Happy New Year!

Hello hello! I trust everyone’s holidays and beginning of 2016 is so far going well!

I ended up ringing in the new year this year at a the home of the Painting Sage with some friends, bevvies and boardgames.

Sir, I do challenge theeee!
Disclaimer: I have never watched the TV show for this boardgame. I have no idea what they say when they fight. Aaarg?

While I am not a Spartacus fan, I would actually highly recommend this boardgame – it was a good couple of hours of fun – and I won every arena fight I was dropped into.

Thank you thank you. You may call me the dice master.

Now I realise that in my last post I had only just started painting my green dressed girl buuuut, the ladies are done!!

Soon to be seen* on a Victoria’s Secret runway near you.
*skin grafts not included.

So I ended up not only doing each dress a different colour, but each girls un-dead skin tone a different colour.
Now that I’d done it, I kind of wished I’d just picked 1 skin tone and done them all the same. They don’t really look like a team like this, but ah well; I suppose we live and we learn ey?

I struggle to get ANY photos of Sybelle, because of her darker scheme, and her hunched over pose she has proven to be the worlds more giant pain. I sent a picture of her to a friend that asked how she was going – looked like a dark blob with hooker heels.
Great stuff Sybelle.

I ended up priming up a couple of Reaper Bones minis as well to try to practice painting with.

I am unsure if I have discussed this on my blog before – but it’s time to come clean and tell the truth.

I. Am. The SLOWEST. Painter. You. Will. Ever. Meet.

Legit – in the same amount of time that it takes my friends to paint 2 full miniatures I’m sitting back and like ‘Phew, glad that left arm is done!’. It’s extraordinary…

So I gave my self a time limit of 3 hours per mini. In 1.5 hours, I had skin:

Yaaaaarg! *cough-ehem* No but really, can I have purple chain mail? Pretty please? Can I? Can I? Can I?

I was so incredibly unhappy with this, that I stopped the project and he is now soaking in a tub of paint stripper.
Siiiiigh.
One day, I’ll get there I swear.

Why hello there, madame. Mighty fine to meet you. Have you ever considered, immortality?

I have started my Seamus! I am unsure why I went the extremely self punishing route of STRIPED pants, given that I now have to reproduce these on this Copy-Cat killer. . . but we persevere.

Thanks for tuning again! Catch you all again on the side upon which is revealed whence one rotates a coin mid-air. Otherwise known, as a flip side.

So, you wanna be the master of…Malifaux?

Do you have the skills to be…..come a bro?

I wanna beeee the veeeery best, that no one ever waaaas.

Sorry folks. It’s been a Pokemon kind of day

So, recently, I have been playing a bit of the Pokemon Trading Card Game Online and actually thoroughly enjoying it. To be fair, I do not versus other players – I just use the stock standard trainer decks it gives you and battle the occasional NPC.

This got me in the mood for buying packs, something I find highly additive, exciting and often soul crushing.

ANYWAY, I get home with my little foil sealed packets of potential devastation and find this:

So on the left is my “bonus foil” and on the right is my “1 x rare”. They were actually the same card. What are the odds, ey??

Apparently pretty damned high. This has now happened to me a good 5-7 times. What is the go? Is it because the set has so few cards in it!? Or do I have magical pack-picker talons on me?

This got me in a nostalgic mood for checking out some of my older collection..

I miss the days where “foil” actually meant, do not expose to direct sunlight as you might burn a hole in the ozone with the reflection bouncing off of that bad-boy.

While I was digging these out of their super-secret-hidey-space I found a bunch of clippings I’d put into a folder with my cards.

Wow, $109.90!? Are you dicking with me? Should probs be nicer to the parents, the struggle to afford to raise a nerdy child was real.

Moving right along…I have been continuing to paint my Seamus Malifaux ladies – although, one of my hookers in tights appears to have gone missing. I cannot tell you, how devastating that is to me, to own a “set” that is not in fact “complete”. Like for MULTIPLE reasons, this is heavily upsetting. But we soldier on.

Wanna see me twerk it to Katy Perry’s – This is how we do?

So, unfortunately, I didn’t know that the angle I was on was casting such an orange hue over my photo – but we work with what we’ve got. The back of her dress is getting some highlighting and her skin is undergoing a little correcting time.

I actually dropped the whole mini in my drive way, skinning the paint off of her face, knees and the front of her dress directly after painting this.

Yooooou dropped me!? ME? Have you seen me? I’m amazing. I don’t know if we can hang out anymore, Ellie.

I tried my best to fix her back up, but she undeniably now had some uneven textures and variations in colour. Ah well, if anyone asks I’ll say she’s growing lumps.

Well, as per always, great chats! We should do this again soon.

~ El

Painting, Paining and Clock Work Gaming!

Hello lovely people!

Recently, I traveled to Geelong (Australia) for the Clock Work Dragon event.
This was a Warmachine Tournament charity event for raising food for the homeless.

Wait! One of these guys is a slow walker.

Although I wasn’t competing in this event – I was volunteering and running around being an all general pest with my phone camera.

The event was 3 rounds (35pt) of 6 competing teams of 5.

During the lunch intermission, everyone signed their name in front of their army (or specific model) and left for lunch allowing for painting judging to proceed.

It was AMAZING to see some of the things people had painted.
The names of the painters have been cropped out as I don’t want to be posting people’s names – but how awesome are these!? I love seeing other peoples beautiful work.

In the end, the event raised over 4000 cans of food for the homeless!!

Awesome effort from everyone! And now my upper arms know the meaning of paint when it came time to moving that from the room to the various charity cars.

AAAANY how, in Ellie land, I have been getting back into painting! I finally have some free time after settling into my new office and my new role at work.

Hello, I will be your waitress for this evening. Do you prefer to be roasted? Or fried?

Her skin did NOT come out at all how I intended. My idea was to give her a kind of purple hue to make her look a bit pasty and dead. Instead, I just ended up making her look actually skin toned.
Ugh – ah well.

Oh oh oh, my other news! Everyone, gird your loins.
PAX 2015 is upon us.

Well – love you all! See you again next time for another ‘Things I have been doing, without any coherent style of commentary’.

~Ellison

My Sky has a Rim on it

When The Elder Scrolls Skyrim came out, I was wholly obsessed with it.  To the point, that I got tired of missing out on all the pretty texture packs of the PC users (as I was playing on PS3 at the time) and literally went out and built a computer JUST for Skyrim.

After all this time – it would appear I am obsessed again. Hahaha.

Onto the adventures!!

I started myself a new Warhammer wielding bringer of death, collected my Lydia (aka. Chlamydia) and took on the world.

Hey Chlamydia, go easy on the contouring ey? You look like you have a 5 o’clock shadow… I mean heeeey gurl, looking on fleak today!

So Lydia and I start stomping around the country side. First priority, is to visit every city so that I have a fast travel point for near by questing.

Stopped by Markath to solve some murders and buy some goods.

I reaaaallly have to question  what that meat he’s holding is. Because when you’re just a torso trying to sell me large chunks of mystery flesh – I start to ponder being a vegetarian.

Now, one of the other things I’ve been doing is trying to get the 15 Daedric Artifacts. These tend to be fairly high in stats and look a bit fancy, so I picked myself up the Savior’s Hide. Now, this was the most powerful piece of Armour I had at the time so I was of course wearing it.

While this armour looks a bit skankeriffic in general, I wasn’t fully aware of HOW skanky it was until I got a kill cam on a Dragon.

I can imagine what the towns people are saying while I defend their city from the flying lizards.

Look friends! It’s the great Dovakin here to save us from the…oh my! Kids, cover your eyes.

The second Daedric Artifact I got was ALSO a piece of armor. While it may not be as revealing as the first, I’m pretty sure my epic mustache mask has it’s own level of seduction.

New from Victoria’s Secret – the Mustache Night-Mask. Now only $499.00.

While Chlamyd’s and I were dungeoneering, I found this odd shaped ball. Figured that it would look nice at home on the mantle to shoot sparks at and pretend we’re having he worlds most ancient disco when suddenly a voice emanates from it asking me to return it to it’s rightful place.

As I am not in the business of robbing others of their party goods, I promptly followed the instructions and went to find the shindig to ask if we were invited and could my trusty follower come as a +1?

When I arrived, it turned out that the voice was coming from some sort of statue in the middle of who-knows-where.

Have you considered Tindr? Your love can reach a radius pre-determined in the settings.

I stepped up, as I’m not one to judge the race of others, far be it for me to tell a statue they can’t hook up and party, and placed the disco ball into the nook at the bottom when suddenly I get launched into the air.

Ok lady, calm your various light beams, and put me back on the ground. I’m not into your weird sky events.

Meridia, who turned out to be the god of infinite energy asked me to go turn on the lights for the party in her old temple.
Lydia was a fan of the idea despite telling me 18 bloody times “I don’t like the look of this”, but then again, she might of been catching her reflection in the pool of blood on the floor.

I flick all these reflective balls on, and the temple starts to light up – which is far more the party I was hoping for.

You’ll be coming home with me tooooniiiiiight, and we’ll be burning up like neeeeon liiiiiights

So cool, the lights are on. I go to leave the temple and let Meridia know she’s ok to start letting the guest know that they can start arriving when this AWFUL, and I mean AWFUL dude leaps out and starts shooting me with ice shards.

Normally, I’m ok with someone gettin’ all mad that there is a party happening in their house and they weren’t invited – because that’s just rude, but this guy just kept at it.

Wouldn’t listen to reason so had to give him a beat down and let him know that it was not ok to just start shooting at people when suddenly, he changes into his party gear.

On second thoughts Meridia, I don’t think I like your friends. We might give the party a miss.

After putting down the scary bro at the end of the temple, Lyds and I head back to let Meridia know what happened, and show her this cool sword we picked up when suddenly she get’s all cult on me and asks if I want to preach her religion of Tindr fans and party goers.

Sorry but, there is no other word appropriate here except a really loud NOPE.

Well, that is the end of the adventures for the time being.

Tune in next week for another episode of Skanks with Swords.

Old-School: My Atari had a broken Wang

So, I have been rather nostalgic lately, and spending a lot of time scrolling through my Steam library thinking “It never used to be this hard to pick a game!”.
I used to open the cabinet, choose from one of my 10 Atari games (90% likely that River Raid was coming out) and then spend the next happy hours of my life shooting planes and collecting fuel.

What does any normal person do when feeling nostalgic? Look at a photo album? Google some info?

… you’d be wrong.
They immediately hit up their local ‘Buy Swap and Sell’ facebook group asking who is selling an Atari 2600.  Am I right!?

And I got this!!

A very tidy haul if I do say so myself!!

Now, out of the above, only 1 of the Atari (Atari? Atari’s? How does one exactly plural this console’s name?) actually worked, the second one he threw in because ‘it’s a fancy paperweight’.
And I’m sure you noticed, as I, that nice little box that reads ‘River Raid’ on the cover!!

Out of all the games I got with this…

…only 1 of them doesn’t work.
Guess which one?
GO ON. TAKE A STAB?
I BET YOU’LL NEVER GUESS THAT IT WAS  BLOODY WELL RIVER RAID.

After a few moments of weeping in my soul, I moved onto inspecting my new collection of 20th century adventures.

This bad boy, looks like he has legitimately NEVER BEEN USED.

But then again, who in their right mind plays Golf games anyways?

Now, Atari number 1 was all plugged in and happily beeping away as I died repeatedly in GORF, but Atari number 2 was sitting there looking at me like as if it had been neglected and wanted some attention.

So I popped open the case to see if there was anything obviously wrong with it.

The answer would partially be – because it is HELLA filthy. Ew.
Like, I don’t judge smokers guys, I don’t.
But if you DO smoke around electrical equipment, it’s going to end up with a nice gooey grime layer like this.

Please don’t smoke around pets, children and retro gaming systems. This public service announcement was approved for use by the Ellie Foundation of Gaming.

Anyways, after about an hours worth of cleaning, I noticed that the contact points on the capacitor were not correctly touching, so I wriggled it around until it had a good connection.

I love that this is called a ‘Wang Scap’….because I’m a child.
My Atari’s ‘wang’ was broken guys. It was broken. But I fixed it.

Now! I am the proud owner of 2 baller level Atari 2600’s.
Hahaha, why I need 2 is beyond me, but I’m stoked none the less.

Bring on the 8-bit adventure!

~ Love you all,
Ellie.

Kick-off 2015 with Kromaster

Hello friends!!

So to ring in 2015, the Painting Sage and I decided to bust out my Kromaster Arena board game that I picked up at PAX Australia.

This is a cool little fantasy fighting boardgame where you use the characters spells and abilities to chase down and attack your opponent.

Now, to be absolutely honest, the primary reason I got this game was because it looked BLOODY cute. Like, this is adorable. But, another reason I was drawn towards this, is that I am really not one for lengthy super involved rules.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a game with depth, but if I need to spend an hour on YouTube to work out how to set up the map then Ellie’s out. You can find me over at the other table playing Munchkin.

This game has a big rule book, with mini-maps that act as a step by step tutorial! We figured we’d take advantage of the nice weather outside (once a year where I live, seriously) and have a game outside in the shade.

There is dialogue facing the other player and an in depth explanation of the rule you’re learning to the left. This was the tutorial for basic movement, terrain interaction and attack.

As things became more complex, the map got a little bigger and the characters started multiplying to work together. In the above photo I was playing “Sheep guy” and the “Hooded con man”.

You can also buy “booster” boxes with additional characters. Even though we didn’t play with these guys today, I had purchased these when I picked up the board game itself.

I love that the boosters come with their own token set. You beauty! I hate nothing more than adding things to a game where you have to “pretend this token is this”.

I don’t want to really give this a x/10 at the moment, as we only went so far as the tutorials to start – but so far this is shaping up to be HEAPS of fun. Can’t wait for a couple more rounds of this – and to try out the expansion! (Yes, I’m that person that purchases the cool looking expansion before they even know if they like the base game *ehem*).

Blogger Tag: Best Games of 2014

So, in going with the write tag given out by ‘What’s your Tag?‘, I am going to do a quick list of the best games I played in 2014.

Now, I would like to re-state the ‘I PLAYED IN 2014’ part. These are not necessarily 2014 releases, and they are in no particular order other than the one my brain remembered them in!

Pokemon Alpha Sapphire (Nintendo 3DS)
– To be absolutely fair to all other games, this made it to my list partially because of my love for the Pokemon series of games. It is highly probable that the reason I thought it was an amazing game, is because of the same reason I loved all of it’s predecessors. BECAUSE, GUYS, I DON’T KNOW IF YOU KNOW BUT YOU CATCH BADARSE PETS WITH SUPER POWERS. What’s not to love?

The Last of Us (Playstation 3)
– This was just one of the most epic games I have ever played. To be absolutely honest, I felt like I had been thrown into the middle of this amazing movie and told to hit the ground running. I plan on buying a PS4 soon – this will be being re-purchased purely to play it on my new console. I’m not even kidding.

Beyond Two Souls (Playstation 3)
– Basically, see above. Epic story. Amazing acting. Love love love. Also, you may not have heard, but there was boob.

7 Days to Die (PC)
– I’m sure most people are familiar with this title, but I have literally not stopped wanting to play this game since I got it. Originally recommended to me by the Painting Sage, I was somewhat hesitant to purchase an alpha game with such a hefty price tag ($30AUD) – but it turned out to be money well spent for all the hours, with all the different friends I have spent killing zombies and building ridiculous looking forts.

Don’t Starve (+ Together BETA, PC)
– This, for the same reason as 7 Days to Die, made it on the list for the sheer amount of time I have enjoyed running around with friends quickly hording supplies for our camp – and adventuring off on my own to discover underground monster caves filled with fresh carrots and glowing bushes, this is a game I am happy to have spent my money on.

Well, I might leave that there, at a shortish list of a couple of games that particularly stood out to me over 2014 “vidja gaming”. I’m sure I’m forgetting a couple of epic things I played, but for right now – this is it.

I wish you all a fantastic 2015 and hopefully by 2016 I’ll be posting “Best holodeck games I played this year” … no? pipe dreaming? drat.

~ Always, Elison

Pixel Life and Video Games

Ok, well first things first – what have I been playing? As it turns out, I have never heard of RimWorld and Prison Architect. How did I completely miss these amazing resource management/architect/survival games I will never know – but yes.

RimWorld. All I can say is GET ON IT.
I discovered the game by watching through a bunch of quill18 let’s play videos, and stumbled across this little gem.

So the concept is that you are 3 little guys that have crash landed on the surface of a planet, and you need to try to build a functional colony to survive, collect resources and build an escape ship WHILE defending your colony and people from rogue animals, waring neighboring colony’s and natural disasters.

So, I began my little colony with no concept that you were able to “re-choose” you starting people. I thought that what you got was what you got. I started my little base with limited success but soon found out that “Valentina” was a useless bitch.

Olivia was stuck being the sole hunter/bread winner and defender, while Zeppy rolled about casually constructing walls.

I finally had a little battery and power supplying my tiny compound when tragedy struck and a fire started pouring in over the walls. I am pretty confident that Olivia and Zeppy had a pretty good handle on things, when a pirate decided to take advantage of the situation, walked in the door and shot everyone dead.

You had 1 job, Valentina. Watch the flippin’ door. But no, you decided to nap didn’t you? Boo, you whore.

Attempt 2 went somewhat better. Now that I could start again, and try to select some potentially decent friends, I started my base.

Now, I constructed an extra room in case we got a new friend willing to join us, or a pirate we captured and swayed to our side.

Sadly, the pirate I captured, was Porcene. Porcene had suffered a gun shot wound to the head at some point and as a result permanently moves at 50% speed, and tends to spend her days moving my “stuff” from one pile to another. Great.

Maybe I could sell her to the exotic goods traders for parts? Turns out, they deal in body parts.

Don’t worry, Porcene. We still love you. Even if you did just move all my steel to the other side of the fence.

Prison Architect is also very good, although – I’m not finding it as fun as I find RimWorld. The concept of this game is to build a prison that can successfully house “x” number of prisoners.
That number of prisoners is influenced by what kind of prisoners you are willing to take in (if any), such as low security prisoners come in larger numbers than high etc etc.

One of the things I love about alpha indie games, is their “incentives” to purchase their games. PA offered people the opportunity to “write” a prisoner profile. So you often encounter some award winning dudes.

“The Fatness”. Sounds terrifying.

I did notice, that a number of my friends that had been playing for a while were totally unawares of the new intro offered to learning how to play the game.

I began my adventure, being told the story of a prisoner on deaths row – for which I was tasked to build an electric chair to execute.

What was his crime? You may ask. WELL, let me tell you – the game does not leave you hanging and gives you his entire confession by way of pixel acting and some weird-o polaroids.

Turns out, dudes wife was cheating on him so he shot her and her lover in his home.

What I would like to know, is what happened to the existence of his wife’s right leg…or was she an amputee?
Also, dude, that guy is obviously a unich. You got nothing to worry about.

I last left the game at this point. I have some happy little prisoners in cells, one peeved because he’s still stuck in the holding area napping on a bench and a shower that insists on over-flowing every. damned. time.

Well, hope to talk to you all soon! I have been recording some amateur Let’s Play videos and posting those on YouTube, but due to the fact that my microphone is now permanently busted I can’t do anymore of them at the moment until a replacement is sourced.
Will post a link here if I happen to record anything particularly interesting though.

Love you all! And a miniatures update is coming shortly! I got some new loots. Woo woo.

~ Sincerely, Ellie

P.S Have a fantastic New Years everyone!

Sushi Go!

So I recently had the opportunity to attend a new local table top gaming club (mostly focused on boardgames and card games than miniatures) and got to play a little card game called Sushi Go!

I have to admit, I had an absolute ball with this game! Rules that probably took under 2 minutes to explain and comprehend, coupled with some very cute packaging and art made it an attractive game to want to invite others to play.

Please note: This image is not mine, it was sourced from Purple Prawn

The basic concept is:
1. Each person is dealt 8 cards from the deck.
2. From these 8 cards you pick 1 and place it face down
3. Hand the remaining 7 cards in your hand to the person next to you
4. Once everyone has handed over their hand, they flip over the face-down card and then pick another card, face it down, hand on the 6
5. Repeat process until all cards are used up, tally up your cards and put them into the discard pile (leaving pudding cards out in front of you)
6. Deal another fresh 8 from the deck to everyone and continue in this manner until the deck is gone.

The idea is that you want to collect cards to obtain the most points. From the image above, the green “sashimi” cards, need you to collect 3 of them to get the 10 points, but the blue “dumplings” merely grow from a minimum of 1 point with each additional dumpling and so on.

Image source: IndieGogo

If you’re looking to have a games night with some friends that aren’t into the bigger board games, or want to game with kids, or merely need a simple ice-breaker for a new gaming group I would definitely recommend this!!

All of my friends are getting a copy of this from me this year. Hahaha.

Where did she come from? Where did she go?

Where did she come from, cotton-eyed joe?

Yeaaaa….that just happened, folks.

Any how, I am well aware that my blog unfortunately dwindled to fewer and fewer posts until it eventually just went quiet for a bit there. In all absolute honesty, it was mostly out of priority and time shifting in life – and unfortunately keeping my blog up to date was one of the things that went to the back burner until such a time as I could properly do it again.

So here I am!! I don’t have any miniatures for you today, as painting was also a back-burned item, but I have been doing some gaming as of late!

Lately I have been playing A LOT of 7 Days to Die. I have to admit, I love this game a lot and that has a lot to do with watching LordMinion777‘s YouTube videos of him and his mates/girlfriend bro-ing out on it, but it’s stacks of fun.

The idea is Zombie Survival Crafting. So kind of…. Day Z meets Minecraft. I was recently playing with a friend and we set off on our brave adventure into the land of infected humans and broken down homes.

We head into this old gas station. As I’m scuttling around down in the station looting cars and various left over people’s limbs I suddenly hear ‘HOLY MOTHER OF …. WHAT JUST HAPPENED’.

Turns out my friend had found a ladder leading to the roof, and plummeted to his broken boned doom.

Did I live? …. Nope. Not a chance.

We ended up not making it back to any type of structure before night hit and quickly built ourselves a little hide out in the middle of the rubble.

Sorry you’ve caught us in the middle of renovations. Please excuse the mess. Teehee.

Nah actually this was a pretty tough little fort come sun down. It was mildly terrifying in the flicker of a candle light watching zombie shadows shoot past the gaps and then start ripping into the walls – but we lived.

Looked very cozy on the inside if I do say so myself.

It is important to keep in mind though, that this game is most certainly an Alpha. Even though it’s heaps of fun even WITH alpha style bugs, there is still definitely a lot of bugs. And the game play experience is changing and updating constantly.

Loot this corpse you say? Don’t mind if I do….

There is currently an issue with Zombies spawning mid air. The lucky survivors of that particular glitch end up on rooves occassionally, so in the morning my “first objective” for my survival was to wander the streets and pluck them down with my cross-bow. Without fail, every single one “landed” mid fall in the air.

Ah well, it made looting them all the more amusing I guess.

Well, that’s all for today my friends! I shall leave you with this glorious screen shot of the amazing sun rise.

– Sincerely,
Ellison