The workbench this week… is up and running in our new condo! We had an offer accepted at the beginning of February, got the keys ten days ago in mid-March, and are largely settled, set up, and getting on with things.
Set up in my new office/hobby lair but still looking fairly familiar. New larger cutting mat, though.
Gradually getting the painting and hobby stuff sorted and functional; the new room isn’t as large as the one at our rented place but forcing me to organize and stay de-cluttered is not actually a bad thing…
Tiny Messerschmidts for some fokkers to fly around in. (credit for that joke apparently goes to Douglas Bader…)
Decided to work through the stash of 1/1200 WW2 aircraft I got from Last Square a few months ago, starting with a trio of Bf110s and five Bf109s for the Luftwaffe to cause trouble in.
Always the random Reaper figures. Need to add some details to one or both treasure piles so they aren’t so obviously identical, but they’re neat sculpts!
I’ll be at Trumpeter Salute 2023 in Vancouver in about three weeks running a 1/1200 naval game of some sort, probably KM Schnellboote attacking an RN-defended British coastal convoy this time. This’ll be the first Trumpeter Salute since 2019 (a smaller event happened in 2022 but I didn’t get to it) so it’ll be fantastic to be back!
Personally and hobbywise, it’s not been a terrible year, although it’s been a bit low on the number of blog posts, overall. But for the rest… yeesh. Good bye and good riddance, 2021!
A bit of year end figure painting, with the faithful feline assistant in the foreground making things warmer but more awkward! Wargames Atlantic plastic skeletons for our fantasy skirmish stuff, whenever current circumstances allow us to resume in person gaming! Click, as usual, for larger.
With the surge in Omicron cases locally we’ve stopped in-person gaming again, out of an abundance of caution. We will probably resume sometime in January, but it’ll be back to webcam Gaslands for a bit in the first couple weeks of 2022.
A quick count shows 22 blog entries here in 2021, far more in the first half of the year than as the year wore on. Not bad, but I would like to get a bit more momentum going through 2022!
To that end, I’ve joined the PaintSlam community and their Discord channel; like a lot of wargaming social media it’s heavily GW-focussed but by no means exclusive to GW in any way. I’m “Vemundr” on most Discord channels, due to having started on Discord for Society for Creative Anachronism reasons, so if you’re on the PaintSlam Discord discussion group feel free to say hi!
Here’s to an improved 2022 for everyone over 2021! Stay safe, get your booster when you can, and try to get some gaming in!
No conventions, no in-person gaming at all for a good part of the year thanks to our local COVID precautions, and yet things still got painted, finished, and even played with.
Before COVID (Remember That?)
Low over the coastline, approaching the village. Click for larger.
We started the year damp and cold off the 1/1200 coasts of England with a lot of naval gaming and scenery for that, then we were briefly visited by a very strange bartender indeed and got a few games of tiny ships done in-person.
Narthoks all finished except for basing. Go on, tell the bartender your troubles! Click for larger.
The Weird Begins…
March was when it all went weird. The high point of my own gaming year, Trumpeter Salute over in Vancouver, was cancelled on less than two weeks notice, work-from-home started abruptly, and all sorts of other things went very, very sideways. I did spend some of the money I’d have ordinarily have spent on other things on orders from Bad Squiddo and Forge of Ice, two tiny one-person companies I’ve been meaning to order from for many years now, so that part was nice, but the fact that March/April/May 2020 have fewer blog entries here, combined, than I made in January indicates how off-kilter everything was!
The end of May did see the modification of our local COVID restrictions so that we could have “pods” of up to six or so people, so my brother and a friend resumed gaming most Sundays, starting up a Frostgrave campaign that eventually morphed into a fantasy-flavoured Pulp Alley campaign.
Start of the game. My chaps centre foreground, Sean’s ogre ladies top left, Corey’s mousling bravos top right. Click for larger.
COVID Bubble Gaming
June and July saw something like a normal posting pace resume here as I cranked out a bunch of fun quick fantasy scenery to add to our Forestgrave tables including a standing stone and a big tree. There were also a few impossibly tiny planes as a diversion from fantasy!
Tiny, tiny 1/1200 RAF and Luftwaffe airplanes to trouble boats not quite as tiny.
August saw a return to naval stuff and small scale scenery, and September saw the arrival of Gaslands on the scene, which has provided much pandemic diversion since!
Mad mushroom jungles for properly fantastical fantasy gaming!
The Bubble Bursts…
The last quarter of 2020 saw tightening of our local COVID restrictions and the end of even limited in-person gaming, but before that we did get to see some mad mushroom jungle terrain and some other weird fantasy terrain before we finally turned to that most 2020 of communication solutions, online webcam conferencing, for a Gaslands gaming fix.
Gaslands by webcam, via OBS and Discord.
So, that was our 2020 here at the Warbard! A weird, stressful, very strange year but here’s hoping that sometime before the end of 2021 we’re back to in-person gaming, conventions, and something vaguely like pre-pandemic normality.
In the meantime, wear a mask, keep an eye on how soon you can get your COVID vaccine, try to get some hobby time in if your situation allows, and stay safe. Happy New Year, I guess!
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.
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.
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!)
No posts since mid-March of this year. Did’t realize it had been that long!
I’m still kicking, just doing minimal wargaming these days. First there was lots of family stuff (now mostly resolved) and then other hobbies and the summer weather distracted me.
I’ve got the usual heap of back-burnered projects, and I promise I’ll wander back into active gaming one of these days.
In the meantime you can follow some of the other stuff I do over on my everything-but-gaming blog, Turned Skyward.
Real Life ganged up on me pretty solidly around mid-September and didn’t really let up until nearly the end of October, and by then other hobby interests had wandered in and distracted me from wargaming, hence the utter lack of updates here in three months!
I’ve committed to running at least two games at Trumpeter Salute 2018 in mid-March, though, so I need to get going on finishing scenery and figures for that!
In the mean time, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to all my readers, just in case I don’t get around to another post here before 2017 staggers to an end.
Same room as before – our guest bedroom/office/workroom – but we’ve moved the shelf unit I used as a painting and building bench to the other end of the room, away from the door. It’ll be slightly closer to my computer desk, which is out of frame to the left in the photo below. I’ll have a bit of natural light from the window just to the right, and more space for shelving along the wall below the window eventually.
It will also make the room more usable as a guest bedroom, because the guest bed is now right close to the door and all the messy hobby stuff is at the other end of the room!
The relocated workbench. Click for slightly larger.
The next several Lead Painters League entries are barely visible in the photo, lined up across the centre of the shockingly tidy desk surface. If that CSI TV-show “Enhance… enhance… enhance” voodoo were real you could peek into the future and see my next four or five LPL11 entries in various stages of completion, from “Ready to photograph” down to “O Dog am I going to get these done in time?!”…
I’m off in Vancouver this weekend, so have a brief link to an older Penny Arcade comic about one possible solution for that age-old gamer problem, “My dice hate me!”.
I might need to get this kit for some of the d20s I use in Infinity and at least one set of my Blood Bowl block dice…
