Grow Your Own Painting Service

Why ship your figures halfway across the world to pay Sri Lankan children to paint your figures, when you can just grow your own locally? Now, I'm sure once you start accounting for prorated shelter, food, education, bail, etc..., it's not quite as cost effective, but if you ignore all those real costs, it actually looks quite cheap!

Nice Gaming Table!

I have found the design for my dream wargaming table. Now I just need a house large enough to fit it in.

The World Turned Upside Down

What kind of world is it that we live in when we are so blessed with choice that it has become impossible to determine the best comic book superhero movie? Because, let me tell you, the Dark Knight is awesome. It completely gives Iron Man a run for its money. Heath Ledger was the best Joker ever-- no laughing gas, no stupidity, just sheer broken insanity-- but he couldn't have carried the movie, and the awesome performance by all the other major actors here really make for a quality movie. I think I would pick Iron Man as my favorite, although I'm not sure it's fair to compare-- the Dark Knight is a very dark movie, in terms of world view and morality, whereas Iron Man is much more traditional.

Talk to your children about Evolution...

...before someone else does!

Pokemons for Fudge

By request: Eevee, Flareon, Jolteon and Umbreon (I'm detecting a pattern here).

Not so GURPS Pokemon

Okay, so I've been working on this a bit. I love GURPS, but I stopped using it for this. While I wanted some mechanics in my kids' first RPG, GURPS was just too much. For one thing, the mechanics were more rigid that I wanted, and I felt that by throwing out so much of the rules and home ruling so much, I was probably just using the wrong system.

Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace

So the son and I watched Ep 1 yesterday-- the daughter was grounded, so she will be catching up on Friday. Anyway, I went in as open minded as I could. I didn't let my opinions cloud my son's judgment, and I thought maybe I was simply playing into the conventional wisdom about how bad the movie was. But no. It really is a genuinely bad movie. It has genuinely terrible dialogue at times. Ah well. My son knew all the names of everything from reading (and rereading) a Visual Dictionary I have. Especially during the underwater scenes. As they enter the water, he says, "Ah, that's the Water Breather 99!" or some such. A monster appears, "That's the Sando." I was on the verge of laughter! He seemed to enjoy the movie, and didn't seem to think it was any better or worse than any of the others he had seen (IV-VI).

Shadows Over Camelot

Verily! There is much goodness in yon game. We played two games of Shadows Over Camelot last night. It way the first time for Mik and me to play, and our buddy Ray, who owns the game, ran us through it. We played the first time without a traitor, and although we had a tough time defending Camelot towards the end thanks to taking catapults earlier in the game, won pretty handily. The second game, though, we played with the Traitor and had an absolute blast!

Friggin' Star Wars

My kids have been on a big Star Wars kick lately, and I've bought them some of the Collectible Miniatures. You may recall that I bought a bunch of these a while back. There is now a fixed Obi-Wan in a starter, so I picked that up, too. Well, my son got a Reek in his pack and was about to wet himself wanting to play with it, so I sat down and rumbled with my 7 year old son.

Cool gameroom pictures

I always love to see pictures of people's gamerooms and imagine how I could do mine. I kind of think his "GM" space could be a little more pretentious...maybe he should raise it up on a 6" dais. ;-)

Return of the Jedi

The kids finished the original Star Wars trilogy this weekend. Both really enjoyed it, but my daughter has quickly turned into a full-on Star Wars geek. She immediately went out and created her own visual dictionary with pictures of all the main characters. I mentioned the Thrawn Trilogy, and the Solo twins, and she whipped up an illustrated short story about Luke's daughter Ashley Skywalker fighting the Emperor's son. She's already half-way through Heir to the Empire. This has gone too far! I've got to sit her down and make her watch Star Trek (the original series).

The Empire Strikes Back

I rented TESB over the weekend. I had plans to, anyway, to make sure the kids found out Darth Vader was Luke's father by watching the movie, but it was also a good way to give the kids something to think about other than Bear's death. They really enjoyed it, my 8 year old daughter especially. As Darth Vader asked Luke to join him to rule the galaxy, she was yelling, "No! Say no! Say no!" And when Darth Vader said he was Luke's father, she just sat there for a minute, then said, "He's lying."