Thinking Outside the Box

This afternoon I found out that the Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne, has passed away. Although I've been a fan since my early teens, I am surprised at how strong my reaction to the news has been. I had missed out on catching the Black Sabbath farewell show a few weeks back during live stream, so I've not yet seen it. A friend of mine told me about a few days after, and I'm looking forward to watching it when it becomes available. I've had the good fortune of seeing Ozzy perform twice; once at an outdoor stadium show with Zakk Wylde on guitar, and once with Black Sabbath several years later. I remember more about the experience of those shows than the specific details, and could not tell you set lists or anything like that. His impact on music and pop culture, both as a member of Black Sabbath and a solo artist simply cannot be understated. As impactful and important as that is, it also hits me that his children have lost their father, which happened to me at the end o...

Yesterday I set up another 2'x2' board to continue re-learning Pulp City . This time is was a 9-level villain vs. villain showdown. I had found my Warhammer cemetery scenery during my hobby cleanup this month and thought it would look good on one of the urban mats Mantic produced years back for Mars Attacks. After my first refresher game I have been collecting the various dice and tokens needed to play the game. While I do know another person in town who has some Pulp City figures, it's been ages since we played due to our schedules seldom aligning. Other than attack and suppress tokens, I think I'm pretty close to having what I need. I played both sides in the game as though it were a normal 2-player game, as a simple brawl with no plots or agendas. The blue team was almost pure "Shadow Axis" faction, comprised of Big Brain, Alpha Male & Mayhem, Immolator, Blackthorn and Twilight. The red team was a more varied group of villains with Gentleman, Anansi, Do...

Following on from my large build project, I picked 5 figures from the batch to paint. I ended up selecting enough to do an 8 Level team of "Shadow Axis" villains for Pulp City . Immolator, Big Brain, Blackthorn, Alpha Male and Mayhem. The casts required very minimal cleanup, with all of these being a single piece. Simply glue them down to the base and primed white. As with a lot of my painting lately they were done with a combination of Army Painter speedpaints and traditional paints and washes, depending on the figure and my mood while doing the model. Alpha Male, Immolator and Mayhem were particularly fun to do as they provided an opportunity to try out some really different skin tones. According to his game card, Blackthorn is able to create trees that get placed on the table. I found two spooky trees and a stump in my "Haunted Manor" box from Mantic Games. They were a touch too big to put on 30mm bases and I don't think they' have looked very good. Since...

I knew it had been quite some time since I posted anything here, but I didn’t realize it was pre-covid! I have been hobbying over the years, apparently just not posting about it. Perhaps I’ll remedy that and start posting regularly again. I’ve got quite the backlog I can discuss if not new things. Just this week I built and primed 40 new Supremes for Pulp City . These are all characters by Kitbash Games , from their season 1 Supers Unlimited Kickstarter that they ran back in 2019. It's been a long time since I got Pulp City on the table, gaming or hobby. I do have several original figures painted, and was just going to set up a few to refresh myself on the rules. However, it appears that all the cards for my figures (not to mention all my unbuilt/unpainted models are in an unlabelled box in one of the closets somewhere. So since I knew where this box of minis were, I made a little project of it. It took me two evenings to clean up and glue the figures together. The casts were ove...