Media - Page 14 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the inside of the music store Manny's, with rows and rows of shiny and differently-coloured guitars mounted on the walls.

We caught the Metro to Crows Nest today to drop two of my guitars off at Manny's for a restringing and full setup. Had coffee with @[email protected] then went back via Manny's again to ogle guitars. I also had a play on one of the serious business Roland V-Drums electronic drum kits that's fully five times the price of my one, and while it's neat I think it would take someone of significantly higher skill than me to actually warrant paying such a huge sum for it. 😅

darkroom crows nest guitar

Posted on 12 July 2025, 15:35

A photo of a oval-shaped stainless plate with three different types of pasta piled on top next to one another: spaghetti bolognese, a penne mushroom carbonara sort of thing, and fettuccine that I don't actually remember the flavour of other other than it being tasty and having a bit of spice thanks to the chilli flakes in it.

A photo of a thin crust vegetarian pizza with spinach on top of it, this was actually my favourite one. The base was crispy and delicious and the spinach added some really nice freshness.

A photo of a thin crust pizza that had some sort of bolognese meat sauce on it underneath the cheese, it was delicious as well.

Dinner was at Bar Reggio in Darlinghurst and it was gooood and I am now extremely full. Most other people went for gelato afterwards but I was entirely sure I would have regrets if I did that.

pizza food portrait mode pasta darlinghurst

Posted on 10 July 2025, 20:15

A wide-angle photo taking looking west over Sydney from our 30th floor office. There are a couple of buildings that are taller over to the right of frame but it's otherwise a straight view out west, with shorter but still tall office buildings close to ours then tapering down the further out you get. The sky is mostly blue but with fluffy clouds out in the distance towards the horizon. The sun is just in frame at the top-right.

In the office today for an after work team dinner, and while it looks very #GloriousSydney out there, holy shit is it windy. I'm sitting on the 30th floor and can hear the wind periodically blowing a gale out there.

darkroom buildings in the office

Posted on 10 July 2025, 15:02

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. Left of frame are the six hulking and putrid Plague Marines in large sci-fi-looking dull green amour with all sorts of tentacles and demon faces coming out of the armour. At the right are the extremely ramshackle-looking green Orks of the Wrecka Krew, all with mismatched armour plating on various parts of their bodies and holding all sorts of ridiculously oversized weapons.

In the office for Kill Team tonight, my Plague Marines versus the Ork Wrecka Krew, and despite a decent start it ended up completely falling over in a heap and we called it at the start of turn 3 when the score was 7-3 to the Orks and I was going to be completely unable to score anything more. 😞 I think I need to go back to my Angels of Death, I just cannot for the life of me keep everything they can do in my head and I'm constantly forgetting their rules. The Angels of Death are more self-contained, where each individual operative doesn't need to interact too much with the others.

darkroom gaming kill team games workshop death guard orks in the office

Posted on 7 July 2025, 17:53

A photo of a rainbow lorikeet sitting in amongst the leaves and branches of a big tree.

I am unreasonably excited to have spotted a rainbow lorikeet hanging out in the big tree in our backyard! They're such lovely birds and we don't see them around here. It was chirping away another one that I couldn't see.

our house darkroom birds

Posted on 23 June 2025, 13:38

A photo of our dining table with a Warhammer Quest game set up on it. There's lots of cards and dice everywhere, and in middle are a bunch of variously-shaped tiles connected together that look like the inside of a set of buildings. There's four hero miniatures at the right (one heavily-armoured warrior woman with a sword, a vampire hunter with a long leather coat and a big hat, a steampunk dwarf, and a priest with a rich red robe and a big staff) plus two groups of hostile miniatures: two lithe vampires and three shambling zombies.

A photo of our four hero miniatures standing next to and being positively LOOMED over by the Vargskyr, which is a massive hunched over demon/bat hybrid thing twice the height of the heroes, with red skin and brown fur down its arms. It has blood around its mouth and dripping from its claws and there's a pile of skulls on its base. In the distance across several board sections there are a group of rat swarms and another group of bat swarms ready to overwhelm us.

We had @[email protected] over today to finally continue our Warhammer Quest adventure! This time it was the first half of the next Kill The Big Bad journey, it was pretty smooth sailing compared to some of our previous efforts and we managed to stay ahead of the suffocating gravetide without too much issue. Plus we even took down the mighty Vargskyr before got a chance to attack us when it showed up!

All four heroes are inspired and ready for the second half next time, which I expect is going to be quite nasty: the target is Gorslav the Gravekeeper and he'll be accompanied by all ten of the zombie miniatures that come in the Cursed City box, plus a batch of corpse rats and a batch of bat swarms. Gorslav has a number of nasty abilities and can bring zombies back after you've killed them, so it's going to be hectic.

our house darkroom gaming games workshop warhammer quest

Posted on 21 June 2025, 21:01

A screenshot from Diablo II Resurrected in the "Legacy" graphics mode showing the software renderer in all its 4:3 aspect ratio glory. My Assassin is holding a sword and a small round shield and standing next to a shallow lake with a large tree beside it. It's all extremely pixelated by today's standards.

Another screenshot showing the exact same scene as the previous image, but this time it's using the new 16:9 widescreen high-resolution remastered graphics. It's still not a graphical tour de force of course, but it's a SIGNIFICANT upgrade from the original.

Tonight featured a bit of remastered retro gaming: I started with Star Wars: Dark Forces and then discovered that the Diablo II remaster was on sale for the princely sum of $23! So I picked that up and was delighted to note that it continues the grand tradition of remasters allowing you to flip back and forth between the new and original graphics. Check out this wonderfully pixelated art from 2000 versus the shiny new remastered graphics. And I realised after I'd taken these that that was at the gloriously spacious "800x600" resolution, there's an option to use the 640x480 resolution from the game when it first launched and you can see even less of your surroundings, haha.

The remaster also has a "Performance" or "Quality" toggle for the new graphics, and honestly I don't think I can tell the difference whatsoever except that "Quality" mode drops the framerate to 30fps. Though funnily enough I actually kept that on anyway because the original graphics only run at 30fps so it's much less jarring going from 60fps in the new graphics to 30fps when I switch back to old.

screenshot diablo gaming xbox

Posted on 16 June 2025, 23:17

A screenshot from Forza Horizon 5 taken from behind and a reasonable way above the car. The car itself is a black 1991 Nissan Pulsar hatchback, that wonderful early 90s not-quite-completely-boxy shape where car designers realised they could round off some of the edges. The car is blasting along a dirt road in the rolling hills of a rural area with dust billowing out behind it, there are a handful of trees around and a bit of scrub and it all looks very dry. There's a wooden telegraph pole at the right with a single cable stretching behind the frame, and out beyond the trees. The overall light in the scene is warm and it looks like it's getting towards late afternoon.

Book-ending the weekend with Forza Horizon! This time I'm blasting around a lot of the dirt tracks to get the "Drive on every single road" achievement.

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 9 June 2025, 19:59

A photo of two round golden brown loaves of bread covered in flour, sitting on a cooling rack. There's a magnificent split along the top of both of them and I can confirm they taste as good as they look.

Yissss.

our house darkroom food portrait mode bread

Posted on 8 June 2025, 16:26

It's the Friday night of a three day weekend and I'm in Forza Horizon 5 blasting through the deserts of Mexico in a hotted-up 1970 Datsun 510 while listening to the game's synthwave radio station. 👌🏻

screenshot gaming xbox forza horizon

Posted on 6 June 2025, 21:03