I’ve completed the graphics and sound for Quartus, but you can’t hear them now, so this is a bit of a limp post – sorry.
Phase two, which I’ll give myself two weeks to do, is to make a functioning flash app out of it: a title screen with music! If I can make that happen it means I’ve got a handle on the absolute basics and I’ve figured out how to get sound and graphics into an appropriate format.
I abandoned my initial plan to paint a figure for me mam this week because it is going to be so annoying to clean and assemble that trying to do it in one week would have resulted in a really shitty job. Instead, I painted up a pile of ickle peasants.
I’m not very good at speed-painting, but I did my best with this lot. First mistake came at the base-coat stage:
Try to ignore all the bits I missed.
Each model got exactly one coat of each colour, with very little care given to correcting mistakes or getting good coverage. I didn’t pay enough attention to restricting my palette and ended up using fifteen different paints at this stage… fifteen paints is fifteen passes – not exactly quick.
The banner is intentionally blank, by the way. I’m not sure about the heraldry for my army yet.
Next, I applied the magic of Devlan Mud wash:
All the arrows you can stick in the ground are a great part of an otherwise ropey kit.
They all got a kludgey, overgenerous application of DM. It would look better with two thin coats, but that would have just taken too long!
Finishing up involved the techniques that I hope will make my Bretonnians look at least a little characterful:
Much better? I hope so.
I drybrushed each guy from foot to waist with a light earth colour, then half that with a darker brow, then half that with a dark brown. The bases use the same browns, but working up from the darkest. Splodges of water-effects on the bases and feet give the impression it’s nice and muddy.
What I’m hoping will be a good effect in the end will be that the army will be mostly grubby peasants with small units of knights. The horses will all be grubby to the same height, which doesn’t quite reach the feet of the mounted poshos. Artistical, eh?
I can’t say I’m proud, but I’ve finally admitted I haven’t the foggiest how to control my diet and started calorie-counting. If the gradually-falling numbers on my bathroom scale are to be trusted, it’s working quite well.
I’ve been using dailyburn.com to do the hard work for me, without which I doubt I’d have lasted long. It couldn’t have been more straightforward to set up. I registered, told it my height, weight, activity level, and goal weight and it gave me a goal number of calories to consume each day to lose roughly three kilos per month. There’s an extensive, searchable database of foods, which makes it very easy to track what you’ve eaten (at least roughly) without obsessive weighing and calculating. So far meeting the calorie goal hasn’t left me starving, which is nice – it’s just meant I don’t have toast before bed if I’ve already eaten plenty that day.
It also keeps track of how much protein, fat and carbohydrate you eat, and gives you healthy goals for those. Which means I now know I eat far too little protein, on average.
A bonus feature is that you can track your exercising as well, and adjust your calorie goals appropriately. I’ve switched that feature off for the moment, but I still enjoy the spurious statistics. For example: on Thursday I apparently lifted a total of 5,400kg! Which means nothing!
I forgot to say: this week I will be mostly reading A Cure For Cancer by Michael Moorcock.
I really want this outfit
There’s not much one can say about Fear and Loathing that hasn’t already been repeated ad naseum, so I’ll try to be brief.
(note – I failed to be brief)
It’s one of those books you can intend to read for years – in my case easily a decade – and just not… quite… get around to. So much a legend, or a cultural touchstone, that you could be forgiven for forgetting that it’s also a book and the correct thing to do to a book is to read it.
Bizzarely, I think its high cultural status did it nothing but favours for me. Like when I first listened to some early Bob Dylan and discovering that under all the voice of a generation/archetypical hip folk poet business there was a man who could really, really seriously write and deliver songs in a way entirely his own. Maybe I subconsciously expect less of anything fêted but it always delights me to find substance under hype. Let’s blame a life-long interest in computer-games and move on.
The point – and I know this is bad writing but I don’t know how to fix it – the point is that I expected Fear and Loathing to be visceral and meaningful and hold a wonky mirror up to a half-fictional world, and all these other things one hears about it and may even have seen in the film. What I absolutely didn’t expect is how amazingly written it is. Twice it moved me nearly to tears, on behalf of a character whom I couldn’t even bring myself to like.
More than that; it helped me understand the point of view that seventies America (and thus, in consequence eighties America) was sort of shell-shocked, enervated retreat from the collapse of the sixties counter-cultural dream. It helped me see the world from another perspective, is my point, and that’s something only the really good books can do. So it must have been a really good book. QED. Yes.
And it did all this in 204 pages. Which naturally begs the question: who writes all these 800+ pages, first-in-a-series-of-fourteen, fantasy epixxx anyway? I mean… really? Your vision needs 11200 pages to unfold, does it? You and your vision should get a room and stop bothering everyone else, that’s what I say. Pffft.
It’s just occurred to me that since I have a full day tomorrow of playing nerdy games with my chums I ought to put up my promised Saturday update a bit early. So I am… doing… that?
Fitness-wise, things are going rather well. I’ve been eating well, exercising plenty, and so on. Also, if you’re interested – and I’m sure you are – then you’ll be interested to know this interesting thing:
I’ve started tracking my daily calorie intake via the pleasing website Daily Burn. I’d love to give you an involved breakdown about it now, but I’m afraid there’s just NO TIME.
NO TIME!
Making-a-flash-game-wise, things are a wee bit rockier. My computer broke, so I had to fix it, but that took some time. I’ll do the stuff I was going to do this week, next week, I promise.
Whoo! Check this bad boy out:
Swoosh! Dakka! Etc!
Finished!
Next week’s project is a Gandalf in a little cart for my Mum’s birthday. Finishing early on Mr Tank should mean I can take a nice, relaxed, run at it.
I’m not sure if I should give more information about finished models I post on here. I’ve assumed that if you don’t already know about ‘em, you probably don’t want to. Thoughts, chums?
I’ve used up all my fun name juice, which is probably for the best.
This is probably the most straightforward project of the lot. I’m going to make a Flash game. Each week I will set myself a little goal and finish it by the end of the week. After a while I will have a little game. Then I will try to make another one which might be better. Then I’ll make a third one which I’ve been thinking about for quite a while but will probably be worse than the second one.
This is all assuming that I don’t make one game then decide that’s quite enough of that.
This week’s goal:
You’d think this’d be really involved but, if I’m honest, Game One isn’t going to win any awards for anything at all.
This one is a mixture of Primus and Secundus in that it is about both self-improvement and tidying up the results of unfettered spending.
You see, I used to be a voracious reader; in terms of words consumed per unit time I probably still am. The problem is that I don’t really read books anymore. Instead I read RSS feeds, magazines and game rulebooks.
This wouldn’t really be a problem at all, apart from silly, snobby reasons but for two things. For one: when I do remind myself to go to bed an hour earlier and read a novel I always enjoy it, and feel jolly good for having done so. For two: the unread books shelf:
I think this is most of them.
You see; my love of buying books hasn’t really adjusted to compensate for the low rate at which I’m reading them these days. Hence these, the rules of Project Tertius:
If anyone reading through all this is concerned I might be taking on too much, they should recall that I have a great deal of free time.
Tanky tanky!
A little background: as I mentioned a couple of posts down, I am a giant nerd. The nerdiest of my hobbies is probably playing table-top wargames with miniature figures I’ve painted myself.
The problem with this hobby is that painting the tiny men, as fun as it is, takes blimmin’ ages. So long, in fact that one can rather get ahead of oneself in buying tiny men to paint, which is what I’ve done. I’ll pop a picture of the backlog in an upcoming post but please trust me when I say it’s substantial.
Compared to Project Primus this might seem a little trivial but, frankly, I much prefer them painted, they look ugly all lined up in my living room unpainted and I’ve been slacking off on painting some of the less interesting models (read – almost the entire giant box of Games Workshop “Bretonnians”).
Here follow the rules of Project Secundus:
The first model I’ll be completing is the partially painted tank thingy linked at the top of the post. Expect photos on Saturday!
There – that can’t possibly go wrong or become frustrating or anything like that.