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! ;-)