The Resumption of Hobby Night

Hobby night is back to a weekly thing. I'm even dragging my carcass down to paint on other days as well. I suppose one could argue that if I'm having to drag myself to an activity that I supposedly enjoy then maybe I don't enjoy it as much as I think. Whatever, Freud.

It is a pleasant basement to hobby in, even if the light is somewhat nightmarish. I need to replace the bare bulbs with some sort of fluorescent bar to make it more ambient and less "reveal Mother Bates" shadowy. My dog Bitz likes to lay down on the wooden shelf below my hobby table, so I paint and pet him with my foot. It's pretty tolerable.

Here are some more Heretic Astartes pics. I painted the flamer guy, then started working on the heavy bolter guy and aspiring champion with power fist.

I bought a photographic mat last year, and it doesn't make them look half bad, especially compared to the poor lighting of the bottom pic. Even so, white balance took all the contrast out of the skull/spike on his backpack and made it a uniform yellow. We got a super-cool 3' cubic photo booth thingy at work with built in lighting and I'm thinking of bringing in a mini or two to try it out. It fills the space with a crazy amount of ambient light.

In further basement news, I also bought a utility sink and will be hooking it up too at some point.
Here's a picture with my dog in it, for no good reason.

This will require me to cut into existing water lines, which puts the fear into me. I've done water line work before but never with Pex. It seems easy, but you never know until you get started. PVC I'm reasonably comfortable with. I can even solder copper in a pinch. It's the mistakes I made getting there that make me queasy about trying a new material.

I'm experimenting with putting pics on Instagram. It seems like there is a much higher pic to blab ratio there than on Twitter. You can find me at the usual name, https://www.instagram.com/hakomike/ if you'd like. 

New House, Resumed Hobby

On May 4, we closed on a new house. It's within 10 miles or so of the old house, which doesn't add a great deal to my already substantial commute.

Going from a partially finished basement with well-established hobby area to a ready-to-finish basement (read: unfinished) was daunting. I had packed something like 25 boxes of hobby stuff (medium moving boxes) and there was really no good start to putting things away. I ended up buying a bunch of plastic shelves and unloading the boxes onto them. It looked so nice when we moved in, but quickly became a hoarding nightmare.

Before my stuff

After my stuff, but before more shelves

My plans to drywall quickly fell by the wayside. I'll get to that, but I didn't want to delay using the space until drywall was up. It had been almost a year since I stopped hobbying in preparation of the move, and I really wanted to get my life back.

So as a small I decided to create a 40k Kill Team. I got the box set and expansions, and my son and nephew (and hopefully my brother-in-law) are going to play. I chose Heretic Astartes, and started a list consisting of 5 CSM's and 6 cultists. Two CSM's are painted now, and I'm slowly putting colors on the cultists. Interestingly, I found myself assembly-line painting the cultists, but the marines each get converted and painted individually.

Regular Dude and Zealot Specialist

I heard about a tactic to give the weakest, cheapest guy in your kill team the "leader" role, so you can hide that model away and not risk losing the extra command point. For instance, you could make a kill team of killy Ork Kommandos and include a grot as your leader. I'm not here to tell you that you are playing your toy soldier game wrong, but if you do this then you are definitely playing your toy soldier game wrong. Don't be this person. Seriously. If I play against someone who does this I will throw the game through a series of calculated tactical blunders so that they feel superior to me for winning and I feel superior to them because I am not them. It's a win-win.

Now if someone came up with a list that heavily included grots and used this guy for his leader, I would find that amusing and worth playing against. I have this model and he's awesome. 

For the record, my leader is the beefiest dude on my team with the best gear, the Aspiring Champion of Chaos. I have as hard a time imagining Astartes following some wretched mortal as I do a bunch of Orks following a grot.