Category Archives: Asides

Short posts with slightly special handling in WP’s TwentyTen theme.

Remembrance Day 2020

All the ceremonies will be streamed online this year, because COVID, so my longstanding habit of going to one of our local ceremonies will probably be swapped for sitting in front of my computer, which is an extremely 2020 way of commemorating Remembrance Day.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

-- Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

I try to remember to mark Remembrance Day here on the blog too, although will admit these November 11 posts have been patchy the last few years. I feel it’s the least we can do in this peculiar hobby we all share, one that’s simultaneously intimately connected to warfare and weirdly stylised and distant from the realities of it.

I hope you and yours are safe and well, on this strange pandemic Remembrance Day.

Interesting Times

Well. One minute I was too busy getting ready for a local SCA event mid-March and then Trumpeter Salute 2020 in mid-April to blog about what I was doing… and then the real world intervenes rather abruptly and rudely.

Painting and terrain building hasn’t stopped although it has slowed down. We’re safe and well enough, the cat is enjoying having people around to sit on much more of the day than she’s used to thanks to work from home, and I promise I’ll get actual content up here shortly.

I’ve got some more ships for 1/1200 WW2 coastal naval, some fun stuff for my 28mm fantasy-ECW project, and I’m probably going to be building up a Frostgrave fantasy skirmish warband, because why not?

Stay well, stay safe, do that physical distancing thing, and try not to let work from home drive you insane.

Some End-of-Decade Housekeeping

After a few minutes of experimenting with the new WordPress Twentytwenty theme (not bad, but not image-centric enough for me) I’ve taken the time to tweak Twentyfourteen (finally!) to suit my taste better, and done a bit of other cleanup and housekeeping, mostly behind the scenes.

At some point early in 2020 I’m going to have to do much more major behind-the-scenes work, as the WordPress install this blog (and a bunch of other stuff) runs on was first spun up in 2009 and parts of it are showing signs of cruft and wear. Not looking forward to that, but it needs doing.

Happy New Year to all my readers! May 2020 bring you what you need from it, without too many “2020 vision” bad jokes along the way.

Twenty Years of this Nonsense!

2018 has been a year of not much wargaming. I’m busy and well, just not doing a lot of gaming.

Last month was a bit of a milestone, though, that I should acknowledge: November 2018 makes twenty years straight of me having a wargaming presence online of some sort or another! Way back in November 1998 I signed up for a Geocities account (remember them?) and built the first version of this site in my college’s computer labs, because I didn’t own my own PC until 2000 or so.

While I’m at it: Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and such. May the holidays season be what you need from it.

(also: the new post editor WordPress 5.0.1 ships with is shiny hot garbage. It’s deleted three draft versions of this post. Install the ‘Classic Editor’ plugin to restore WP to sanity if you’re a WP user!)

Pardon The Dust

Decided that the blog had worn it’s old skin (WordPress’s functional but basic Twenty Eleven theme) more than long enough and have updated it to WordPress’s much more recent Twenty Fourteen theme. Still trying out features and playing with things, but the actual content hasn’t gone anywhere and neither have most of the navigational features. A few things have moved, though.

Twenty Fourteen also makes it easier and more interesting to use Featured Images and Featured Posts, so I’ve fiddled with a dozen or so of the older posts to make them more colourful.

For those of you who primarily read the blog via RSS or over the TGN Blog Network, mind you, this all makes no difference at all. Still the same content, I promise!

Added a “Reviews” Page & Category

I realized I had an increasing number of review posts here at the Warbard, but no category or single point of reference for them, so I’ve created a Reviews page and a corresponding WordPress category to gather all the reviews up. So far it’s mostly books, but there’s some miniatures, some terrain and some rules in there, and more of all of those to come.

You can also find a link to the Reviews page in the menu up above, in the dropdown below Inspiration.

The “Salute Bump”

We track basic visitor stats here at the Warbard, as most websites do. What people are reading, which links they’re following, the usual stuff, including how people find this site – what inbound links they’re following, and (to some extent) what search terms they’re using to find us. We use the open-source web app Piwik for most stats, and the built-in WordPress Stats for a few details.

Over on Flickr, both Corey and I can track views on our accounts in a similar fashion, which photos are being looked at and what search terms people are using.

We’ve both noticed, this year and last (in other words, since we rebuilt Warbard in it’s current format) a mildly amusing thing: every year after the huge Salute wargaming show in London, over the water and far away in the United Kingdom, we get a big jump in viewership stats. The reason? About a month before the world-famous Salute show, we have the Trumpeter Salute show in this part of the world, and for four of the last five years, I’ve been there, taken lots of pictures that’re up on Flickr, and for the last two years, posted here about it as well.

So gamers hit Google looking for eyecandy from Salute, and get our blog and our Flickr photos because of the similarity in event names. Oops.

Trumpeter Salute is a great convention, the highlight of my gaming year in many ways, but it’s not the immense and justly famous show in London, which I got to in 2000 and badly want to go back to one of these years! If you’ve come looking for Salute pics, sorry to disappoint you! But have a look around, you might find something else of interest, and thanks for the bump in traffic and the minor amusement!

Historical Gaming page

Created a new Historical Gaming page, which has replaced the ECW/TYW page in the top menu; there’s also a matching Historicals category now to populate the page.

With my interests wandering into the Great War, Russian Civil War, English Civil War/Thirty Years War and elsewhere recently, a new catchall page was needed. I’ve retroactively added old posts to the new Historicals category as well.

There will, of course, be a lot of overlap with my long-standing Pulp interests, which is only natural as most of my developing historical interest grew out of the quasi-historical pulp games we’ve been playing for the last several years! Expect strongly pulp-flavoured history, as well!

GZG Links Edited

Just updated the Ground Zero Games/Dirtside II/Stargrunt II/Full Thrust Links page, which has, like some of the other resources on this site, needed updating since the early 2000s. I’ve killled off a bunch of dead links, replaced other URLs, left a few favourites with plantive notes for assistance in finding up-to-date URLs, and finally added a note to contact us if you have suggestions for new or replacement links!