Media - Page 12 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of twelve people sitting around a few tables in the corner at the pub, all smiling at the camera. (Sorry Mark, I don't know why your face turned out so red, I think it was light reflecting from the side of the bar next to you!) As per most pubs, the lighting isn't very good or flattering, haha.

Excellent turnout for the fedimeet, thanks as always to @[email protected] for organising!

Great to see @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected] again, and to meet @[email protected] and @[email protected]!

(Also really good to see and chat to @[email protected] who won't see this, haha.)

It's getting large enough that we're going to be spilling over onto additional tables at this rate!

darkroom friends surry hills fediverse meet

Posted on 11 September 2025, 21:06

A photo of a game of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. The board looks like the metal of the inside of an ancient steampunk starship, and the terrain is a bunch of walls all connected together in the same steampunk style to form number of interconnecting rooms. Closest to the camera are my Corsair Voidscarred (think punk/pirate space elves) in elegant fuchsia-coloured armour, and facing them on the far side of the board are the pustulant warriors of the Death Guard. There are three Plague Marines in hulking green armour with tentacles coming out of them, and six Poxwalkers which are basically zombies but with open wounds and bone spikes and tentacles.

A close-up photo of Arendra Firewinter, my Starstorm Duellist, right as she was vaporising one of the Plague Marines. She has dark skin and a bald head with a white flowing topknot, is wearing got a dark-ish teal cape that looks like it's blowing in the wind, and she's holding two elegant-looking alien pistols, one of them aimed forward and the other held pointing upright like she's just finished shooting it. Through the hatchway in front of her is one of the hulking Plague Marines holding a huge boltgun and with a demon face in his shoulderpad. Just to the left of frame you can see the Poxwalker's foot that she killed right after the Plague Marine.

I FINALLY got around to playing some single-player Kill Team! I decided to use my Corsair Voidscarred since I love the miniatures so much even though I'm pretty bad at remembering everything they can do (which I guess just means I need to play more). My Death Guard were the non-player operatives (NPOs) and I went with a mix of the light "brawler" troop type so I could have an excuse to use my Poxwalker miniatures, and the heavy "marksman" type for the Plague Marines.

It didn't actually start off super-well, I was very excited to see my Shaderunner get stuck in because she can teleport through walls, but misjudged where I could move her and keep her safe before she attacked, and she ended up getting killed by one of the Plague Marines before she did anything. 😞 I think I also need to rethink my initial deployment strategy on Into The Dark because I always end up sitting with a hatchway closed because I don't want to open it and give the enemy free reign to shoot my quite-squishy operatives, and if I was to run out my operatives would be completely murderised.

Operative of the match goes to my Starstorm Duellist Arendra Firewinter who single-handedly accounted for two of the three Plague Marines and one of the Poxwalkers. One of the Plague Marines in particular got absolutely turned into slag, he was on ten wounds and got hit with three critical successes from Arendra's fusion pistol, which meant that the Devastating 3 rule went off and immediately inflicted three damage for each crit, with no save possible, before anything else even happed. And in the same activation thanks to the Pistol Barrage ability that lets her shoot twice, once per pistol, she then turned around and killed the Poxwalker that was standing behind her with her shuriken pistol!

Overall I only lost three miniatures, the aforementioned Shaderunner along with my Way Seeker and my leader, and the win condition for this scenario was to just completely wipe out the enemy.

As I'm writing this, I realised another difficulty I have with the Voidscarred in particular is that they're very close-combat-focused because I built them all as the specialists with no regular warriors. My Fate Dealer doesn't see much action especially on Into The Dark (she did nothing whatsoever this game), and although the Kurnite Hunter finished off the remaining Plague Marine in this particular game, I'm constantly wishing that he was a regular Warrior with a shuriken rifle.

our house darkroom gaming kill team games workshop death guard into the dark corsair voidscarred

Posted on 7 September 2025, 16:45

A photo of the lake at Nurragingy Reserve. In the middle of the photo is a big ornate white Chinese arch bridge and on the right up the top of a set of big stones that has a waterfall coming down it is another traditional Chinese building. The whole lake is surrounded by trees, some have their leaves and some don't. It's completely sunny and the sky is blue, and the whole shot has a warm early-spring feel to it which matches exactly what it felt like being there.

We went and did a few laps of Nurragingy Reserve today, you absolutely could not have asked for better weather for it! There were quite a few families hanging out, we spotted at least three separate wedding parties having photos taken, and also got to say hello and give scritches to two Malteses and a Pomeranian.

lightroom nurragingy reserve

Posted on 6 September 2025, 17:00

A photo of the front of our house. It's a standard-looking single storey house in red brick, in the middle is a large box window with thick white PVC frames. To the left of the window is the front door also in white, and left of that the side of what is the garage extends out towards the camera and out of frame. In front of the window is a small garden with various trees and plants. The new guttering is the same dark grey as the roof and blends in nicely and looks very nice.

A photo of the side of our house that faces the backyard. Three windows are visible, all with the same thick white PVC window frames as the front, but on the two larger bedroom windows there are tracks for shutters to run down (right now the shutters themselves are fully hidden because they're open since it's GLORIOUS today), and there's a big box at the top of both where the shutter rolls up into. The tracks and shutter boxes are a cream colour and it looks really crap now.

And we're done! I didn't realise just how awful the old gutters looked until now, they had been painted (badly and unevenly) in a really drab-looking brown. Of course, now the frame of the shutters for the bedrooms looks really shit because it's a cream colour and it looks dingy next to the nice cleanness of the white window frames and dark grey guttering. 😛

lightroom our house renovations

Posted on 2 September 2025, 13:37

A photo taken from our home office looking out the window, where there's a metal platform a bit above the windowsill with a tradie in shorts and wearing a toolbelt standing on it. You can't see above his waist and he's working on removing the old guttering.

Current status: banging and crashing.

(We're getting our gutters replaced because they're in atrocious shape.)

our house darkroom renovations

Posted on 1 September 2025, 10:41

A photo taken looking down a train platform towards a brick road bridge that goes over it. The sun is setting and casting yellow light through the underneath of the bridge.

A photo taken looking down the platform of the Sydney Metro at Central. The glass divider that separates the train tracks from the platform is at the right, and there are a bunch of people all the way down the platform waiting for the train, most of them looking down at their phones.

We took a trip to Newtown to visit @[email protected], had to take the Metro to Central because the usual train line was partially closed due to trackwork. No photos of us because we were just sitting around chatting but I got a good shot at Newtown Station, and I'm constantly surprised at how packed the Metro is at basically all hours of the day. This was at Central which is only the third stop on the line, and as I type this we're heading towards Victoria Cross Station and it is PACKED.

lightroom people train station central newtown

Posted on 30 August 2025, 18:18

A photo of a shallow bowl with chunks of beef in them in a rich-looking dark brown sauce. There's also mashed potato, green beans, and peas.

In the office today for an after-work music jam, the hot lunch was beef bourguignon and it was gooooood. :chefkiss:

food portrait mode in the office

Posted on 28 August 2025, 14:21

A photo from our home office looking out into the backyard. There's a two storey house to the left left of frame blocking most of the view and sunlight, but just past that is a tree with golden leaves that's being made to look extra golden by the sunset shining on it. There are some other trees to the right of that, and the sky is grey and cloudy. In the front of the trees is the little room/structure that's turned into our hobby-slash-storage room, it's got browny/red walls on it and a white roof.

It was completely overcast and dreary the whole day today, then right as the sun was setting the clouds started to clear out west and we got the sun shining on just the tree in our backyard!

our house darkroom trees

Posted on 25 August 2025, 17:12

A screenshot of the original Doom, looking pixellated by today's standards but otherwise okay. It's got the hand holding the pistol in the middle of the screen, a brown kind of military/sci-fi wall at the left with a VERY-obviously 2D sprite barrel of green goo, the section in front of the wall has some steps and that section is lit up, but in the distance it's all dark and hard to make out, but you can see some computer screens and what look like control panels up near the roof. No idea why they're up there because you couldn't use them!

A screenshot of Dark Forces, it's EXTREMELY pixellated, much more so than Doom because I've turned it back to the original software rendering. The character is holding one of the black blaster rifles that stormtroopers use, the floor in front of me is dark grey cobbles and there's a gap in the floor you can't see down, then past that on the other side are white walls that look like they've been in a war zone, with black blaster marks on them. The whole thing is quite dark because the power is off at this point. The sky has delightfully pixel-art-looking mountains with a purple sky that's either just after sunset or just before sunrise.

A screenshot of Doom 64, this is a fair bit less pixellated than the other two screenshots, but all the textures have that early 3D rendering "smooth" look to them. The view is looking into a hallway with rusted metal-looking walls and in the centre is a glowing orange floor panel. The whole scene is lit in orange/red light that's coming from that panel.

I've been thoroughly enjoying going back to my gaming roots recently, with the remasters of Doom, Dark Forces, and Doom 64 on the Xbox!

The first screenshot here is the original Doom, which we got a demo of with our Power Macintosh 6200 in 1995, and my parents very much disapproved of the amount of gore in it. We also got the demo of Dark Forces on that same demo disc, which was just the first level, but I was so keen to get the full game that I begged my parents and promised I'd even delete Doom and not play it anymore if they got me the full game for Christmas. 😛

The second screenshot is very early on in the second level of Dark Forces, in all its software-rendered pixellated glory, and I can still remember sitting in my pyjamas on Christmas morning playing it with a sense of awe at all the new levels for me to explore. I think my favourite level was later in the game, Nar Shaddaa, the sheer vertical scale of it really grabbed my imagination.

And then lastly we have Doom 64, bought a handful of years after Dark Forces, and because it was on the Nintendo 64 and everything was 3D now, everything also had to have coloured lighting everywhere. It's hilarious how overdone it was looking back at it now, sort of like looking back at the pinstripes in early Mac OS X. Games now have lighting that makes sense contextually, you don't really notice it that much because it's realistic, but this was all "GONNA BE RED, LET'S HAVE SOME BLUE HERE, AND SOME GREEN THERE." 😂

And man, playing these I'd forgotten about the total lack of any sort of hand-holding you got when trying to figure out where you needed to go. There was an overhead map but absolutely none of these objective markers or UI indicators of direction. If you get lost, tough shit, you're going to have to wander until you figure it out!

screenshot gaming retro things xbox dark forces doom

Posted on 19 August 2025, 21:54

A photo of a thin-crust pizza with cheese that's browned around the edges and peas dotting it, sitting on a round pizza tray. It looks pretty delicious and I can confirm that it lived up to that.

Aww yiss, trashy dinner tonight for @[email protected]'s birthday: store-bought pizza bases to make home-made pizza, with green Tabasco plus home-made ranch dressing. 👌🏻 And we're just about to watch This Is Spinal Tap, which I don't even recall the last time I saw.

our house pizza darkroom food portrait mode

Posted on 18 August 2025, 19:41