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.

The "Filters & Pages" button in the top right will give you more control over what blog entries will be displayed, or the following quick links can be used:

News Computer Games Wargaming Board Gaming Old Stuff

Stebloke's Website ©2008-2026

So, the final part of the Final Fantasy VII Remake series has been announced.

If, for some bizarre reason, you wish to read about my initial thoughts, click the following button:

Show / hide FF7 ramblings

It's been way too long since I last dipped my toes into the messy and frustrating task of 3D printing. The cold winter months and a new job have simply prevented me really getting back into it.

As I'd got most of a bottle of resin that was going out of date in May, I figured I should get to printing something, indeed anything, just to use it up.

I'd got so many things that needed printing, and ideas for games and accessories. Some less important things seemed like a decent place to start, rather than for my big games like Epic. It wouldn't matter so much if the prints came out a bit crappy because of the expired resin or my dodgy settings.

My initial idea was to print the calibration model again, to test the resin and maybe set me up better going forward. Even though I used pretty much the same settings as when I last printed it, this time it got completely stuck to the build plate. In my efforts to scrape it off, several of the corners snapped due to brittleness.

It wasn't looking great if I couldn't even print the test print model correctly.

Still, rather than tweak settings and spend another couple of hours printing it again, I decided to just barrel straight into it. I set up a scene with 4 potential bases for some cars for Gaslands, a game I couldn't even play until I printed some parts for it, as well as a bunch of guns.

Unsurprisingly, this print again failed, with all 4 bases losing their supports in the same place, and ending up all warped. I clearly did not get it set up right in that area. What's worse, removing these prints was even harder than the calibration print, and the rafts just kept snapping. This was even after halving the bottom exposure time to 10 seconds.

I quickly learned that the trouble I was having during removal was due to temperature. I was simply waiting too long after a print was finished, and everything was cooling too much to easily remove. If I got there while the prints and plate were still warm, they would slide off of there with very little effort.

So, those first bases were a bust, but at least the guns looked usable.

During my next printing effort, I proved myself to be an enormous idiot. In my frustration and eagerness to get the next print going, I forgot to tighten up the build plate onto the z-axis arm, and when I went to check on it a couple of hours later, the clamp was hanging nearly half off and nothing had adhered to the build plate. So a good clean and tidy up was required before I could go again.

Eventually, I got a rhythm going, and managed several somewhat succesful prints. Then, because removing the supports was causing quite a lot of pitting, I reduced their size, causing a massive failure printing a tank turret, which I had to print again. That was a 5-hour print down the drain.

There was an additional problem where a lot of the things were slightly warping when they were curing. I even took to leaving the supports on during this phase to see if it would hold things straight a little bit better, but it had little effect.

I'm guessing some of these issues would be alleviated if I had a proper curing setup, as I have only cured in daylight so far. I'll have to sort something out for my next little printing marathon, whenever that may be.

Despite all of these issues, I've managed to get some prints that at least look somewhat usable. Sure, I've still got to remove some of them from their supports after they've cured, but whatever.

So there can be no real complaints as long as I've learned something and managed to get something out of that old resin bottle.

And the things I've learned are thus:

• Never use light supports, especially if using anti-aliasing.
• Don't be frugal with the alcohol - have to get that stuff really clean to prevent it going tacky.
• Remove the prints from the bed while everything is still warm.
• Don't rely on daylight to cure things properly or evenly.

There are so many other things I looked at printing over these last few weeks, but I often had to find other things to print instead.

Most of the things I looked at need editing in something like Blender. Either they need fixing, splitting, joining, or modifying in some other way.

And that will have to wait. Probably a very long time.

We had just our 2nd game of Sheriff Of Nottingham recently, which like last time, was a 6-player game.

This time, I got absolutely rinsed, and not once was I allowed into Nottingham without someone checking my bags. Of course, this also included the time where I went for broke and tried to sneak in three crossbows.

This all meant I finished well off the pace in last, with just 83 points, over 40 points behind the winner.

---

I've introduced a few more players to The Gang, and after the three-player game from last time, I've now played both four and five-player games.

The four player game went very well, and we won our two games 3-1.

But this game gets harder with more players, and when we stepped up to 5 players we lost our first game 0-3. Then in the second game we were losing 0-2 before things started to click and we managed to win 3-2.

We then wanted to play a decider, but lost this 1-3 as we all seemed to get a lot of very similar hands, and were unsure of where to place ourselves in the order. And then as we didn't want to end the evening on a loss, we played one last game and managed to win this one 3-1.

---

Our last game of 40K-S was the last game we played with the previous version of the rules from back in December. This is because I've finally pulled my finger out and created a slightly updated version for when we get around to another game.

In this one, I sent my Marines against Scoob's unholy trinity of Chaos, Orks and Dark Eldar, in a 3600pt game.

I started pretty weakly, but a string of good saves kept me in the game and I was able to keep kicking out consistent damage to win 3048-2547 after 4 turns.

A bit back, my Mum had a problem where some of the plastic on the inside of her laptop had snapped. This meant the monitor bracket was loose inside the machine, which was obviously quite the pain indeed.

To remedy this, I got some very small bolts, and drilled through the outer case of the laptop, which allowed me to bolt the bracket back to the case.

It's not tidy, but it does the job.

Then for some weird reason, I thought I'd see if I could get that old IBM PS2 keyboard to work. After taking the whole thing apart, I cleaned over all of the boards and pads with isopropryl alcohol, but after trying it again, it was still faulty.

Oh well. Into the bin it went. A little less clutter in the loft I guess.

And very recently, after reading about how it was a good idea to put another SSD into the PS5, as the main one in there is not replaceable, I decided I too should do this.

Not that I play my PS5 enough to wear out the main SSD, but still. I only wish I'd done it sooner, so SSD prices were not so high as they are these days...

I am however disappointed that it's speed is not what is stated on the box. However, I'm led to believe this is a problem with the PS5's hardware rather than the SSD, so I'll let it slide.

40 years.

That's how long it's been since I had my very first cinema-going experience, when I saw a film which was part of my favourite franchise back when I was a kid: Transformers.

In honour of the film's anniversary, and because I'm a stupid nostalgic freak, I thought it would be a good time to finally play Devastation, as it's something I really should have played all the way back in the PS3 era.

As the game was no longer available on PC, I had to look at getting it second hand for console.

I'd have much preferred the PS4 version, but whenever I saw it up for sale it was always way too expensive. This left me with just the PS3 version I could use, though as I did not want to use my old console again due to the lack of screenshot capacity, I was left with learning to emulate the PS3 for the first time.

Luckily, RPCS3 is only slightly more complex to set up than something like PCSX2, which is not exactly that hard itself. The only problem I had, which is a known issue when emulating this game, is that the cutscenes play in very slow motion. This led to me looking at some of them on Youtube, but mostly I just skipped them and played without really knowing what the story was.

Firstly, I was actually quite surprised by how hard this game was. Or at least, how hard it was to play it well. I was expecting more of a button-masher, but you really have to be quite precise on your dodges and parries to be the most effective.

It also didn't help that the controls were a bit funky, especially in vehicle mode. There was also a very strange lock on system, if you could call it that. It just auto-locks on to the nearest enemy whenever you attack. This is very disorienting if the nearest enemy is behind you when you're trying to attack someone in front, particularly at range.

Because the bots can all be upgraded individually, I just stuck with Prime and pumped all my points and effort into making him as strong as possible. This became more apparent nearer the end of the game, when I realised that I could spend credits to upgrade his stats, which made a lot of fights a lot easier than they had been.

In fact, I found the easiest chapter to be the last one by far. I got S ranks on several of the missions, and got an A overall. This was a marked improvement over all of the other chapters, which all ended with me getting a C.

There weren't really any other problems, but I suppose it would have been nice to spend more time in other locations, as most of the game takes place in the same city, and re-uses the same map.

A lot of the boss fights were also repeated, with especially the Constructicons popping up multiple times.

It was also very weird seeing how big they made the fully-formed combiners. I mean, Prime should at least be up to Devastator's knees, not down around his ankles.

Thinking about it, the other combiner in this, Menasor, was an even stranger fight, as they made him able to move so fast for such a big bot. It just seemed really absurd.

It was however very cool to hear a lot of familiar voices, as a lot of the 80s cartoon actors voiced their characters again in this.