01 November 2008

The mother-in-law is arriving in town at some point tonight to help with the baby; hopefully he makes his entrance in the two weeks she plans on being here. We stayed up late last night watching the latest Incredible Hulk movie, which was pretty good. I think there were a few scenes in the film that set up an Incredible Hulk sequel with the Leader as the main villain, an Avengers film, and quite possibly an appearance in the Wolverine solo film. I guess the Wolverine encounter could be in the next Hulk movie as well.

We slept in this morning and spent the bulk of the afternoon and evening running errands and cleaning house a bit. It was very exciting stuff.

I've been waiting for the Army Builder files to come out for the new Space Marines codex, but so far they've only been released in French. I can't read French, so those ones aren't much good to me. I lost my original handwritten Space Marines list, so I had to come up with another one. I don't like it very much, unfortunately, so I'm going to have another go at it.

My Imperial Armour - Model Masterclass Volume One book finally arrived from Forge World a couple of days ago. The pictures are certainly exceptionally pretty and so far it seems like a lot of the advice and methods described and shown in the book will improve my skills a fair bit. And since I apparently ordered one of the first 500 copies sold, the book was autographed by the book's main contributors.

My next step is to trim some flash off of the Assault on Black Reach sprues, prime the Space Marine parts, and slap some paint onto the Dreadnought. Once I get him finished I'll have a whopping 185 points of Space Marines painted up. That total goes up to 275 points if I repaint some details on the half-squad of Marines I finished a while back. I also realized recently that the new Land Speeder kit does not actually contain the parts for the Land Speeder Storm (the variant that carries 5 Scouts around the battlefield and gives them bonuses in assaults), so I'll have to wait for the Wave 2 releases to get my hands on that model. That's all right, though, as it means I won't have to paint up a unit of Scouts for a while. Before I finalize my lists for Orks and Space Marines I'm thinking about using empty bases and vehicle-sized bits of cardstock to play a few sample games and see how the different weapons and rules work together. We'll see how it goes. Pretty much all of my army lists for any game system are based on models I like rather than any pretense of in-game min-maxing. I figure I spend 99% of my hobby time planning and painting, so I might as well be working on models I like.

I got an e-mail from Games Workshop today featuring all of their new releases for November 1st. The most exciting things listed are the new boxed army deals for the Lord of the Rings. They've got armies for the Eastern Kingsdoms (with a Mumak!), Gondor (big blocks of troops!), Mordor (2 Trolls!), Rohan (Cavalry!), and Isengard (Warg Riders!). They're a bit pricey (between $135 and $343 depending on the set and the number of models) but come in at a pretty big discount from buying the components separately. I did the math and they come out to right at $2 per model for each set. That seems a bit high, but the discount comes into play when you figure that the special characters and large models run from $17 to $60 purchased on their own. I probably won't be getting any of them, but it's nice to see them coming out with some nice big Lord of the Rings boxed sets. It seems like I've already got an avalanche of models that will take at least a couple of years to paint unless I really make some amazing strides in my painting speed. I imagine my free time isn't going to increase anytime soon with a new baby in the house.

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