Created on Wed Nov 16, 2011 1:26 am with 91 blog posts
I've begun making some basic terrain to add some obstacles and elevations to my Warhammer game table. I acquired some foam from a friend a couple months ago to line the bottom of the box I carry my army in (to cut depressions to hold individual models in place as I move around) and I used the rest of the piece he gave me to cut the foam. I used my Dremel with a rotary cutting blade to make the cuts… generating lots of sticky frass that coated me pretty good 
After the vertical cuts were made, I then took the dremel at an angle to make a slight slope along the edges, rather than have them vertical. The uneven nature of the insulation foam causes irregularities in the cutting path, but, given I wanted a somewhat "natural" contour, the irregularities were somewhat sought. I used Weld Bond glue to attach the levels together, mostly because it's what I had available, and it seems to be holding pretty well.
Obviously there's more to do yet 
I'll likely have to add sand or something for texture, and paint it. I test sprayed some scrap foam with Krylon paint, but, as I figured it would, the paint ate into the foam. I'll have to seal the foam before painting or else it's gonna get all weird and ruined I've been playing Warhammer 40,000 for a couple months now, using base models mostly, nothing special. But now, I've begun my foray into customizing, models to represent different characters or unit types. I'll be using different combinations of Games Workshop bits, and crafting some new bits myself. I still don't have any green stuff or the like to work with, but that's something I'll have to work with eventually
First up, I'm working on a mock up of the Catachan Jungle Fighter elite model/unit, Sly Marbo; he's a Rambo adaptation ; a lone unit unto himself, a master of stealth, a sniper, and carries a deadly demolotion charge to wreck the enemy's day.
I'm limited in what bits I have available, and will likely have to get some green stuff and model him a vest... or maybe just use one of the torsos with a shirt already. I'll also be modelling some leaves and the like to add some camouflage flair
The Ripper Pistol was made out of a boltgun with the back of the stock, barrel and sight cut off, a scope added, and the hand grip trimmed, with a lasgun barrel glued on the end. I think I might abandon this as I should probably have used a bolt pistol chassis, and I think maybe use a meltagun barrel instead. I found a bolt pistol to modify, but I have no extra melta (I have almost no melta armed models in my army as it is). This would make the ripper smaller and look meaner, I think.
I might add a thread tassel to the handle of his knife, but, probably not. I'm considering shaping the blade a bit as well, but haven't decided on how.
I'll have to find something for the demolition charge he carries as well 
Yep, more Warhammer. This is my blog, deal with it
About two weeks ago, I played a game of Warhammer with my wife, splitting my army up into two 500pt. groups, so that I would be forced to learn the rules in preparation for the tournament I played last weekend. She didn't want to play, but agreed simply to help me out. Despite her initial feelings and reservations, she did approach the game with an open mind, and had some fun in spite of herself.
Her primary objections (aside from the same "it's expensive" objection I have) centered around her dislike of the model designs for the Space Marines and such that I was playing, they weren't her aesthetic. She's more interested in a steam-punk or fantasy aesthetic. With this in mind, we started looking through the different non-Space Marine armies to see if anything caught her eye. She liked a couple rare/expensive styles of Imperial Guard (the Armageddon Steel Legions and the Death Korps of Krieg), and kinda liked the Eldar, aside from their conical hemlets. She likes the idea of long range combat more than hordes of troops, so kind of decided on Eldar. A friend's little brother played some Warhammer with his friends back in the 90s and he had some Eldar that weren't being used, so I contacted them about buying them and did some research on used market value of what was there so that my wife would have an ok base around which to build an army, and some models to paint (which she is mostly interested in).
The little army is an Eldar Battle Force box set, plus a metal Farseer and Warlock:
The Warlock is a little useless, however, as they are supposed to be in groups of 3-5; there's no way to really use just one.
In the Battle Force box was:
.: 20 Eldar Guardians (troops)
.: 3 Eldar Guardian Jetbikes
.: an Eldar Vyper Jetbike
.: an Eldar Falcon
All together, there's about 500pts of units in the set.
As you can see, the plastic models were fairly sloppily assembled, using a model glue that bonded the plastics; given the age and sloppy gluing we determined the value to be about $40; well assembled stuff would be about $60-70 used, and buying new kits would cost about $215.
I don't know how my wife plans to paint these yet. It should be interesting to see what she makes of them. 
These marks keep appearing, and I'm not sure why…
… It's getting out of hand.My (digital) collection of academic journal articles is something of a mess. I've combined collections stored on multiple computers a couple times over the years, and have multiple copies of the same paper in some cases, and slightly different name schemes, or files that I acquired from friends that have completely different file name schemes… I've really gotta take the time to properly sort through them and put them all in one coherent place (rather than having nested file folders of partially overlapping material). Given that I have about 1.5Gb of pdf papers to go through, reorganizing them is going to be a task :/
A friend just informed me of a sort of academic journal organizer/social media system that I'm going to try out; Mendeley, which imports your articles, extracts metadata, and helps you organize your papers… additionally it's a social network, allowing some discourse and sharing of material, and offering article recommendations, etc. I just downloaded it and imported my nested Articles folder, and it seems to have extracted titles, authors, years and keywords for most papers, but there's still going to be a lot of work to do. Luckily, it certainly highlights duplicate files, which will help sort this all out a bit faster at least.
I don't have much experience with it yet, but, I suggest giving it a try if you're academically inclined
Note - General name scheme I use for my journal files is like this:
.: Single Author - AuthorYEARNameOfArticle.ext
.: Two Authors - Author1Author2YEARNameOfArticle.ext
.: Multiple Authors - AuthorEtalYEARNameOfArticle.ext
Generally, this name scheme works pretty well, and allows for easy file sharing; having no spaces or the like in the name means that web resources or certain OSes don't need to use character codes for spaces, so the file name looks the same in all situations. It's also the way most citations would appear, making things easier to look up.
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