Media - Page 16 | virtualwolf.org

A selfie of me, a white man with a short red beard and short brown hair—although both are getting a bit scruffy—smiling at the camera. I'm holding a guitar and standing in front of my standing desk, which has an Arturia MiniLab 3 MIDI keyboard in black sitting on the desk. On the main computer display is Logic Pro with Arturia's Analog Lab plugin window open, and on my laptop's internal display to the left there is Toontrack's Superior Drummer 3 plugin window showing half of a frankly absurd number of cymbals and toms, partially covered by the window for Neural DSP's Archetype PliniX guitar amp software showing a cool-looking black amp with a red glow coming from inside it.

Current status: feeling inspired. 😎

(Of course, it's probably going to end up being another couple of months before I actually finish this thing. 😅)

our house selfie me music darkroom guitar midi keyboard

Posted on 18 May 2025, 20:47

A photo of a mostly-assembled single bedframe. Main components of it are thick black metal U-beams that make up the four sides of the frame, with another one running down the middle. There are wooden panels on the outer sides that attach to the metal to hide the frame itself (the panels themselves are solid wood too and quite hefty), and four panels of wood that the mattress sits on which have holes drilled in them to allow the mattress to breathe. These panels get screwed into the U-beams of the frame itself, and the whole bed is raised on four solid round wooden legs, with an extra leg right in the middle of the centre U-beam to provide even MORE support. The whole thing would have to weigh like 90kg, it's ridiculous.

And then this evening I put together the world's most overengineered bedframe, which weighs more than I do.

(We got this one specifically because a) we're sick of having to replace cheap bedframes because the slats either warp or the whole thing starts creaking, and b) all the other ones were too low to fit our storage boxes under them.)

our house darkroom tidying and rearranging

Posted on 10 May 2025, 18:36

A wide-angle photo taken looking down a long table of a bunch of people sitting and talking at a pub. There are empty plates scattered over the table, and a big window on the left looking out into some greenery.

A photo of the box of Lhykhis, a Warhammer 40,000 miniature. She's wearing sleek black armour and is partially crouched in mid-jump with a bunch of what looks like lightning underneath her in a partial globe shape like she's just finished teleporting from somewhere else. She has one hand out behind her, the other holding a big sword, two additional mechanical arms coming out from her back and pointing forwards above her shoulders, and ANOTHER two coming out underneath her real arms, and the whole effect very much brings to mind a spider.

I had a (belated) birthday lunch at our local pub today! Great to see friends, the food was delicious as always, and @littleal@mastodon.au bought me a present, the new Warp Spider Phoenix Lord miniature for Warhammer 40,000!

warhammer 40k darkroom rouse hill games workshop friends aeldari new miniatures

Posted on 10 May 2025, 16:19

A selfie taken of me and three other work friends in our music room in the office. There's me, a white man with a short red beard and short red hair at the very left of the frame grinning and leaning in so I'm actually in the frame, sitting behind an electronic drum kit. Next around is Harry, a white man with shoulder-length curly brown hair standing holding a bass guitar. After that is Andy, a white man with a short black beard, black hair, and glasses, also standing and holding an electric guitar. And lastly is Nidhi, a South Asian woman with glasses and dark hair, leaning in from the right of the frame over a keyboard and grinning cheesily.

Another Thursday, another jam session! And we had a team event today and so had a paid-for-by-work lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Barangaroo and it was delicious. 👌🏻

selfie me darkroom friends in the office jamming

Posted on 8 May 2025, 19:43

A photo of a sheep standing behind a waist-high chain link fence nomming on some grass.

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 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, and at the far side away from the camera are six Ultramarines of broadly the same shape armour as the Death Guard, but it's a rich blue and they don't have tentacles and demon faces.

In the office today for after-work Kill Team! On the way to the train station this morning the sheep were out having a good nom and I said hello and they all stared blankly at me haha.

The Kill Team game itself was Plague Marines versus Angels of Death, I've really struggled to figure out how the Plague Marines were meant to be played and had a REALLY frustrating game week before last where I conceded before the end of turn 2. This game was the complete opposite of that, the final score was 11-3 and I wiped out every single enemy operative and lost none in return!

I can't claim too much credit though because my friend who was playing against me had read the Plague Marines rules and gotten a sense of how they worked, and kept reminding me of stuff and making suggestions. He's generally played a lot more Kill Team than I have so has the concepts and tricks down a lot better too, and plus he deliberately took a fairly melee-focused roster which meant that with my Contagion strategic ploy he was always at -1 to hit, which it turns out is surprisingly powerful. He also had a couple of terrible rolls, like rolling five dice for one of his nasty melee warriors and four of them being failures. 😬

Still, I'm feeling a bit better about them, I just need to play them more, though I also need to figure out some method of organising myself so I don't keep doing things like forgetting strategic ploys that I've paid command points for.

schofields darkroom gaming kill team games workshop sheep death guard space marines in the office

Posted on 5 May 2025, 20:20

A photo of April, a fluffy chocolate brown labradoodle, running full-tilt in a large grassy field with a purple rubber ball in her mouth.

A photo of a Dalmatian, whose name I didn't get, standing still in between two people and staring very intently at something behind me in the distance.

A photo of Pickles, a very scruffy-looking cattledog-cross-poodle, with her head down and tongue out looking directly at the camera. She was mid-trot so the middle half of her body is in focus and her head isn't. She was fond of just dramatically flopping to the ground to get scritches, then she'd be up and about again.

A photo of Alfie, who is a big at least partial English Sheepdog, mid-walk with his tongue hanging out. Three other people are standing around, and April and Amber, @ausfestivus's dogs, are just visible behind Alfie and the people.

We took full advantage of #GloriousSydney today and went to Fagan Park to meet up with @ausfestivus and his lovely wife and their two dogs April and Amber. Hornsby Council have recently opened HUGE off-leash dog park there so we went and did a bunch of ball-throwing for April and Amber and met several other dogs as well and it was excellent.

dog darkroom people fagan park

Posted on 3 May 2025, 17:19

A photo of the two ballot papers for the 2025 Australian federal election. There is a small green one with seven boxes to number from 1-7 in order of voting preference, which is for the House of Representatives (your local MP in your local electorate), and then there's a massive white one that's so wide it's curving up the sides of the voting booth. This one is for the Senate which is for the whole of Australia, and 20 columns with the various different parties. There's a thick line diving the "above the line" section where you have to number at least 1-6 (but can do more) in order of preference, or you can vote below the line (at least 1-12) for the individual senators from each of those parties.

Democracy: done. ✅

No democracy sausage since it was early voting, but for some bizarre reason when we went in Tony fucking Abbott¹ was standing there with the Liberal² people who were handing out the how-to-vote pamphlets. It was surprisingly busy, we had a minute or two's queue before getting our ballot papers. Then on the way back out, Abbott was talking to a few people outside one of the shops, with a photographer who I assume was from a newspaper. Just bizarre, I'm not sure what they were attempting to accomplish there.

(Footnotes for the non-Australians:

¹ Abbott was one of our worst and most unpopular prime ministers and ended up with his own party voting him out of leadership in 2015.

² Very confusingly, the "Liberal" party here are actually the conservatives).

darkroom politics stanhope

Posted on 24 April 2025, 11:15

A photo of a game of Warhammer Underworlds. There are two rectangular boards with hex tiles on them, the art on the boards looks like gnarled and corrupted roots like you're deep within a cursed forest. Closest to the camera are Domitan's Stormcoven, three warriors in armour who look like they're also mages because they all have staves and one of them looks like she's levitating. On the other side of the board are the Gorechosen of Dromm, a three-fighter warband consisting of very large meaty-looking warriors in large red armour, one of whom is clearly part daemon because he's hunched over and has MASSIVE arms and huge horns sprouting from his head.

@yayKM and I played some 1v1 Warhammer Underworlds for the first time in ages! @yayKM went with her now-standard Gorechosen of Dromm, while I played Domitan's Stormcoven who I haven't actually played at all before despite getting the Wyrdhollow box nigh on two years ago now. 😬 The Stormcoven are shamefully unpainted and we had to call it after the second round (and it ended in a 8-8 draw!), but the Stormcoven's gameplay was really interesting with the inspiration being able to be switched around after activations, I'm looking forward to playing them more!

The miniatures themselves are fantastic too (you can see them close-up when I assembled and undercoated them) and normally I find the Stormcast Eternals very uninteresting (they're much like Space Marines in that respect 😛) but Games Workshop done a really good job with these three, in particular Leona Stratosi who looks like she's actually flying.

our house darkroom gaming games workshop warhammer underworlds nethermaze gorechosen of dromm wyrdhollow

Posted on 21 April 2025, 22:03

A photo of my birthday presents. At the top is the box of an Arturia "MiniLab 3" MIDI keyboard, it's a small 25 key keyboard with a number of dials and sliders and buttons above the keys themselves. Under the keyboard box are four books, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, the Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, and The Killing Moon also by N.K. Jemisin.

And the actual birthday goodies! I'm really looking forward to playing around with the keyboard, the company that makes it has a big synth plugin that integrates specifically with all the dials and sliders on the keyboard itself so you can control all the various parameters of the synth without needing to take your hands off the keyboard itself.

books our house darkroom presents midi keyboard

Posted on 20 April 2025, 10:18

A photo of a half rack of beef ribs and a bowl of hot chips sitting on a, well, wooden board.

A photo of the strawberry and cherry sundae, it's in a tall glass and has one of those crunchy hollow chocolate stick things sticking out the top. The glass has hundreds and thousands artistically attached to the rim.

My actual birthday is tomorrow which is Easter and everything is closed, so we went out to Meat & Wine Co. tonight for a birthday dinner and got the beef ribs and it was goooooood. Then I followed it up with a strawberry and cherry sundae which cleared the mouth-grease up very nicely!

darkroom food portrait mode dessert ribs bella vista

Posted on 19 April 2025, 19:57