Warmaster Paper Miniatures

I just stumbled across a Blogger page called A League of Ordinary Gamers, and specifically to a page with downloadable printable paper minis for Warmaster (fantasy and Ancients)!

The page owner also has Napoleonics paper minis too, so if that's something you wanted to try out, then this is an excellent cheap way of doing so.

As for Warmaster, I have Undead, Dwarfs, and some Chaos figures, but always wanted to try out Orcs and Lizardmen, so this'll be an excellent way to do so and figure out if I like them and which ones I'll buy next. :)

Thank you to The League, you've done an excellent job!

What I really miss about wargaming

I went to my local club recently for the first time in over a year--just to drop off some minis to a friend. I didn't hang around but did say hi to everyone there.

That short visit made me realise that other than the painting and the collecting and the playing of different games, what I miss most are my friends.

I've made a lot of good friends at that club, many of whom I consider among my best lifelong friends. So even if I'm not playing any games, I will be going back when they open up for the new year.

It's too easy to take the friendship and the camaraderie for granted.

Well it's a start...

Dave! Hey Dave! Look, I've undercoated more minis! What an achievement!

This weekend I will no doubt be inspired to start my 3M1P project too.

It feels good having a brush in my hand after far too long. Although I'm cramped on my desk with a sheet of newspaper to protect my keyboard, I'm very happy that I've begun.

It's a step forward.

Onward to victory!

3M1P - 3 Months, 1 Project

I'm going to set a goal for myself. I am going to spend the summer (I'm in the southern hemisphere) working on one project. I made an attempt a couple of years back (or was it last year?) to join the first 6MMRPC 6 month mountain reduction project, which went, but not as well as I would have liked.

And now I think that part of my problem (the part that isn't comprised of laziness and a short attention span) is that I have too many projects. It's hard for me to find a focus. A zen workflow if you will. I just want to do it all.

After viewing Onslaught Minis' webpage recently, I have decided that I won't buy any more miniatures until I finish painting a decent chunk of the last lot I bought, which I think is actually two lots from Plasmablast. There are some that I started painting, and when I found out that they were possibly changing ownership, I contacted Mario and bought a whole lot more of his beautiful minis.

There are other projects that will fall by the wayside, but honestly? They probably were anyway. This is a way for me to focus on one thing and get it done. I could be painting some jetplanes for Target Locked-On, but I can play that with half painted minis. Sure it won't look at pretty, but I'll try not to be precious about that.

Onslaught Minis - 6mm SciFi Goodness

O.M.G.

Seriously.

I have seen some Onslaught minis before, but either I had totally forgotten about them, or in the last couple of years, they've expanded the ranges exponentially.

They look utterly incredible. I am including the renders here for clarity of the sculpts, but the images of actual minis look fantastic as well.

Previously my favourite 6mm scifi mini manufacturer was Plasmablast Games, but seeing as I have all of their miniatures (many unpainted--naturally), I need some more to hoard... er, I mean, collect to studiously paint and play with.

Blogger Custom Domains vs HTTPS - a Techical AAR (After Action Rant)

So now I'm seriously considering exporting this blog and hosting it myself because Google don't seem to have their pants on straight.

I just made an edit to the layout, afterwhich it prompted me to visit the site to check out the changes. Only it sent me to the HTTPS secure version of the page, which didn't work. I kept on getting errors like my site didn't exist. Had a mild fluster of panic wondering if my domain name had expired in the last few minutes, and then went to pantsofwar.blogspot.com to check if it was still available from there.

It was, and even redirected to pantsofwar.com and that worked. I went to the other tab and reloaded.. nothing. And that's when I noticed the https vs http. Checked the settings, and lo and behold, secure pages aren't available to custom blog domains.

Awesome.

So my choices are now:

• put up with a malfunctioning Blogger hosted page
• dump my custom domain in favour of the generic Blogger https
• dump Blogger and pay to host it myself

The downside of dumping Blogger is that I will lose the excellent wargaming community here. Wargamers who use Blogger won't be able to see my posts on my own blog without visiting my site separately. 

I do manage my own server farms and host other sites, but specifically chose Blogger to host my wargaming blog for the community. So I guess the real choice is between "put up with it" and "drop the custom domain." 

Ah well, at least I'm getting my money's worth out of Google. I certainly can't complain that they're ripping us off.

Target Locked-On - Modern Air Combat Rules

A couple of years ago, I tried to buy a physical copy of Airwar C21 to play with a couple of folk at my local wargaming club, but got the run-around from the distributor/seller.

I have a preference for physical copies and don't like paying for PDFs when I will just have to pay more to print them out. Needless to say, I gave up on Airwar C21, and didn't feel comfortable getting my friends to pay for it.

Well, recently browsing I found a new game which looks along a similar style, but a bit more streamlined, called Target Locked-On by Rory Crabb. It's available as a PDF from Wargames Vault/Drivethru RPG for under US$8, so I made an exception to my PDF rule, picked it up and have started reading it.

My only gripe so far is that it could do with a proof-read and minor editing, and perhaps if it goes to print it'll get this. Mr Crabb, if you're reading this, I can offer you an editing service in exchange for a couple of physical copies. :)

That aside, it looks like a great set of rules. Easier to read and follow than Airwar, and easier to make sense of. So far, it looks to be the superior product.

I also really like that the Aircraft Control Sheet lists the stats in a nicely laid out and easy to read format. The acronyms of Airwar made it hard to understand what the stats were if you hadn't looked at them for 6 months. But with Target Locked-On, it's all perfectly readable.

As a bonus, you can download additional aircraft lists, as well as templates and counters, all for free on Rory's website.

I'm really looking forward to get into this and have a play, and it'll motivate me to finish painting some of my aircraft, which have been sitting neglected for far too long. I'm also hoping this gets a physical print-run, or becomes available as a print-on-demand book. The former would be my preference as a saddle-stitched booklet, perhaps with all the other add-on PDFs merged together as a supplement book.

A Kickstarter perhaps? I'd support that.

What do you think? Have you played it or does it pique your interest?

What is Google doing to Blogger?

In a completely unrelated note, and while I'm on a roll... Blogger, in their infinite Googlish wisdom, have changed the front page of Blogger and "simplified" it. Although I don't quite understand their definition of simplification.

It used to be that you could get an overview of the stats of all your blogs, with a list of recent posts to blogs you sub underneath.

Now we are forwarded to the post list of our most popular blog, and we have to click on Stats separately. Then we have to go to the next blog we host, and then click on stats there. And the next, and the next, and so on for all your blogs.

Then to see the feed list, we have to click on Reading List.

How do you feel about that? I'm personally not liking it and left feedback asking them to give us an Overview page that had the same amount of information as before.

I don't feel that this is a good feature, and am not a fan of the constant changes that Google make to all their application interfaces. It seems nonsensical to me. It seems to me that we're at an age where computing power is sufficient that programmers can give us the ability to customise the interfaces to our own needs, not accept how they think we should be using it. BTW - there's some anger on Youtube on recent changes Google are making there too--things such as unsubbing people from feeds they may not have viewed for a while, and changing some algorithms for the recommended video feeds that make it harder to see what you're subbed to. Perhaps these are changes that are on the mobile interface, and frankly the Youtube app has never worked how I expect it to, and never showed me what I am interested in seeing, so I just don't use it.

Same for Google+. I stopped using that because to view specific communities, you used to be able to hover over the menu and it would auto-pop out the right content. Now we have to click here, click there, select that, and drill our way down to find things.

I think what I'm trying to say is that they keep making their interfaces more tedious, and I can't for the life of me figure out why.

So I'm putting the question out there. Is my own bias blinding me to some obvious use cases where their changes make sense, or are you equally as frustrated with their constant and nonsensical changes?

What happened in 2016?

Well, to put it frankly--zero.

I haven't done any painting, or any wargaming this whole year. I have a couple of commissions that have been waiting patiently (and thankfully low priority) for me to get back into the game, but all I've done on one of them (for my good friend Jackstorm) is deflash the figures, stick them on popsicle sticks, and start undercoating them.

Life has been particularly interesting this year. Some ups, some downs, but many busies. And now with summer coming up, I'm going to get cracking and get onto some painting.. and some fixing.

We had an earthquake here recently, and one shelf full of toy soldiers took heavy casualties. Oddly enough the two shelves next to it looked like they didn't move. But the one--and the one with my Warmaster minis & WWII 15mm Brits, plus some other misc scifi--took a dive. I was too sad to see what the extent of the damage was, so packed them all up off the ground, and will deal with them in a couple of weeks when work closes up for Christmas.