[unofficial weekender] Oh boy my back hurts.

[sundancer 42900xp 2]

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Read all of this before you start as it will save any trouble later.

First thing you must do is make your “pledge”. It can be anything gaming related, big or small, and you don’t even have to finish it. No, in here, happiness is the road. Have fun doing whatever it is, but it is not a race. Accompany your work with pictures or we might think you are do something sinister and just using us for cover.

You are also presented with a few questions. It is to get the conversation started. Try and keep your answers ‘conversational’, no text speak, and certainly no “basically”. This is how we all get to know each other better. While you are here feel free to tell us a story, show a picture, joke, tales of love or woe, or just add your own little bit. This is the whole point…in here it is just us.

If you have never taken part before we may bark and bite, but we also like a cuddle! It is all done in the best possible taste and it is character building. feel free to give as good as you get.

A few other things to note: NO RELIGION & NO POLITICS! Glasgow pub rules are in effect. If you need to make a better point then it is fine, but don’t take the piss. And always keep it civil.

Play plenty of music to go with your work. Loud and through proper speakers. Write us a playlist of things we might not have heard before.

Now, after all of that there is only one ‘real’ rule in here and it cannot be broken: NO DICKS! (Exceptions may be made for little fighting men with little plastic/resin/metal wieners)

And don’t forget the highlights of the weekend: The Weekender on Friday and XLBS on Sunday. And the little show that is the unofficial Hobby Hangout over at twitch.tv

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Questions of the week:

• What was your last non-wargaming related project?
• Do you take care of your back?
• Garden, beach or foreign lands. What is you preferred space to relax and tune out?

Well, get on with it!

[sundancer 42900xp 3]

Answers as is tradition:

• The sandbox in the garden… boy have I underestimated the work that needs to be done moving all that sand XD
• Yes. Standing up a lot at work and doing bends every now and then. The occasional swimming helps too
• My living room. Reading a book. Maybe some music in the background.

Now back to the daily life of a dad 😉

[comet5 3429xp 4]

• I cannot remember.
• I have to, I had 8 months off due to pain in 2018.  I now have a special table at work and try & avoid tasks that involve bending.
• My conservatory, it’s where I paint, model, and hobby in general.  I listen to audio books, podcasts, Warren’s radio show and zone out.

[ninjillyParticipant 11673xp 4]

Hello hello… I genuinely forgot it was Friday already!

Pledge for the weekend is to paint up the Minas Tirith warriors sitting in Dettol right now. The bird from last weekend is still alive in the walls but hopefully it (and we) will be out of our misery soon. How long can a pigeon live without food and water is apparently longer than you bloody well expect!

Questions of the week:

What was your last non-wargaming related project? – I installed a new shower a few weeks ago. Not a skill set I will find many uses for but youtube taught me well enough for a job well done.
Do you take care of your back? Not particularly, I have enough other problems but I probably should
Garden, beach or foreign lands. What is you preferred space to relax and tune out? A trip to the sea puts me at rest but sadly it isn’t as close as it used to be. At home, my little balcony in the sun is great. It’s not much but I’ve put in plants and made it look as nice as I can. It’s great for sitting reading but Scottish weather is not giving me much to work with these days

Some music – with the bird in the walls most of this week has been loud to try and drown it out but let’s have a little electronica for the weekend

 

[limburger 21668xp 3]

1) What was your last non-wargaming related project?
Ages ago I made a bot-editor for Unreal Tournament.
Also made one for UT2k3 … and then I lost interest and code.
So if anything it reminded me to always have backups and a proper NAS instead of an external harddisk for keeping stuff safe.

2) Do you take care of your back?
*eh*

3) Garden, beach or foreign lands. What is you preferred space to relax and tune out?
bed / comfy chair and good music …

I gots my 9th edition ‘soon’ … or at least I got the notification that I should receive a tracking mail today.
Like I suspected when I ordered it the initial order confirmation said I would have had it ‘by friday’.
So if all goes according to plan I will be assembling a lot of platic terminators and kniggets this weekend.

// edit

MyWarhammer went live … and as one ought to have expected the servers are probably overloaded, because of course they would.
At least that must be why I haven’t had my confirmation mail.
(Apple addicts need to wait a little longer until their app is available … not sure whether that is good news :D)

[danlee 22433xp 4]

This weeks pledge is to assemble and start painting some more Kingdom Death models. Probably some more survivors from the core box as when I first got it I only assembled and painted the starting survivors.

 

1. What was your last non-wargaming related project? – Building some raised vegetable beds for our garden at the start of lockdown.
2. Do you take care of your back? – I try to be careful when I’m lifting but so far I’ve been lucky and not hurt it badly. I get the impression once you hurt it once you have trouble for the rest of your life.
3. Garden, beach or foreign lands. What is you preferred space to relax and tune out? – Earlier this year I learned to appreciate sitting in my garden, mainly because I wasn’t allowed to go any further!

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 3]

I suppose this week I will try and finish the Umbers. They are coming along well enough. Haven’t decided 100% on a project after that, but we’ll see. It MIGHT not be related to the Iron Throne…but probably will be. I do have a massive box to finish so I can play with it…

Questions!

What was your last non-wargaming related project?

Definitely a school project. Probably a paper on the origins and formations of the Abitibi Greenstone Belt in Northern Ontario/Quebec because I’d already handed in my Glacial Response Time paper…

Do you take care of your back?

I’m 6’5.5″ (or near as damn it 2m)…there is no taking care of my back well enough to NOT make it hurt…

Garden, beach or foreign lands. What is you preferred space to relax and tune out?

If we’re talking holiday locations, I prefer being somewhere cool and north…like the Arctic Circle. I did once go on a summer holiday north of the Arctic Circle…best holiday ever!

[scribbs 14506xp 4]

At risk of sounding like a broken record, still working on the Black Watch. I’d like to get this last batch of Highlanders maybe halfway done by the end of the week.

1. Last non-wargaming project was knocking together a couple of raised beds for the garden at the start of lockdown from scrap fencing panels and a miscellany of salvaged nails and screws.

2. Hadn’t ever really thought about my back too much, until having a daughter. Lugging her around as she got heavier was definitely noticed, so I’m a little more careful about what I do now.

3. Beach, but mainly for the chance to have a swim.

[horati0nosebl0wer 19610xp 5]

My last non-gaming related project… not long ago. I’m working on one now aside from just completing some commission work.

I take care of my back to a minimal degree. I really should do more as it also affects my neck and hips.

D, None of the Above. My preferred place for where I tune out generally is in my bedroom. Its the one place I can close a door and listen to my own music/get minis painted. If that can’t happen I like to go for a walk outside and get away from the world that’s in my head by allowing my body to soak in the sensations around me.

Pledge: get more commission work done and other stuff like the following

 

 

[limburger 21668xp 2]

I really wonder who designed, tested and approved the Warhammer 40k app.
As suspected the servers were a bit overloaded at launch, so it needed a bit of time before the ‘confirmation’ links were sent.
Not a big deal, because that is pretty much par for the course when popular websites launch.

The real kicker … once you do sign in you are greeted with one of those “welcome here” popups that (some) apps use.
However on my phone that popup is bigger than the screen, so the button to close it is not available …

And then there’s this review :

The Goonhammer Review: Warhammer 40,000 – The App

What the heck GW?

Are you seriously telling me that this app is simply a big library for all of your books with a minimalistic search engine ?

And that’s before you consider the spelling-errors (surely those aren’t in the source material ?) or the implications that the core-rules are hosted on Google Drive.
I hope the reviewer got that bit wrong and it simply downloaded the booklet to his own Google Drive …
However that still makes me wonder why they are in a document inside this “app” at all.

If it weren’t for copyright issues (and the stupendous amount of work of adding all data) I’d be tempted to build my own webpage/app thingy, because the core design of this thing is flawed.

It is like they simply told an intern to build a digital library for all of their books that could be monetized.
I get it is hard to organize the data into a single coherent database when you’ve got a dozen versions of unit stats spread across several books, but that is supposed to be the one thing that solves the need to browse through half a dozen of codexes just to build a single army.

/rant …

tl;dr; : a good idea ruined by bad design choices and an obvious ‘release now / fix later’ mentality.

 

[blinky465 17027xp 3]

What was your last non-wargaming related project?

I’m not sure what this means? Just, what stuff (that isn’t little fighting men) have you made? Or something else? I made a vortex paint mixer out of a motor from a laser printer the other day. Does that count? If not, then I guess it’d be a hexapod I built for my son-in-law a few months ago. Most of the stuff I’ve been working on since lockdown is tabletop-gaming-related in some way or another!

Do you take care of your back?

My back has been busted for about eight years and I regularly get spasms. Every year or so, I’ll have a few sessions at the chiropractor to straighten it out a bit. I’m careful with it, rather than taking care (so brace before a big sneeze, never cough while putting your socks on, the typical middle-aged-man kind of stuff….)

Garden, beach or foreign lands. What is you preferred space to relax and tune out?
Beach. We live a few minutes walk from the sea. Since late May, Mrs Blinky and I have been going swimming. To really zone out, I find a good long walk is perfect. We were looking to get another narrowboat recently (having lived on one a few years ago, we both admitted to really missing messing about on the canals) but since lockdown and loads of people looking to live aboard, prices have shot up (and I’m not sure that playing on the canals would be all that much fun right now, there’s a *lot* of activity because of cancelled holiday plans etc). To really “lose myself” I love playing at jam nights – it’s hard to focus on anything else at all when you’re desperately trying to recall which key you’re supposed to be playing your pentatonic scales in, so a perfect way to leave everything else behind! I miss playing live music.

 

Pledge: finish some buildings for Cyber City; I’ve laser cut a load of mdf, but the idea of spending weeks painting and modelling a whole bunch of basically big boxes leaves me cold: I might just make some stickers of brickwork etc. and slap them on the sides and call it done.

Music: yep, it’s Croydon’s knock-off Blondie wannabe tribute band, Transvision Vamp. I don’t care. I like them. Sorry @ninjilly if it’s the weekend, it should be guitars. Loud, noisy, fun guitars 😉

 

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 1]

@limburger I suspected that this app would not be optimal. They just don’t want to give things away for free with 40k, so they have to create a system that works with that. The AoS app is a joy to use, because of how it is set up with the game being free, but they did that because of the whole ground up rework of the game. 40k is a bit of a money pot and, despite what GW may claim, is still being run for the competitive demographic. It’s a shame, but they want to still be selling codexes at the end of the day.

[limburger 21668xp 2]

@crazyredcoat

the AoS app has zero content … until you pay for stuff.
And even if you do own the books you need to pay again to unlock the digital equivalents.

You’d think that all GW would have to do is change the resources used.
It doesn’t even use Google drive to share the core rules (which are free for 40k as well!)

It should have been easy.
The only tricky bits that are excluded are :
(1) a subscription model to access all content instead of paying a single fee for access to partial content
(2) a method of unlocking content based on some sort of unique identifier from a physical book

IMHO this can only mean one thing : the app was developed by a different company.

And errors like unit names … for something like this ?
I mean, yes it is a lot of data, but GW should have that sort of data in a single master vault as they need it when updating their point values anyway (unless they don’t … which may help explain why the balance is lacking … ).
I get the impression that they had to manually scan & copy the individual books … heck, they even might have hired a few cheap monkeys to copy them by hand. There is no reason for having the kind of spelling mistakes.
Missing images is the only thing I can understand, because even the codexes don’t always have an image for every unit (which sucks … ).

The less said about the restricted and useless results in their search engine the better, because that is just pathetic.

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 1]

Oh I know there is still a paywall, but I find that the AoS app is good enough to look up a stat sheet for when you’re playing a game. It’s far from perfect, but it works as a nice game aid for simple games.

[limburger 21668xp 2]

yeah … which makes it all the more absurd that the 40k app is that buggy / incomplete / inconvenient

as I said : this should have been a no-brainer app if they had a solid foundation for their AoS app.

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