the rules. A combination of careless reading and scrolling back and forth on the computer. But we had a back and forth bash up and the boy had fun. So mission accomplished.

I'll try and do a re-enactment photo session and perhaps we'll get in another game.

Thanks for looking.

Farewell Leia and Maggie, welcome back Fran

Hi All,

Just wanted to draw your attention to a few things.  As you may have noticed I redid my banner to better reflect my painting output for the last year or so. I have finally graduated from being  just a wargames waffler to waffler and painter.

My wife texted me this to shame me. She should know, I have no shame.

One of the things that needed to go was Princess Leia in her "slave" costume from return of the Jedi. Apparently seeing it chapped my wife's ass.

You can revisit my posts about Leia here and here. Sadly, Leia's Metal Bikini is no longer with us, but you can find it archive.org.

I also removed Margaret Thatcher, or rather Meryl Streep dressed up like her to please Ray. Although, to be honest, she was only ever there to get a rise out of him in the first place.

Ray and Maggie do the forbidden Dance.

Okay, not my best photo shop, but you get the idea.

Switching gears I'd like to herald the return of The Angry Lurker Fran's excellent blog. He was one of Postie's Rejects and Ray's partner in crime. You may remember my re-imagining of their weekend in Nottingham for Blog-Con. It was entitled "Of Budgie Smugglers and Banana Hammocks"  (beware, you cannot unsee the images contained in this post). You may prefer the follow up "Salve for recovering from the last post" as many people to this day apparently do. (No nudity, but you may not want to look at this at work.)

I was going to make another Photoshop of "Frandoz", but since the last one was such a cock up I'll save it for another time.

The self imposed painting ban will end this weekend. I'll have some more stuff for you soon.

Cheers

Giving the blog a face lift

Hi All,

You may have noticed that the blog looks different today. I feel that it's been long overdue for a change up/ update.

In the coming days I'll be noodling around with things and trying to update the various pages with, hopefully, more useful information.

As I do these things I'll try to share them with you as a source of ideas for you, should you want to try them.

The changes today were from a simple template to an Awesome Inc one. I changed the widget display to a single column, and adjusted the width of the blog to 1000px to fit my 900px standard pictures.

I'll be working on the banner and a photo gallery next.

In other news, I joined the Oldhammer Forum, and noticed that A Tale of Several Gamers Blog is gone. I'm sad about the second thing, as I think that a collaborative project blog to inspire painting projects was a great idea. I feel like I'm responsible in part for its demise because I forgot to update it with my Oldhammer USA prep stuff.

I'm hoping to get more stuff painted for Oldhammer in the final part of the year and I'm thinking a lot about going to more cons or ways to play more Oldhammer.

I think it's time to revisit my mighty empires campaign and consider how to do some remote games in it.

Where I'm at in the AHPCV in the final week free for all

Just an update as we enter the final week of The Challenge.

As you can see it looks like I'm not going to hit my projected goal of 1000 points of painted miniatures. I think I may be able to squeeze out another 96 and make the third points tier of 750.

For some reason I seem unable to dedicate time to the hobby regularly. As you can see from the weekly points graph, I had too many (every other) weeks where I submitted nothing. So something to strive for. We'll see what I can do but I'm going to be fairly busy this week.

Wish me luck.

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.

I've been Liebstered Pt. 2 - (I'm a stubborn SOB)

Well, I've finally slogged through all 309 blogs that I follow in preparation for nominating some for this award. I used getting this award myself to finally knuckle down and do this as the list is getting unwieldy and I have many that now appear to be defunct.

As you may recall I was awarded the latest iteration of the award here. If I recall correctly the main criteria is for blogs that are under 200 followers. Many of the blogs I follow either don't include the follower widget or are WordPress blogs which also don't count followers. So I excluded those. I also wanted to be a little more restrictive and give some more love to those blogs that were under 100 followers, but with the stipulation that they had to have posted at least once in the last couple of months. Sadly I've noticed many of the blogs I follow not updating for 5 months or more.

So here are my nominations: (Please feel free to just accept it and not go through the hassle of answering the questions and nominating other blogs, I'm totally fine with that).

Avid Wargamer's House - A THW and Ganesha games player and battle reporter.

Steveo's Mini Soldiers - Warhammer, a guy having fun with miniatures. He's a new blogger so show him some love.

Luke: hoti to kratistos - Very interesting 1/300 modern and Dark Age gaming. Interesting way of making battle mats.

Amateur Hour - Great character development, figures and art. I also may have seen someone else nominate him but I can't see where right now.

Ancient Miniatures - 1/72 Ancients, nicely painted and a wide variety of ranges.

Oldhammer in the New World - Oldhammer USA style!

Cluck Amok - 54mm FIW with beautiful figures and Terrain.

The Inward Curving Isentropic Endoscope of Dr Cornelius - 15mm, RRtK and hexographer. Nuff said.

Brigantes Studio - Loki and Kev's painting service.

Toy Construct - Reviews of Cool toys and games.

Pushing Tin - Interesting looking games and the Valeur et Discipline Rules

So those are my 11, I don't think it specified how many. There were of course many more blogs, all deserving in their own right, but I've spent way to long on this as it is. I also wanted to give a boost to those blogs that are out there but not getting the exposure they deserve.

Have a good one all. An RRtK battle report is coming soon.

Basing and Base coating

We've managed to keep up the pace here. On Friday I finished basing the last five Mantic Skeletons and the
14 1/72 figures I had mounted on washers.

I am a world class procrastinator

Well I've done it again. I've put off working on the casualty round until the last minute. I only cleaned the figures yesterday and need to get them done before 11pm Saturday night my time. Fortunately it is another small project, consisting of only three figures. We shall see what I can achieve.

I have a lot of figures half to almost completed for the Talomir campaign. Steve and Ruarigh have fought out the invasion of The Abyss by Mirish, with Mirish being victorious. It hasn't been posted to the blog yet, they may be waiting on me. The main reason I'm holding off on fighting the battle is I don't want to mix up the started figures with the strictly legal figures for the challenge. I've put too much work in not to get any points.

Since I posted about Anonymous posts I have been deluged by 20+ emails from various blogs. I have unsubscribed from the posts in question. I am considering whether or not to take the extra step of making an exit comment, just to get across the point. I don't know. I personally wonder if it is worth the effort to block out anonymous comments. Obviously some of you do feel that it is.

And if you are looking for the followers widget it can be found at the bottom of the first page of "More Gadgets" when you go to add a gadget in layout view. I read about it here.

I also think that I mentioned a review in the last post, and then didn't really review anything. So I'll owe you one.

I actually started writing this this morning. I planned on posting during the day but got caught up in things. The casualties are based and primed now. I hope to color block them while I watch Game of Thrones Season 3 with my wife.

Wrasslin', Review and update

Hi All,

The family went to WWE Live on Saturday night and it was quite fun. My wife had won some tickets from work so she and my son sat in the company suite while my daughter and I sat with the unwashed masses. While there was some body odor in evidence we actually sat between several women, one of which actually smelt quite nice. Any how there was chanting, trash talking and great athleticism in addition to the sheer spectacle. It was quite a bit of fun even if I have no idea who most of the wrestlers are any more. My only gripe would be the one guy who stood up 100 times during the matches who was of course one row down and right in front of me. I let it go because he was obviously really into it and I figured it wasn't worth raining on his parade.

Obligatory crappy cell phone picture.

The stuff I ordered through Amazon has been coming in, in dribs and drabs, but I think it is all here now. I read the entire Walking Dead Vol 3 in one sitting and am reading Conan Vol 2 in spurts to give myself a break from various tasks.

The flash diffusers arrived and I hope to give them a go in today or tomorrow. I have a ton of chores to do and I have to play X-Wing with my son or suffer the consequences.

Painting Update:

I have been painting a lot, unfortunately nothing is finished. It is also cutting into my planned challenge painting. I am pushing to finish those 1/72 figures for the Treyine vs. Stygustan battle for Talomir Tales. I need to get to work on my casualties and prep the figures for the last stand so that I'm not down to the wire for that one as well. I just need to stay focussed.

Oldhammer:

Of course it is a total side track, but somewhat relevant as I am painting the figures for it in the challenge (sort of). I dug through some old boxes and found notes and letters pertaining to my Orc army from the 90's and the Mighty Empires Play by Mail campaign I was trying to do with my highschool gaming buddy Charlie. This is the campaign and setting I want to revive, perhaps this year finally. Lots of good stuff. It made me realize that I did actually own, and may still have, Warhammer Armies (3rd Ed). As of right now I don't know where it is located, but the notes on the armies can only have been done with access to the book and I was the only one who invested in Warhammer at all. I think a couple of my friends bought a blister pack or two, but they decided they didn't like painting and collecting figures or modelling terrain. So thus ended my foray into Warhammer.

Charlie's roster on the left.

Bloggery:

Anonymous has started up again, and by that I don't mean the hackers (or whatever that group is). Anonymous comments have been cropping up again on many blogs I follow. I like to be notified of follow up comments to posts in case there is an interesting discussion going on. The Anonymous comments are almost invariably spam of one sort or another.

For the love of all that is holy, stop allowing anonymous comments. Seriously. In the almost 3(?) years I've been blogging I can count on my fingers the number of legit anonymous posts I have seen across the hundreds of blogs I follow. Otherwise they are just trolls and spammers. My new policy is to immediately unsubscribe a thread that gets an anonymous post.

Also I would like to encourage everyone to add a followers widget to their blog. While follower count is a little bit of a false ego boost it does have a couple of advantages. The first is that the number of blogs followed in this way seem to have no limit, where as manually inputting them does. The other reason is that many blogs have a blogroll of the blogs they follow so you get advertising on their blogs if they can follow you easily. As a corollary, always follow back.

Welcome to:

Jay from Finely Diced Gamers, a blog about board games from the look of it. I already see a couple that have peaked my interest. And of course I love Risk, although getting my family to play seems a bridge too far.

The Lord of Excess, who has no less than 5 blogs. The main one seems to be The Excessive Gamer. The foremost topic is D&D edition wars. For me it's AD&D (1^st) if you must know.

Just a reblog from Oldschool Gamers on FB.