Media - Page 1 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the Picard expansion for Star Trek: Away Missions. The front of the box contains a clear plastic section so you can see the five miniatures in it, all in light blue plastic. There's Picard himself of course, along with Dr. Crusher, Counsellor Troi, Wesley Crusher, and Geordi la Forge.

Yisssss.

our house darkroom new toys star trek: away missions

Posted on 14 July 2026, 15:46

A photo of a Roland electronic drum kit sitting in the corner of a room, next to a big bookshelf with a bunch of DVDs and books and random crap on it. My laptop is sitting on a stand behind and to the left of the drum kit, and the origin of this exercise (the CalDigit Thunderbolt dock) is just visible sitting vertically on a set of hooks that are attached to the wall. The dock has a bunch of cables coming out of the bottom of it.

Woot, I hit up Bunnings today for some sort of mounting system so I can use my ex-work CalDigit Thunderbolt 3 dock in the back room to plug my computer into the drum kit with a minimum of fuss and dicking around with cables. I've also got a little K-Mart side table to put a Bluetooth mouse on instead of reaching awkwardly over to the left to use the laptop's trackpad, and remembered that I had an old Apple Bluetooth keyboard floating around as well. And as a bonus, I even got everything going through my drum speaker too!

our house darkroom drums

Posted on 12 July 2026, 14:58

A photo of the box of the Star Trek: The Next Generation "The Complete Series" Blu-ray box set. On the front it has a dramatic photo of the U.S.S. Enterprise D with a blue nebula/starry background behind it, and underneath the English text is French translation.

Woot! 🎉 Looking forward to watching all the extras and documentaries once we've finished the series.

(It has French on the front as well as English because it's a European import since I couldn't find it anywhere else. I also learnt as part of trying to find where to buy this that there are only three Blu-ray regions, and Australia and New Zealand are lumped into the EMEA region.)

our house darkroom star trek: the next generation blu-ray

Posted on 9 July 2026, 10:31

A photo of the Star Trek: Away Mission board sitting on our dining room table. The art on the board itself looks like the inside of a Borg ship, all exposed electronics and wires and metal plating. There are the four Klingon warriors of Chancellor Gowron's team, all red plastic and wielding a variety of weapons, both close combat blades like the bat'leth as well as Klingon pistols. Three of them are clustered together with one off on a different section of the board. There are also two grey plastic Borg on the board, with the others being held in reserve for later turns. The cards for each character are laid out on either side of the board, and there are dice and tokens scattered around.

We had @wobin@aus.social over for a game of Star Trek: Away Missions this afternoon! (I only have one core box so it was only able to be two-player, @wobin@aus.social versus @yayKM@aus.social, with me in an advisory role.)

Someone on BoardGameGeek came up with a set of decks for most of the expansions so I rejiggered the Borg and Chancellor Gowron decks this morning and we used those two teams. Really impressed with how they went, both teams went really well and the final score was 180 points to @yayKM@aus.social's Chancellor Gowron team versus 150 to @wobin@aus.social's Borg.

There were plenty of Borg shenanigans with bringing back dead drones, getting to bring one of the drones out early, and hive-minding to active other drones at terminals across the board. Plus the Borg even managed to assimilate one of the Klingons, Kromm, when Locutus rolled five attack dice and (after a bunch of back and forth discards to reroll), ended up doing a massive eight damage to Kromm and immediately turning him into a Borg drone. Sadly he didn't get the opportunity to actually do anything because he was immediately killed by Chancellor Gowron, but it was still very cool to see. The whole game felt very thematic, it was fantastic.

I just need Gale Force 9 games to hurry up and release the Klingon and Romulan boards so we can do multiplayer games without me needing to buy an entire second core box. 😛

our house darkroom gaming star trek: away missions

Posted on 4 July 2026, 20:27

Bass Chugging

I did a bit of screwing around with my bass guitar and a pick and recorded a short little thing! I'm fairly sure I haven't recorded anything utilising a pick before, and I'm pretty happy about how mostly in time I kept given how quick the drum pace is.

(I need to clarify the drums are not me playing, there's no way in hell I could play that fast and I also don't have a double-kick setup. 😅)

music audio bass guitar neuraldsp

Posted on 2 July 2026, 21:00

A photo of the board game board sitting on a dining table. There are separate sections that look like rooms in the Taskmaster house, each with a pile of cards on them: "Living Room Tasks", "Lab Tasks", "Kitchen Tasks", "Garden Tasks", and then two at the bottom that are "Secret Tasks" and "Final Tasks". In the middle are the little self portrait boards that you draw your face on (we were playing in teams of two hence why there are two people on each board).

This afternoon we went over to a friend's place and played Taskmaster: The Boardgame! It's actually surprisingly well done, we really enjoyed it. You definitely need to be playing in a house that's got a bunch of stuff in it though, I don't think it would have worked very well at ours place, haha. Some of the tasks included "Make the smallest sandwich", and a two-part one that started with "Draw an outline of your hand" and then when everyone was done, "Turn the outline into a self portrait". We didn't do any of the "garden tasks" because it was raining, so hopefully next time we play the weather is better and we can see what's involved in those!

darkroom board games seven hills taskmaster

Posted on 28 June 2026, 17:54

A photo of the cover of the aforementioned Deep Space Nine Technical Manual. It has a side-on illustration of the top half of the station with one of the pylons curving over, along with the U.S.S. Defiant.

I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I realised I could just buy the Deep Space Nine Technical Manual book second-hand and not spend $300 on a brand-new copy. So I did! 😁 It joins the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual and Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise books already on my bookshelf.

books our house darkroom star trek: deep space nine

Posted on 23 June 2026, 18:13

A wide-angle photo looking across the lake in the middle of Nurragingy Reserve. The water is rather brown rather than blue, but there are trees surrounding the lake and a big fountain going in the distance. The sky is completely with a few scattered white clouds towards the horizon.

Another wide-angle photo, this one is looking across a natural wetland that has a bunch of low grasses interspersed with tall trees.

Today we took advantage of the off-the-charts #GloriousSydney and had a picnic lunch at Nurragingy Reserve then did a good 5km walk around the surrounding Western Sydney Parklands trails! You couldn't have asked for better weather for it.

darkroom lake trees nurragingy reserve

Posted on 21 June 2026, 14:52

A photo of two slices of rustic-looking home-made bread sitting on a white dinner plate. On top of the bread are thick slices of cooked tomatoes, then sliced up mushrooms all dark and cooked, then crumbled sharp cheddar cheese on top of that.

A photo of a whole bunch of golden-brown miso chocolate chip cookies sitting on a cooling rack.

Well, that's certainly been a delicious five-day weekend so far! On Tuesday night I got some bread going, baked it on Wednesday and had mushrooms cooked in sage, rosemary, and garlic on it for lunch, and then this afternoon I made a big batch of miso chocolate chip cookies.

I definitely have to once again thank @cthulhu@aus.social for getting me onto the book Flour Water Salt Yeast, if you have any interest whatsoever in making your own bread I cannot recommend it highly enough.

...and while looking that up, I just found he's got another book out that includes making milk breads and brioche, ooooh.

our house cookies darkroom food portrait mode bread

Posted on 20 June 2026, 18:04

Power Chords in D Minor

Phew, that took a bit longer than intended because on subsequent listening I didn't like the keys instrument I was using. Also the song itself is called "Power Chords in D Minor" because that's what it is and I'm shit at coming up with cool song names. 😅

But I'm very happy with this one, I started with the drums playing along to a metronome because a couple of friends and I were doing some collaboration mucking around, but they both have small children that precluded them doing anything quickly so I decided to take the drum track and come up with a song around it while I was waiting. I played drums, guitar, and bass guitar, and the piano track on top is from Toontrack's EZKeys 2 plugin (both the actual notes being played and the sounds, though I picked out the specific grooves to use from EZKeys' big library and also came up with the chord progression), and I'm pleased to report that I once again didn't need to do any quantisation to put my drums, guitar, or bass in time. Ironically though, I needed to apply the tempo from the drums to the global tempo track and then have the piano track follow that, because while the tempo only varied by a maximum of about 2bpm across the whole song and I was playing in time with the drums for the guitar and bass, the piano track was exactly on the beat and it clearly sounded off. 😛

music drums audio bass guitar neuraldsp fender made in japan hybrid ii telecaster

Posted on 14 June 2026, 11:25