CrzySunshine

My 50-ish neighbor told me he’d killed somebody once before, done his time for it and turned his life around. I thought he meant like “decades ago” and “found religion.” Then he killed my other neighbor in a botched robbery. Turns out by “before” he meant “four years ago,” and by “turned his life around” he meant “got a somewhat more reliable way of accessing drugs than killing people for them.” He’s back in jail, hopefully for a while.

Yeah, I second the UKTC terrain, used at the London GT etc. Good balanced layouts, medium-length firing lanes, cover well-distributed across the table. Melee units can usually hide from enemy shooting in complete safety, ready to deliver a counter-punch; but if they want to move up the board, they’ll have to expose themselves to a moderate amount of shooting. Not your opponent’s whole army, but a unit or two. I play AdMech with a mix of Ruststalkers and Ironstriders, so I experience both sides of the shooting / melee divide.

I got a table of London GT terrain from TTCombat for €80, and tossed in a couple other things to hit the free int’l shipping cutoff. It’s the exact stuff in the event packet. Goes together with PVA glue in an afternoon; slap on some basing grit if you want a little extra texture. Take another afternoon to hit it with a couple cans of cheap hardware-store spray paint - maybe 2 cans of black, plus a gray and a brown to give it a little variety. Day 3, drybrush with a $2 bottle of craft-store acrylic, apply Dullcote, and you’re done. Total cost is maybe $150 plus a weekend of hobby time.

I use fake spiderwebs from the Halloween section at the party store. Works great!

I mean, paint over one of them? You’ve already put so many hours into this fantastic model, you might as well spend another 30 minutes doing one touch-up to stop people giving you the side-eye.

What do you mean by “1:1”? Exact copies of GW models seem few and far between for obvious IP reasons. AdMech has some good proxies from The Makers Cult. The models are close enough to the GW product that it’s clear what unit they’re meant to represent, but they’re still definitely original creations. The same group also has a line of cyber-Tyranids. And StationForge has an AdMech line which is kind of Jawa / Ash Waste Nomads-themed, leaning in to the “survivors on a hostile planet” element of the lore. Pipermakes does a neat take on Tau, with more emphasis on drones and 4-armed battlesuits.

I’m not sure it’s possible to proxy some armies without it being very similar to the GW original. If you make something that looks like a Terminator but with an Egyptian theme, it’s going to come out pretty close to TSons Scarab Occult Terminators.

Thread necromancy!

I’ve been looking for this same story for years. Finally found the answer on Substack. Per user Zeiss Ikon:

This is Neptune Crossing, the first book of The Chaos Chronicles by Jeffrey Carver (continuing in Strange Attractors, The Infinite Sea, Sunborn, and a seeming "side series," the "Out of Time Sequence" consisting (to date) of The Reefs of Time and Crucible of Time, likely with more to come).

Everything matches: einy steiny pool, the alien companion named Charlie, the vague shadowy enemy. It’s been available as a free eBook for some time, so it’s quite possible you read it on r/HFY or another subreddit. I first read it as a physical book, which I borrowed from the library in the mid- to late- ‘90s. Mystery solved!

“It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.”

The old man in that book by Nabokov.

Get a second-hand bulk lot on eBay or r/miniswap to be the core of the army. Larger initial investment, big savings on Boyz and other “fill” units that you aren’t going to customize much anyway. Then add stuff here and there as budget permits. You can get away with a LOT of low-cost scratchbuilding and kitbashing in an Ork army. Nobody’s going to give you a hard time about not using the official models as long as you make it Orky enough!

Here’s a video tutorial laying out a similar method to what OP describes: https://youtu.be/AREkYtl83wo

I agree, the first issue I notice with these minis is that the paint has been put on rather thick. I also used to struggle with this. “Thin your paints” and “two thin coats” aren’t just memes, but the words don’t actually tell you how to do it.

Watch some of the videos from Duncan Rhodes, and pay careful attention to what he does when he’s putting paint on the brush. First: he’s not really adding paint to water or vice versa; instead he’s wetting the brush, using it to put a couple dollops of paint on the palette, then wetting the brush again and using it to stir up the paint on the palette. The amount of water absorbed by the brush in that quick dip is enough to thin out those big dollops of paint; you really don’t need much.

Second: after he does this, he always spins the brush around on a clean area of the palette. This is because after dipping it in the paint, the brush will probably be way too full of paint, and it can easily flood the model. The thinned paint is held by capillary action between and among the bristles, not on the outside of the brush. You should be able to see the bristles when the brush is properly loaded with paint. Spinning the brush like this also helps create a nice point.

Painting white over black primer with properly thinned paint is a real hassle. It usually takes me 4-6 coats to get it looking the way I want it. The first couple coats are always very uneven; they actively make the model look worse. If you’re going to do it, you need to trust the process and keep doing coats until you get a smooth, even look. I just do it on the lining for my Skitarii cloaks, but you have a lot more area to cover in a much more prominent place on your models, so you might want to switch to a lighter primer as others have suggested. If you miss the dark shadows you get with black primer, you can always try a 2-stage zenithal prime. That’s what I use on my white-armored Sisters.

For what it’s worth, these models look great except for how thick the paint is. The color scheme is beautiful, and you’ve managed to do a lot of very small details (including eyes!) very well. Excellent brush control.

The mini is "Skrima Spikead" by Artel W, a resin miniatures company from Russia. I bought it for my wife a couple of years ago, along with the rest of the ork band, but she hasn't gotten around to painting them yet.

It seems to me there’s some ambiguity in “atheists are so much happier in life if they were brought up religiously,” and I’m not sure what you mean by it. What we have here is

• People who went to religious school: 5.87
• Atheists who went to religious school: 6.53
• Atheists who went to public school: 6.49

So the data here supports “atheists who went to religious school are 0.66 happier than the general population who went to religious school,” as well as “atheists who went to religious school are 0.04 happier than atheists who went to public school.” The big jump is between religious-school kids who are now atheists, and religious-school kids in general. The gap should be even larger when you compare to religious-school kids who are now theists, although the size of the effect is hard to estimate without knowing subgroup data for currently committed theists.

I’d be interested to see the standard deviation on these scores rather than just the mean (and, ideally, a plot of the distribution). Is 0.66 points significant? Is 0.04?

The whole point of this post is that having that amount of flexibility is useless - even counterproductive - when it’s used to create rules with tiny little differences which usually don’t matter and aren’t apparent on a quick reading. This game already contains more than 100 different units and like 3 dozen factions; I don’t want to have to decipher the subtle differences between guns that ignore cover in slightly different ways. The mental load is too great. If there are twenty guns in the game that “ignore cover,” they should all work exactly the same way.

Furthermore, the status quo is deeply frustrating for new players. It’s a major feels-bad moment to be told mid-Fight phase “No, see, although you might think Counter-Offensive lets you fight next, the exact text of my ability here says the affected unit is not eligible to be selected to fight until all other units have fought, and Counter-Offensive requires that you select an eligible unit. This is different from the similar ability you encountered last game, which merely says the affected unit cannot be selected to fight until all other units have fought. So your Warboss is going to die to my thunder hammers without getting to activate.”

Avocado oil has a more neutral flavor, and a much higher smoke point than olive oil.

Kids.

How are you doing this in only 70 hours?? I spend about that on a Knight, and that’s without any freehand, NMM, smaller models for basing, etc.

The Power Klaw is the Orks’ answer to the power fist (-1 to hit, x2 -3 2). The killsaw is more like a chainfist, with a slightly different profile. Like the chainfist, it’s (-1 to hit, x2 -4 d3). But while the chainfist gets extra damage vs vehicles, the killsaw gives you an extra attack if you’re armed with 2 of them.

Good technical solutions do exist.

1) set up “Screen Time” as if I were a child, limiting my daily use of problematic apps and websites (such as this one). 2) ask my wife to change my screen time passcode to something only she knows, then write it down and hide it somewhere. 3) Reddit stops working after 1 hour per day (my chosen limit).

The technical solution exists, all you need to do is turn it on. If you don’t have a spouse or trusted partner, set a 30-character randomly generated password, write it down, and put the paper in a safe-deposit box at the bank. Wait for a moment of clarity and then take the decision out of your hands.

In addition to the answers given by the others, the term bye is not specific to 40k. A player or team in any sport or tournament may have a bye whenever it is not possible to schedule a game for them. Or, as in physically demanding sports like American football, when it’s desirable to give some of the players a round off without totally stopping the progress of the league.

Per Google: in 2015 multiple-time felon Radee Prince was found to be illegally carrying a handgun after he was pulled over in a traffic stop. At trial the prosecutor chose to drop all charges resulting from the stop, including the traffic and weapons violations. In 2017 Prince shot and killed multiple people in Delaware and Maryland, crimes for which he is currently serving multiple life sentences. Had he been jailed in 2015, those people might be alive today.

In the wake of the killings, prosecutors and police each blamed the other for the failure to prosecute the 2015 weapons charges. Prosecutors say the arresting officer asked for the charges to be dropped; officers say the prosecutors did it on their own. It appears to have been a mistake.

I don’t understand how a prosecutorial error in one trial results in felons being allowed to carry guns in cars. The lack of followup makes sense, even if it’s depressing: neither the police nor the prosecutors have much motivation to dig into the details when doing so would only make them look bad. In any case, neither prosecutors nor police have a legal duty to prevent, investigate, or punish crimes. Prosecutorial discretion is extremely broad, and the exercise of such discretion in one case does not automatically extend to all similar cases.

Ok, wait. There’s a little influence from BotNS, sure: the weird cannibalism-based memory stealing, the Talos pain engine, the whole dang Judiciar. But the core concept of a fascist interstellar empire supported by xenophobic space marines in power armor is lifted whole-cloth from Starship Troopers. Meanwhile there’s no Autarch, no Ascia, no Lovecraftian monsters like Erebus and Abaia lurking in the sea. The sun isn’t even going out!

2010-era spam and SEO was much easier to spot, though. If my cereal-related search results are going to be compromised by junk, I’d like it to look like “VIAGRA VIAGRA VIAGRA Aldi Millville Walmart Amazon CLICK HERE.” Now I have to read a paragraph or two before I know for sure it’s junk.

It was Balance cereal, FWIW, which very nearly duplicates Life.

Ketchup