1) So much choice! @sundancer isn’t wrong about the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I’d be remiss not to shout out such small-screen gems as Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Spartacus, but if we talk anime then the 00’s were an incredibly fertile period – Fullmetal Alchemist got 2 utterly superb adaptations at either end of the decade, Gainax returned to the mecha genre to offer an alternative reconstruction in the form of Gurren Lagann – the very antithesis to Evangelion, Gundam Seed updated the framework of the Universal Century to a more modern sensibility whilst Gundam 00 aimed for a more grounded approach, and lest I forget Ghost In The Shell set the bar for small-screen cyberpunk with Stand Alone Complex (shout out to the Appleseed cgi movies that still look absolutely stunning)

2) Valves Orange Box might still be one of the best value collections every put to retail. Certainly played a roll in pushing Steam to its place of dominance. Also Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Grand Theft Auto III (plus Vice City & San Andreas), Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3, Red Dead Revolver (yep, Revolver), Halo: Combat Evolved (still got the pc version and eagerly awaiting the Master Chief Collection now it’s officially coming home 😉 ), Kingdom Hearts, Beyond Good & Evil, God of War 1 & 2, and more that I’ve forgotten. The 00’s were a very good year for videogaming. And lets not forget Good old Games beginning their mission to keep the classics of pc gaming alive and playable…

3) Oh gods now your asking for it.  BEHOLD!!!:

4) Mos Eisley space port, the Pellanor Fields.

And my pledge – to continue work on these 6 Terminators,  the Knight Preceptor and the Knight Armigers:

And I’m expecting Shadowspear to arrive tomorrow, so might start in on building the Primaris units. I have had some bits through that will allow me to build some more Tempestus Scions, so want to try and get to 2 full squads built.

Now admittedly this depends on being mobile enough to do it, as it took me the best part of an hour to be able to stand this morning, so we shall see….

Happy Weekend everyone, hope you all have a good one.

Pledge
Again, rugby tomorrow.  Probably only going to watch Wales v Ireland.  Have some family stuff on as well.  I hope to get more organising done (I have models all over the place and if they don’t get sorted into projects now, they’ll never be sorted), but I have also found some Gripping Beast Arabs that need basing and so will try and do that (there isn’t that many) and some might need transfers on the shields as well.  I’ve also started to read the Age of Sigmar rulebook so will keep going at that.

Answers
1. There were a few TV series I thought were very good.  I loved The Wire and Deadwood was awesome (shame they didn’t make anymore).  The return of Doctor Who as well!  Dexter started off stronger, then I got bored with it.  Friday Night Lights was good if not a little cheesy.  Movies – obviously you have Lord of The Rings.  One book series I love was the Shardlake books by CJ Samson.  I’ll add more as I remember them.

2. I got back into hobbying in the late 2000s after a long break, so can’t really answer this as I only really got back into painting to begin with.

3. This is a hard one!  I would say my 5 favourite bands from the 2000s were Primordial, Evergrey, Enslaved, Iron Maiden and Grand Magus or at least these are the bands I remember listening to most.  I’ll drop in more albums or songs I loved from other bands as we go through the weekend.

Primordial

Evergrey

Enslaved

Iron Maiden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx3UPfzGeN4

Grand Magus

4. Another hard one.  One battle I would like to recreate is the Battle of Benburb using Pike and Shotte.  The site of the battle isn’t that far from me and just think it would be an interesting one to recreate.  It was a Scottish v Irish force, the Scottish got their ass kicked badly, but it would be interesting to recreate the battle and see if the Scottish could have won.  Part of Irish history I also know very little about.  Another battle I would like to do are the Battle of Clontarf, which was Irish v Norse and Irish – but given the size of the battle (some estimate that 10,000 men were killed in the one day battle),  a smaller scale might be best.

One alternate history game I would like to play would be Romans (maybe even Julius Caesar himself) invading Ireland – but I am not smart enough to make it 🙂

This weekend’s pledge?
Well, I have to confess… not only do I have a laser cutter (which gets quite a bit of use these days) but I’ve had a 3d printer for about two years. And have printed a little calibration cube and a tiny polygon-dragon, and that’s about it.
So this weekend’s pledge is to get the thing working again and print something “terrain-y” on it. Anything.
Waiting on some fresh filament and the nozzle’s been soaking in acetone for an hour or so already to unblock it….

1. Memorable films from the 2000s? The Lord of the Rings trilogy was good, wasn’t it? And the early Harry Potters were pretty impressive for their special effects (though not really for the child acting!). Does the Matrix count? I know it was first released in 1999, but I didn’t get to see it ’til it came out on DVD! That (the first movie) was a great film! The Batman reboots were pretty good – but also ushered in the start of the current mind-numbing “super hero” crossover film franchises.
Books? I’m going to admit that I quite enjoyed the Da Vinci Code. I don’t care about the cheesy dialogue and the stilted prose; when I first read it, I enjoyed it.

2. This was a pretty busy time for me, and I didn’t really play much tabletop. I don’t have a video console and, as I used to write games for handhelds, I’ve never really spent any time playing video games (too much like reading the Matrix for me). As far as gaming goes, a bit of a lost decade for me. I did notice that zombie games were particularly popular during this time (hey, I was busy, not asleep).

3. The 2000s were a great time for Me First and the Gimme Gimmes:

The world’s best (and most troubled) rock band, the Wildhearts continued to split up and reform, but still put out some excellent stuff during the 2000s. Their covers EP was just as good as any original material:

The Reel Big Fish went from initial to commercial success but then lost it all before going “indie” and producing their own records. Their sound (and some might argue chord arrangements) didn’t change. Personally, I like that it didn’t. Their cover of New York, New York is a modern classic:

While artists like Imelda May took rockabilly mainstream, there were loads of cool bands chugging out fast-punk 2/2 marching time tunes. The Creepshow with Zombies Ate Her Brain mixed a popular style with a popular topic of the day:

I still return to the Bad Luck Bandits for a quick burst of tongue-in-cheek misery:

4. Probably something industrial – that could double-up as a zombie/post-apocalyptic terrain, or a sci-fi battleground.
I really like the look of how Wildlands plays:

1. ‘…what books, movies, comics, TV series or anime from the 2000’s surprised you or was most memorable?

I’m going to do one post about books, one about movies, one about comics, one about TV series and one about Anime. Buckle up.

Books

When I finished school in 2004 my reading and interest in it started to decline. This was due to happenstance with: becoming an adult, going to college (the course concerned was 38 ish hours a week, with two hours commute each day on public transport) part time work at the same time (doing 28 – 35 hours a week, part time my ass), starting my current job and meeting my sons mother (now my ex) in 2010 I had a lot going on.

Not a million miles away from what some of you were saying about the 1980s or 1990s.

As a kid I read Goosebumps (I read other stuff too but kind of forced to by school/parents that I had no real interest in) before discovering the Hobbit (forced to pick a book in school to read and write about, this was it) and loving it and transitioning into Lord of the Rings.

This brings me up to around 1999. At the same time I got into Terry Pratchett, but lost interest in the mid 2000s. I found that some of his books changed focus between different characters and genres (Rincewind and the Watch were my favourite by far) that I lost interest in what was essentially a series about a loosely connected world when random books about newer characters appeared it felt kind of… forced.

With that being my background in reading and what I was up to at the time, I started reading Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire to the initiated) in the mid to later 2000s. The card game was going pretty strong in my local games club and the owner, workers and members at said shop (The Gathering, in Limerick, still there btw) were all reading the series and all fans. What made me want to read it is how, at random points on nights out, be it earlier, later, waaaay later, at conventions, in pubs or back at a guys apartment: it ALWAYS got brought up, anecdotes about parts of the story were told, cool scenes were described and it was mentioned with such passion. So I was on board.

Or so I thought. I forgot about it. I started my current job toward the end of the 2000s. After a year or so my father and I went to Portugal. I had forgotten to bring a gaming supplement (which was very unlike me) or book to read (as I mainly ‘fell’ out of reading’) but I did pick up the first book in the ASOIAF series which was at the airport book shop: Game of Thrones. The flight flew and I read the book on holidays. Kept reading it when I got back, finished it and loved it. This was before HBO announced the series was even in development. I found GRRM’s writing style smooth, easy to read, detailed, descriptive but not clunky, convoluted, contrived nor self-indulgant.

For those of you who have not read the first book (I wont even get into the Series V the books) then you really should: Roose Bolton is introduced earlier, there are far more characters, the plots and story details go into way further detail and not just detail for detail’s sake, and you really get inside other characters heads and get mentions of things and hints that point toward the origin of different things in the world as well as a few theories about legends and other figures in the setting that don’t really get broached upon by the TV show.

Also if you say you’re a huge fan of GoT, play wargames, read but have never read ASOIAF, Im sorry, but I laugh in your face. If you’re a nerd and on this site and match the criteria of the previous sentence and you really don’t have time to read ONE book in the series, but do have time for TV/anime/comics/youtubers/reading a rules or gaming supplement/hobbying then you go down two levels of respect in my eyes. It makes you a hipster.

And I hate hipsters. Hipsters will be there along with the cockroaches after nuclear war* kills off humanity (real human beings).

*Or some other extinction level event.

@mage I did watch some GoT, got bored by it and didn’t read the books because for some unknown reason (aka MONEY) the German books are cut in half. You get one book from ASOIAF in English but you need to buy *two* in German. So it’s a hard pass for me. Also the story line really doesn’t catch me. But I’ve read all discworld books.

I did some hobby too

@blinky465

Unintentional, where was it too dark and I will perky it up a little through the magic of editing? I think Im cranky and I dont realise it…

1. ‘…what books, movies, comics, TV series or anime from the 2000’s surprised you or was most memorable?

Comics

Comic Books are something I did not properly get back into til about 2014 ish. After the split with my sons mother, well, I went through a very dark, painful and lonely period. I splurged on some comic books on a day out in Galway, probably my favourite place to be in Ireland if I am to be honest, and got back into them from there. It was therapeutic and I took comfort in them. The odd day trip to Galway perked me up after a bad week (the solution to a bad day was takeout) and inevtiably more comic books.

But that was not the 2000s.

The 2000s saw me reading Deadpool Comics but not collecting them seriously nor chronologically. Not that that ever mattered to the Merc with a Mouth. I cant really go on about this at length like previous posts as pretty much everyone at this stage has seen the two Deadpool movies and is familiar with the character. There are a few funny moments: accidentally warping into an alternative version of earth where apocalypse is in charge and the world is pretty much gone ‘Wow. Its all gone. Its not… THE Age of Apocalypse but its AN age of Apocalypse.’ I laughed myself silly at that one.

I also read some Manga for a time but then swiftly fell out of it after a few volumes. While I enjoyed it, at the time of reading them I did not travel much or go places much. Their availability and getting the proper issues in certain order, and the length of some series made me quickly lose interest due to cost and logistics. Daemon Diary was good, King of Hell was better but the plot took too long to kind of… form…ulate. You get me. RG Veda I read a bit of but it was too convoluted. There are doubtless others I have forgotten about.

Of course I loved Dreamwaves G1 Transformers and Cybertron: The War Within. I could go on about these in detail and length, and want to find them again and complte my collection soon. However if your not a Transformers fan hearing about it must be tedious. Also, I need something new to start collecting as I have almost got all the ships for the game Starlink: Battle for Atlas, which sadly seems to have tanked.

Laptop almost dead and do not know where charger is, back later! Well, I will still post but that is it for long posts.