The Greatest 40k Hobby Adventure Ever Told [Part 2]

(Part 1 here)
[Please excuse my over use of Gifs. It was tough for me to write some of this out. Also sorry for the long post - I could not break this part of the story up. If you can make it to the end it is worth it!]

Our first few weeks in Sweden were hard. Nothing seemed to go to plan at all. Without all the details this was me:

The Greatest 40k Hobby Adventure Ever Told [Part 1]

Big call right. - Trust me, it's worth it.

The Easter break provided me with the opportunity to finally pen this epic tale. 

Enjoy it while downing a few choccy eggs ;) 

Being married with young kids, along with having a job that is hard to leave at work, means that finding opportunities to game can be really tough. In the past it has been the norm that I will organise a 'game day' with my mates and it will be cancelled because someone’s kid gets sick or someone’s wife pulls the pin on it. It happens and we move on. It makes the time we do play special. It is probably why we take photos, blog and celebrate the games that we play so much (thanks Muppet). This epic tail (over a few posts) is about that ultimate 'no holds barred' battle between real life and gaming. This time however, I set the stakes higher than ever before. This is the story of one man battling against extremes odds to play a game of Warhammer on the other side of the world.

I visited Warhammer World back in 2009 during a quick work trip to the UK. It was great. No, it was awesome. “How cool would it be to one day come back to the UK and play a game with my own army?” I thought to myself. It was an impossible dream. How would I even get an army from Australia to the UK? No, it's ridiculous. I was engaged and had no kids at the time but even then I knew it was a ridiculous dream. This year that dream became a reality.

Ackland Returns from Exile with Plans to Invade Europe: The Blood Lion Crusade

Hello Blogging world! I have pushed my way past the scattered piles of half written blog posts to finally hit the publish button on my blog again. As always I have enjoyed reading many of your posts but have not been as much of an active participant as in the past. I have missed that and so am finally back at it.




Whats been going on?
My last post was June last year. At that time my wife was a couple of months pregnant with our second baby. We always have complicated pregnancies and have lost a few in the past so from about July onward things started getting stressful. I still had some hobby time and even a few games in with my favourite gaming partner (Muppet); Sharpe fought of loads of Orks earning himself glory and a few fresh scars.

"Stand fast men, I can take him alone!"

Terrain Building: Carving Rock Pillars with a Hot Foam Cutter

I have been on a terrain building bout recently working on my old school wind generator and a small forest of trees. I have always wanted to make some big rock pillars and cliff faces for my terrain set as well. Thus, it was finally time to get a hot foam cutter and give carving foam a go!

Hobby space rework: The reset button has been pushed!

I have not posted here since last year but sometimes it is healthy to step away from things to come back re-invigorated. There has been some sporadic hobby time in there but nothing made it to the blog yet. With this on and off hobby time my desk became a bit of a dumping ground. Eventually it hit the critical level of messiness where it was simply too much effort to sit down and do anything there. Not only was it a cluttered mess but the desktop board 
had bowed badly because I hadn't put a support beam under it when I build it. I always planned to add it but never got around to it. 

Last night after a particularly hard week of work I looked at the sad state of my hobby space and decided it was time for a literal and metaphoric fresh start.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry

I am very good at planning and very good at finishing things, just not so good at joining those two concepts together. I inevitably end up doing way more than I planned, way better than I planned, way later than I planned. 

I was optimistically hoping to keep up weekly blog posts but I missed the last three. I do have some good news though. After what has now been six years I am proud to say that finally I handed up my PhD thesis. It was a monumental effort in the end so following its submission I took a week off, played with my 20 month old son, caught up on sleep and generally recovered from the thesis ordeal. 

With that all behind me I'm ready to get my hobby on again!

Taking Cover From One Hundred Thousand Hits!

My blog has clicked over to 100,000 hits! Thank you to everyone that has stopped by over the last four years especially to all the great bloggers that have left comments from time to time!

In the real world I am submitting my PhD thesis over the next two weeks as well as working. As a result, my days are split between 10 hours of shiftwork, 8-10 hours of thesis writing and 3-5 hours of sleep. Thus, there is no modelling happening at the moment. I do have my finished defence lines to show off though! Here is where I had left them in the last post.

Celebrating 50,000 Hits

Evening Gents. I'm just kicking back with a cool drink on a sweltering 43 degree day looking over the crazy number of visitors that have stopped by my little blog this week.

Over the last two and a half years my hit counter has slowly risen in small increments. I try to blog regularly but usually one post a month is all that eventuates from my sporadic hobby time. As a result, this is only the 67 post on my little blog while other blogs of the same age are at well over 100 posts. Never the less, I noticed last week that I was only a couple of thousand hits from the 50k mark and I thought to myself "That will be a nice milestone to hit in 2 or 3 months time". I'm surprised to say however, I completely underestimated how many people would be interesting in checking out the cavalry! In a week my Rough Rider Army post has clocked over 4500 views which is about 10 times more then I expected it to be seen in a month. The result is that I have absolutely smashed past the 50,000 hit mark by several thousand.

In Search of The Ultimate Risk Set

Preface

This post has been a long time coming. I have wanted to broaden my blogging topics for a long time but just never got around to it... until now!! In part this was inspired from seeing Odie's new blog Full Color Gamer, which is dedicated to painting board game pieces. I have also really enjoyed seeing other peoples side projects too. Like Headologist's Alternative History Game "1919", Colonel Scipio's Trench Raider Rules, Admiral Drax's Flames of War stuff, Mordian7th’s MERCS as well as everybody else's cool interesting stuff that isn't 40K. So here go's, you might wanna grab a beer before starting this one... lots to tell! 

DIY Hobby Desk

-AKA Colonel Ackland's Sanctuary

'The Discussion'
For many of us, Growing Up has meant that we have had to face discussions with our partners about having models and a hobby space in the house. It's one of those things that isn't really about winning or losing but is about striking the right balance so that 'life' works. 

My New Toy

A quick non hobby related post (and why my blog has been quiet lately)...

I have my own little 'count as' Titan just in time for the new apocalypse release! 

Too busy!

I haven't been around the bloggosphere all that much lately, so, sorry to all the fantastic bloggers that I follow! Looks like Life is getting in the way again!

My Top 10 Blogs

I just hit 50 followers, wow what a milestone. To all my new blogger friends - Welcome!

I really love tracking down new blogs to follow. Blog networks are great for that but another way I find some real gems is by looking at what blogs other people follow.  With that in mind, I thought it would be cool to highlight my favourite 10 blogs and tell everyone why I like them.  This was way harder then I initially thought, but after a lot of cutting down, I have a list. I found that there were really two groups in my top ten - big well known blogs written by veteran bloggers that have a large following (heavy weights), and smaller less known blogs that are written by equally talented people but just haven’t been around as long or are less publicised (middle weights).

So without further ado, in no particular order, Col. Ackland’s favourite 10 blogs:

"suddenly one of the models turned to look at me" HELP I'm losing my mind!!

I started painting these a fortnightly ago.
Just as I was getting into the painting, suddenly one of the men turned to look at me. Well I know that's impossible but....

20 Questions

OK, I'll jump on the band wagon too!

Favourite Wargaming Period, and Why?

The future, because anything goes! With a bit of tweaking you can mix every historical period into a great big sci-fi jumble mix tape! Plus I do enjoy sci-fi which I only realised when I got to my 20’s.

Reforming my Imperial Guard (part 2) (and the truth about my dark addiction)

The second part of reforming my Guard are my Praetorian miniatures. I have been conflicted with my blue coated Praetorians for a long while. I really like the fleet regiment aspect that I reverted back to in April- that’s not the issue. There is still a little bit of me that wants to paint some red coats. Not so much for the historical aspect but from the point that I love the original look of them. I realised I felt this way when people would say 'sham you didn’t paint them red'. In truth if I didn't care then that comment would mean nothing, but there was always a little part of me that would say 'yeah, kinda wish I had'. 

So why didn’t I paint up some read coats? I collected lots of praetorians and I wanted to paint them all the same, cos you know - 'that’s what you have to do'. But in reality (and here is my dark secret) I have way too many praetorians for one army. I’m not saying this to brag at all, in fact I’m a little ashamed that I got so addicted to buying them that I have this many. How many I hear you ask? I'm not sure, but more than 500. I haven't counted them any time recently. It was my dark secret, my 'crack' praetorian addiction.

Here is a photo from a year or two ago when I stopped buying them. I tried to pull them ALL out but I ran out of time and room on the table : / 

Yeah, it’s a lot I know. It’s almost unbelievable, especially considering what they sell for now on eBay.

The point is I do have enough to paint up more than one army. This allows me to keep my blue coated fleet regiment- for nostalgic reasons, and do other things too. What I would like to do is a few different small armies. These are at various stages of painting but here is what I have in mind:

Reforming my Imperial Guard (part 1)

Still, I have been away from my modelling desk yet to get back to all my awaiting projects. As devastating as that is, on the plus side the space away from my models has allowed me to rethink what I want to do with them and how I would like their fluff to work.

Also the space has made me realise that, essentially I can do whatever I want with my miniatures. It is nice to have fluff that doesn't contradict the established universe, but even if mine did, nothing would happen. At the worst, someone would say, "hay, that doesn’t work!" to which I would reply with a shrug "so?". This freedom was what I really enjoyed about modelling in the 40k universe (opposed to historical modelling) when I started out. You can do whatever you want with your colour schemes or be utterly ridiculous about the planet you say they are from. As it turns out it wasn't too hard to make my fluff fit (and I don't think my colour schemes are all that ridiculous), but knowing that I could do anything was very freeing.

So, in a grand reorganising of my miniature forces I have broken my Guard up into distinct elements which I will post about separately. First off, I have my Macharian Thunder Guard, my blogs name sake, and a group of minis that I suspect will take up a lot of my future modelling time. I decided this would work best as a division rather than a regiment. What I wanted was a division of several different regiments, which would allow me free rein to come up with whatever cavalry units I wanted. Like I said, it’s all about feeling free to do whatever I want. :)

I returned to the model desk! and 'How a haircut = more cavalry'?

Wow, people in the blogging world have been busy –weddings, moving houses, new jobs etc etc LIFE!  But who would have thought that wargamers would have lives!? Aren’t they all nerdy single men that live in the attics of their parents houses? Apparently not, apparently there are girls, jobs, houses, kids, holidays, mates, and lots of cool accessories and distractions that the modern nerd needs in his life.

Yeah, I feel it. I haven’t been at my modelling desk since -ummm- the end of November -Ouch! This has been in an attempt to finish my PhD thesis. I had planned to get it out by February but that flew by, then I thought end of March. Well it’s now mid-April and there is still a lot more to do. The issue is I keep underestimating how much work goes into an 80,000 word thesis.

Anyho, on the weekend I through my hands (and papers) into the air and sat down at my modelling desk – just for a bit. Oooh hello cavalry.

New Paint Déjà vu

I was perusing an old White Dwarf (WD), well not just any old WD – it was issue 222 from June 98. Rings a bell? Well you may know it as the issue containing the ‘Last Stand at Glazer’s Creek’. Here are few shots for the fans...

Happy OZ day! & thoughts on Warhammer 120k? hmmmm.

Allow me to interrupt the standard modelling posts to say Happy Australia Day everyone.