Well, it’s been a while since I’ve made an entry. This has sort of been because I’m busy, but has more to do with the fact that I’ve been playing way too much Civilization III. I bought it months ago but didn’t actually have the time to get into it until my two weeks off over Christmas and new years. Now I’m a hopeless addict, and spend my evenings plotting how to get hold of that aluminium resource just inside French territory, or how to get the Aztecs to attack the English without implicating me. Great stuff!
I really have to complement Firaxis on the new resource and trade system. In Civ II you could cut yourself off from the rest of the world and power on to building the spaceship. In Civ III you have to expand to secure sources of horses, iron, saltpeter, coal, rubber, oil, aluminium, uranium and a few I’m probably forgetting. And while you’re at it you need to find luxuries like dyes, silk, furs and ivory to keep your people happy and distracted. And you can trade all of this, so if you’ve got more iron that you need you can exchange it with the Chinese for some of their excess silks. Cool!
Anyway enough rambling about geeky computer games. What else have I been doing?
Well one thing I did do during my break was try to grow a beard. One of those funky Generation-X style goatee beard things, just for the heck of it. I was under the strange impression that this might make me look cool, so I stopped shaving my chin for a week. I’ve always had particularly fast growing facial hair, so I figured a week would be long enough to see how it turned out. So, how did it turn out? Horribly, that’s how.
It appears that while my facial hair grows very quickly (particularly just below my lips) on my chin proper it’s virtually non-existent. So, after a week of careful cultivation I had a thick, caterpillar like growth immediately under my mouth, and below this a great bald patch with a total of six straggly hairs attempting to cover it. This looked utterly ridiculous, so before I went back to work on Monday, I shaved it all off. So much for looking cool 🙂
I am looking a bit paint spattered though. I decided over my break to get on and do a proper job of painting some of the Call of Cthulhu figurines I bought some years back. I’ve got a shoggoth, three deep ones, and a yithian, and all were sorely in need of a decent paint job to replace the seriously desultory ones I perpetrated when I first got them. So to that end I headed off to Games Workshop at the Galleria on Saturday to purchase some paints.
This was actually a bit stressful as I haven’t been inside a Games Workshop store in years, and despite my supreme geekiness I’ve never been all that comfortable around hard-core wargamer geeks anyway. To make matters worse of course it was Saturday morning, which meant there were several games in progress in the rather minuscule store and you could hardly move for tape measures and Tyranids. But I’d done my research and had a full list of the paints I wanted, so just shoved it at the guy behind the counter who flicked them out of the racks with remarkable speed and efficiency. I handed over the cash, grabbed my receipt and then fled before I could be attacked by a genestealer 🙂
Now the great thing about Citadel Miniatures paints is that they all have highly creative and funky names. You don’t just buy “red”, you buy “red gore” or “blood red”. You don’t purchase “purple” you purchase “liche purple”. So rather than thinking to yourself “I’ll try a mix of dark and light greens with a touch of grey and a yellow wash” you can think “I’ll try a mix of dark angels green and snot green with a touch of codex grey and a bad moon yellow wash”, which is infinitely more entertaining.
So, I’ve spent the better part of the weekend teaching myself to paint figurines. Which is harder than it sounds. I started on the shoggoth, on the basis that it would be difficult to mis-paint a festering protoplasmic ooze. As it turned out this was quite easy to achieve, so my shoggoth is now weighted down with about six coats of chaos black and dark angels green (which should at least make it easier to run away from Mountains of Madness style). But I finally got the hang of it, and the final layer of paint looks quite spiffy. I’m working on the deep ones at the moment, and they’re starting to look OK. I’ll probably post pictures when I’m done.
So yeah, that’s been my last few weeks. People waiting on emails should get them over the next couple of days (sorry about the delay), and I’ll try and update a little more regularly from now on (yeah sure).
PS: Rebecca is staying for a few days. Cool 🙂
