Media - Page 4 | virtualwolf.org

A photo taken in the middle of a game of Magic: The Gathering. There are four play mats sitting on a dining table with cards all over them.

A photo of my torso, wearing a black t-shirt with artwork of a quite worn stone head on it where the eyes have been dug, and it's not entirely clear if it was originally human or not. Underneath the head it says "Be'lakor" all in capitals with a bunch of extra lines coming out from the "A" and flowing through and around the rest of the letters. Next to the t-shirt I'm holding up the Magic: The Gathering card "Be'lakor, the Dark Master" which has artwork of a demon with horns and massive red wings in mid-flight, holding a massive sword.

Went over to a friend's house tonight for some Magic: The Gathering! This was the 100-card singleton format Commander which I just do not have the mental capacity to make decks for, so I just borrowed decks rather than bringing my own. The first was a zombie deck that had a bunch of my favourite cards from my own regular 60-card strictly-Innistrad-block zombie deck and it was very close in the end, I ended up coming second.

The second game I used one of the very flavourful Warhammer 40,000 crossover decks, the Chaos one which I hadn't played before, and completely coincidentally the commander I used was Be'lakor and I happened to be wearing a t-shirt from the metal band Be'lakor. 😂 (Yes, the band is named after the Warhammer demon, haha.) I also ended up coming second this game, and mostly due to a misplay on my part which let another friend pull out a win.

darkroom gaming magic the gathering seven hills

Posted on 28 February 2026, 23:25

A photo of a black mouse sitting on a dark grey mousepad. It has a two buttons behind the scroll wheel, another two to the left of the left mouse button, and you can't see it from the angle of the photo but there are another three around where your thumb rests. The whole design is a bit angular in places but isn't the absolutely ridiculous "We're trying to make this look like a Lamborghini" styling that you see in a lot of mice.

New mouse day!

My six year-old Microsoft Intellimouse's scroll wheel was starting to misbehave, and the rubber on the thumb rest was starting to go gross so I figured it was time for a new one. I specifically wanted a wired mouse and man there are not a lot of choices if you don't want to go wireless. My old Logitech MX518 was an absolute trooper so I figured I'd go back to Logitech, this one is the G502X and I am overwhelmed at the amount of buttons on it (11 in total). I'm not even sure what I'm going to do with half of them.

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 25 February 2026, 13:22

A photo of the Hero Quest board in all its 1980s glory. The board itself has a bunch of rooms on it, and in about half of the rooms there are things like cupboards or bookshelves or tables, made partially out of cardboard and held together with plastic. The three hero miniatures are visible, all in dark red plastic, along with a handful of heavily-armoured Chaos Warriors. A big Balrog-looking thing is just visible behind a cardboard fireplace.

Tonight we went over to a friend's place and played the original Hero Quest from 1989! We played the introductory mission, and only @[email protected]'s elf made it out alive, my barbarian died fighting a rear-guard action trying to escape, and the Dwayne the dwarf was killed by a Chaos Warrior as he was running away (though to be fair he brought it on himself, we opened the central chamber where multiple baddies were, then Dwayne decided it would be a good idea to go and open another door down the corridor, inside which were another two Chaos Warriors and some demon-gorilla-looking thing as well). My barbarian was able to take out the big-bad Balrog without getting damaged in return, but the weight of numbers of the Chaos Warriors proved too much.

I was going to play the wizard but there isn't any magic in the introductory mission so it would have been kind of pointless because the wizard is otherwise fairly useless in combat. There are apparently sixteen missions in the main campaign so we're going to start on that next time. 😁

darkroom gaming seven hills hero quest

Posted on 22 February 2026, 23:21

A photo of the side of the thermal imaging camera sitting on a table. It looks like of like a cop's hand-held speed camera except much less chunky. It's dark grey with red highlights and and has big handle that you hold with a trigger that causes the camera to take a photo.

A photo taken with said thermal camera. It's showing my computer setup, an ultrawide monitor with a laptop sitting open to the left of it. The monitor is various shades of orange, shading up to yellow towards the top, and the laptop has the bulk of the heat in the middle where the keyboard is. The screen is relatively cool, and most of the rest of the surrounds are just blank purple, but you can see a faint warm patch in the desk where I had my arm resting when I was typing on the keyboard. There's a tracking point showing the warmest part of the image is middle of the laptop which is 32.7 degrees Celsius.

And today was in fact a double package day, I had also ordered a set of D12 dice from AliExpress (my very first order from there; all I wanted was a decent number of them to keep track of wounds when playing Kill Team, but all the D12 sets I could find were just a handful of D12s along with a whole bunch of other different types of dice which I had no need of) and while poking the site around I found a cheap thermal imaging camera so grabbed that too! I've always wanted one to double-check the insulation in the house and various other things, but I didn't want one that required a smartphone and app, and all the standalone ones were multiple hundreds of dollars at the very least.

This one works perfectly and was only $150, my only complaint is that somehow none of the USB-C cables I have actually register when plugged into it, I've needed to use the cable it comes with (which is USB-C to USB-A annoyingly, so I need an adapter).

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 20 February 2026, 21:07

A photo of my home office desk setup: an expanse of white standing desk in its standing position, with a 34" ultrawide monitor in the middle, and my laptop to the left looking like it's suspended in mid-air (it's on a monitor arm/laptop mount). Underneath the right side of the monitor and the laptop on the left are two speakers sitting sideways on the desk. They're almost entirely white except for the rubber bit around the woofer cone and they look VERY sleek and modern. Tucked away, if such a word can be used to describe a honking great black box, at the left foot of the standing desk on the floor is the subwoofer.

The speakers (and subwoofer) arrived today! I'm glad I got the speakers in white, they're very handsome-looking but also blend in to my desk rather than being BIG CHUNGUS OBVIOUS BLACK. I'll need to do some mucking around tomorrow to get the subwoofer levels right, and there are some switches on the back of the speakers that changes some frequency response to counteract them being so close to the wall so that'll be another thing to play with too.

I also need to go to Bunnings to pick up some sort of individual switch powerboard or adapter to plug the speakers and sub into so I can easily turn them on and off, because fuck me is reaching around to scrabble behind them trying to find the power switch annoying.

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 20 February 2026, 20:54

A photo of the band Lacuna Coil on stage, lit in red and purple. Two vocalists, one female and one male, a guitarist, a bass guitarist, and a drummer. The two guitarists both have full corpse paint on.

As expected, that fucking ruled. 🤘🏻

They played a couple of my absolute favourite songs (Kill The Light from Dark Adrenaline, and Spellbound from Shallow Life) and man Cristina Scabbia can hit those notes that are so pure and clear that it makes the hairs in the back of your neck stand up! I took a bunch of RAW photos and will see what came out tomorrow.

darkroom concert moore park lacuna coil

Posted on 14 February 2026, 22:57

A photo of a band on stage, lit in white and blue. Two guitarists at the far left and right, guy with a magnificent beard on drums, a tall woman in bass, and the vocalist is a woman who couldn't be taller than five and a half feet or so, she's got a really good clean singing voice and an hell of a roar!

The opening band was called Future Static, they're from Melbourne and have a woman on vocals and bass! They were quite good and it turns out they're on Bandcamp too. :success:

darkroom concert moore park lacuna coil

Posted on 14 February 2026, 20:36

A photo of two white men standing in a very dark concert hall, smiling at the camera.

Currently waiting for the opening act before Lacuna Coil with @[email protected]!

selfie me darkroom concert friends moore park lacuna coil

Posted on 14 February 2026, 19:43

Factory

I have finished my song! 🎉

It's titled "Factory" because the keys sounds are from the EZKeys Dark Industrial expansion, and I chose a more raw metal-sounding kit for the drums (plus the user interface for the Dark Industrial expansion is really cool and looks like a steampunk keyboard). The guitar, bass guitar, and drums are all played by me, the only thing that isn't is the keyboard sounds (and looking at the MIDI files they're simple enough that I probably could manage to do most of them myself as well, but ehhh).

Really really happy with how this turned out, I did a bunch of reading and watching about how to EQ and master songs and the whole principle of making sure each instrument has its own space in the track and doesn't end mushing into other tracks and ending up muddy. I'm also very pleased that I once again didn't need to have flex-and-follow turned on on the guitar or bass to keep them in time, and the only tweaks I made to the drums were to fix just a couple of bits that weren't quite in time, to make a couple of the fills flow a bit better, and to slightly improve the feel of the final chorus at the end. And I didn't need to spend a ton of time re-recording the drums to get them right, it was probably only half an hour or so in total!

music guitar drums audio bass guitar ibanez jiva10 neuraldsp

Posted on 13 February 2026, 19:07

A photo of my home office desk setup: an expanse of white desk with a 34" ultrawide monitor in the middle, and my laptop to the left looking like it's suspended in mid-air, sitting on its shiny new monitor arm/laptop mount. Underneath the main monitor is a USB audio interface and guitar load box.

I wanted to get a pair of Yamaha studio speakers so I can listen to and mix my songs on good speakers without needing to cart my laptop down to the lounge room and plug it into the amplifier there, but I'm quite short on space on my desk. I could fit the speakers but the left one would have to go exactly where my laptop stand was. I was doing a bunch of poking around trying to figure out what I could do, and discovered that you can get VESA laptop mounts that attach to a regular monitor arm!

So I bought a mount from Desky and another Ergotron monitor arm (I've already got my monitor mounted on one), the laptop mount arrived yesterday and the arm today, so now I'm all set up!

...now hopefully the studio speakers actually ship soon. 😛

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 10 February 2026, 12:46