Battle Standard Bearer

After my Psychology final this evening I took a few minutes and got my Empire Battle Standard Bearer put together. I even managed to make him fit in with my unit of Halberdiers. And even with a heavy standard you've got to bump him pretty hard to make him tip over, thanks to the lead shot in his base. I'd like to thank Ryan over at From the Warp for featuring my basing tip as part of the Tuesday Top Ten this week. To make the list last time I had to stab my finger with a hobby knife and bleed all over the desk, so this is a step up for me. Anyway, back to the Battle Standard Bearer. Here's a picture:

He's sort of a grizzled old veteran. He has the stats of an Empire Captain, but I picture him as more like an old First Sergeant. He's probably crusty as heck and likes to be down in the crap with the men.

The Captain who leads my force is going to be a sort of a fop. He's got way too many plumes on his hat, wears a cape, and is too young to ever be wrong. After all, he learned everything there is to know about warfare while he was in the Academy. I imagine he's also very good with whatever passes for Excel and Powerpoint in the Empire. I think I will add a flask or bottle to this crusty old Battle Standard Bearer so he can swill a little extra motivation when the young Captain gets on his nerves. It also works in a pinch to get his troops moving in the right direction, as do a few good stories about the wenches down at The Twisted Tree Trunk, one of the less-reputable establishments in the settlement.

Turrible, turrible!

I'm formulating a post at the moment, but while you're waiting, here's a funny little video I saw this evening.

A Bit of Discouragement

This evening I planned out the rest of my degree program. Even if I am able to pull off a superhuman effort and take 9 credits of upper division classes per semester, it will take about 5 school years after the upcoming deployment to finish my degree. That would place me at about 35 years old. My day job is somewhat flexible when it comes to hours, but many of these classes are only offered in the daytime, so I may not even be able to get 9 credits per semester. Summer sessions are pretty much out since it seems I've always got my two weeks of annual training right smack dab in the middle of the shortened semester. The lesson in all of this is that if you're going to finish school, finish it while you're young and relatively free of other commitments. Otherwise you will be grouchy and not sleep for like fifteen years trying to get your degree. And you'll whine about it on your blog. I'm not cutting my hair all emo, though. You can, but I'm not.

Speaking of Basketball...

Infantry and Artillery Complete, Leadership and Cavalry Lacking

I used up some time this weekend to finish assembling my Flagellants and Handgunners. Now all that's left to put together is a unit of Knights, a General on a horse, a Battle Standard Bearer, and a Wizard. Once the 1000 points is put together it's off to the races on painting the dang things. It shouldn't be too bad, assuming I find some time most days to work on it. Here's a picture of everything that's put together so far. The Mortar and the Handgunners provide ranged support. The Greatswords and Flagellants are Stubborn and guard the flanks, the Halberdiers will house the Wizard and the Standard Bearer, who will carry banner that lets the unit reroll morale checks. And the General and the Knights will hopefully be able to charge anything that gets bogged down fighting the Stubborn units in my army. That's the plan at least. I haven't played enough Warhammer to know if it will work the way I envision it.

Here's another view of the infantry line from the front. They look mean enough, I suppose. But there sure don't seem to be enough of them.

Here we've got the Handgunners for the army. You may notice that I've got the Repeater Handgun on the left of the photo and a soldier wielding the Hochland Long Rifle on the right. I didn't actually select either of those upgrades for the Sergeant-type of the unit. I figured that by using both of them in the unit (an illegal combination) my opponent would be able to see that I used them for fluff purposes rather than actual upgrades to my list. I surmised that the Handgunners are made up of a few men who are good shots and got recruited, a couple of somewhat wealthy eccentrics with gadget fetishes who want to try out their Hochland Long Rifle and Repeater Handgun, and a few guys who think that maybe being a Handgunner would be safer than being on the battle line with the Halberdiers, especially on whatever flank is shared with the Flagellants.

I had a lot of fun putting the Flagellants together, particularly the first rank. Flagellants do not get a full command (Sergeant-type, Standard Bearer, Musician) in the rules, but I modeled my unit to have an approximation of one anyway.

The Prophet of Doom is in the center. He's the ringleader for these folks, and probably had them all will their worldly goods to him before the battle. I imagine being the leader of a Doomsday Cult could be pretty lucrative if you make sure you're the only survivor of the battle.

The musician has got a few bells and a blindfold on. I imagine his music isn't good enough to warrant any in-game bonuses, although his mates might throw themselves a bit harder against the enemy in the hope that they won't have to hear his music anymore in the afterlife. At least it's not bagpipes, right?

The Standard Bearer was a fun model to put together. He's got a pole with a book strapped to it, and on top of that is the flaming head from the Flagellants sprue. I think the head belonged to the former leader of this group. It has shown a surprising resistance to decay and the Flagellants claim that it speaks to them from time to time (the new leader of the group spent some time as a magician and ventriloquist, but they don't know that).

The guy on the far left in the stocks is a particularly sorry case. He doesn't have any weapons and doesn't really want to be here. He joined the group when it was just a discussion group. He recently expressed some misgivings about the direction things were headed and claimed that Doomsday might not be as close as the leadership was predicting. He also resisted willing his goods to the Prophet of Doom. He's being punished and re-educated at the moment by being sent into battle unarmed and restrained. If he survives, it will be proven that he is a thrall of the Gods of Chaos and the group will kill him. If he dies in battle his name will be cleared and his goods will be split up among his "friends." He is hoping to slip away unnoticed and move to a different province. Nordland is nice this time of year...

Everyone else in the unit is just your standard robe-wearing, flail-wielding, bearded, frothy-mouthed cultist. They look forward to dying in battle so that their self-fulfilling Doomsday prophesy will come true. I hope they take a few Beastmen with them.

The only good thing about the Jazz-Lakers playoff series is that one of them will lose. Since the Rockets didn't even make the playoffs this year I am reduced to rooting against Utah. I don't know if I am disillusioned enough to actually pull for an Eastern Conference team this year. But to cheer us all up, here are some Bo Jackson videos that I promised earlier. The quality on them is kind of low, but they were filmed 20 years ago, before the days of HDTV.

Heavy Bases

One thing I don't like about my plastic regiments is that the figures scatter all over the place at the slightest bump. They're just not quite heavy enough. So I came up with a fairly simple solution that adds weight to the figures without costing an arm and a leg.

I went to a local sporting goods store and bought a 50 lb. bag of lead shot, the kind that people use when refilling shotgun shells. You want some stuff that is pretty darn small, like size 7 1/2 or 8. If you get shot that is too big it will poke out past the bottom of the slotta-bases and you'll have to file it off or something labor-intensive like that. Back when I bought it, I think the bag cost about $20.00. A single bag will probably do several thousand bases. You can pack a lot of lead into 50 pounds. I store mine in a little plastic bin in the closet.

The next thing you need is a whole lot of superglue. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a pack of the cheap stuff from the dollar store will be just fine. Scoop up some shot from your container with the base, level it off (over the container so you're not picking up tiny BBs off the ground for the rest of your life), and lay out your bases in some sort of organized fashion. Open up your superglue and squeeze it into the bases, making sure to get a little bit on each bit of shot. Then wait for it to dry. If you flip it over too soon you'll wind up with bases stuck to your table. Today I did 35 bases for about a dollar. This will be heavy enough to keep just about any plastic figure in place, even standard bearers. It will help with metal figures, but I still have metal standard bearers that tip over even with the weighted base.


And that's really about all there is to it. If you're worried about lead poisoning you can paint over the shot and hit the bases with a coat of varnish. Also, you'll be dealing with a huge amount of superglue and the fumes can be overpowering. I'd recommend opening a window or you may experience headaches, nausea, and stinging in your eyes.

Is It the Shoes?

I've been wearing the same pair of shoes for several years now. I'm pretty sure I bought them when I got home from my deployment to Iraq, so maybe in fall of 2005? My foot is starting to poke out through the side of them, so I am starting the search for a replacement. My wife always teases me because I like shoes that she calls flashy. I guess that's just one of my quirks. I've been looking at these Nike Trainer SC 2010 in the "Baseball Glove" pattern.


They are modeled after a shoe Bo Jackson wore during the "Bo Knows" ads, and are colored and patterned to look a bit like a baseball glove. They also feature stitching that says Bo Knows 1989. Why the tribute to Bo Jackson? The "Bo Knows" ads started in 1989, the same year the original Trainer SC was released. You can see the shoe from all angles at this post on the Eastbay blog.

I don't know that I will end up scoring a pair. I generally find myself somewhat reluctant to put up the kind of scratch it takes to wear "fresh kicks," but it can't hurt to window shop and dream a little. I know a couple of my uncles are die-hard shoe lovers, but I think they tend to focus more on the Jordans. It is pretty rare for footwear to ignite this sort of fire in my belly, but for whatever reason these ones hit my buttons.

Empire Army at the Moment

These aren't the best pictures, as there is a lot of background clutter, but this is what I've got put together so far. You can probably click on the photos for a larger view.

My wife has been talking about planting a small garden this year in the raised beds that the previous owners of the house built in the back yard. Today was the day that the plan went into action. I bowed out of the work as I needed to stay inside doing homework so I can pass my classes and keep my GI Bill money. But when I looked out the window and heard the sound of the shovel my sense of duty pulled me outside to help dig out the bed. Then I decided I might need to help lay down the weed barrier and fill the box up with the new soil mixture. I still was able to get some homework done at intervals, but the wife is pretty happy with her new garden bed and usually when she is happy I am happy too. I hope her garden does well.

There are some old birdhouses in the back yard, also left behind by previous owners. I peeked into one of them while we were outside and saw four little baby birds with mouths pointed upward calling for food. I hope that our activity in that corner of the yard didn't disturb the parents so much that they abandoned the nest. Some robins are building a nest in one of our trees as well, and there are plenty of ducks in the canal behind the house. Out of all the birds I think ducks are my favorite. They seem so cheerful all the time.

I've finally got my unit of Halberdiers put together. Sometimes posing them is a pain because their halberds extend a fair bit out in front of their bases, so I've got to place them in such a way that the halberd ends weave in between the other figures. The easiest thing to do would be to place them all in the exact same pose in the exact same position on their bases, but I dislike that much uniformity in a mass of troops. To hit 1000 points for my Empire list I've still got to put together a few Flagellants, some Knights, a unit of Handgunners, and three character models to represent my General, a Battle Standard Bearer, and a Battle Wizard. Hopefully I can get that done fairly soon. It's only 31 figures, so it shouldn't take too long. The hard part is that some of the characters are going into the Halberdier unit, so I will have to shuffle them around to make everything fit again. Fun stuff.