Articles tagged with: Offtopic

One of my current goals is to "reduce waste". Not wasting time in absurd tasks, not burning energy in negative or harmful actions, like getting angry or complaining when I could remove, ignore or change those negative sources, but also reducing my physical goods. I've been hoarding toys, devices and "things" in general since I was a child, and while the emotional value is and will always be there, the less I have to care about (where to store, put, maintain etcetera) the better I feel, as I can use those energies to focus in other more relevant tasks. Tasks both "serious" and hobby-oriented, like painting, reading, playing games and videogames.

One of my few remaining LEGO items was a castle from my childhood. If I recall correctly I got it around when I was 14 for christmas, built it in a morning and then slowly expanded and filled it with extra pieces and figures. Since then, I have never ever dismantled it, and while I gifted all my LEGO blocks (bags and bags of them, imagine that I even had a CPU case made with them, like Google's first computer).

I now wish to reuse the space it takes to better distribute other items (mostly Warhammer 40,000 scenery that I have currently piled up), so I decided to take some photos of it and let another memory go with a better new owner, my nephews, so they also enjoy it and who knows, maybe they come with a better new design!

My beloved castle, front view. Walls have extra height, and every wall and tower has some ranged weapon, from crossbows to muskets.

Main gate, with two knights marching.

Main tower, with a flag and a wizard ready to launch fireballs to attackers.

Detail view of the front guards

Aerial view of the interior, which is quite packed

Closer aerial view. Horses with dragon helmets can be seen waiting for their riders. Also note the cannon, a movable ballista, more guards on every wall and toewer, and some treasure chests. Under the cannon there is a floor gate and underneath more chests and barrels too. All of them full of precious gold coins.

Left side view. Again the extra wall height can be appreciated, and under the pillars there is water.

The army general and a city soldier talk around the campfire, while another wizard seems to be busy behind them. There is also a castle king inside a tower (I forgot to take a picure of him), looking exactly like the general but with white arms, trousers and helmet dragon decorations.

Horses detail view (wizard and king's). A ghost can be seen in the chests building, lower floor, but even better is my custom ninja/assassin (just painted a normal head with black), awaiting instructions.

Back view, with the treasure holding building on the left and the king's tower on the right.

Main tower back view, with the forge on the floor above the gates, and two more mounted warriors ready to exit the castle if needed.

The forge room, also containing vials and scrolls for the wizards to ready their combat spells.

Rear view of the treasures and the horses.

The treasure building has an escape ramp that can only be opened form the inside, for an emergency where the treasure had to be moved quickly. Outside there was water and a small boat, docked and ready to be used by the king (but I already gifted this pieces).

More details of the courtyard: The cannon (and ammunition near the black well), the horses (here we can see general's black one) and the ballista.

More courtyard. The awaiting riders have simpler armour, only having a dragon decoration at the helmet. We can see that the wizard is preparing some potion near the shooting range.

Right side view.

Left side internal view. If you notice there is a guard behind the tall grey wall, but cannot be seen from the outside.

And that would be all. May the wisdom of the castle king help you out, and remember that this lands are under the rule of the dragon knights!

Posted on 2017-03-20

I've been quite silent lately. The reasons are a mixture, but basically:

I just migrated this blog's internal system. Instead of doing it earlier I chose to migrate another blog, experiment with that one and once the process was mature and stable, apply to this one. Everything went smoothly and all content should be here, including custom pieces like the photo galleries. The one piece missing is the old, dark design, in which I'm working but as usual it is not easy to move from one blog engine to a different one.

I am painting and "reshaping" my home. Initially was a simple painting of the rooms, but as usual things got out of control and I've changed all my miniatures from shelves to glass-door cabinets, removed a table (now keeping both the computer and tools in the same one)... And most important, we're cleaning lots of old stuff from the house, either trashing it or gifting it.
This also helped me notice that I have way too many miniatures, so I've started gifting some old ones and storing others in their game boxes.

I am base-priming all Betrayal at Calth minis so it is easier to play with them, but now with the showcases I have a more urgent feeling of some badly painted or half-painted minis requiring urgent work. So I'm not doing anything fancy...

I also couldn't resist adquiring Deathwatch: Overkill for those incredible genestealer minis (Deathwatch ones are also cool but my genestealer cult will love the additions), so I also have another bunch of sprues to work on.

And that's mostly everything, for now... Soon, more interesting posts

Posted on 2016-04-09

I've had some busy weeks lately so there has been not much visible progress to show here. I haven't been able to paint because I reordered a bit the workspace and had to focus on assembling pending models* to make space, plus RealWorld (tm) tasks prevented me from hobbying too much.

I do have two books almost read so book reviews will come back soon, but meanwhile what I actually did was moving to this blog the list of space marine names I have for my Dark Angels. Currently has +130 names and I plan to keep adding new ones as I read books or find more appropiate names. As I mention in the page it has only the names I personally like and they are suited for Dark Angels, so is really subjective and narrowed.

I also wanted to buy some Forge World MKII and MKIII squads (I love those two old armour versions, especially the helmets), but the pound sadly is too high compared with the euro so it becomes way too expensive. I guess they will have to wait until those rumors of FW miniatures on physical GW stores become reality.

Let's hope I can at least finish painting soon my Imperial Knight :)

* I found a great deal at Ebay, getting a cheap full Skaven army from Warhammer Fantasy 8th ed (I wanted some skaven as I'd like to recover the old Advanced HeroQuest I have and play it), so I had lots of models to assemble. Plus some ork conversions that I will showcase once painted.

Posted on 2015-11-21

As my spare time becomes more scarce and I prefer to write fewer blog posts but with more interesting content (at least more focused and containing less offtopic clutter), it's been quite a few months since I posted something about my painting progress or CRPG related entries.

As a summary, that I will probably do again in the future, this is more or less all what I've been doing:

Boardgames

D&D Castle Ravenloft: Not much to say, we played the first missions, it is interesting but hard to win the bad guys!

Our ongoing Risk Legacy campaign: Finished battle 9, really cool how the game develops, and still way to go until the map "becomes fixed".

Descent 2nd edition: I liked it so much I bought the base game. Expansions seem a bit meh, until I get tired of the base game I doubt will buy anything else.

Flash Point: A collaborative game where up to 6 firemen try to save 7 people from a house while fire and smoke spreads and causes explosions.

CRPGs

Braverly Default: I'm loving it. Same as Final Fantasy series are dead (last games being a disgrace), this is a nice spiritual successor, combining Final Fantasy III job system with summonable friend special moves and combat tweaks, plus configurable difficulty setting and encounter %. And lovely graphics. Did I already say I'm enjoying it a lot?

Zelda: A link between worlds: I was reluctant to play this because the 2D Link wasn't appealing, but I tried and I actually like a lot the puzzles, but I agree on the general consensus that it is quite easy. I haven't finished it yet, but due to lack of time.

Project X Zone: More tactical than RPG, it's very similar to Final Fantasy Tactics but with simpler "fighting-like" battles.

Diablo 3 expansion: Now it finally is a roguelike and action house went to hell, so has become what it should have been two years ago.

Warhammer Quest on iOS: Along ALL expansions, and now I'm playing the additional characters, so you can imagine how much I like this game. One of the best purchases for my iPad, it's so great to have a "portable WHQ" even for holidays.

Space Hulk: One of my big dissapointments, and not due to the game itself, because the mechanics are so nicely replicated, but due to the mess of technical issues and bugs that come and go on most game updates. From neverending turns to glitches, sound muting or crappy 3D performance (I recently updated my graphics card, which makes the situation even more absurd), if the game worked tecnhically correct it would be great.
Also the DLC plague made it a "just buy the basic game, and if on sale, better" approach.

Shadowrun Returns: After finishing the main game, how with the Berlin campaign/addon free for being a backer I'm having more netrunning and turn-based combat. I still have my hopes in the fan-made content for the long term, but even without it is a nice old-school like RPG.

Fire Emblem: Awakening: This was a cool strategy-RPG mix, that hooked me to my 3DS for weeks. I pumped 30+ hours to finish the main story and didn't managed to do every side-quest and character sub-plot, so it can become a really long game if you want.

RPGs

Not much, although I'm reading a lot of Warhammer 40,000 codexes for the lore and background (literally skipping the rules). I must have read around a dozen codexes, along with companion books (new Games Workshop way of squeezing more money, put half of the lore in another book), and of course the books which I still do reviews here.

But no pure RPGs since a while...

Painting & Assembling

I'm still assembling all Deadzone minis, plus a cool Imperial Knight and some unexpected things; GW's new website and the exclusive minis touched my collector weak point so I grabbed my wish list and now have a few more things to take care of.

I'm currently painting the Imperial Knight, and had some started minis pending (some old Rogue trader-era MKVI Space Marines and some Necron basic troops) also on the queue for whenever I want to change a bit.

As usual, with my rate of painting It'll take weeks, but I prefer to go slow but leave it in a decent painting level (decent for my skills, not for normal standards which are way higher).

Apart from normal miniatures, I've finally started painting a Star Trek Enterprise model I had from my trip to Australia a few years ago. I expect to finish it soon as I don't want to ad too many details.

Posted on 2014-04-18

2x1 post.

First, I'd like to share that I've updated the recommended links page with some links to LEGO related websites, from people contributions (by far the best part) to scans of set building structions or the biggest wiki about our beloved building blocks.

And second, in the official forums of Eternal Crusade* there's a thread of choosing the favourite piece of Warhammer 40,000 art. At the time of this writing it is 35 pages long and there are dozens of high resolution artworks from most of the races.
Definetly recommended having a look at it, I found some new images I still didn't had on my "digital collection".

* In case you don't know what I'm talking about, check the Dark Millennium Codex website for all available info about EC MMO.

Posted on 2014-01-08