Musings – On the Quiet Side of a Red Moon

Community Blogging Challenge

I’m a bit late to the party, and I only made it at all because I recently stumbled onto a new blog that referenced it, but apparently Roger over Rantings from Under The Wargames Table has thrown down the “Community Blogging Challenge“

He posted an excellent list of blogs, many of which I hadn’t previously found (really, only Azazel’s Bits Box and Wargames Terrain Workshop were already known to me. The rest have been an excellent discovery and I’ve already added them to the blogroll for people to peruse.

But now I suppose it’s time for me to give a shout out to some other cool hobby blogs I’ve encountered.

Carmen’s Fun Painty Time deserves a follow – they are infrequent posters (last post roughly June 2025) but have been at it for awhile now. Their latest few posts journal their process of scratch-building ship figurines to use on the table and make for an excellent read.

Lonely Gamer’s Blog focus on historical war-gaming (the website is also attached to their store, where they stock a lot of books and historical minis). Their content is mostly battle reports.

Wicked Paintah regularly posts their latest completed minis, and they’re always well done. They seem to favour a lot of Infinity and other scifi stuff.

Wyrd Fish – A newer blogger, he started out discussing the hobby community happenings over on the Fediverse¹. His newer posts discuss building and painting a Mordheim warband.

Lead ‘n’ Paint – Just a guy tackling his mountain of metal / plastic and blogging about the journey.

I Am Gerard Thomas – A very game-design focused blog. No minis here, but Gerard posts about his process concocting new rulesets to play with.

Big Geordie Geek – Regularly shares their completed minis and his hobby journey. Tends to be very 40k focused.

Edit – Also adding Sad Little Men – a new blog that appears to have just launched a few days ago. No comments on his page, but lets find a way to give him a warm welcome anyhow.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to the hobby community over on the Fediverse – while it is technically not blogging, there are a lot of wonderful people there I get to interact with on the regular.

The Fediverse is the name given to the conglomeration of Mastodon, Pixelfed and other ActivityPub based servers that forms the decentralized social web. ↩︎

Now With a Like Button

I’ve been considering adding a simple like button for awhile now – just to give a people a way to say they enjoyed a post without needing to go to the trouble of typing out a full comment. I didn’t want to use the official WordPress one because it ties being able to like things into having an official WordPress account (which most random visitors won’t have) and also means your activity is likely being logged to them as well (I’ve avoided Jetpack for similar reasons, I’d like to avoid having external trackers on here where I can).

I ended up settling on WP Ulike, a like plugin that claims GDPR compliance by minimizing what it logs and as far as I’ve been able to determine, isn’t sending any data anywhere but a dashboard in my admin console. Some parts of it do feel like I’m not the original audience (the dashboard has a lot of ‘optimize your content’ messaging, clearly aimed more at businesses), but it does look like it does what I need.

You should see a like button at the bottom of posts now. Much like the Mastodon like button all it does is tell me you liked my post. No algorithm or advertiser should be getting any data from that, but I’ll feel happier knowing you enjoyed it.

New Year, New Start

Last year wasn’t a great year for hobbies. Work kept me busy enough through most of the year that when I got home I was often too tired for any hobby activities. Overall, four minis were finished for the whole year – the last of the three miniatures as part of an experiment with colour schemes¹, and three more Hell Dorado figures slowly completed over a few nights.²

I’ve also got a terrain project that’s close to completion, but hasn’t made it yet – it has been mostly painted but play-testing has found that the slopes of the hills on it are still a bit too steep despite my best efforts. I have a plan to fix that, but it does mean I’ve got a bit to redo. There’s also a small cairn detail that remains unpainted, but that can wait until the piece is fixed and the rocks also repainted.

A large painted terrain piece, consisting of four ruined columns spaced around a large hill — This slope proved a little too steep for most minis.

A large terrain piece sits on a table, clearly showing the slope of a hill that rises up towards the centre of four large monoliths. — This slope proved a little too steep for most minis.

I also managed to conclude a long running Numenera Campaign and the beginning of a new Invisible Sun campaign. That campaign is still very early, but so far is looking good³.

But this year is already off to a better start. I had a few friends over for a hobby day on New Years Day, and it lead to much fun, camaraderie and a productive afternoon of hobby activities. Two more Hell Dorado troops have been finished, as well as one StarGrave crewman (with three more started and in the pipeline).

A figurine of a man in ornate plate armour stands, brandishing a sword. — Basecoats down, still working on the rest.

A figurine of a man in plate armour, shown from the back to show off the shadows and highlighting of his flowing red cape. — Basecoats down, still working on the rest.

Overall, a pretty good start to 2026. Here’s hoping I can keep the momentum up as the year continues.

A Screenshot, Some Colours and a Scheme ↩︎
See Resuming after a break. You can also see how the two Hell Dorado figures I finished on New Years Day looked at the end of 2025. ↩︎
One of my players maintains an in-character journal, you can read their first post here ↩︎

No Longer Alone in a Tiny Pod

Up until very recently , I’ve been hosting this blog from a tiny Pikapod¹. That worked fine, and I’d recommend it as an option for hosting your own blog for people with some basic technical skills (mostly DNS) – it’s fairly straightforward to set up and there’s few other ways host a blog for $2/month.

Recently the Australian Posters Union decided to offer WordPress hosting to donating members. Since I already donate to them it made perfect sense for me to take them up on the offer.

The Australian Posters Union are a social media co-op that runs the Mastodon and Pixelfed instances I’m on. They’re supported by voluntary donations, and I’m happy to be one of their supporters because the only path I can see that gets us away from a social media environment where we are the product is building a social media environment owned and operated by the communities it serves.

Social media co-ops offering blog hosting as well is a wonderful idea. Blogging is a good complement to micro-blogging, it can provide a space to capture the long form thoughts in a more permanent and easily referenced place, whilst more ephemeral and still developing thoughts can be shared on the Fediverse. Co-ops generally already have the infrastructure to deploy blogs on, and for most small blogs the actual load is very small and easily accommodated.

Meanwhile, it can provide bloggers with a good alternative to either the free but ad supported blog hosts, or the more expensive commercial hosting. This gives us another way to start pushing the web away from the tracker ridden, ad infested space it has become.

Pikapods lets you run preconfigured pods for a variety of web based apps. They’re fairly easy to set up if you’ve got basic technical skills and the supported options include WordPress and Ghost. ↩︎

A Blog is born

I’m still setting this site up, and I’ll have to come up with a better name, but it exists. It is here.

I’ll be using it to share the miniatures and tabletop stuff I find myself working on. I’ll probably continue to post WIP shots to Pixelfed, and to do more long-form write-ups here.

If you’re interested in hearing more, go ahead and add me to your RSS reader of choice. If you don’t have an RSS reader of choice, consider adopting one for the sake of the indieweb.