Java Fiend

How do you pronounce Ben's name anyway? Is it SAYNZ, or SEENZ, or what?

This comes up regularly on the Tolkien discussion groups.

d20? What's that? I and my friends still play AD&D, with Players Handbooks that have the big orange idol on the cover.

Hello? Hello, may I speak with Java Fiend? This is Java Fiend. Hello sir, my name is Jonathan... What are wearing, Jonathan? Are you alone? What color are your eyes? Uhh... How tall are you? Do you have blond hair? I love blond hair. [click] No, I haven't done it but I would love to try.

Sesame oil. Don't forget the sesame oil, it adds a great and very distinctive flavor. Except, it burns at high heat so don't use it as your main frying oil.

Ohh, now that's cool. It's so... otherworldly!

Angels wear boots?! ...and what in the name of all that's holy is an Astral Mauler?! Very cool.

Well you see, when a mommy ogre and a daddy human love each other very much...

Bakarathi! We haven't had a new Bakarathi figure in ages. Squeee!

I kinda like Hungarian notation.

Whoah, now that's a seriously huge hill giant. I love it.

A friend of mine has a son in the US Army who's stationed in Iraq, and he sent her some photos of a really big and nasty looking bug that he found in his tent. It was sort of a cross between a spider and a scorpion, and it was as big as your hand. He spent quite some time ranting about Evil Bugs. I thought it was a bit much for a bug, but I guess if you're writing home to Mom you can't very well rant about the really gruesome wartime stuff.

I'm one of those old school AD&D gamers who will not buy a Warlord figure -- or Warhammer, or Confrontation, or Rackham, or Freebooter -- because it's got multiple parts. I happen to like one-piece miniatures. As a result, my miniatures consist mainly of Reaper DHL, Ral Partha, Grenadier, Rafm, and reaching farther back, preslotta Citadel, and Superior. I even happen to like broccoli bases. So there. And isn't that what the Warlord line is for? Keep DHL one-pieced as much as possible, and integral-based too, thank you very much.

Try this location instead, and click on the Miniatures item on the navigation bar at the left.

Akuma, you should check Codex Draconis, an effort to catalog all the dragon miniatures ever. It's pretty ambitious.

So that's where the Beatles got that line in Maxwell's Silver Hammer!

Are those mammoth tusks poking out of her sack?

Speaking as a camera novice, I'd like to underscore one of Aryanun's implicit suggestions. Aryanun mentioned making sure the camera has a tripod mount. Get a tripod, and use it. It really, really helps with the stability of your miniatures photos. It seems obvious but it wasn't to me, not for the first six months.

Yep, the guys over at Emperors Choice indeed have flying sharks.

This is why it's so useful to use live models when painting, so you can get the colors just right.

Why do I call myself Java Fiend, and have a sprig of coffee beans as an avatar? Hold on, I'm not quite awake yet. Let me tell you once I've had my first cup.

Once the baby is born, for the first week or so you will be running on pure adrenaline, as if you were in an emergency situation. Then it will slowly sink in: This is not an emergency. This is not a crisis. This is what normal is, from now on. Good luck!

Yeah, doppelgangers! There hasn't been a decent doppelganger mini since Grenadier. Y'know, if you sculpt it right, you could have a fantasy doppelganger figure do double duty (doppel duty, heh) as a sci-fi Grey as well...

I can understand why angels, and other good-aligned creatures, are underrepresented by miniatures companies. After all, mostly you use miniatures when you need to run a combat, and mostly your PCs are going to be good-aligned, so you probably will have them fighting evil-aligned opponents. That's where the demand is for miniatures. Having said that, it would be nice to have not only more angels, but more celestial figs of various sorts. For example, it would be cool to have those guys with human heads and winged lion bodies, from Hebrew and Babylonian myth -- what are they called?

Ankheg. Slaadi. Modrons.