Another Lesson Learned

Today I have learned that if you wash all of your pants at the same time, it pretty much limits you to staying in the house for a couple of hours.

My wife is approximately 2200 miles away visiting her family, and I am almost done eating the food she left for me to survive on this week. I suppose I should have rationed it out a bit, but it looks like I'll be living on Easy Mac and ice cream for the next few days. It is suprising that I survived the years between leaving home and the time my wife started feeding me regularly in college.

The good news is that I've mostly overcome my illness and I'm about 60% done with my unit of Clanrat Slaves. The bad news is that the sun is coming up and I haven't gone to bed yet. Hopefully I'll be able to wake up to wake up at a fairly normal time and do something with my day off. Then it's back to the grindstone for a few days of work and a long weekend with the National Guard.

A Case of the Crud

Today I spent most of the day drugged up in bed, as I've caught some sort of energy-sapping runny nose/sore throat bug. I'm hoping that I feel better in the morning because I can't afford to be missing work.

A couple of hours ago I managed to drag myself out of bed long enough to clean up and assemble the rest of the Skaven in my possession. Maybe tomorrow I will prime them and at some point actually put some paint on the figures.

Tonight I assembled most of a Clanrat Slaves unit for my Skaven. I'll probably have time tomorrow to assemble the last rank of the unit and spray them all down with some primer. I've only got eight more figures to purchase for my 3000-point Skaven army, and 42 more figures to assemble and/or paint. This Slave unit comprises the bulk of that number.

The Boise Warhammer group has a beginner's tournament tentatively set up for the middle of August. I'm hoping that I can have my Orcs and Goblins are finished out to 2000 points by then, but if not I can come up with a Skaven list for the tournament. It'd be nice to have two armies by then, though.

My wife spent a good portion of her weekend cleaning up the kitchen, so I figured that I should spend a portion of my weekend cleaning something as well. I cleared out my hobby area and boxed up all my miniature projects aside from the last few Skaven I've got to paint. I also cleaned out a bunch of stuff from the "back room," which is where stuff we don't know what to do with goes to die. At some point I'll be taking my big box of action figures to donate to a second-hand store, where hopefully they will be purchased and put to a better use than sitting on my bookshelf. There is still a lot to do, but I feel better about doing something. A big step would be to get the shed cleaned out and move the weight bench out there. Then the computers and hobby stuff (my miniatures and my wife's crocheting/knitting) could be moved into the small room and the "back room" could be converted back to the bedroom.

I also signed up for a couple of college classes in the Fall Semester, so hopefully I'll be able to further my education in some form and advance toward a degree of one form or another.

And as an update on the Reaper Warlord rants, it appears that no answer is forthcoming to my question about ordering individual sculpts from the army packs. I'll give it a few more days and perhaps repose the question, but for now my Warlord stuff is packed up and ready to be abandoned.

With the recent price increases on Games Workshop figures, I thought about why I am angry about Reaper's change and indifferent about the GW changes.

I think it's because the relative cost of an entire army doesn't change that much on the GW side of things. Most of their price changes target the blister packs and individual characters, which really only bumps the price of an army up by a couple of percentage points, as you only need a few such figures for the average army. The bulk of a Warhammer army is made up of boxed regiments, and so far the prices on those don't seem to be rising.

Reaper's changes essentially double the cost of an army at Warlord's typical point level (1500 points). There are ways around paying that much, but the results are still either a lot more expensive than they used to be, armies made up of one sculpt repeated many times, or a combination of the two. A casual player or army builder has no real option to get around the extra costs.

More Griping About Reaper Warlord

I am growing increasingly frustrated with the changes to Reaper's Warlord game. In the forums it was mentioned that people who don't want to buy army packs (9 figures, generally 3 each of 3 sculpts) or blister-pack singles (all the same sculpt of one grunt figure) could buy a variety of the sculpts from the army packs from the online store. After re-doing my army lists to represent the point-cost changes I went to the website to see what the prices on the singles are. There is no listing for them anywhere on the site as far as I can tell.

I have 7 units of figures that I need for my armies that all come in at the 4-5 figure mark. I'm unwilling to buy seven packs of nine figures when I'll only end up using half of the miniatures in each pack. If I went that route I'd end up paying almost $9 a figure. It just doesn't make sense financially.

And if I buy the blister-packed singles, I'll have units composed entirely of one sculpt. That is undesirable from an aesthetic perspective.

I've posted again on the forums asking if there is indeed a place to buy the individual sculpts, and hopefully there will be something that I missed in my visit to the site. Otherwise I will scrap my plans to build up some Warlord armies and divert that time and money to a different project, perhaps a Space Marine army or some sort of historical force.

Finished Pics of Warlord Crusaders Battle Nuns

They're not the best, but they're finished. The pictures are a bit blurry as well.

The Battle Nuns are finished, but due to the camera not being in its usual spot, I wasn't able to get pictures of them before work. I'll try to post some photos of them tonight.

I've fallen way behind on everything, it seems. A lot of it seems to stem from my general inability to wake up in the morning (actually closer to early afternoon) when my alarm goes off. I think my slackened energy level may have something to do with my diet, as I have been eating almost solely straight-up junk for a while now. The obvious answer is to start eating better and get some exercise. It's easier to sit here on the couch and think about it than it is to actually do it.

I slapped some dullcoat on the Battle Nuns tonight, so the metal is shiny and the cloth is less so. I'll hopefully snap up a few minutes tomorrow and flock the bases so I can post a few photos here and be done with them.

From there, I'd like to get my unit of Clanrat Slaves assembled and primed, hopefully in time to get a good basecoat on them by the end of Monday. It will more than likely take a bit longer than that, but it's good to set goals. I've found my focus wandering, and I think my production has suffered because of it. When I had a firm goal to get my 2000 points of Skaven done it seemed like I had a lot of motivation for the project and got stuff done without it feeling forced. The same sort of feeling applies for the contest minis I've done recently. At the moment I've got minis from 3 or 5 different projects on my desk and armies planned out for another handful of games, and I don't really see an end in sight for any of it. The short version of all of that is that I need to get some more focus in my hobby time. And hopefully with the drama of the Fantasy Basketball playoffs behind me I'll have more time to devote to the rest of my life.

A Lesson Learned

Last night I learned that you should not purchase and consume egg rolls from a gas station convenience store.