In The Two Towers, Book III, there's an intriguing conversation that happens between Gimli and Legolas. Gimli is waxing poetic about the caverns and halls of Helm's Deep, and in response Legolas says:
You move me, Gimli. I have never heard you speak like this before. Almost you make me regret...
As a newcomer to miniature painting, I'm, er, fortunate to have made lots of stupid mistakes early in my hobby journey. In my own defence, I did a lot of research before starting to paint. That saved me from some really egregious errors. But I managed to make a mess of a few things. Here's what they...
In an effort to keep better track of what I watch, I'm reviewing the movies and shows as much as I can. No spoilers in this one.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a stop-motion movie about a fox whose love of stealing chickens from local farms endangers his family and community. It's based on a Roald Dahl boo...
Last year, I developed and published Skuffle Wammer, the universe's smallest wargame. It's designed to be played in 5 minutes or less, with the intent of being the tabletop gaming equivalent of a good stand-up-and-stretch at work. The play area is an A4 sheet of paper, you throw out some miniature...
Player characters in an RPG can be tricky. A player character is an imaginary person who you're meant to speak for and control. The character is meant to be distinct from you (in reality), and you're also supposed to be mindful of fellow gamers at your table (in reality) which obviously your fiction...
Last year, Catalyst Games ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund BattleTech: Mercenaries, an expansion set of miniatures for BattleTech: A game of armoured combat. I don't play BattleTech (yet?) but I like mechs, I'd like to paint some miniature mechs, and I do play some mech battle wargames, so I...
I'm an avid fan of speculative fiction (SF), and have been for my entire life. I like a lot of different kinds of SF, but I do seem to have a preference for dystopic science fiction, specifically. In my exploration of that genre, I've noticed a sub-genre within it, which I'll just call superhuman d...
I'm still new to the hobby, but by now I've painted over two hundred miniatures from 2 cm tall to 20 cm. I've made lots of mistakes but I've learned to avoid some and fix others. And yet I still experience a little trepidation when faced with a new miniature. I guess it's that paralysis you hear a...
A defining aspect of geek culture, at least for me, is correlation. As a kid, I spent hours every day correlating different elements of a fictional universe to other elements within that universe, or else I'd correlate one fictional universe to a different one. That's why, for instance, the Dunge...
I love pre-built characters. That might seem strange, because I also love building characters. On a week when I don't have an RPG to play, I'll often sit down with a rulebook and build a character that will probably never get used. And yet, I love a system that provides a good array of pre-built cha...
The Contrast line of paints by Citadel are designed to provide instant highlighting and shading with just one coat of paint from just one pot. When it works, it's the stuff of science fiction. To this day, I sit and marvel at my painted Ur-Ghul miniatures, and all I did was slap some Pylar Glacier...
My partner and I love a good "couch co-op" game, a video game where you and a friend can play together on the same computer rather than over a network. We recently played through Quest Hunter and its Strangewood DLC, and this my review of it. This review contains minor spoilers.
Cutting to the...
A Castle for Christmas is a Netflix original movie starring Brooke Shields (from Muppets Take Manhattan) and Cary Elwes (from Princess Bride obviously).
The story goes something like this. The main character, played by Brooke Shields, is an author of romance novels and in the 12th book in the...
I've been a pretty active blogger for a while, although initially most of my content was concentrated on the very technical side of open source computing. My gaming life tended to creep in on my tech blogs, though, and so this past year I made a concerted effort to expand my active blogging to g...
I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.
In this episode, Jurgen and Baldur make their way to the factory producing a bunch of drugs. I feel like th...
I'm running Tomb of Annihilation as a Pathfinder 2e adventure, and as usual there have been some surprises when comparing what a book says and what happens in a game. I regretted starting my players in Port Nyanzaru because, as hex crawls go, Tomb of Annihilation is not exactly the best. It's ab...