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

There have been a few more battles waged across our available boards.

Up first, Gareth challenged me to another game of Epic, which saw us each choosing a 6000pt army.

G took command of the Chaos forces, and selected a smaller, tougher, more elite army, while I went with quite a lot of smaller Eldar units.

Things were pretty even in the first turn, but in the second, one of my detachments got completely minced as the Chaos army charged into close combat.

My long range shooting ended up being largely ineffective, and I couldn't quite take the last wound from several enemy units which would have ended up breaking them.

The game ended after 3 turns, with the score 3999 to G and 2598 to me. Even though the VP target was 4000, it was pretty obvious at that point who the victors were.

---

The first of our two most recent 40K games saw a bit of a Tyranid civil war. Scoob went full on Nidz, while my little bugs mind-frelled some Imperial Guard and brought them along for the ride.

The first turn was pretty good for me, and I made some good rolls. But on the second turn, Scoob did his signature deep strike invasion, and was able to get many charges off. In addition, my rolling luck started to turn sour.

Dropping my own deep striking units for the start of the third turn backfired, when Scoob again got the initiative and was able to intercept my reinforcements. My rolls started to get even worse, such as when 10 Genestealers and the Broodlord attacked Scoob's Psychophage, which at the time only had a single wound remaining, and they somehow couldn't kill it.

This game saw us running out of time, so I had to withdraw. Though it was unlikely I could have clawed my way back into this one, at the end I only needed one wound to wipe the Psychophage, one wound to break the Hive Tyrant, and one wound to break the Norn Emissary, so may have got some good points.

But as it was, it ended 1351 to 1006 in Scoob's favour.

My man of the match was my Officer John Guyman, who Power-Fisted both the Neurolictor and the flying Tyranid Prime out of existence.

And our latest game saw some strange allegiances, when I took my Marines and Eldar to face off against Scoob's Space Wolves and Chaos.

In probably our fastest game yet for death and destruction, we both ended up with very little left after four turns.

T'was a shame then that I ended up with the most beat up of the two very beat up armies.

Highlights included yet another successful deep strike by Scoob's Bloodletters, that dropped in to annihilate my Assault Marines and Captain in one stroke. And one of my Dreadnoughts that exploded and took out several of the Blood Claws that had just wrecked it.

Most useless units in the game were my other Dreadnought, that ran backwards and forwards trying to find a suitable target, and Canis Wolfborn, who skulked down the flank and was unable to find any combat.

The game ended 2380 to Scoob and 1923 to me.

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.