With The Season

Another week, some more minis

The last week, and the next few weeks, are travel weeks unfortunately. I’m not really one for traveling, at least not more than a day trip when I have to, so this is a pause in the action. I’m only going to be staying in a hotel towards the end of September so even if I had a travel kit, it won’t really work. Which is really frustrating, as the Kill Team season is going to start at my LGS soon, and the only team I have ready is the Imperial Navy Breachers squad I was given.

It’s still a team, and they do look good, but I’d rather play with teams I painted, especially if we get a campaign going. It will be fun either way, but I’d rather play with my teams. I have the starter set with Kommandos and Krieg Veterans as well as few more bespoke teams. I am really excited to get them primed and ready to get painted.

I’m really looking forward to the new Kill Team Season. I quit drinking back in ‘22, after that it wasn’t long before I started reading up on all the fun tabletop stuff I’ve missed on out between family and just being a drunk dipshit. 2024 is almost over, I’ve been painting minis and building terrain, collecting paint and reading rule books and have barely played any games! It is going to be so fun rolling some dice with a bunch of smelly dorks. It’s been far too long!

Stay Frosty

The work for our family Frostgrave games continues apace. Now that I have enough basic minis, I’m spending more time on objects I’m excited about. Not that I haven’t had a lot of fun printing and painting my various war-bands, but since I needed so many I didn’t really have the time to enjoy every model. There are no themes or stories attached to the various models you can assemble into a war-band with my collection of fantasy minis. It’s really just a grab bag of people swords, axes, clubs and shields. Also, a pretty simple collection of some zombies and skeletons.

That’s why now I’m working on a fun flesh golem from OPR I’m using as a large construct for summoning or random monster work. I’ve also got a really fun frost giant and ice toad primed and ready to get painted. I’m taking pictures and videos as I go, trying to find a good workflow to blog and get some of this stuff out of the swirl of my brain, but as we all know it’s hard to stop when you’re “in the zone” so that is still ongoing.

I’m also working on finishing up more great terrain from Makers Anvil. They’re not participating in the big fire sale right now, which is fine, it’s good, fair priced stuff! So go grab some good, middle of the road fantasy terrain any time you want. No need to wait for the sale.

What Else…

My wife and are finally getting some work done making our house our house after living here for 5 years. Most of this isn’t very fun, not stuff I’m going to blog about or making videos with. But! There is some fun involved, my Ender 5 Plus is going to get some more work soon, to go with the controller stands I printed for our PS4 (we’re old, we don’t have a PS5 yet) and our Switch controllers. There are brackets, picture hangers and some fun curtain rod holders that will need to be printed.

I’m also redoing my network setup, but only the actual physical network. I’d like to get some new hardware and spend some time thinking about the most efficient way to manage our home network, but I don’t see that happening soon. For right now, I’ve been wanting to clean up the network mess for a while and my wife wants to get our living room into shape, so it’s perfect timing. Getting it all moved under the entertainment stand while we get ready to paint is a big improvement over piled in a corner as a setup.

I’m going to have way more fun than just moving it and untangling some cord! I have a few things in mind, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to drill some holes or spend some time in the crawl space, because the best idea I’ve got so far is to move the entire heart of the network out of the living room all together. This is not going to be trivial, and I’ll be sure to get some photos and videos to document the terror of crawling around in my 60 year old crawl space.

Speaking of the Sony EV-10 MK ii…

I per-ordered my new camera, these days it can be a gamble hoping you’ll be able to just, ya know, buy something when you want it. I’m delighted with it! Even pre-ordering, it took a bit longer than I’d hoped to arrive, so no regrets there. It’s my first really nice camera, and the first bit of really new tech I’ve had in a while. Even my beloved, hand crafted, Ender 5 Plus was outdated when I got it as a project printer. I think the 5950x purring away next to me, several years old now, is the nicest bit of kit I’ve got recently.

This camera is the tits! I’m not going to do a review or anything like that, I’m not an expert by any means, no one care what I think about it. I will say, I wish I had gotten a prosumer camera sooner. Not only is it just a great, new camera, it can shoot in slog-3 at 10-bit color, in a nice 4K downscaled from 5k something. I’m not sure what the exact numbers are and I can’t find them off the top of my head, but it’s a very clean crisp 4K video.

I’m a dab hand with photos, I’ll say that without much worry I’ll be proven wrong. The video however, I just haven’t had a chance to learn how to shoot good video with a good camera like this. The rest of the work I’ve done with even decent cameras was all with my GoPros. They capture great video, but with no zooming and no aperture control, along with fairly limited ProTune controls, it’s a whole new world learning how to get decent video out of my new camera.

I’ll keep trying though! For now, enjoy some YouTube shorts and some great pics when I feel like posting them. Eventually you’ll all get to see my ugly face as I post more full length (I mean, 10 minutes or so) YouTube videos to go along with my posts.

Till Then!

Sadly, probably won’t have much to show this time next week, as I’ll be spending my week at the Billings Home Improvement Show, in Billings, MT. I’ll make sure to get some fun videos and pics along the way, so if anyone is actually reading this for some strange reason make sure you check out my Instagram as I post my various adventures throughout the week.

With any luck, and some hard work, I’ll at least have a Flesh Golem or a Frost Giant to share! Until then, have a great week!

• Alex