CaptainPete

Well, that sold me on Q37... After I already ordered some books for Ghost Archipelago and pre-ordered SpellJammer... My wallet weeps.

I'm getting ready to start working on my "learn to play" crews, so I was wondering what people think of Quarantine 37 and The Last Prospector? I ordered TLP but I'm not sure if Q37 is worth it.

I'm trying to dig through my good sized collection of manga to find a one-off one that has mecha in it and I'm not having a lot of luck. I'm thinking about doing the second manga for Dominion Tank Police or the manga for Black magic, which is very different than the anime. Hmm. I'm also watching the Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles. I've seen it before but was totally lost because I had forgotten or not seen a lot of original stuff. This time around, it was a lot easier to know what the hell was going on. I'm going to be spending the rest of the morning cooking and cleaning. Can I stop having to be an adult now? I want a refund!

I have tons of them. It's been helpful the past few years, as I wasn't able to bring my laptop to work, to get those notes down and ideas hashed out. I actually had to go through them recently to pull out my notes for something I want to finish this year. A lot of my larger projects have several notebooks, sketchbooks, and graph paper. I think this is something else. It's like... One part imposter syndrome, one part stressing myself out because I feel like I *have* to be doing something. And maybe a few other things. As I put that story out there, I then sat down and cranked out a follow up. I was already planning it but I'm wondering if it's good enough or if the same people will like it and so on. And I force myself to wait to edit things because of that. While I'm waiting to let the thing cool, I usually try to do something completely different, so I'm not thinking about it. I also had some sinus issues this week, which kind of killed my motivation. So... Now, looking at it, I have no idea what's going on.

It looks like I'm suffering from "Idea ADHD" yet again. I keep coming up with new projects or ideas I want to work on and keep jumping around from project to project. And it is driving me up a wall! I went months without having much creativity and now I can't turn it off or get it to focus. I think that means I need to buckle down and get something done. Exactly what, I don't know yet. I'll probably try to direct it toward that group project but get some notes down for some of the others. Now, my next non-creative project is going to be working on my minis photography. I've got some ideas but I need to get things worked out. It'll be a nice distraction to get me to let the creative stuff to cool off.

These were taken at the same time as the last ones I showed off, so the lighting issue is the same. I'm working on the lighting. The cord in the background is a set of LED lights that I'm going to start fooling around. I used an older digital camera without flash, as I was afraid it would wash out the details. I'll keep experimenting with the set up.

So, I painted this one, too. I know that a lot of the colors are very bold but I wanted it to look like some old comics, with vivid colors. Let me know what you think.

This sounds familiar. Have you talked about it before? And I had a vague idea of what a ghost clown horror movie could be and it wasn't that. You could go for the "Scooby Doo Classic" and have a ghost clown haunting an amusement park. Or you could go for "inspired by real people" where there was a serial killer who lived in the house before and killed people in the clown suit but was buried alive by the community because he got off on a technicality in court. Or reverse it and the serial killer killed people dressed up in clown outfits and buried them in the garden. Either one of those could be done easily and well on a low budget.

I've been working on a cooperative story idea... Thing... With a few people and it's reminding me why I don't do this anymore. Right now, there's seven people involved but only three of us are really working on it. Of course, some of those already said they were busy, so I'm cool with kind of leaving them behind on the world building but I also worry about losing them as we might agree on something they don't like or they might feel like we don't want their input. That said, it's one of those "you get out what you put in" kind of thing, so I'm not letting it get to me. And now I have a few things to pick up with the money I got from my tax return.

My mind went to two different places with this: 1. You you want ghost clowns? Because this is how you get ghost clowns... 2. Perhaps an angry wife had enough of her husband wearing a clown getup and buried it to keep it away from him. One is a horror movie just waiting to happen and the other is a sitcom plot.

That's insane. I don't understand how they can do that. Good luck. For my end, my body is fighting me when it comes to sleep. Over the past year, I've been going to bed exhausted or just physically tired. Now that I'm not wearing down my parts, my body seems to be be wanting me to be pushed to the edge before I can fall asleep. And I'm already taking OTC stuff to help me bed down. So, I ordered food, I'm going to do dishes, and then I'm going to crash. Hard. Now, I need to start tracking down more raygun gothic looking drones for some Last Days: Zombie Apocalypse goodness.

Got trained at the other desk last night by a dude old enough to be my dad (he's a year old than my dad, actually) and he smokes. A lot. I like to dip out here and there for a smoke but this dude was like every 30 minutes. I'm not saying a thing to my bosses, because screw the man. He gets the job done. I've got a few Twitter writer friends that are talking about doing a co-op story and I suddenly feel like it's 1999 again. We'll see what happens... And now I need to get started on some things. I may make another tread for some single minis I took pictures of. And I might put some together if I get some requests after the blog post goes live.

Color theory is important. It's also why I swapped the flame colors as well. It also means that the red one has hotter flames.

Thanks. I'm trying to work on a better set-up for pictures but space is very limited.

So, I took some pictures this morning and was "encouraged" a while back to make a thread with some stuff. I'm not great but I paint for fun, not to win awards. There's two of these because I wasn't sure which color scheme to go with, so to follow the meme, why not both?

Photography happened. I need to get a better set up going. I also need to paint more, which I think is a higher priority... The weather has finally changed completely. It's no longer dry and cold, so my hands are healing. That was a really rough week. And since I'm no longer out on the beat, I don't have to get soaked all night this week. I still will on the way to work but I don't have to deal with constantly wishing I could light people on fire with my mind so I can get dry. Oh, I keep forgetting about this. I don't know if anyone remembers but I had some of my Bones I translucent minis get sticky... Last year? Year before? Anyway, I was showing them to my friend the other day and, sure enough, it happened again. I soaked them in 91% alcohol for a day or so and they seem okay. It just sucks. What to see how bad my lighting is? Sure you do!

Well, I *suppose* I could give them fair warning. 😛 In other news, no pictures happened tonight. I did get to hang out with my friend before bed but I was up way too late and then woke up at my normal time. I did just lay in bed for a few hours, I don't feel all there today. Nothing important got done last night. Except for a shopping trip. I spent twice as much as I usually did a few months ago. This sucks. However, my bank account had more in it than I expected. Which I promptly used to buy more stuff from Reaper. And some other things...

I mean the whole thing. Cities, towns, parks, everything. There will be no Texans, only wind turbines. Bury the state and let there be not a thing left! Muwahahaha! Yes, I think this is my super villain origin story... And then I remember this. 😛 In other news, I'm going to finally take some pictures of my painted minis. I'll have them up on my blog soon.

Finished my story last night. I almost finished it yesterday but just didn't have it in me. I'm finding that the more I get things done, the more I start to second guess myself and the stories. I'll probably have to take a break before I get tempted to throw my laptop in the toilet. In other news, I am going to be working desks from now on. Three days at one spot and two days where I've already been working. I'm so happy to be sitting down. I'm too old to be walking the beat. I just don't have it in me anymore. I do worry about my health a bit, as walking around has kept away a lot of health issues. I'll be able to make some other changes to off-set the changes. And I have a friend coming by today (I hope). I think we're going to play some Ghost Archipelago...

Well, I'm assuming that there might be alcohol and my ability to keep my damn mouth shut (already defective) fails when I have even one drink. So.... Yeah.

There's so many other places I have people I know online. There are some things that I would like Reaper, as a company comment on due to being located in Texas. And the government of Texas has done two things in the past year or so, one very recently, that makes it hard to not just take over the world so I can pave over the whole state and turn it into a massive wind power farm. That idea came from a Texas native, by the way. However, I have those other places to discuss those things and do so there. That's what the internet is for, isn't it? Screaming at people you don't know and calling them names? So, I rather like just talking about little plastic and metal people. And how to paint them. And what ones I'd like to see. And so on. The other problem is that things have gotten so bad in the last six years that friendships and families have been broken up because of their political beliefs, not to mention the religious and others, which are all tied up into a massive knot in the US (and some other places). If we were to discuss some of the topics, even politely, there's a very good chance that you might find that the folks you like might have very drastically different beliefs than you thought. There's a few people I interact with here that I freely admit I would slam with memes and taunts on, say, Twitter if we were talking there, due our drastically different beliefs on the topics of politics, religion, labor rights, Covid, and so on. I'm able to set that aside because I'm here to talk about those little people I mentioned earlier and not those issues. That said, that's probably why I won't go to ReaperCon for a while.

Another night and more writing done. Of course, the place I've been working at is falling apart, I swear. For those of you who don't live in cities, a lot of buildings built after 2000 or so switched, at least out here, to electronic locks and use FOBs (no, not the military TLA, the thing you use to turn on your car alarm, close enough). These systems are good for access control and replacing a FOB is cheaper than replacing a ton of locks around a building. The nifty thing about these systems is that you can use a computer program to pop a door open or closed, which is really handy. There are flaws to these systems, as many of them use magnetic locks, which are really electromagnets, and unlock if the power goes out. And now, there's a big flaw, as the system where I've been seems to be suffering a cascade system failure. At one point, none of the FOBs worked and they had to manually open the doors and then put someone in an elevator to press buttons, because they had to put it in independent mode. That means that it goes to the floor and stays there. So, yeah, hot mess all around. Last night, the garage gate was locked open and not one but two homeless dudes tried to walk right in, which isn't cool because every time the doors or gate mess up, someone gets in and busts car windows. And the loading dock was messed up so I had to got pop open the door manually without a jacket. As much as I enjoy working desks, this is becoming a nightmare. As for the state of the world today, not just overseas but in the US, I just.... I got nothing. Giant Meteor 2024!

In the original Deadlands system, they had variant Walkin' Dead for various environments where the bodies ended up before getting "inhabited." Insects do interesting things to bodies, post mortem, but the basics (that can be discussed on a full stomach) are that they will get rid of soft bits. It's not uncommon or unheard of for people in the forensics business to use beetles and others to remove the meaty bits to get to the skeletons. One of the more weird things that have happened was a skeleton that was left somewhere with a heavy mineral count and ended up with a skull-geode. I have a picture *sighs* somewhere...

So, one of the things I've discovered about my body as I've gotten older is that I can get extremely dry skin. On my hands. On my knuckles. Since we've dried out (and dropped to ice cold), my knuckles look like I got in a fight. It's not like I need to use my hands for anything. Nope. Not at all. I've got some cream I can put on my hands but I'm only suppose to when I go to bed and then I have to wear something over them. I usually use old socks. I think I'm going to put on a layer after I finish cooking. I'm also writing at work this week and it is fun times. When things quiet down and I put my music on, I can actually get stuff done. Tonight I got a call that someone thought they heard a dog on a patio after midnight. It was something like 20 degrees in Freedom Units and the wind was blowing. I poked around and couldn't hear anything but I will do something terrible if I find out someone actually did something like that. I hoping that the dog was at the patio door and whining, rather than being outside.

I believe there's a quote for that: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.