Those Animals: Tame (and weird)

 Couple of things mixed together here!

animals tame (and other)

Alright, getting some things crossed off the list. This lot have mostly actually not sat in the drawer for too long - in fact, two of the models only arrived a few weeks ago! Not too bad. But then again, the Necromunda Wyrd was in the pile for the failed Old World Army Challenge from 2023, so let's not brag.

melty men

First off, some melty men. Like last time's mootants, these are Thunderchild Miniatures. A few layers of yellows, contrasts, washes, drybrushes, glazes, picking out the white teeth and eyes, varnish. Fun and easy. Sorry they're not in the group photo, this is what happens when you break up the painting and photography but not the blog post (also are they even really in the animal theme? eh)

melty butts

I deliberately painted them with a gooey industrial base so I can plonk them as antagonists on any board and they'll look just fine. I love these guys and am glad they aren't languishing in a drawer forever more. Now they can languish in a cabinet! Or a different drawer! yayyy

Orientalism!

This fun little set comes from Eureka. The rest are forthcoming as part of some generic civilians, don't worry. I like it for a bit of colour, even if it is a cliche. I painted the snake as a monocled cobra because the eye motive is going to come up on some other miniatures and to give it a it of character past 'snake'.

Old mate has more-or-less denim shorts and an experiment with a dusky skin tone. I think he came out okay.

eggs

These are from the latest Colony 87 kickstarter - which only finished delivery this month! Wow! So fast! These are painted inspired by cassowary eggs, which are bright green. Uh, I promise the sticks and base are painted differently....

Little Guy

I like to think this thing is actually incredibly vicious, with those long sharp front claws. This is also from that recent kickstarter, so this is one of my shortest turnaround times between receipt and painting. Unlikely to be repeated (although others from this delivery are in the now-undercoated pile...)

kitties

These are phelynx from the 'new' (yes I know they restarted it eight years ago) Necromunda Escher range. I just think they're fun sculpts; here painted similarly as the 'Eavy Metal team have painted the Phyrr Cats. White with pink stripes is a bold look.

The fact that they come with collars implies that these are owned, possibly by Julius Samarkand.

Wyrd Beastmaster (Aly Morrison) and Pals (Trish Carden)

This fellow doesn't quite match the others. He's based for my other Necromunda gangs on the same kind of ruined landscape that I use for Death Guard. As I said above, he was on the list for the failed Old World Army Challenge. While I wasn't quite able to base and prepare anything else in that drawer during the fit of productivity that resulted in these other civilians, I did get this guy ready. And so here he is!

His friends were especially fun to play with...

Beastmaster

I kept him fairly simple, browns and easy tones. I did try to have multiple browns on the loincloth, but they got muddled in washing and I kind of lost interest in doing more. I like the eventual outcome just fine, and I'm trying to get away from getting bogged down. I have a lot of unpainted dudes!

Beastmaster, rear

Great textures on this model.

My favourite detail is that he has a flute. Aly thinks he's funny.

rat

These rat sculpts are so good. Really nobody does it better than Trish Carden. This guy is a mixture of mammalian grey fur and blue-green reptilian scales. Great, great fun.

rat

This one has buboes and sores, one wide staring eye that I did in whites. I can't quite remember what I did for the tail, presumably a thinned wash and Trust The Trish Sculpt (can't go wrong). The rest was painted as for pale human flesh, with some red and purple washes to make him look yucky.

rat

And finally, this horrible little tumorous thing. Human skin tones on his skin, and the rest done as wet, wet bloody tumours. Final coat of gloss varnish on those to really bring it home. Absolutely wonderful to paint.

oops, out of focus. you get the idea

That's it for this entry! Those of you following along on Instagram might have some idea of what's next...

Those Animals: Baggage

Share the load.

green transportation alternatives

I haven't gone anywhere, I just haven't had much to share. It's been either too hot or too wet to paint, and I'm so busy at work - and consequently exhausted - that I haven't been able to schedule any games. But I have assembled, cleaned, and based a ton of new additions to the civilian project (and just in time to receive more Colony 87 from another kickstarter too, so I feel very embarrassed not to have done the last one...) -- and last week I was finally able to get out the spray undercoat. There are a couple of different things in train.

Let's start with a baggage train, eyyyy

After Action Report: Second Squats

 I have noticed that a cat will turn up her nose at a piece of meat if I hand it to her, but she will devour it with gusto if she has "stolen" it. The meat is the same, but the difference lies in the predator's delight in recognizing itself.
   - Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

Ruins of Saint-Mina-Outre-Eaux, Finistère

Scouting action, withdrawal, feint, cautious probe, flattening artillery barrage, feint. The bastards were dug in pretty well - a tacky and reductive thought, not worthy of the son of a pâtissier - and so far the Guard had been unwilling to commit fully. Nobody wants to try and dig out a 'dwarf.

Command was getting impatient with the slow pace. Finistère was as fringe a world as the name implied. Once at the outstretched fingertip of Imperial colonisation efforts, the rotting world had been left to ferment by the contraction of the empire from coreward space since the sack of Badab. This was the first Commissar the world had seen in three generations, most like.

And now here he was, crawling his delicate son-of-a-pastry-chef arse through some backwater grass analogue that reeked of petrichor and ozone and whatever the hell those abhumans used in their anti-plant munitions, Betsy hooked over one shoulder. The Saint-Saëns CXLIV had brought in their ratling auxiliaries, along with a platoon of hulking "Southers" from Đại Du'o'ng. Who knew if those pale barbarians even had a regimental number. It wasn't like they had uniforms -- wait. Was that a motortrike engine?

No whole-of deployment photo, oops.
I deploy on the left of this photo!

Friend of the blog Mangs has a new 6'x4' table and when I asked to help him break it in, he suggested a game of second edition! Neither of us have played a game of second in decades, but he still has all his templates and cards and such, while I've painstakingly reacquired the rulebooks (no templates, though) - so why the hell not?

I suggested some initial minor modifications to the Squats army list in Codex: Army Lists to bring them more in line with the Rogue Trader-era Brotherhood list, as that's what I've been using to organise my collection (as per my old tumblr post on the subject), to which he readily agreed. I then counted up more-or-less what I have painted and arrived at 1560. Mangs put together about the same in Imperial Guard (he didn't deduct points for stripping the Leman Russes of heavy bolters) and we were off.

We avoided psykers to keep it simpler, still got half the rules wrong (Leman Russes have targeters! and I probably had my bikes do hit and run attacks very wrong!), and used way too much terrain, as we usually play each other in skirmish games.

But we set up, deployed, and played all four turns with very infantry-heavy armies in around three hours flat and had a blast (sorry) the whole time. Hell yeah. Second edition is back, baby.

Project: Scabby Terrain

On moonless nights, when the air is still, vessels from across the Turnip world disappear, sucked down the rusty plughole of death to a forgotten ship’s graveyard far below the world known as the Abyss.
   - Scabz, Apocrypha_Now and Max Fitzgerald

normal oil refinery

Ages ago, famous internet miniatures weirdos Max Fitzgerald and Apocrypha_Now collaborated on a game of rusted hulks fighting each other on an oil-slicked black ocean. It's called SCABZ. I got very excited about it, along with the new Turnip-universe game Max was working on called Swill - and then Swill got put on some kind of indefinite hiatus and I lost a lot of emotional impetus.

I still haven't built the ships I intended to buy, although I have gone through a lot of cans of fish.

But, somewhat unusually for me, I did build a lot of scenery first (wild, I know). Some of it I mentioned in my year-in-review for 2025, where I decided not to count it until I finished the final piece. Which I did, a few weeks ago. It's the normal oil refinery, above.

Scabz calls for 3-7 pieces of terrain measuring roughly 5”x 5”, representing wrecked ships, sunken row houses, corroded naval mines, decaying docklands or islands of rotting fish. I've made:

Project: Wet Ømens

 I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite.
   - "Dagon", H.P. Lovecraft

Church of the Fleshkeeper

Welcome back to another installment of "I made a small warband as a break from my larger projects." This time, it's a gang of horrible fishy friends for Ømen Tide. Created by Paolo Boracchi and Simon Schnitzler, two of the luminaries of the Inq28/weirdos-on-Instagram world, Ømen Tide is a tiny skirmish game of salt-soaked body horror, religious fanaticism, and that icky feeling you get if you accidentally touch seaweed while at the beach.

You can find the rules and much more for free at the Patreon.

I found the aesthetic and the inq28-inflected 'make your own' bit as inspiring as always - plus, technically, you only need three models for a warband. I got carried away and made a miniature of every role in the Church of the Fleshkeeper, but I do have some things wrong with me.

I may even make a terrain board, but only if I wind up doing a Mordheim-y waterfront - I've got too long a to-do list to commit to that sort of thing... discipline is boring

Repost: After Action Report: Skirmish on Qyzylqum XLII

+ + + TRANSMITTED: Ootheca
+ + + RECEIVED: Badab Primaris
+ + + DESTINATION: CLASSIFIED
+ + + DATE: ERROR. Ref. 00-00-0-CHRN/1
+ + + TELEPATHIC DUCT: Zechariah-n008808
+ + + REF: Inq/06048102||0891-40-42/MNRN
+ + + AUTHOR: CLASSIFIED
+ + + SUBJECT: Qyzylqum XLII, Skirmish, 880.41
+ + + METADATA: Mantis Warriors; engagements; Malachi; heretic astartes; renegade astartes...
    Cross-ref extended metadata file 0891-40-42/MNRN-α
+ + + ACCESS GRADE: Sangria

+ + + Thought for the Day: Non vi, sed verbo + + +

+ + + ACCESSING + + +

c.880.M41, the Maelstrom. Nomadic space pirates which had been using the Sinistral Gate to launch raids on Imperial shipping were growing bolder and more savage in their attacks. Intelligence from Ordo Hereticus quisling units among pirate factions report the growing spread of Chaotic influence. Several bands of human and sub-human renegades had fallen under the sway of demagogues spreading the worship of Malachi the Surly, a Daemon Prince of Khorne and Wielder of theBanesword (cf the Cruor Event; the Caedis Incident; Sanguis VII; the Neco City Massacre;
+ + + ERROR: REFERENCE FILE IN EXCESS OF MEMORY
+ + + TERMINATE SERVITOR AND RE-ACCESS + + +

+ + + ACCESSING + + +

2025 in Review: Literature

 Alright, let's do it. Last day of the year!

2025: In Books

Last year was a little tough. Lots of life stuff. This year, despite everything, I somehow managed to do way better in terms of reading. I think having a regular pattern helps, making sure I prioritised reading helped, but also I read some really fucken cool stuff this year. I experimented with Scandi-noir, I read some things I'd been meaning to read for years, yeah. Good things.

Rules

Only physical books count - the rare audiobook or ebook do not - and neither do graphic novels, nor any re-reads. A 'book' is defined as the thing between two covers - so an omnibus of three novels and two short stories still only counts as one book.

I think that for 2026, I'll drop the graphic novels not counting part. Not counting them means that I have a small but growing unread pile - and they take about as long to read as a short novella anyway, and those count.

For the past couple years, I read in a pattern:

• No more than 1-in-5 books can be a franchise tie-in novel.
• At least 1-in-5 books must be authored, co-authored or edited (for anthologies) by a woman. 
• At least 1-in-5 books must be in translation. 

This results in a cycle of Woman-Translation-Franchise-Free Square-Free Square. It's fun to have a pattern - and ensured I read at least 20% of female authors, something that's challenging when you read books with dragons on the cover - but this year, I did something a little different.

Because January 2025 had accidentally had a theme of 'women and books in translation', I decided that each month would have a theme, mostly with really stupid and painful pun titles. I'm going to put each month below the cut, if you want details.

2025 Results

Everyone loves an analysis. How did we do in 2025? Did dropping the cycle rule make a difference? 

Total: 83 books (up from 35 in 2024)

Women: 34 books - 41% (up from 37% in 2024) [+1 NB]

In-Translation: 25 books - 30% (up from 20% in 2024)

Tie-in: 6 books - 7% (down from 20% in 2024)

Works in translation: 1 Arabic; 1 Danish; 3 French; 1 Old French; 1 German; 1 Greek; 1 Hungarian; 4 Icelandic; 6 Japanese; 1 Russian; 1 Serbo-Croatian; 1 Sumerian; 1 Swedish; 1 Yoruba; and 1 anthology with various languages of Africa.

So... pretty good. I read more women, I read more translated works (although having a 'noir' month combined with 'get into Scandinoir' made that pretty easy), and I read fewer Warhammers. An excellent result.

Unfortunately, my shelves are now groaning with unread books that either didn't fit into their monthly categories or otherwise have been deprioritised, so I have a feeling that for 2026 I may drop the rules... we'll see...

Okay, who wants to see some truly stupid monthly themes?

2025 in Review: Miniature Wargaming

 Well, I'm not going to finish anything in the next 27 hours, so let's wrap it up.

currently on the mat

My son's beautiful eyes still glow in the daylight, don't you worry about that, but now that he's running around and not a little potato baby I am less willing to post photos on the blog. Other than that, this has been as crazy a year as everyone always complains in these things - changed roles at work, juggling parenting and a far more stressful role (and for less pay, thanks inflation) without the ability to work as flexibly (see parenting) has meant that finding time for hobby things is very hard.

Also, I tried to be a bit more disciplined than usual, as mentioned in 2024's wrap-up post. How did that go?

Project: Exclusive

Sometimes I ask myself, what the hell are we all running around for, anyway? To make money? But what the hell do we need money for if all we do is run around making it? 
   - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

sorry about the square crop. stupid instagram

Remember back in March when I painted those silly Ásatrú cowboys? Well, my lovely friend has since convinced several of us that this time he really will do it, and this time it's Zona Alfa, the Metro 2033/Stalker/S.T.A.L.K.E.R/Roadside Picnic Osprey blue book game about ex-Soviet adventurers in some kind of Horrible Place post-Event. A lot of people read Event as Chernobyl-style nuclear disaster, although Roadside Picnic is not at all like that.

For me, I've been Zona Alfa-curious for years, and I'd recently seen tylerisalrightatpainting's really lovely go at the Eureka sculpts, so I was already teetering on the edge. When my friend said he wanted to organise some gaming in 2026, I popped in an order to Eureka (and then another order when they arrived and I realised that I forgot the sniper I wanted). I'm still not convinced my friend will be organised enough for me to make the trip up to see him, but regular guest Mangs says that he can put together a gang, so we'll see. And flaky friend has managed to organise at least one game since I bought these, so maybe I'll eat crow.

After Day Report: Badab War: Battle for the Old City - Galen IV [Part 3/3]

 The last of our coverage of the Battle for the Old City, Galen IV.

Howling Griffons terminators appear in a swirl of octarine

We've been talking about the Badab War day, hosted by Combat Company and organised by the Badab War Reenactment Society. So far, I had one astonishing victory and one crippling loss, with the Secessionists fighting hard for victory - but it was all to play for in the final game of the day. Sweaty, lunch-filled, and tired, we looked over the board.

After Day Report: Badab War: Battle for the Old City - Galen IV [Part 2/3]

 Last time on unjust still...

Niijima and her scouts butcher a heavy weapon squad

Last time, I talked about the Badab War Day on 29 November, with photos from my first game. This was the high water mark for my player skill for the day - but I didn't expect to win any games, so I was having a great day.

At the start of the second round, the Secessionists controlled most of the territories of value, including the Governor's Palace -- but would they continue to hold? Alex's Howling Griffons moved into the Palace, trying to take it from... I forget, but I think it was the all-bike Executioners. In orbit, Mantis Warriors were defeated by Howling Griffons, putting the pressure on the ground war below.