Crooked Chaos

I got a lot of work done in the Nerd Bunker this weekend (with the help of my lovely wife) but I’m not ready to show off my progress yet. So instead, I’ll show you the Chaos Space Marines Rhino troop transport from Games Workshop I’ve been (poorly) building lately.

Nearly built Chaos Space Marine Rhino

Having never put one of these specific kits together before, I didn’t really know which pitfalls to look for and avoid. My first army was Tau, so I was pretty familiar with the Devilfish platform, but the Rhino platform is quite a different animal. If I had bothered to do some research online, I may have discovered some helpful tips, like don’t bother to put in the inner bulkhead, or if you do, make sure to not glue it in crooked.

Really pretty crooked

When one glues the inner bulkhead in crooked, one gets a crooked Rhino (see above). There’s pretty much no other way to get around it. It annoys me a little bit, but I figure that it is a Chaos Rhino, so if it was all clean and straight and well-kempt, then that would be out of character for Chaos, wouldn’t it? As it stands currently, I’m nearly done, I’m just planning on adding some greenstuff for ‘Chaos corruption goo’ and some glue and baking soda mixture for ‘rusty moldy ick.’ These are technical terms, I admit, but I’m not the kind of guy to talk down to my audience.

Generally, it turned out okay, and I’m hoping things warm up a bit outside pretty soon so I can start spray priming in the garage. My sprayroom’s ventilation system isn’t installed yet, so I don’t want to use the rattlecan in the house until it is. I’m planning on trying the old ‘hairspray and salt’ trick with this Rhino’s paintjob, and I’ll write a blog post about that as I go through it step by step.

A Convention, a Chaos Rhino and a Computer Meltdown

Wow, that month went by quick. Sorry about the long stretch between posts. Things have been very busy.

Busy with what, you ask? Well, I was busy getting ready for the Fire & Ice convention in Manitowoc at the end of February. It’s a great local convention that hits at nearly 400 attendees. It’s filled with boardgames, RPGs, miniatures, card games, vendors, a costume contest, a Warhammer 40k tourney, and a lot more. It’s a great time, and I always look forward to going each year.

Running a miniatures demo for weirdos

This year I ran Song of Blades and Heroes demos, two on Saturday and one on Sunday. It’s always fun to run that game, and it was enjoyed by those who played. I had some problems getting prepared, as I seem to have lost (since the move) my big shoebox full of plastic D&D Minis that I use for demos like this. Luckily, as my wife and I were looking, she found a box of old Mage Knight minis, and I stayed up late building four small warbands the night before the convention. Everything worked out, even if the MK minis are of really lousy quality and I ended up not getting much sleep.

I also shot a lot of video while I was there, and did some interviews with the coordinators of the convention and of the 40k tourney. It was my first two camera shoot, and hopefully you’ll be able to see the results of the shooting soon. Keep looking here for more on that.

Since we last talked, I started building a Chaos Space Marines Rhino kit from Games Workshop. It’s a neat little kit, but it’s the first one I’ve ever built, and it hasn’t gone together as well as I’d like. I glued the inner bulkhead in a bit crooked, so now the whole vehicle is a bit crooked. I’ve been justifying it to myself by saying: hey, they’re Chaos Space Marines. If it was built perfectly, it wouldn’t be chaotic, would it? I should have the build finished this week, and I’ll probably put some photos of it up here.

Lastly, I was greeted on Saturday morning with a desktop PC that wouldn’t boot. I asked it why, and it told me it was because I didn’t have a hard drive. I assured it that indeed, I did have a hard drive and it clarified its position by saying that I didn’t seem to have a working hard drive. After hours of dinking around and driving back and forth to the computer center, I did have to agree that I did not have a working hard drive. Now I have to buy a new computer (and I have a strong suspicion that it won’t be another Dell) and go through all of that. I’m not sure if I want to build my own or buy a pre-built machine. I kinda need to figure it out quickly, though. If you have any suggestions, please let me know below or on my Contact page. And then, I get to go through the long process of re-installing all of my software and trying to get my digital life back in order. It could certainly be worse; I could be dead in a ditch somewhere.