[unofficial weekender] A day off

[collins 16349xp 2]

nope, we have two bank holidays in the UK but currently I couldn’t tell you the season never mind the month soooo

Feeling fine, alive. tired though, absolutely fed up of the current situation, and I don’t even have it bad! loving the affect its had on my road though, everyone is much friendlier now.

my biggest purchase is deffo my Prusa i3Mk3….£700 plus. I’ve used it a lot too, second to that is either a kickstarter, but probably my Anycubic Photon. im quite tight in normal day to day life and have no offspring so disposable income is abnormally high at the moment. It will change in the future no doubt. make hay while the sun shines and all that!

I haven’t got any plans for Star Wars weekend, might watch one of the films, won’t be painting any of my Star Wars models though I don’t think, got moderns and DnD ones to do first.

[sundancer 42900xp 0]

700? that’s 800 Euros…. that’s 8 months worth of hobby budget for me… oO I need to start selling organs XD

[danlee 22433xp 1]

This week’s target is to paint some ghouls for Age of Sigmar, and to start playing Arena the Consts solo.

 

1. Is May 1st a holiday in your country too? – We usually have first Monday of May as a holiday, but this year its going to be Friday.
2. How are you feeling? – Stress levels steadily building up. Trying to deliver the biggest project our company has ever done while working from home, home schooling, and unable to do any of the stuff I would usually do to feel better (gaming club and gym).
3. What is you biggest one-time purchase in the hobby? – I was thinking the Imperial Knight when it came out (£95 for a single model) then I remembered Kickstarter. Kickstarter can list all backed projects by cost, which tells me by biggest spend was $584 for the all in pledge of Conan.

[collins 16349xp 1]

Oh cricky! No don’t let me give you the wrong idea, I had to save up hard to get that prusa printer! Haha I’m not made of money, I just don’t have a lot of draws on it thankfully.

[horati0nosebl0wer 19610xp 1]

After a steady stream of expletives in seeing my attempt at a post get eaten multiple times I’m now able to put something up.

• May 1st is not a holiday for me, by any means, where I am.
• I am feeling a little sick of the emotional rollercoaster but generally life has made it apparent that the good comes with the rough side too.
• My one biggest purchase for the hobby was my Sotar 20/20 airbrush for about $200. Aside from that I’d say the largest drop of cash I did was $310 for an army from Titan Forge’s Raid on the Temple of Serpents Kickstarter that is stuck in their warehouse until Spain opens postal service again. These are singular events so far, though I am looking at an oil filled air compressor from Silentaire that will cost more than both (one day).

Ok, pledge time, I will paint one if not two of the figures in the Signum Battle for Vallor box set I got on Kickstarter oh so long ago which I have with me in my hotel.

In honor of Stranger Things, Tales from the Loop, Things From the Flood and the Netflix series I ploughed through Dark I drop this music upon you.

[blinky465 17027xp 1]

@crazyredcoat – I can’t decide if this is hideous or absolutely amazing. I suspect it’s a bit like Ronnie James Dio’s solo career and sits somewhere smack bang in the middle of the spectrum!

@horati0nosebl0wer – I never had a Sega (I refused to believe the ZX Spectrum was dead, long into the 90s – as long as I could POKE some memory locations and make my own sprites move around a screen, it was a perfectly valid home computing platform!) but I remember being blown away by both the audio and the graphics when one of my friends got one. Listening back, it sounds like one of those songs made using floppy drives!

(not the Floppotron version, but a homebrew lo-fi one!)

 

[blinky465 17027xp 1]

I think I need to update my answer 2.

Today, I’m on top of the world! I’ve heard cyberpunk/sci-fi terrain being talked about a lot in recent days – or maybe it just feels like it, because I decided to put my own cyberpunk skirmish game together (a bit like when you buy a new car then notice how many of the same make and model are on the roads).

While digging about in my loft the other day, I came across some old QVGA screens that I thought would make excellent advertising display hoardings in miniature. It was a bit of a pipe dream, as it’s more than ten years since I even looked at them. But I’ve spent the last few days pushing bits and bytes at them – and today I got one to work!

Cyberpunk Advertising Signs

It’s not 100% complete. But I reckon by the end of the weekend, I’ll have a working advertising board. Which means you can too! I’ve a few of these spare and happy to share with anyone who wants to try one out….

 

[blinky465 17027xp 2]

Holy moly! That happened quicker than I expected. I got my cyberpunk advertising billboard working

Now I just need to make an enclosure to make it look like an actual billboard, and not the internal gubbins of an electronics project! (sorry about the embedded music – but honestly, it’s better than the original audio of my wife and I discussing the merits of different biscuits over the top of Wuthering Heights on the telly).

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 1]

@blinky465 I honestly love that kind of faux 80’s music. Gloryhammer and Beast in Black are some of my favourites. I also love Alestorm, but that’s just silly for the sake of it and it’s great. The frontman of Alestorm is actually in Gloryhammer, which sort of makes sense. I have an eclectic taste in music…

I’m also having a Hobby Hangout over Skype with my brothers this afternoon, so SOME work will be done! Finally… 😛

[sundancer 42900xp 1]

May 4th

Music! Enjoy!

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 2]

I actually got some paint to plastic! I have some pictures on my phone that I might put up later, but I’ve only finished the armour and a bit of the trim (my Mephiston Red is not in the best condition right now so painting with it is a bit interesting). I’m planning to get a whole step by step done for my project log that has been slightly lacking for a week or so… Deff going to try merging individual pics into one to help save on uploads. I think it was the Hobby Hangout from the week before last where @sundancer and Jerry were discussing that in some of the logs. Sadly basing on these guys will have to wait (I ran out). I could probs order more, but I’m trying to limit spending… In the meantime, have a wonderful classic for your enjoyment.

[blinky465 17027xp 2]

@crazyredcoat – merging pics also has the effect of making your painting look half-decent again! A few times I’ve painted a mini and thought “that doesn’t look too bad” and taken a picture of it. But the digital photo shows every brushstroke, every blemish, every bit of unsmoothed paint – the thing looks horrible! Yet in your hand, you know the mini looks ok.

So put a couple of photos together into a montage and rescale to about 800-1000px across; this reduces the image so that it’s big enough to show the details, but not so HD-like that it picks up every single blemish and wobbly line!

Add in some Gerry-screen-blur and you’ve got the perfect photo 😉

 

I too love the original 80s “metal” – not so much the dungeons-and-dragons, Iron Maiden warbling though; more the sleazy, nasty trashy “hair metal” of bands like TigerTailz and Danger Danger.

[limburger 21668xp 0]

Biggest non-quite-hobby related purchase was quite a bit more expensive as that was my trike ( HP Velotechnik 20 FS … don’t Google if you value your sanity 😉 and/or credit card).
Adding an electric assist was not cheap either.

That’s the thing when you can live lean and have no extra money wasting habits …

These days with effectively negative interest rates it sucks that getting in debt is cheaper than actually saving money 🙁

Not a lot of hobby happened, but I think I blame Rimworld on that one.
Trying to keep a colony alive is surprisingly tricky and addictive at the same time.

[sundancer 42900xp 2]

not so much the dungeons-and-dragons, Iron Maiden warbling though;

@blinky465 that’s called New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (or NWOBHM for short) and it’s the best metal. EV0R! Also Focus is early 70s 😉

And in the Discord @avernos put in a very good song:

[blinky465 17027xp 1]

I never really got on with NWOBHM as a name for that particular genre. Maybe it’s because our music press never quite got to grips with it – they tended to focus on the “Britishness” rather than the “heavy metal”. Sure, I can see how grouping Iron Maiden, Motorhead and Judas Priest made sense. But Def Leppard? I just didn’t get it myself. They may as well have included Status Quo…

(plus, growing up a few years behind my elder sister who loved Iron Maiden in the early 80s, it was almost law that I had to hate them, just as I only started following Liverpool FC because she supported Everton).

I can’t hear the Stranglers without being reminded of one of the most forgettable Prime Ministers of all time, Gordon Brown.

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