Hobby Update 2

I had been hoping to post this update the weekend before last, but at the time I felt like I’d not done enough to write about and had hopes of painting my Vampire Raider by Sunday night. Well, that didn’t happen and last week ran away from me, so I didn’t get any hobby time beyond odd bits and pieces and a game of Aeronautica on Wednesday night.

Oh well. At least I managed to watch Zulu Dawn and Zulu in the few hours I managed not to spend working.

Gaming: Aeronautica Imperialis

Another resounding victory for the Astartes over the foul Aeldari. This is the third game on the bounce that I’ve wiped out my opponent in three turns or less and I’m starting to feel a bit bad about it. To be fair, the dice were really REALLY in my favour. My Xiphon interceptors had armoured cockpits (6+ armour save) and I succeeded with three out of the first four saves.

Anyway, here’s the two lists:

Astartes:

  • 2x Storm Eagles
  • 3x Xiphon Interceptors
  • All with Armoured Cockpits

Aeldari:

  • 3x Nightwings with Twin Scatter Lasers
  • 3x Phoenix bombers With Twin Pulse Lasers

Painting

Managed to finish off my second Hemlock Wraithfighter on Monday. Have to say I’m not too struck on the end result. I opted for a slightly simpler scheme than with the first one in order to differentiate it and save a little time when painting, however I feel like the end result is a little… meh…

Oh well, at least it’s done!

Reading:

Finished reading the third Gaunts Ghosts omnibus, The Saint by Dan Abnett, which concludes my current collection of that series. Looked up to see if any more books exist. They do, but getting a copy means paying over the odds to scalpers. Guess I’ll just not read them. Started writing a ranting blog post about this but haven’t had chance to finish writing it.

Had a dig through the bulk book purchase I made a few years ago and found the Eisenhorn trilogy, so I’m looking forward to reading that now.

Website:

Added a page for my Blood Angels force including why I chose them, a bit of lore and a few pictures.

I’ve also been thinking about what I want to do design wise for the site, as the theme I selected doesn’t scale for smaller screen sizes like on phones. This was some what intentional when I set up so that I’d focus on publishing content rather than perfect presentation. However, if I ever want to share my ramblings with the wider world, I’m going to have to make sure it works on everyone’s devices…

From a design perspective, I want something fun in a nostalgic way and have two lines of thought at the moment.

The first is to adopt the style and feel of the old Citadel publications from the 1990s. You know, the ones that showed off the range and how to paint your models on bright red and yellow pages.

The second is what I would call early Grim-Dark. The sort of style they used in the third edition Warhammer 40k rulebook and codexes as they moved away from the vibrancy and chaos of the 90s, but still captured an older sci-fi feel.

I think at the moment I’m leaning towards a tribute to 90s Citadel as I think it’s the most fun, but third edition 40k might be more visually appealing. That being said, I might do both. I could set the layout of the site to be standardised and build multiple style-sheets that can be interchanged. Then I could add more designs later and switch between them as the mood takes me without having to build a whole new theme…

That’s it for now. If you have any thoughts on how I should design the site, leave a comment below.

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Hobby Update 1

There are regularly times when I go to show someone a picture of a project I’m working on only to find that the last time I’d worked on it was a hell of a long time ago, and the photos are hidden amongst a never ending stream of screenshots, family photos and dubious memes my friends sent me on WhatsApp.

As a whole, this website will help me to keep info about and images of projects together, but I also want it to keep track of what I do and when.

As WordPress blog posts are dated and timed, the easiest solution is probably to post hobby updates as I complete things, or group them together as a sort of weekly or monthly diary.

I’m not sure how this will look going forwards, but for now I’m going to start with a bit of an info dump of what I’ve worked on this week under some loose headings.

Painting – Aeronautica Imperialis

Decided to crack on with my Hemlock Wraith fighters this week. I’ve managed to finish one (needs a few touch ups but it’s fine for now) and made a start on the second one. All that remains is another coat of yellow in places to correct some mistakes, the windows, soul gems, metallics and shading. I had been hoping to complete that today, but now I finally have time, I don’t have the motivation, so decided to get this hobby update done instead.

Gaming:

Aeronautica Imperialis

On Wednesday I played Aeronautica Imperialis against a friend and absolutely tabled him in two turns (again). This was the second time we played a dogfight with these lists and, despite him learning his from mistakes the previous game, it’s evident from both games that the standard areas of engagement that come with the boxed sets are too small for the Aeldari to take advantage of their speed and manoeuvrability. I think it’s time to invest in some bigger maps. Anyway, here’s the two lists:

Astartes:

  • 1x Thunderhawk
  • 2x Fire Raptors
  • 2x Storm Eagles
  • 2x Xiphon Interceptors

Aeldari:

  • 1x Vampire Raider
  • 2x Hemlock Wraithfighters
  • 3x Nightwings
  • 3x Phoenix bombers

0AD

Had an urge to play Age of Empires but my PC is on Linux and I couldn’t be bothered faffing around to make it work, so I gave 0AD a go. I got annihilated. On easy mode. Was fun though so I’ll give it another shot soon now that I understand the power balance better.

Website

This week saw me re-launch this website. My reasons for this are covered in my blog post from this morning, but in short the intention is to just get on and do it rather than worry about getting it perfect.

I picked an old fashioned theme (twentyten) and just got on with writing, starting with the home page and a page for useful links. Then I spent a few short sessions in between other activities (breaks from work, waiting for x, y or z to happen etc.) writing up the re-launch blog post, a list of current projects, and even started documenting my home-brew Aeldari Craftworld.

In all honesty, most of this content is incomplete, but in the spirit of “get on with it”, I’ve got them to a basic level of utility and hit publish. And I’m happy with that. Far happier than I would be if I’d just saved them as drafts with the intention of getting them up to standard before publication.

Next Item

I think it will help with motivation if I designate the next task I intend to do when I sign off these updates. So the next job I want to do is finish off painting the second Hemlock Wraithfighter, followed by my Vampire Raider. If I can tick those off it will complete my current Aeldari force for Aeronautica which will be a rare accomplishment for me.

Wish me luck!

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Website Re-launch

I originally started this website in 2019 as a place to share my hobbies online. The site has seen a couple of iterations since then, but in all honesty, I’ve never used it as intended.

I think initially I was too precious about the content being perfect. I wanted everything to be structured and polished to perfection and that meant posting anything there became a bit of a chore, so I barely did anything.

I then came across a hobby store that was closing down and took the opportunity to buy out all their remaining stock at a bargain price (I can be rather impulsive). At this point the website turned into an online store for a few years to help sell the products. As before, I wanted everything to be perfect, which just prevented me from getting on with adding products to the site and marketing it. Eventually the site encountered a couple of technical issues and, rather than fix them, I just pulled the plug.

Which leads to where we are today. I’ve been watching a few videos recently about the revival of the indie web, the Y2K asthetic, Frutiger Aero design and generally a lot of nostalgia from my years of growing up online. One thing led to another (including a desire to stop scrolling on Youtube shorts every time I had a gap in activity) and I ended up browsing some sites made on Neocities.

For those of you that haven’t come across it yet, Neocities is effectively a spiritual successor to GeoCities and was set up to bring back some of the individuality and fun that defined the early internet. Honestly, I recommend you check some of these sites out. A good place to start is the “Featured Sites” section on the Neocities home page which lists a handful of randomly selected sites to peruse.

Anyway, it was looking through some of these sites that gave me the inspiration to give this another go.

By modern design/UX/UI standards, most of the websites on Neocities are abominations. And that’s what kept me hooked. Maybe some of it was nostalgia for the old web, when browsing was a purposeful activity and a pastime that required paying attention and working out where you wanted to click next. Nothing is standardised here. It’s a no holds barred free for all where creativity and fun are the hall marks of a good website.

On top of that, the content on these websites is genuine. It’s people from all around the world sharing the things they create, their thoughts and opinions. They don’t care about spell checkers. They’re not worrying about converting every image to Webp format and optimising for search engines. They just say what they want to say, share what they want to share and release it to the world, warts and all.

So that’s what I’m going to do here. This website is more about the doing than the presentation, so to start with I’ve opted for an old, basic WordPress theme (it’s not even mobile responsive!). Once I’ve got some content in place and caught up on a couple of projects I’ll build a new theme that puts the fun back into functional.

That’s enough rambling for now. I hope you stick around and enjoy my ramblings 🙂

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