Category: Musings

Thoughts and observations

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
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.
A figurine of a man in plate armour, shown from the back to show off the shadows and highlighting of his flowing red cape.
A figurine of a man with a musket and a sword, wearing a wide brimmed metal helmet.
A figurine of a man wity a sword and a musket, viewed from the back.
A figurine of a man wearing a red trenchcoat with yellow accents and bracers.
A figurine of a man wearing a yellow t-shirt with a red trenchcloak and pants. He brandishes a pistol and has a medallion of some sort upon his chest
Several figurines, most in various stages of being painted with a red and yellow paint scheme sit on a teal painting mat. One completed figurine painted in the same scheme is also present to act as a reference.
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.

  1. A Screenshot, Some Colours and a Scheme ↩︎
  2. 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. ↩︎
  3. 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.

  1. 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.