In seemingly alternating bursts. I’ve actually been up to quite a bit in the last week or so since writing here. In relatively chronological order, I’ve been playing a good bit of Infinity! Undeniably my favorite miniature wargame. It kind of catches me coming and going because I love the ‘orders’ system. Then you add to that my love of the futuristic (but good future) sculpts and background…it’s pretty much a solid hit for me. I just don’t feel the appeal for the ‘grim darkness’ of the future…because if we’re looking from even the 1950s to today, things have generally gotten a lot better in my opinion. It’s definitely not perfect, but in my tiny corner of the universe the people I know and work with really seem to be trying to make it better. Hmmmm… Actually retyped this several times after waxing too philosophically! Opinions are not in fact like assholes, because everyone has LOTS of opinions, and I’m determined not to make this some opinionfest… Evidence! That’s what we need! So here’s evidence of my most recent Infinity games in the StrikeZone Wotan campaign. I decided to put them all in one place so far. Might come back add new ones or just make new posts. We’ll see.
Proper Care and Feeding of Pupniks
MVZ: Most Valuable…Zhanshi?!
Bar Fight on Sygtir-1
The Triumphant Return of Zombie Salty Bob
The Combined Army Could Not Care Less
Those have actually been properly fun to put together. I’ve been using Prisma for the filter and then PicSay Pro to add captions. It’s just kind of entertaining; I know what ‘happened’ in a game, in terms of X shot Y, Y punched Z in the face…but when you sit down after the fact and try to write out what actually happened, you find yourself starting to name the characters and making up a more cohesive story of what happened.
Bonus! I also learned more about photo editing in GIMP. It’s how I made some of the images like the featured image for this post. As I’ve learned taking close ups of miniatures on a camera phone, depth of field is a complete jerk, so what I’ve now learned to do is take multiple photos holding as still as possible (yes I should have a tripod…but that’s pretty inconvenient in the middle of a game), then go back later import them into Gimp and try to overlay the focus of each photo. Kind of a fun process and pretty new to me.
Oh…lastly…more work in the garage today… It feels like a bit of the end of an era. I decided it’s finally time to dismantle the CNC machine. Amazing how quickly something like that comes apart…and sad in its own way. The poor CNC machine was just a victim of too many problems. On the one hand it could only cut plywood and some hardwoods…very very slowly… It also had a ridiculous toolchain ie: design the part in whatever CAD, import to Heeks CNC, basically extract the outlines which sometimes mostly sort of worked, then make sure you have the right bits, speeds, feeds, etc set up, run the G-Code creator… put the file in the shared folder… shut down windows and boot into Linux to run Linux CNC… realize you made a mistake… boot back into Windows… screw with the gCode… etc… Also as an added bit of wonderful functionality, the lack of breakers in the garage meant that I had to power up specifically and I could not operate any other devices on that circuit… I also had to watch it to make sure it didn’t light itself on fire… you know again… It was also insanely loud. So that left me with an overall process that took a long frustrating time to get the part to start cutting THEN left me sitting there staring at it, because I couldn’t do much of anything else while it ran…
All that whinging on though…the CNC did its job. I did learn a HUGE amount about CNC, gCode, toolchains, tooling generally…and I had a lot of fun building it. It’s also left me with the confidence to design or build one again…this time knowing SO much more. So yeah…Project Success! Not a brilliant success, but still a good one!
It is amazing how months of work went into it and it took…oh maybe an hour and half to have it pretty much disassembled and any of the valuable components stripped off… Admittedly a CNC machine made of MDF and some bolts does not have many valuable components remaining…
Spiderwebs are nonconductive right? I’ll definitely keep all the stepper drivers for the next project…that serial controller though…what a pain to deal with! Either use linux or Windows XP…Linux is fine it’s just all my other CAD/CNC stuff is Windows only…
Bah! I’ve been typing too much! Time for bed!
It Rhymes with Hockey 