Exquisite Turmoil

Well, I just won myself a nice deal on a Vampire Counts lot on ebay, about which I am very excited. Ran me $112.50 (with 25 for shipping, which I think was excessive for sending parcel post, tbh, but it’s still a deal) for which I get:

• A VC rulebook (that I don’t need) ($22)
• 1 wight king / necromancer ($10-12, I’m not really sure, he doesn’t specify)
• 20 zombies ($35)
• 30 skeletons (20 spear, 10 swords) ($66)
• 10 ghouls ($22)
• 20 grave guard ($50)
• 1 corpse cart ($25)
• 8 black knights ($80)

So by my math, that’s $310 for a total savings of $173ish dollars (no, I don’t feel like calculating tax and the like for buying brand new, so we’ll settle on $173). My only issue is that the models are already painted, and the picture is (obviously) not close up enough to see HOW they’re painted. And, of course, the models are plastic so stripping is going to be a pain to repaint. Hopefully they’re not too badly done and the paint is thin so that I can repaint them my own way. If not, at least they’ll give me a crapload of extra models to throw around while I build up my army.

I’m figuring I’ll field the army as it is for now and just slowly strip down a few models at a time, repaint them, and add them back into the unit. Now, off to hunt for advice on stripping plastic models!

Well, as can be seen, my blog is working as intended so far as I can tell. I managed to get all of the pictures (I hope) looking like they should, but it required like — relinking all of them directly from my gallery page rather than uploading as I’m accustomed to, and then manually telling every single freaking picture to float either left or right. Ah well, at least it is working, excessive effort aside.

I’ve also changed my theme (like that was really hard to spot :p). Well, actually, I changed it about 700 times, but I think I’ve settled on this black and purple one and, yay, my most recent gallery images now display on the right side of the screen so people (not that any people read this :p) can see when I’ve posted new ones without my having to explicitly say so.

Anyway, if you notice anything about the new layout that needs adjusting, please let me know.

I mean, I know that it is a useful program and makes blogging easy for idiots like me. Well, easy for idiots like me if we never have to “update” or want to change themes, add functionality, etc. Thankfully idiots like me occasionally have intelligent husbands who can take care of these things for us.

Now, not to brag but — my husband is one of the smartest husbands in the world, I am quite sure. So when he has to spend a few hours trying to make something work it says to me that something is wrong. Yes, my blog is now working again. Yes, this stupid gallery program is installed. It doesn’t, however, appear to do anything other than put a new bar in my administration page that uh.. changes absolutely nothing no matter which options I check / uncheck / select / whatever possible thing there is to do to them.

And I HATE this stupid upgrade. All of my pictures now look like shit because it has decided to arbitrarily crop them wherever it feels like cropping them rather than resizing and / or making thumbnails. I am.. extremely displeased with this. I am a bit of an aesthetic, as anyone who reads my blogs agonizing about how to paint little plastic men should know.

The fact that my blog now looks like a random bit of text that chopped up pictures got vomited up onto.. well.. it kind of breaks my heart. Hopefully with a few days of blogging and posting pictures I’ll actually get used to this version and figure out how to make things look how they should look.

In any case, despite Wordpress sucking… Honey, thank you for spending hours fixing things for me and even going through my computer and refinding all of my old pictures to put them back up. You’re the best, and being with you makes me an extremely lucky woman.

So, my grandma leaves the house to go pick up some liverwurst for lunch (yum) and comes running back in the house — quite literally looking like she’s about the have a heart attack. “Snake!” she gasps out. So anyway, I go look out the front door and sure enough, there he sits, chilling out by my tires. So I call my darling husband and ask him wtf to do about it (I can’t tell if it’s a rattlesnake or something else) and, regardless, my grandmother won’t leave the house until it’s gone. I want liverwurst, the snake must go.

My darling husband, being so concerned for my health and safety.. tells me to get a broom. WTF? I’m not Steve Irwin — I’m not going to go wrap a rattlesnake around a broom while yelling “Crikey”, stick it 5″ from my kid’s face and then kiss it a few times before I relocate him to a new habitat where he can play with the other little poisonous beasties.

So I call my dad. He tells me to call the fire department. This feels retarded to me.. calling the fire department to come rescue us little girls from a snake, but I do it. The woman on the phone tells me to keep an eye on the snake from a distance so that the firemen can snag it when they get there. The snake, of course, does not want to cooperate and makes me chase him all around the driveway, through the side yard and into the back yard.

Where he proceeds to DEFILE my Bowflex. Finally he settles in a nice little nook by the hot tub. At this point, Katie’s boyfriend Trey tells her to walk up beside the snake slowly and chop it’s head off with a shovel. She doesn’t want to kill it, so he tells her to grab it by the neck. You can really tell, ladies and gentlemen, who truly loves you. Notice that our significant others want us to go snake wrangling. Our father wants us to call the fire department and stay the hell away from the possibly poisonous and ridiculously fast creature.

Finally some big burly men (three of them, to be precise) from the fire department show up to rescue us from our scaly friend. They, of course, start laughing at us (perched up on the hot tub, out of reach of the snake) because it is a bull snake and not a rattlesnake at all. They grab him up with some snakey-tong things and at least inform us that it is one of the largest bull snakes that they have ever seen. They throw it over the fence for us x.x Had I known that all they were going to do was pick it up and toss it five feet over the fence (through which it can easily just slither back into the yard..) I wouldn’t have called in the first place. I suppose if it had been a rattlesnake, they would have actually taken it away to the poison control center.

Ah well, there’s my excitement for the day!

As a PS here, for those of you making fun of me for thinking it might have been a rattlesnake, this is taken from wikipedia:

Bullsnakes are often confused for rattlesnakes, and killed by laypersons. Due to its coloration, dorsal pattern, and semi-keeled scalation; the Bullsnake superficially resembles the Western Diamondback Rattler ( Crotalus atrox ), which is also common within the same range. The Bullsnake capitalizes on this similarity by performing a very impressive rattlesnake impression when threatened. First, it hisses, or forcibly exhales through a bisected glottis, which flaps back and forth producing a very convincing “rattle” sound. It will also take on a rattlesnake-like “S-curve” body posture, as if it is going to strike. The Bullsnake will commonly vibrate its tail rapidly amongst the brush or leaves, and flatten its head to make it take on a more characteristic triangular-shaped head of the rattlesnake. These defensive behaviors are meant to scare away threats, not sound an attack. Their rattlesnake mimic is so impressive that it is frequently the Bullsnake’s very undoing when discovered by humans.

I’ve decided to go with a dapple horse for this particular knight. Unfortunately the lighting in the picture is awful so you can’t really see the coloring very well (it looks more brownish than gray in this picture and the.. uh.. dappling.. is practically invisible). I’ll attempt to take a better picture later (after I finish the head, likely) so that anyone who cares can get a better look at it ^_^ I think that this is my favourite knight so far. I really like #2 (the red martlet) because the gold / white / red look so nice together, but this heraldry is my favourite, even if the colors are not.

I need to figure out how I’m going to do my unit champions and standard bearers. I’ve been considering having the champions incorporate purple into their heraldry to make them stand out from the rest of the unit (as I intend to give them lances instead of stupid swords), but I was also kind of thinking that my standard bearers should be painted to match their standards..

Anyway, if both the standard bearer and champion are painted differently from the rest of their unit, I’m afraid it will look too.. glaring. Having one model with differences is one thing, but two? I just can’t decide..

Speaking of standards — my embroidery kit for my first standard arrived. I decided to go with a woman. It just seemed so much more striking to me. Hopefully I’ll get a good start in on this banner while I’m stuck at the hotel all week (July 3-8th, I believe) while Jamie is visiting. It’s on a 40 DPI scale and we’re looking 2″ x 2 1/2″ so.. well.. a lot of stitches. Hopefully it won’t take me more than a few weeks of working on and off, including the time out at the pool.

Looking at the image, however, just makes me despair over my standard bearer! I don’t want him to clash with his banner so I can’t just stick the banner on a random knight.. it needs to be color coordinated. I’d like to try my hand painting the woman’s face on his shield, but I’m really not sure that it is something I could manage. I’m not really a painter — the freehand that I do is very geometrical in it’s way, and painting a woman is, well… not. Ah well, I suppose that I have a few spare shields, so I can always give it a try and see how it goes. If I hate it, I guess I can just scrap it and pick some kind of feminine symbol (a lily or something) as the charge instead.

Yes, one of these days.. I will actually have readers. Then when I post questions, someone will actually respond. Anyway, this is my newest (fourth, if you don’t count my completely failed NMM attempt) knight. I’m digging the split / cross theme although I have a few things I’m not sure about and I wish that I could get more opinions. I suppose I could post on DakkaDakka but for some reason I always feel like an attention-whore when I post there. It’s not the membership, they’re all really nice and all that, I just feel weird for some reason.

Anyway, on to what I’m wondering about.

1. Should the lines on the left half of the shield be smaller, thus enabling me to fit three black stripes on?
2. Should I add a thin “outline” line of black (like around the cross) to the black lines on the left side of the shield?
3. Should the horse be black or white, because my knight is vain and would have matched his horse to his heraldry? Should the horse be gray to be a complementary color but add a little bit of contrast? Should the horse be brown to just be totally different and show that my knight doesn’t give a shit about fashion?
4. Do men have these kinds of problems when painting their armies?

Well, Jamie got the news today at her ultrasound (today was also her first wedding anniversary ^_^) and it’s a girl! So sometime in November-ish Dan and I will become an Aunt and Uncle for the first time to little Lilyana.

They’re thinking either Kate or Madison as a middle name at this point in time. Anya’s vote is for Lilyana Alicia and Alex’s only input is that they not name the baby “Transformers” because Transformers can be very mean.

I finally have an Alex quote to impart! This day shall go down in history, or something..

In a moment of drunken idiocy (always the best kind) Katie jumped off of her friend’s roof and into her friend’s pool and slammed her heel straight into the bottom.

Anyway, the next day my grandmother took her to urgent care to get some x-rays and find out if it was broken. When they came home Katie was on crutches and in a walking cast type of thing. Alex sees her, gasps and says “Aunt Katie! What did Grandma Joan do to you?!”

Well, my newest knight is moving along. I’ve finished half of the caparison (with the exception of one hoof that still needs to be done, but it’ll have to wait until after my green stuff fetlock repair dries, and a touch up on the back crescent).

BTW, while all of the legs sort of.. look painted, the back two (as in far side of the model, not hind legs) aren’t finished. I had mixed up a batch of paint for a palomino scheme and I figured I’d paint all the legs while I had the paint nice and moist.. but the back ones aren’t highlighted yet and the white isn’t done, since I haven’t actually started on the other half of the caparison.

Anyway, opinions are always welcome. Also taking ideas on heraldry for my next knight. I’m thinking I’ll go black / white on the next knight and that’ll give me a red/white, blue/white, green/white, and black/white. I’ve decided on white as my “unifying theme” with red / blue / green / black being my four primaries. So yeah, time for a black / white knight.

Alas, the title says it all. I am having Warhammer dilemmas. The Bretonnians have been my army of choice although, admittedly, I haven’t gotten much painting done. I have two completed knights and one that I had been working on but never finished (was trying out NMM and totally could not get the hang of it, so I scrapped it with a completed horse and a pair of legs ^^;;) and am currently underway on a third (fourth..?) model that will feature a blue / white quartered shield and a gold (yellow) crescent moon as the charge.

My actual dilemma, however, is that I’ve sort of fallen in love with Vampire Counts. We snagged the new book recently since Dan has had his eye on Vampire Counts for a while and I made the mistake of flipping through the book (I say that as if I haven’t read all of the Warhammer books that we have QQ) and I just fell in love. The lore for Vlad and Isabella, particularly, caught my eye and led me to want to proxy a battle or two and now I’m just hooked.. but I don’t want to abandon my Bretonnians and start a new project. If I keep going at this rate (paint a few lizzies, swap and paint a few horses, swap and paint some skellies) I’ll just end up with.. no painted armies.

So.. once and for all, WHAT SHOULD I PLAY? That’s not to say I won’t collect and paint a new army after I actually finish one, but which one should I finish first?