Ebay: everything must go! You've never seen anything like it!

My car came back from the garage on Friday. It had been in since Monday. The bill was a little over £500. So I'm selling about fifty lots on Ebay, hoping to go some way toward being able to pay off the resulting credit card debt! If you've ever liked any of my vehicles, the chances are that you'll find them on here at a knock-down price! Even if you haven't, you could still equip an army at a fraction of GW's prices! There are too many to provide photographs of, so I shall just list them with links.

Two Exterminators
Two Hellhounds
Three Laser Destroyers
Two more Exterminators
Two Russ hulls
Two more Russ hulls
Two Basilisks
Two more Russ hulls
Two Russes
Two more Russes
Two Exterminators
Two Russes
Two Russ hulls
Two more Russ hulls
Another two Russ hulls
Two Russes
Two more Russes
Two Demolishers
Two Russes
One Executioner, one Russ
Two Chimeras or Salamanders
Two Sentinels with Multilasers
Two Chimeras
Two Chimeras or Salamanders
Two more Chimeras or Salamanders
Another two Chimeras or Salamanders
Two Chimeras
One OOP Forgeworld Shadowsword in resin
Two Heavy Mortars (those things that they have in Griffons, you know)
Two Sentinels with Lascannon
One Steel Legion Sentinel with Lascannon
One artillery company - that's one Chimera and nine Basilisks!
Two Heavy Mortars
Two Chimeras or Salamanders
Medusa conversion kit for Basilisk
Two Chimeras or Salamanders
Two more Chimeras or Salamanders
Another two Chimeras or Salamanders
Two Chimeras
Two Heavy Mortars
Three Thudd Guns or Quad Launchers
Two Chimeras or Salamanders
Two Russes
Two Russ hulls
Two more Russ hulls
Two Chimeras or Salamanders
Two Chimeras or Salamanders or Trojans
Two Laser Destroyers
Legion of the Damned: Sergeant Centurius, rare OOP
A Bitz Box of Heay Bolters, Heavy Flamers, missile launchers, Lascannon and all sorts of weaponry
Forgeworld Centaur transport
Old Style OOP Space Marines
58 Warhammer Fantasy Goblins: some archers and some spearmen
Plastic and metal Necromunda miniatures

Back to the '90s: Retro Week Cometh!

About half my memories of the 1990s are of watching TV shows. The X-Files, Space: Above and Beyond, Fortean TV, Friends, Frasier, American Gothic, Dark Skies, Babylon 5, Star Trek (TNG, DS9 - and had Voyager started by then?), The Adam & Joe Show, The Friday Night Armistice, Ellen, Caroline in the City - a veritable smorgasbord of good and bad telly. I found a single episode of Caroline in the City on an old VHS a while back, and I have no good explanation for having watched it. Inarguably, I watched way too much telly back then. When your Latin teacher is teasing you for watching too much telly, then there's something wrong. Luckily, when I went to uni I had no telly, so I broke myself of the habit. These days I don't watch it for myself. I watch quiz shows with the folks and a few sitcoms with my brother. Oh, and Castle - I rather like that: Nathan Fillion, dontcherknow!

Anyway, when you have a lot of time on your hands, you end up doing stuff to relieve the tedium. So over the last few months I have scrupulously catalogued every old video I could find, and all the DVDs in the house. We have a startling total of over a thousand films. Nostalgia has thus been brought to life. I've got several old episodes of Fortean TV on tape, and they are as entertaining now as they were fifteen years ago. I found I had most of Dark Skies, and then it got released on DVD, which allowed me to fill in the few gaps. Just the other day they released Space: Above and Beyond on DVD in the UK. For those of you who missed this classic hokum back in the day, here is the set-up. In the near sci-fi future A rag-tag group of recruits have all decided to join the USMC for a variety of reasons, including one bloke who got bumped from a colony ship at the last second - when suddenly it's war! Villainous aliens have attacked a human colony - worse, it's the colony that said bloke's girl is on. Then the aliens come after Earth.

The best of the Terran forces get severely beaten up, but the aliens are repelled at the last moment. Our new recruits then spend about twenty episodes flying around with some '90s CGI, feeling angsty (like nBSG) but retaining some semblance of military discipline (unlike nBSG), and fleshing out the universe. A couple of X-Files writers were behind the concept, which is stuffed to the brim with pure frothy patriotic nonsense. Remember President Bill Paxton's speech in Independence Day? Like that but with more soldiers. Add in a villainous human corporation that has some big, sinister secret, a bunch of AIs gone rogue, and a load of humans grown in vats for reasons that never really make sense, and there's your universe: cheesy, silly, overblown, awesome. Because the writers were from The X-Files, they reuse actors you know, so you get to think, "Hey, I know that face!" There's the small town sheriff from Home, the reincarnated love of Mulder's past lives from The Field Where I Died, &c, &c.

One of the nice bonuses about getting this series on DVD is that it's one of those spaceship-set shows with quite a bit of darkness in it, so it will be a nice bit of background for my continuing terrain-making for Space Hunt! I did get a bit bummed-out today, so I haven't done so much as I wanted to on the generator. I have done some work on that and on a few other things, including conceptualise what will be a very attractive wall-mounted fan. I was a bit narked because of the nexus of several things. I asked for a book at the library, which has arrived. "Er, that annoyed you, Pete? You're nuts!" Wait, you! The new Fortean Times came out today. "But you love that magazine!" Hush a moment! It was annoying because my car has been in the garage since Monday, and the weather here is making people suspect that ark-building would be a reasonable thing to do. So if I were to walk the two miles to town to get the book and magazine, not only would I be drenched by the time I got back, but I'd have an expensive wad of papier maché, too.

Our rabbit, Spot, has been doing his best to distract me. He has been demanding that I pick him up or play with him even more than he usually does. I've started to suspect that he's realised he has a dog's name. He likes to chase one's hand or foot in circles, and ends up chasing his own tail. When one leaves the room he runs after one, and when you enter it he runs up to one, wanting to play. If one picks him up he insists on licking one's face. He hasn't started barking or wagging his tail yet, but those things are both physically impossible for him. Still, I won't rule either out! Right, until our benign postman delivers unto me the beautiful things I am waiting for, I think it's time to get back to making terrain. I have watched everything suitable except for The Chronicles of Riddick and Total Recall, so I guess it's time to pull them out of the wall of films and start carving up those materials to make the plasma generator. Au revoir, folks!

Plasma Generator WIP: every starship needs one

Or else what would they pump round the ship in pipes? Searing hot plasma is the only thing for any self-respecting starship captain to have in his ship. First things first: this idea is not mine! It is from this excellent blog. It's the creation of a facsimile of the generator in the Dawn of War PC game. I haven't exactly copied it. Back in February I did try to download the template he put up, but my computer wasn't happy with it. Earlier tonight I suddenly thought I could do with a generator for my Space Hunt terrain, and so I have knocked up a reasonably similar version here. Most of the structure is made of foamcard. The pictures contain detailed measurements which should let you make one exactly like this. I have applied some cardboard onto the sides of the foamcard, and will apply a bit more, and some plasticard and so on before I'm done. The base of the generator itself is c.4.5" across, and the plasticard base that it sits on is 7.5" across. My Space Hunt walkways are 1.5" by 1.5", so I shall have a walkway running all the way round the generator. I intend to get this finished to painting readiness by tomorrow. I have also been doing some painting today or three more pipe walls for the game. They look pretty good. Here's what I've got done tonight on the generator front.

Space Hunt: putting it all together

Here, ready for gaming, is everything I have so far got to a vaguely painted stage for my Aliens/Space Hulk/Crusade set of bits and bobs. There are a few more walls outside with paint drying, and several of these pieces need a lick of paint, as you can see! But it's all shaping up very nicely so far. I have re-undercoated a dozen or so Cadians in grey, and intend to use them as my Colonial Dudes doomed to get eaten or impregnated with horrifying alien nasties. With Prometheus coming out soon, I might even persuade a few of my non-wargamer mates to try their hands at this. I'm sure one or two must have played Space Hulk back in the day. I rounded up a few bits of scenery that seemed most fitting for the innards of a spaceship, and I have a few vehicles, if the setting turns out to be an overrun research lab. In a moment of madness last night I did order the tetralogy of Resident Evil films. Some halfwit coined the word "Quadrilogy" to describe the Aliens boxed set some years ago. It's sad that the richest companies can't afford to employ folks who can use the English language. With the double width corridors, one could actually drive the aforementioned vehicles (such as this one from Old Crow) down the middle! No photos of that today, though. I doubt I'll stick a wall on either side of a corridor, either, as it would make gameplay very annoying. They can sit on one side and he decorative. However, for this photoshoot, I shan't use that idea. Salivate over this, though, folks. I am most pleased. Salivate. Oh, there's also a bunny from next door's field. Salivate over him and I'll have to impregnate you with some unspeakable alien monstrosity to protect the bunny. Wait, that will just lead to an alien monster eating him/her. I need to rethink that plan! ;-)

Space Thingummy

The pipe-lined walls are proceeding apace. The key to painting yellow appears to be to have half a dozen large bits of yellow that all need painting in succession. Happily, when you're building a whole bit of scenery, that's what you have! I have been applying Ford Midnight Sky to my model walls with both vim and vigour, so most bits are done now. I used Army Painter Red to get the red colour for the pipes, and have been applying yellows and blues over the other bits to fill in those colours. If I had a bright blue to hand, I would use it. I am at long last experiencing the sufferings of those who hate to use yellow. For years I've been saying, "Use Halford's yellow", which is fine for Dunkelgelb and so on, but isn't quite right for shiny, shiny stuff. Long-abandoned GW paints have been filling in here. On a more practical note, I cut a bit of plastic form a DVD case, and glued 0.25mm plasticard to either side. Having applied masking tape to the clear portions, I sprayed the whole, and the result is a wee scale door that's got two transparent slits. Nifty. If I say so myself. Anyway, these walls will soon be done. Enjoy the WIP and PIP stuff, folks!

Icy Wastes: more terrain

While the walkways and walls continue apace, I am not idle on exterior terrain. After all, if one's going to be nervously checking one's six in a dark, abandoned complex, one has to have got in there in the first place. I already showed you the deserted lab in the desert, and now it has a frosted counterpart. I've been putting together a couple of buildings that when assembled can either do that sort of duty or be handy around the table in any snowy wargame. First up is a missile silo/communications post, which is mainly made out of polystyrene packing foam. I found a perfect piece a couple of years ago, and I have been closing in on finishing it lately. Second is a silo, which currently looks a little odd. I applied that no longer available Citadel red wash a bit too thickly atop Dwarf Bronze or something, and I'm going to have to claw it back somehow. Tomorrow I will be back to the walkways and walls, but for now, enjoy this interlude.

The Continuing Adventures of Stuff Happening in Space!

I have not been idle since last I posted. Initially, I had planned just to do the walkways and some walls for decoration, but with the rapturous response I received for the floors, and the suggestion that I continue to ever greater heights of having no room left in my house, I was driven to make some more walls. First, I added a few more walls similar to the first: a few pipes, some computer access points, even a rack of guns! Then it came to me that I was missing out on one of the big things of sci-fi background scenery: huge pipes filling a whole wall for no readily apparent reason. Needless to say, I at once addressed this problem by hunting out some pipes and whatnot that I have had sitting about for years. Everyone loves ridiculously large pipes decorating their spaceships. All I need to do now is to add some weird bits that vent steam whenever the enemy gain a hit on the friendly vessel. Poor design skills, engineers! Poor design! :-D The camera has gone somewhere, Lord knows where, and so I can thereby explain the poor quality of these pictures. If I acquire a time machine or rediscover the camera shortly, then I'll be able to fix that problem and improve these pics! ;-) Anyway, folks, here's what I have been up to. Yup, it's Lego again, people!

Tumty-tum

I had intended only to make the walkways that I had completed for the three-hundredth update, but the response was so positive and so noteworthy (five comments on an article on this blog is a lot! The number of new visitors and total visitors for the day is around half my highest level) that I have been hard at work on more bits and bobs. I must tease and tantalise you now, though, as I have no pictures to hand. The corridor piece has been annoying the hell out of me, as it has a few dreadful things on it, from the perspective of painting. If I put a few pipes on something, I want them to be in primary colours, dagnabit! If I have a faux-computer screen, I want some amusingly fluorescent green thingy in the style of the 1980s. I shall evoke them, but not duplicate them (as the colours will be inverted). We used to have Amstrad PCW8256s in this house, with a lovely Dot Matrix printer. Truth be told, I think we still do have them. But I have played neither chess nor snooker on them in a while. Our dead PCs (or PCWs) live in the attic, and may even be plotting together to take over Skynet and destroy civilisation. I'd be annoyed if someone had left me in an attic for a couple of decades. Dad doesn't like throwing stuff out. I found some videos in the other attic from 1996 the other day.

The pipes, to which I alluded a few sentences ago, before my small digression about dead attic-dwelling, humanity-hating computers, are in red, blue and yellow. The blue was perfectly simple and a comparative joy to paint. I took some Mordian Blue, mixed in a little water, and applied one coat to achieve perfection. The yellow and the red were much more annoying. Undercoats, repeated coats, and finally me giving up after seven coats or so - that's about what you should have running through your noggins about now. The yellow and red look tolerable, but not as pretty as the blue. I am going to dirty them up and see how they look thereafter. I am, surprisingly, given my moaning, quite happy with the yellow.

Painting sites are forever giving the advice that paints ought to be "the consistency of milk". Painters, if there is something that does not translate to vegans, it's that. I haven't drunk milk since I turned sixteen, so I have only the vaguest conception of what that means. I am very vaguely aware that milk is thicker than water (which is thicker than blood, I hear), but since I drink soya milk I am a bit stuck. How does my vastly superior (you may disagree in terms of taste, as did my ex, who declared it rubbery, but not in terms of kindness to cows!) drink compare with whatever everyone normal drinks? Dunno! There's a shocking lack of websites dedicated to comparing bovine lactation with stuff squeezed out of soya beans when considering viscosity for the purposes of vague correlations with diluted paint. It is almost as though vegans (a minority) and wargamers (a minority) don't intersect very often. Since that can't be the case, let's put the lack of analysis down to appalling indolence. Probably by me, really, how many vegan wargamers d'you know? If you do know any, and they're pretty and single, send 'em here! ;-)

Blathering aside, the yellow looks quite good, and the red is a bit of all right, too. The computer screens of the corridor are nice and bright, and those on the doors are pretty, too. My current plan is to whack everything with a gloss varnish, then apply some transfers to the screens, adding some sort of verisimilitude to the proceedings. Another coat of varnish, then a wash of rusty colours over most of the pieces will give a good look, I feel. Everybody loves rust. Not on the computer screens, of course! Anyway, two corridors are WIP, the first is PIP, and there are a total of four doors in various stages of completion. All doors have little inserts, and so can appear open or closed, which pleases me rather. I have even got a door with frosted glass panels (DVD case). Having thus tantalised you folks, I leave you with promises of pictures next time I post!

300th Post Spectacular: Space Alien Crusade Hulk Something!

I hereby unveil the secret project. If you guessed or deduced that I was working on some floor tiles so I could play some sort of Space Hulk-like game, then you guessed right! For the last several days I have been hard at work carving pieces of plastic and gluing other bits of plastic to them. I have dismantled a dead laptop. I have hacked up some mosquito netting. I have scored and snapped plasticard, and gone through about forty boxes of assorted things to find decorative doodahs. I have visited Halfords and bought grey primer, matte black and some Ford colour called Midnight Sky. On Saturday evening I went out for a Thai curry, but I admit that is not really relevant. The squares in the pieces below are about an inch and a half by an inch and a half (c.38 by 38mm), a size which will allow 28mm infantry and larger models to fit on each one happily. Small monsters will be ok, although large ones might have a spot of bother. My primary objective was to create a load of walkways/corridor floors, and after accomplishing that I got to work on some fripperies. I'm pretty happy with the wall, and the door is fairly nice. I doubt there will be many of those, as I'm short on Lego pieces. We'll see.