DreadTober AU Redux Finale

Presenting the God of Wind, the preferred Mech of Star Captain Enni Bekker, commander of the 43rd Striker Trinary, 50th Striker Cluster, Ghost Bear Alpha Galaxy. She was inspired to name the Mech after a song she heard a Rasalhagian bondsman singing while preparing for her Clawing Ritual after successfully trialling for the Trinary command following the death of Star Captain Milton Snuka in a skirmish with Kuritan troops in 3062.

Never speak to me or my son again. 

Barring, perhaps, a couple of terrain pieces, this is the biggest thing I've ever painted. This pic doesn't really do justice to how it looms over that Knight.

It's hard to get good photos because it's so big. I don't have great room lights, and only indirect outdoor light, and it's taller than my light box, or how high my swing arm lamp will reliably stay. 

I didn't get the snow flock done, or any of the insignia I was thinking of doing, and I'm not entirely comfortable with how well it's attached to the base, but the model itself is basically finished! Still, in the end, I'm really happy with how it came out. All the tiny dots were an absolute pain in the neck, but I think the final effect is worth it.

One more parting shot. Note that even when I do use a ruler, I still can't get the damn lines straight ;) Not sure what I'll have up next, but there will be something. Until then, y'all have a good one now, y'hear! 

Edit: Got the snow flock done. It looks heavier than it will be once the glue dries, but the overall effect will be similar still.

DreadTober AU Redux: The Penultimate Chapter

Everything is at that stage where it's all kind of a mess, and I get worried that I won't be able to pull it out. Or at least, not in time. Still got a bunch of fiddly work on the camo and some more detail on the base to do, and I'd like to try to freehand some insignia on there. Progress is still happening, but I always fret at this stage. Hopefully it'll be done by the end of the month. Until then, y'all have a good one now, y'hear! 

DreadTober AU Redux Week Three

I've got the first colour of the camo scheme blocked in. Needs some touch up in places where the various subassemblies come together, but the basic effect is there. Next up is the neutral grey striping in between these. I don't have a pic of the base in its current state because it's out on the porch with the primer drying, but it'll be quick to paint once I can bring it in.

I also finished up my Alpha Strike box, which had been dividing my attention and painting time, so I'll be able to get more done on this in the remainder of the month. I did the Clan Star in more or less the same Ghost Bear scheme I'm shooting for here, and the Inner Sphere Lances as the 2nd Legion of Vega, because I recently read Heir to the Dragon.

Next week, I should be pretty close to done. Until then, y'all have a good one, y'hear! 

DreadTober AU Redux Week Two

How is it Friday again already? I got a COVID booster on Sunday, and it's been kicking my ass most of this week, so I didn't get as much done as I hoped, but I did get the broken heat sink vanes trimmed down and re-primed, and the sidewalk added to the base along with some spackle to smooth out the cork on that and the fallen wall. Needs a little sanding, and drilling holes for the pins to mount the Vulture itself, and then I'll be able to prime the base. Hopefully from there, things will move along more smoothly. It feels good to have gotten moving on this, even if only a little.

I also did get all the dust properly washed off, which was more work than it sounds like. Anyway, this was basically my "finish building" week, and I'll be diving into the painting proper next time. Until then, y'all have a good one, y'hear! 

DreadTober AU Redux

Doing a nonstandard entry in a couple of regards here. I'm on a total BattleTech kick right now, and I want to try to clean up, fix, and finish the 28mm scale Vulture that I tried to do back in 2019, but couldn't finish because my health was sliding downward for reasons that would remain obscure until earlier this year. Now that I'm recovering from all that, I want to see if I can get this done, too. 

As you can see, the intervening years have not been super kind to the thing. There's a ton of dust, some of it adhering pretty tenaciously, and the heat sinks on the back of the left arm got broken at some point. I need to decide if I can fix those, or if I'm just going to trim them off and have the backs of the elbows be plain. Then I've changed my mind a little about how I want to do the base, so there's some more work there also. Well, here's hoping I can pull it off, and until next time, y'all have a good one now, y'hear! 

The State of the Westrider

Tl;dr: not good, but getting better.

I've been thinking that I needed to make this post a bunch of times over the past six months or so, but never when I was in a position to actually write and post it. In a couple of my last posts, I mentioned being pretty sick with what I thought was just some sort of stomach bug. Turns out it was something nastier. Fortunately, it first triggered a really bad psoriasis outbreak (for "I ended up in the ER" and "one of the dermatologists said it was the worst case he'd ever personally seen" values of "really bad"), which meant that I was already in Harborview hospital when my large intestine started falling apart. It was actually on the day I was going to be discharged, and if it had hit even an hour or so later, or I had gone to a lesser hospital, I absolutely would have died, but fortunately, I was still there, in the only level 1 trauma center in the region, and they were able to rush me into surgery before too much shit flooded my body cavity.

So, yeah. I now just have a semicolon instead of a full colon, and I've been dealing with an ileostomy, recovering from the surgeries (they had my whole abdomen wide open, and I've been doing a lot of PT exercises to get my abs to heal back together properly), and learning to manage my psoriasis since then, which has all kept me pretty tied up, and even tho I have been painting a bit, blogging about it has been far from my mind until I realized it was Dreadtober again.

The future outlook is the good part: Even tho they couldn't figure out what caused the collapse (despite an extensive list of things they were able to rule out), they're pretty sure it had been building up and causing lower level problems for years, which means that I may well have cleared up the root cause of much of my declining health over the past decade or so, and once I get my guts reconnected (The endoscopy department didn't have an opening until January to check out that everything is fully healed up inside, so the reconnection surgery needs to wait until then), I should be on the way to getting back into life in a way that seemed impossible a year ago.

P. S. I couldn't figure out how to work it in smoothly, but I want to talk a little more about psoriasis. I had always seen and heard of it as a joke condition, little more than annoying and unpleasant in appearance, but it can actually be an incredibly nasty condition. In bad cases, it's extremely painful, in a very similar way to first or even second degree burns. Another similarity with burns is that both mess with the body's ability to regulate its temperature. I've been feeling cold in a way that I never have before in my life, in addition to still overheating all the time, and being as sensitive to, say, hot water, as I was when I was a little kid. It's also absolutely exhausting: you don't realize how much energy you spend on growing skin until it's cranked up to 10 times the usual rate. Furthermore, shedding that skin so quickly leads to major fluid loss, as the skin cells die so quickly that their cellular fluid can't be reabsorbed before they go. Between the dehydration and the thermoregulation issues, severe cases can actually be lethal if left untreated, and even without the intestinal issues, I could well have died from that, too, if I hadn't been convinced to go to the ER soon enough. Finally, it's an autoimmune disorder, so the treatments for it are all immunosuppressant to some degree, which adds a whole other pile of extra worries about opportunistic infections. 

I'm not sure how much I'm going to be on here in the medium term, but I do want to take this Dreadtober to finish up the 28mm scale Vulture OmniMech I started a few years back. After that, I might disappear again for a bit, but I'm hoping to be back on here regularly by next spring or so, once I'm solidly into the recovery from the (hopefully) final round of surgeries. 

Anyhow. Hopefully I'll be back in a few days with my Dreadtober starter post, and until then, y'all have a good one now, y'hear! 

Gods in the Underhive (Slaanesh)

Of the four greater Chaos Powers, Slaanesh is unique in not getting even a single suggestion for how to incorporate her worship into the fluff or modelling of a corrupted House gang. I would guess that if they had, it would probably involve Eschers modeled and/or painted to look like they're wearing even less than usual. Let's see if we can't come up with something more interesting than that.

- Goliath: I see a few possibilities here. As with the Eschers, the amount of exposed skin on display could easily suggest something sexual. But I feel like it would be more interesting to explore something like a gang focused on self-perfection to an unreasonable degree, a la the Emperor's Children or the Flawless Host. The amount of stimms they have to use also leaves an opening for falling into the use of less functional drugs as well.

- Van Saar are possibly the most compelling to me here. Imagine a gang suffering nerve damage, all their senses failing them, becoming more and more desperate to be able to feel anything, anything at all, at any cost. Easy pickings for the Dark Prince!

- A Cawdor Word-Keeper could easily fall to the temptation of the inhuman charisma the followers of Slaanesh are noted for. With such oratory and personal magnetism, just imagine how well he could spread the good word of the Redemption. And surely one so righteous would be able to resist the corruption that comes with that power...

- Orlocks, being kinda generic in many ways, don't present a whole lot of specific handles here. The similarly generic sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll combo does feel like it fits pretty well, tho, and could make for a fun project.

- For the Delaque, I think once again their connection with the Silent Ones might be a cool angle. Perhaps one of them becomes fascinated with the different range of sensory inputs that humans have, and pushes those it's connected with to explore them to the utmost. 

- Escher: Again, I think chems are a fun way to go here. This is one of the few that suggests a specific gang build to me, not only focusing on the use of stimms themselves, but also taking chem darts all over the place and getting their enemies all fucked up on Obscura and Kalma. 

- Corpse-Grinder Cults could easily be Slaaneshi as well. In this case, it would perhaps be less about "meat make strong", and more about the sensual allure of eating something with actual flavour. As with Nurgle, there's also some scope here for cool modeling projects with themed masks.

As a side note, I'm only planning one more of these. This is an area where Khorne really suffers from the problem of all war gods in wargames, where turning to him generally involves just doing exactly the same thing that literally everyone else in the game is doing anyway (i.e. violence), just more so, and he becomes basically the generic default option. The standard CGC are already more interesting than anything else I can think of for a House gang.

Anyway, until next time, y'all have a good one, y'hear!