All posts by The Plaid Mentat

Building a Terrain Table

I’ve recently been backing a number of 3d printing kickstarters.  From 3d printable terrain (Hexhog Tabletops: Hinterland Hills, and Fantastic Plants and Rocks), to miscellaneous models (The Graveyard Collection and Pillars of Stone), all the way to full 3d printable games (Pocket Tactics, Chibi-tech SD, and Star Scrappers: Battledrill).  One of the things I’m most excited about though, is building a full terrain table – I want to have a modular terrain system that fits into the game vault of my gaming table. Continue reading Building a Terrain Table

Designing Breach Expansions

One of my goals this year was to design a game or a mod for an existing game.  This year, I decided to get back to poking at Breach: Starship Duels.  Right about the time I got my first 3D printer, I discovered Breach and this was the game that really made me say, “Yes, this has to happen”.  Over the years, I’ve printed multiple copies of Breach, and this year I decided I was going to print a copy for myself and add the ideas that were bouncing around in my head.

What I was able to create from this effort was two small expansions: Breach: Pirates and Planets and Breach: Dying Suns. Continue reading Designing Breach Expansions

Magnetized Titans

Though I built my Warhound and Reaver titans some time ago, and included magnets in the build, I was never really happy with how the magnetization turned out.  The magnets dangled out in the open, and, honestly, the number of times I had to reglue them was a bit of a pain.  This weekend, I got out all my measuring tools, fired up FreeCAD and my 3D printer, and decided I was going to do something about it.

Continue reading Magnetized Titans

You’ve Got to Start Some Time

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down to write.  So long, in fact, that I just noticed my 2020 blog notebook is empty, even though it’s already September.  There are a lot of reasons for this, and they all boil down to “I haven’t made time”.  When I look back to when I was writing regularly (not just the scattered posts of last summer) and further back to when I was posting regularly, I have to ask myself what the difference is.  Then, I laugh, because there are a lot of differences.

There is, of course, that the world is different now.

Continue reading You’ve Got to Start Some Time

Looking Forward into 2020

It’s time once again to sit down and think through my resolutions for the next year.  I’ve got a few more than normal this year, but most of them are a bit smaller (less combo-goals).  There’s a couple that might be a little more difficult to measure, but we’ll see how it goes – It’s going to be the kind of thing that I’ll know it when it see it.  Well, enough of the meta-talk, let’s get to it.

Continue reading Looking Forward into 2020

Looking Back at 2019 – Resolutions

Okay – it’s time for the reckoning, taking a look at my resolutions for the year and deciding whether I kept to them or whether they fell through.  My reflections here tend to be much more structured that in my previous post as I’m going to be looking specifically at the resolutions I made for the year and giving each a pass/fail – there’s no partial credit on these.  With the rules out of the way, here we go:

Continue reading Looking Back at 2019 – Resolutions

Looking Back at 2019 – The Broad Strokes

As the end of the year approaches again, I start to think about how the year went in the big picture sense.  As usual, I’ll have my resolutions post next (the last blog-day of the year), but I do still like to take the time to review everything else.  At the top level, this year was pretty good – I’m happy, healthy, and able to keep a positive outlook.  On the other hand, there has been a lot of craziness, stress, and rough spots that made the year less than ideal.  I’ll talk a bit about each below the fold.

Continue reading Looking Back at 2019 – The Broad Strokes

Building a 3D Printer

A while back, I decided I was going to get a new 3D printer.  My old printer was becoming a bit long of the tooth, and there have been a lot of advancements in 3D printing technology in the last few (seven) years.  A good friend of mine was working at Aleph Objects / Lulzbot, and that gave me a lot of visibility into what was going on in the industry, and that convinced me it was again time to take the dive.  While I was initially investigating and looking into a Lulzbot Workhorse, I eventually decided on getting a Prusa i3 MK3S, the wrinkle was, I decided to get a Prusa kit, which meant I’d be building this one myself. Continue reading Building a 3D Printer

The Haunting of Hill House

A while back, I watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix.  I usually find it difficult to sift through all various television that is on these days, and, having been bitten by a few that were supposed to be good (I’m looking at you American Horror Story), I was initially wary of The Haunting of Hill House.  The problem is that I’m a huge fan of haunted house stories and I’ve seen a lot of them (good and bad), but I’m also limited in my television time, so for it to be worth that time, it has to be good.

That being said, The Haunting of Hill House was good.  There are plenty of spoilers after the jump, but that’s how I do my full reviews. Continue reading The Haunting of Hill House

Geostorm

Upon the recommendation of one of my coworkers (you see, for me, “incredibly bad” is a recommendation), I took the time to watch Geostorm.  Even the recommendation kicked off a discussion of classic (from the 90s) disaster movies, so I both expected this movie to be bad and to enjoy it immensely.  At an atmospherically high level, this movie delivers on the disaster movie promise – cgi action heroics of one guy saving the world…

…For the rest of what I think, and minor spoilers, keep reading… Continue reading Geostorm