This time of year is always a time for me to look back and figure out how the year went. When I think about it, there’s always the stuff that I intended to do, and the stuff that I did in the in-between. I’ll write about my resolutions in the next post, but here I just wanted to write about how everything that wasn’t what I was planning at the turn of the year. Continue reading Looking Back at 2018 – In General
All posts by The Plaid Mentat
Dark
In the last year or so, I have watched the Netflix series Dark twice – once with subtitles and once dubbed in English (from the original German), and I very nearly considered watching it a third time and doing a series of posts rather than just one. From that, you might say that I liked this show a fair bit, but the show also had a lot of depth, which I can only make so much time to write about.
A more in-depth analysis with some minor spoilers below: Continue reading Dark
Thanksgiving Apocalypse 2018
This year, the Thanksgiving Apocalypse match was sizable. Everyone was asked to bring their entire force, which amounted to about 50,000 points per side. The teams were Uncle Clayton (Tyranids), Oliver (Necrons), and I (Space Wolves and Imperial Knights) against Ian (Chaos), Codi (more Chaos), and Keagan (even more Chaos). While not everything managed to hit the table, there were a few titans, more than a few big models, and piles upon piles of infantry.
Pictures after the jump. Continue reading Thanksgiving Apocalypse 2018
The Universe in a Single Atom
My reading time is a little reduced, but I did recently take the time to finish a book a friend of mine recently lent me, The Universe in a Single Atom by the Dalai Lama. This book was initially interesting to me because it sounded like a spiritual leader attempting to reconcile spirituality (in this case, Buddhist spirituality) with modern physics. As I read it, it actually was a bit better than this, which I’ll go into below. Continue reading The Universe in a Single Atom
Warmahordes League – Game Design 3
After reflecting a fair bit on this year’s (and last year’s) Warmahordes League, I started thinking about what things I might try for my next league. This is going to read a little bit like a list of recommendations, and, in some way it is, but it’s also meant as a reminder for me for some things to try, so, at present, they are untested recommendations. Continue reading Warmahordes League – Game Design 3
Warmahordes League – Game Design 2
If you read my last post on the Warmahordes League, you may have gotten the impression that it didn’t go well. In fact, the opposite is the case – it went quite well, and had a lot of things that I think worked out for the better. Continue reading Warmahordes League – Game Design 2
Warmahordes League – Game Design 1
Now that I’ve run another Warmahordes league, I wanted to take a step back and evaluate how this one went. There were definitely some things that worked well – better than last year even – and some things that didn’t quite go as well as I had hoped. Continue reading Warmahordes League – Game Design 1
American Horror Story – Murder House
Just after Halloween this year, I binge-watched the first season of American Horror Story, aka Murder House. I was in the mood for a good haunted house story, and I had heard great things from a variety of people about American Horror Story, so it seemed a good match. Unfortunately, American Horror Story really failed to deliver on either the promise of a good horror story or a good haunted house story. There were three things that I think overall worked against the show: the length, the lack of a coherent mystery, and a reason to suspend my disbelief. Continue reading American Horror Story – Murder House
Warmahordes League – Custom Character Warbeast
As I mentioned last time, this year’s summer narrative league at The Rogue’s Roost was all about building a custom warjack or warbeast. Another thing I did differently this year, was allow everyone to play two factions rather than one – this allowed a little bit more variability in what you could play and meant that everyone got to design two models rather than just one if they chose to do so.
For my custom Grymkin warbeast, I looked to the Rattler for inspiration and looked for ways to destroy even more infantry. The first stop along this path was Death Rattle: Continue reading Warmahordes League – Custom Character Warbeast
Warmahordes League – Custom Character Warjack
For the warmahordes league this year, the featured element was designing a custom warjack or warbeast. I went into this with lots of ideas about what I might want to do, and I ended up with something cool and a bit unexpected. During this league, everyone earned cards for games played which gave them a set of random abilities that could be used to upgrade their warjack or warbeast, so the bound on one’s creativity was the availability of a particular ability. This made for some interesting design decisions because I couldn’t quite get everything I wanted, and had to work with what I had.
Below, I’ll talk a bit about what I ended up with and show off the cards. Continue reading Warmahordes League – Custom Character Warjack