Friday Updates and General Housekeeping

First off, I hope everyone is having a good start to their Friday! Sadly around where I am it’s freezing because of the hurricane that is currently blowing through. Did I ever mention how much I love spring?

Anywho…

What’s going on with you today? Let me know!

For me just tidying up some small things I’ve been meaning to get to, lets get started!

The landing page for the podcast is here in case you’re bored or just miss us. We certainly miss you. Also starting next week we will begin uploading episodes every Thursday morning at ~7am CST. While we were recording yesterday I decided that we’d earned it as we have kept to our every Thursday recording schedule for the last month which is a not insignificant milestone for us. That small investment is worth it I think and we now have four episodes waiting to be posted which is enough of a pad to account for any unforeseen speed-bumps. SoapBubbles will be on vacation in Paris next week which means she’ll be on hiatus from her regular history updates, HOWEVER! It does mean the return of her daily location posts while she’s there. I highly recommend her last series of travel logs if you haven’t seen them already. Hopefully she has a great time and we’ll certainly talk about it on the podcast when she gets back. The following week I will be in Florida and while I wont be doing a travel log I will still hold to my update schedule here with three or four posts. We won’t be recording new podcasts those weeks but like I said we have a backlog so that will help us close the gap a bit, optimally I think we’re aiming to have a one week buffer going forward.

So look for new episodes on the 12th and 19th! When we get back we’re excited to talk some MCU in preparation for Infinity War as well as our normal chat to catch up.

We’ve also set up an email address for the show just in case, it never hurts to be proactive.

If you want to submit questions, comments or suggestions feel free to email us at TheOurcastPodcast@gmail.com. We can also be found on Twitter: SoapBubbles is @Sophycles and yours truly is @NonWashableGmer.

I also updated the podcast page with a bunch of relevant information as well as links to our individual blogs. I’m sure there are a lot of basic informational and customization options I’m missing but it’s a process and I’m learning as I go!

For this weekend I’ll be getting together with some friends to play some of the X-Wing Miniature game which should be a blast. The rest of Saturday will be writing and hopefully a little painting. Sunday I’ll be stopping by GorillaWithaBrush’s twitch stream to see what a good mini-painters work looks like. I recommend stopping by if you’re even remotely interested in the hobby, he’s a hell of a talent.

I think that’s about it, I want to say thank you again to anyone who has taken the time to peruse our content or listening to our podcast. It’s been a real joy for the both of us to just produce stuff that we’ve always talked about but for one excuse or another we’ve never gotten around to. At the end of the day for us it’s less about what it could possibly be and more about just enjoying what it is at the moment. I think a lot more fledgling creators could benefit from a slightly shorter view when they’re starting out. The totality of your ambitions can be quite daunting but working on a single idea for a post tomorrow is a much more reasonable goal.

Until next time folks I hope you have a fantastic weekend!

  • Non-Washable

 

 

The Weekend

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.

  • This message brought to you by people older than you are who actually do know better.

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!

  • Non-Washable

Things I Desperately Need to Do

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!

  • Non-Washable