Category: General

The Weekend

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Hello folks, how was your weekend? No joke, I’m actually curious.

In the meantime let me summarize mine a little to keep myself accountable for what I did and did not accomplish.

Things I did –

Ran my regular D&D game on Saturday which was a lot of fun as usual. This group continues to prove to be one of my favorites from over the years. One of the biggest ways is that they seem to really enjoy taking things slowly. They don’t need me to skip over the mundane parts of their day and would rather take the time and see what happens when they come down from their rooms for breakfast or what the elf does because she only needs to meditate four hours a night. I think a lot of people incorrectly assume that the “down time” for adventurers is boring and only used as some sort of check book style accounting in between “the fun stuff”. I think some of the most entertaining moments from this campaign have come from their downtime antics. It may not suit every group to take their time going through each day but I encourage folks to give it a try, it might be more fun than you think.

I was pretty exhausted after that as the session was ~5 hours so I’m a bit ashamed to say that I laid down and spent some time reading gaming news and lying by telling myself this counted as work. Afterall thinking of things to write about counts too… right? Buying into that is basically what got me to where I am today starting probably five or ten years too late on getting this blog and my other ambitions off the ground. But hey, better late than never. If you’re reading this and thinking you still have time I recommend you find the nearest mirror, stand in front of it and slap yourself as hard as you can. You do have time but that time shouldn’t be wasted because you can always do the things you want to do later. Invest in your passions so you can enjoy them for as long as possible.

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Suffice it to say Saturday was wasted after 5pm. The MN Wild also lost to the Dallas Stars so that was probably punishment for me avoiding my responsibilities. Sorry boys, lets hope for some better luck tonight. I did my part.

Sunday wasn’t much better but I did start on two separate articles, one of which I published today and the other that I’m hoping to have finished for Wednesday at the latest. I did work a bit on my Star Wars: Legion painting project and got a Stormtrooper Commander and regular trooper finished. They’re not great and I’ll probably redo them but I learned a few important things along the way.

I uploaded photos of a couple of the models here if you’re curious what my work so far looks like. I also discovered that I can’t, at least yet, prime them in grey AND white as it obscures too many details and pools unattractively. It could just be my inexperience or it may work with an airbrush. As I’m only currently working with rattle cans I think I’ll stick to priming in white for the Empire which should help with the smoothness of the armor instead of hand painting the entirety of it.

My girlfriend sent me a link to the Twitter of @GorillaBrush whose work with Atlantis Minis is absolutely stunning. He held a stream on Sunday which I had a chance to watch and participate in, really nice fellow who is happy to help newbies to the hobby. This next Sunday he’s having a special guest on and will answer some fan questions about painting. Suffice it to say I had a few which I’m hoping they’ll have a chance to cover. Either way I definitely recommend a stroll down his Twitter feed or head over to his website gorillawithabrush.com to view some of his work. This past year was his 20th anniversary of painting minis and it definitely shows.

I’ll let you go now and get back to work myself! Going to try and get a couple more Legion minis painted today and tomorrow while trying to put into practice some of the tips I got from the gorilla.

I’ll be back soon, until then I hope everyone is having a great Monday!

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Things I Desperately Need to Do

.Reading time 5 minutes.

How often do you look around at your life and realize how many little things you desperately, urgently need to do? Followed by the instant realization that there are not enough hours in the week to get them all done. Hopefully you don’t do this too often because it can be a somewhat hellish vortex of despair. Once in a while though it can help you to put together a bullet-point list so you can prioritize those needs into something resembling sanity.

In the spirit of transparency here is what my current list looks like:

  • Make and eat lunch
  • Stay on top of the ongoing Magic: The Gathering Arena beta
  • Keep up on my RSS feed for news
  • Finish editing two videos I’m working on
  • Officially start on my SW: Legion content – Unboxing/Assembling/Priming/Painting 1 or more models by the end of this week.
  • Write-up on Ni No Kuni and my first handful of hours with it.
  • Back to Vermintide 2 for at least an hour or two this week.
  • Podcast tomorrow with Soapy – Need to write my outline
  • Editing and finalizing the last two podcasts we’ve done so they’re ready to upload
    • Improving my editing and looking for ways to improve the cast
    • Music of some kind for the intro? I dunno, something I’m thinking about.
  • Finalizing my notes for this Saturday’s D&D game
  • Choosing a topic for the next blog post (Not including this one) options i’m considering:
    • Epic open sourcing $12mil in Paragon game assets after its closure.
    • Some thoughts on the Might and Magic mobile game
    • A “Why” for the Nintendo Switch for a friend who didn’t buy one and is curious. Plus I really like the system.
    • Video Game Movies
    • Probably other things too
  • Making additional tweaks to the camera I’m using because blurry is not what you want while working with minis.
  • Working on taking more editing time with my posts. I really need to do this. For now I’m just happy to get things done and up but the quality could really be better. Better to establish good habits now than try to do it later.
  • Stream a little more often when I make time for games. I may as well since it’s not really intrusive to what I’m already doing and it seems fun? We’ll see.

And of course there is more that isn’t even related to what is going on with this blog because life is life. The one thing that I will say about my head first dive into all of this starting a couple weeks ago is that it feels so markedly different than anything else I’ve ever attempted and eventually abandoned. I don’t mind doing it. All of the other things I’ve had to learn while doing this don’t feel like a burden, it’s fun and educational but it keeps me at 100% capacity all day with few breaks. I don’t know if that is good or bad right now but I didn’t burn out after the first day or get bored with any aspect of it and that isn’t really something I’m familiar with.

So… good? We’ll see but for now I’m enjoying it and it feels good to be productive on things I actually care about. I don’t know where it’s going or how it will end up but I’m going to try and find out for once instead of tossing it. I’ve already cleared quite a few speed-bumps which is another thing that usually derails my ambition.

At any rate, no more rambling. Stuff to do! I’ll be back around here on Saturday or Sunday evening with one of the articles I mentioned up top. I’m hoping as I continue to do this a few days a week that it’ll help me tighten my game up and get faster as I do it.

Now, for some fun! Someone on Twitter was asking about the molds on the SW: Legion figures so I took a few close up pics so he could get an idea. I honestly think they look great and the details look like a lot of fun to paint! Feel free to have a look.

Thanks for hanging with me, happy gaming!

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One Piece at a Time

.Reading time 8 minutes.

In an ongoing rally between myself and my good friend SoapBubbles we’re making a concerted effort to boost each others productivity in our various projects. We’ve talked about this in parts during some episodes of The Ourcast and I encourage you to check them out if you have an hour or so to kill and don’t mind two people talk about their lives and futures. We’re not sure where our respective futures will take us but we do know that we want to spend the rest of it creating things for ourselves and others to hopefully derive some joy. We each have documents set up on our Google Drive’s where we can write suggestions for things to help inspire the other to write, it’s not that we don’t have ideas of our own but sometimes it helps to have others expand the scope of your attention.

Immediately after we decided to start doing this Soapy had a list of five or six things up that I need to start working through ASAP. I’m excited to start writing about them and already have the outlines started for a couple but first I just wanted to throw this up because the more I think about it the more important it is that I write down more of my thoughts instead of internalizing them. Otherwise what’s the point of having a blog? A podcast? A Twitter? YouTube? The most challenging thing of this entire endeavor, going back a few years to when I first set up this blog or really became enamored with even trying it is that externalizing all of this doesn’t come naturally. I’m used to having my thoughts on my own, some of them warrant discussion but most of them I consider to not be worth holding on to. If I’ve had that thought surely someone else has had it as well and enunciated it better than I could have anyways, right? The internet is a supremely powerful tool which allows us to find a viewpoint on any opinion we may have or ever have. Over time I’ve discovered that concept can be poisonous to the very nature of creativity. The urge to be standout and unique in the things you do is overwhelming even in the face of it’s near impossibility, that isn’t any reason to not try but it’s also absolutely no reason to not try, either. So with that creative hurdle somewhat cleared and instead just bouncing along dragging behind me like an anchor occasionally catching on some reef or an old sedan, the next one is a matter of habit. Throughout every day, every thing I think or look at and have an opinion on now needs to clear an additional filter before leaving my thoughts forever. Is it worth it write about this? Does anyone care? Do I even care? I still don’t have concrete answers to any of that but I guess like with most things this too will become easier with practice, for now I will write about whatever I get my grey matter on and go from there.

In addition to writing regularly and overall writing more this next week will mark the start of another project I have wanted to get into for some time: Model painting. Specifically minis for games like Dungeons &  Dragons, minis which I have had for well over a decade in some cases, always well meaning about getting around to them but we know how that goes. painting_table

Barring a couple of items this is the setup I’ll be embarking with to learn from the ground up how to paint my mini collection and if everything goes well I’ll be sharing that journey on YouTube through a series of videos. Naturally I’ll post updates about that to this blog as I go as long as things I’m working on that don’t fit into the videos. The first set of minis I’m going to be painting will be from the new game by Fantasy Flight called Star Wars: Legion which I’ve been excited for since it was announced over a year ago, it releases this week on the 22nd. A man who goes by Game Methuselah, or Jim Murphy (Great name, especially after seeing Netflix’s Altered Carbon), recently started his own channel to talk about various table top games, concepts and do videos on model painting. As a Golden Demon Award winning speed painter it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to learn along with him as he ventures into his own new realm of YouTube content creator. He’s a fantastic resource and I encourage everyone to head over and give him a listen! Another resource I’ll be taking advantage of on this path of learning is Sorastro’s Painting guides, specifically the ones on SW: Legion. I’m sure my final product wont be anything up to his standard but they are exceptionally informative which is helpful for a newbie like me. Also, even if you aren’t painter yourself there are just straight up interesting videos to spend a little time watching. Anywho, I’m not what you would call naturally talented at these kinds of artistic pursuits but in one of his recent videos Jim made an excellent point that neither was he until he spent time learning it. Now or never then!

The next post will be on one of the questions SoapBubble was nice enough to provide me with and will naturally be gaming related. She’s given me several fantastic topics to mull over but in the course of writing this I think I’ve decided to tackle the first on the list, has a nice symmetry being that this week will include several firsts.

“Is there a game developer that you trust explicitly and will always play their IP’s no matter what? Alternatively if there is no such developer, what are some that have lost your trust and require scrutiny before purchasing?” 

I’ll be organizing my thoughts on this over the next day or two and get it posted shortly after, hope you are well and I’ll be back to talk to you again soon!

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