Greetings. I am Stebloke, and I am a bit strange. This website contains my blog, where you can read about the things I create, the games I play, and any other things I get involved in.

I make this blog mostly because I like to look back on the things I do and feel nostalgic, but also because it keeps me motivated to keep pushing on with my backlog of nerdy little projects and tasks.

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My usual winter painting shenanigans are continuing, primarily with five more Blood Bowl star players.

The selection this time consisted of five players of very different heights, evident when they all lined up together.

I also got stuck into the players Scoob gave me a while back, with the star Wardancer and Treeman in the mix.

The model I'm using for Bertha Bigfist is the first 3D printed one I've properly painted. Much like the 3D printed Tifa Lockhart, who will appear back on the blog at some point, I had some issues with very obvious layer lines on some of the more upward facing surfaces. That's something I'm really going to have to be mindful of.

But still, I think she'll work, and to be honest, may never even get used. To be even more honest, none of these players will ever get used again if I don't sort out the ERL house rules I started.

This painting leaves me with just six individual players in my collection left to paint, and then the Lizardmen and Wood Elf teams also. Of course, I've got so many ideas for new teams and players. Ideas which will only increase if I really get into the printing side of things.

Just too many "ifs" and "whens" to keep up with.

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And here's the snaps of the latest Blood Bowl players I've completed:

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It's not just Blood Bowl stuff in the painting queue. After finishing my Warlord Titans, I got back to some Orky goodness and have painted the Deathskulls Slasher Gargant.

During the course of all this painting, I finally ordered some proper wet palette paper and sponge, so the old Greggs wrappers that I'd been using can all go.

I had no idea I'd saved up so many of those wrappers. Just how much Greggs did I used to eat? It's probably a really good thing that I don't do that job any more.

After a pretty solid June, July and August, my game completion rate has dropped again.

Desperately needing to tick another game off the list, and being as today is Halloween, I decided to go for a short, horror-ish game.

This game, Carrion, is only horror-ish because this time, we get to play as the monster as we attempt to escape from a variety of different underground labs and facilities.

The foolish humans who have been keeping us in a jar for study must now face the wrath of this snarling, red mass of teeth and tentacles.

Gotta say, I really quite enjoyed this game. At its core, it's a platformer with some light puzzle elements, but it's the fact that we have to fight and kill the humans which made this different.

As we go through the game, we can devour new genetic material from the labs, which gives us different powers and abilities, such as invisibility and defensive spikes.

The humans aren't always pushovers, though. Even a regular person with no armour and a simple handgun can cause some serious damage if allowed. There are also soldiers with electrical shields, people with flamethrowers, people piloting mechs armed with miniguns that can tear you apart in seconds, and other things like automated turrets and drones.

We must use our different powers to tackle all of these, as well as figure out how to escape, in order to succeed.

The only thing I would say is that the game really could have done with some kind of map system. I don't know how a monster like this would even have a map, especially when it doesn't really know where it is or where it's going, but it certainly would have helped in a few situations.

Overall a pretty short game, a pretty cool concept, and a pretty fun time.

Now Scoob's game room is ready for some action, we've played a couple of games of our 40K-S rules. It's been quite a while since we've mucked about with them, so it was about time we started to evaluate whether or not it is a rule set that we should keep developing.

Firstly, in a roughly 1800pt game, I rocked up with a very simple Space Marine army, only to have Scoob drop a Stompa on me. Still, I was empowered by cheesburger pizza, so I gave it my best shot.

We didn't have very long to play this game, so only got 2 turns done. Surprisingly, my waves of bolter fire caused some good damage on the Stompa, while the Stompa's guns were less effective than what we would have thought.

But then, while a couple of my other units tried to deal with the Ork Warbikes on the other side of the table, a horde of Ork Boyz charged out of the Stompa and into combat with my Tactical Squads, hacking a bunch down.

I'm guessing things would have gone downhill for me from that point, but we didn't have time to continue this little test.

A couple of weeks later, during which I spent hours staring at code and spreadsheets in order to improve the army picker, and get more units into the game, we went to war again.

In a roughly 2800pt game, I saw myself commanding my entire current Eldar force, minus Lelith Hesperax, against pretty much all of Scoob's Tyranids.

Now, back when I first started to collect Eldar, I also started to collect Tau, with the idea being that they were going to be allies. Of course, the idea was that the Tau were going to handle the long range firepower, while the Eldar moved onto the board to deal with the remaining enemies at much closer range, and also handle objectives.

Unfortunately, with absolutely no long range firepower in my Eldar army, barring a twin Bright Lance on a Wave Serpent, I could only try and kill the Nidz by getting close. And as you may have guessed, being close to the Tyranids is exactly what they want, and my little pointy-eared lads and lasses got their faces absolutely munched on by all those bugs.

By the end of just turn 2, the outcome of the game was pretty obvious, and I called it.

Got to say though, I was very disappointed that we only got two turns done in about 6 hours. Sure, we were constantly discussing rules ideas, and we stopped for a while to fill our greedy bellies with Chinese food, but I was hoping these rules would run way faster than this.

Still more work needed, I guess...

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Way back in February, before I lost access to the work unit for good, I got the Epic Goffs and Evil Sunz set up for their varnish coats.

For all of the metal models, I hit them with a thick gloss coat first, before then giving all of the models their matt spray down.

There's been no Epic painting since then, except for some sporadic work on my Warlord Titans that I started to renovate back in April.

The Epic 40K metal titan needed the most work on the armour, but because of the design, with all the hard edges, it was probably the easiest to paint.

The old "Beetleback" titans have lots of large and curved armour sections, and I never know how to deal with them at my skill level. I always feel like I should get an airbrush for models like that, but I don't want to spend all that money on a tool I may only use a handful of times.

I decided to once again use some of my many transfers on the two plastic Imperial titans. This time, I made a bit of a cock up when I painted matt varnish over the top of them. I shook the varnish up, then took off the lid and got some varnish from the underside of it, rather than squeezing some out onto a palette. I should have absolutely taken the latter option, as I didn't notice until it started to set that the varnish on the underneath of the lid had started to go a little lumpy.

And now that lumpiness is evident on the models.

Sigh. I mean it's not that bad, but still...

Painting the Slaanesh titan, I completely forgot from when I was painting my black Hive Tyrant all the way back in 2015 that the shitty GW washes can't be thinned with water. So once again I ended up with little white spots in all the recesses, and had to patch things up as best I could. Fucking hell GW. Your washes suck. I mean what kind of water based acrylic paints can't be thinned with water?

At least when I threw on another transfer I didn't cock it up this time.

Getting around to the Tzeentch titan was also interesting, as I was having to finish off a model that I had started an entire 14 years ago.

There were lots of details that I think I was just going to ignore back in the day. But older, more critical me wanted to make a bit more of an effort. I also added bits of paint to the transfers to hide how bad they had gone down back in the day. It's not ideal, but better than it was.

I did actually finish these models yesterday, but I'll wait to snap piccies until their respective armies are also done.

Which might be a while...

I recently took on the task of cleaning out my niece's PS4, as it sounded like it was auditioning to become a helicopter.

I didn't realise just how many different PS4 models there are, and I had to hunt through a bunch of different Youtube videos in order to find some useful ones.

The tear down went easy enough, except for the Blu-ray drive's power cable, which I clearly yanked on a little too hard, and snapped one of the wires.

I stripped the entire console down into its parts, before cleaning and dusting all of the covers and components as best as I could for someone who doesn't own a compressed air can.

Then I went to town with some cleaning solution, and I got that APU and heat sink sparkling, before looking at putting it all back together.

While it was open, I figured it made sense to replace the little battery in there, as by this point, the old one must have been running on fumes.

When I've replaced thermal paste on my PCs before, the recommendation is always to put a pea-sized amount right in the middle of the chip, so it gets spread out when you screw the heat sink down.

But here, I read that it was recommended to gently spread it out beforehand. I'd never done this before, but I gave it my best shot.

Then I just had to wait for a few days, until the replacement cable rocked up so that I could put it all back together.

I suppose my own PS4 will need doing at some point.

Not looking forward to that...