The Eater of Small Things

I built a non-combat vehicle a few weeks back as a sort of exercise. Inspired largely by the galvanic servohaulers kit, I wanted something that looked industrial for my chaos renegades force. I opted for simple and mostly harmless, and thus was born Heretic Jones, and his mildly daemon-possessed light carrier.

I decided to try something new over the weekend. Inspired by the Forgeworld Masterclass piece on how to make camo netting, I decided to give it a shot. My Macharius Vulcan seemed like a good candidate for the experiment since it's larger than the standard 40k vehicle, and there are plenty of large, flat surfaces to muck around with.

Since the wife went out for a ladies' night, and the kids were in bed I was free to queue up some youtube tutorials and take over the family room for the evening.

I distressed some medical gauze and soaked it in a mix of water, PVA glue and paint. After that I hung the gauze to drip dry for a few minutes. I added some wire hooks on the Macharius to hold the netting. Next I rolled up the gauze and stretched it onto the hooks. That was the fun part. It was a mess, but I didn't mind. Painting will come later.

Just a disclaimer: As a change of pace I'm using the Eater Blog to record my participation in a collaborative video game experiment for a few days, so expect the next couple of posts to be about video game nonsense lingo. My sincerest apologies for this interruption of normal blog life.

My friends have wrangled me into a social experiment involving the game Dwarf Fortress. The idea was inspired by those brave individuals involved with managing the outpost known as Boatmurdered (which was constantly beset by rampaging elephants). So we had to try this for ourselves.

I inherited the fortress known as 'Claspsprinkles' to find that the first two years have not been kind to our poor little simulated dwarfs. Everywhere I look there are scenes of death. There are dwarf corpses heaped carelessly in piles, scattered bones, and one count of disorderly conduct against a donkey, though it would seem that the offender has also gone off and died somewhere.

I also found the remains of a dwarf at the bottom of a pond that was supposedly someone very important--- so who is behind the mysterious drowning? My money is on that upstart Sheriff John, who's gone around claiming all the fortress chairs for himself.

Other observations: There's no military, except for the 'Dragoon' and a Wrestler, and so not much to stop enemies if they came in force. However, it looks like there's a gaggle of peasants sitting on idle that are about to be recruited.

There are two entrances that will need to be fortified. Entrance #1 is in good shape, as there are doors that can be locked on the outside, and behind the doors a nice lobby with some traps and fortifications. I think the initial builder's idea was to turn this room into a shooting gallery. Now all we need are dwarfs that know how to hold crossbows.

Entrance #2 is the bigger problem. It's sitting wide open for wagons to roll into the trade depot, but will need some form of protection. One is . I think we'll need a moat and drawbridge to protect this entrance.

Kudos to James for setting picking a nice location for our fortress experiment, as well as directing the growth in the first year. Also, a special nod to John, for keeping the fortress alive during the bloodshed and starvation of Year Two.

Hopefully, Year Three will be just as exciting.

So things look much different after an evening of work. My cardboard supplies are low at the moment, so only some basic structures have taken shape. Not much to report yet, but I promised myself I'd be dutiful about documenting each relevant phase.

The little irregular wooden cubes were left in the closet of my old studio by Philip Brou, the previous tenant. Phil, by some weird quirk, was also fascinated with building miniature dioramas. We had that common ground to base our relationship, but circumstances caught us at odds. He, having just completed his M.F.A., was on his way out, while I was just getting started. So like ships passing in the night, we never got to have more than a passing conversation about our shared aesthetics. (I'm writing this now as a reminder to look him up sometime soon)

Either by design or inadvertently, Phil left me a whole closet full of supplies and art materials when he moved out. Worthless to anyone but myself, these odds and ends have dispersed throughout every "miscellaneous items" box in our house, and the bag of small wooden cubes is just one example.

I actually got tired of working on this sometime in the course of the evening. I found a card game on the Newgrounds site that had me hypnotized for hours. The Necronomicon is a game that is based on the short stories of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

Even as a single player online card-gaming experience, the AI of the opponent proved to keep me challenged. Sometimes it would made weird mistakes that swung the game in my favor, but there were no big, glaring weaknesses that I saw. It's a simple little game to pick up and learn-- and free to boot.

Alright. Back to work.