How come I can crap out a post of this sort like it's nothing, yet if I had to write a paper of a similar length it would take the better part of an afternoon? Mysteries abound. No pictures or anything in this post, just rambling, but I figure something is better than nothing. Pictures next time, pinky swear.
I'm a big podcast fan. It started a couple years ago when I found Fear the Boot and since then it is the rare day that I don't listen to a podcast of some flavor. With the recent resurgence of GW interest, it's only natural that I would look for GW podcasts. I found plenty, but I have one big beef with them: they're too long. Even the shortest run over two hours, which is a bit past my usual limit (1.5 hours for The Instance for those keeping score). The majority of the podcasts I listen to, whether they're about hockey or Warmachine, run about an hour. I wish I knew why the GW-centric podcasts are so much longer. I'd guess it's because lots of folks listen to them while modeling or painting, but then there are lots of Warmachine podcasts that are in the 1-1.5 hour range. Some things will just be a mystery I guess.
I have an ancient plastic Predator from Rogue Trader/second edition 40k, with various bits of crap glued on to make it chaos-y, that I decided to reclaim a while ago. I took all the stuff off and dropped it in a vat of Simple Green, mostly to test out the stripping properties that I hear so much about, but also to be able to use the Predator for my Blood Angels. The tank floats so I've been rotating it every couple of days, which may have something to do with my results, but so far I'm rather disappointed. I found endless anecdotal evidence of people soaking plastic, metal, and/or resin for hours and having the paint fairly slough off. My tank has been steeping for better than a week now and while I've made good progress on it, it's far from clean and ready for new paint. It looks like I primed it with an enamel spray, and I remember putting endless coats of black ink on it because I didn't have black paint at the time, and again maybe this affected my results, but there's still a lot of work to be done. I'll try some metal and foot soldier sized plastics in the future, so the jury is still out, but it's looking grim at this point.
Since school has loosened its grip on me somewhat in the last few days, I've had more time to roam the internet at random. One of the things I ran across was Vallejo Black Lava. Apparently it's black paint (imagine that) with bits of pumice in it (imagine that again). It looks pretty handy for basing, as shown in a couple articles I found, so I may have to look into it. Basing is easily my least favorite part of painting, so anything to make it less onerous is a winner.
I've been distracted by orks lately, and I narrowly avoided stopping by the FLGS to get more minis today. EV offered a Assault on Black Reach trade that I'm considering which would add a bunch more boys, plus some Deffkoptas, to the pile of inassembled, let alone painted, orks that I have sitting around. What I would really like to lay hands on is a mess of power klawed Nobz, but it looks like the ones in AoBR are klawless and I have a bad feeling the Nobz box set has perhaps 2 to cover 5 Nobz. This may be a blessing in disguise though. In doing some noodling with army lists the other night I wrote up a kitted out Nobz unit where every member had a power klaw, along with other bits of fanciness. The price tag? North of 500 points. Maybe dropping some of the 25-points-per klaws will make that unit a bit more reasonable. In actual modeling news, I stuck an ancient Rogue Trader era power klaw on an almost as ancient ork biker to make a Nob. It's ghetto fabulous. I'll have a picture sometime.
As if the ork menace isn't bad enough, I've also been collecting links about Tyranid schemes. These particular schemes are much like what I was doing, or intending to do, when I was painting Tyranids way back when. What I really need to do is put some blinders on so I can make progress on one project instead of quarter-assing it across a bunch of things, but when I've done that in the past I quickly lose the fire. It appears my choices are a) pick on project, do not deviate, lose interest quickly or b) follow the muse, enjoy highlighting a single chainsword tooth, then drop that marine and pick up a Warmachine jack. There has to be a happy medium.
11/9/10
