Media - Page 5 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the game board for the full Warhammer 40,000 game. The board itself is red desert, and all the terrain on it is ramshackle Mad Max-esque junk terrain, or stepped hills that have been painted to look like they're in a desert. On the left are the so-called Tyranids (which are actually 3D-printed proxies that look kind of Tyranid-esque in that they're clearly xenomorph-type aliens but for legal reasons are not actual Tyranids) and on the right are the shameful Space Marines.

A photo of the much-smaller game board for the Combat Patrol game. The board itself is grey urban ruins, and the terrain is a mixture of Warhammer 40,000-looking ruined urban buildings, and a set of grey stone ruins that look like it might have come from some sort of fantasy game. On the left are the absurdly heavily armoured golden Custodes, of which there are all of eight in total, and on the right are the mechanical hunched-over zombie-looking Necrons.

Today I went over to a friend's place to hang out and watch a couple of games of Warhammer 40,000! (I have my mind full with Kill Team, plus I absolutely cannot be bothered painting that many miniatures to make a single full 40K army so I'm happy to just observe.)

The first game was a full-sized game of Tyranids versus absolutely shameful Space Marines, they were mostly unpainted and three-quarters of them were held together with Blu-tac. The second was an introductory game of 500-point Combat Patrol for a friend who hadn't played before, Adeptus Custodes versus Necrons, and both games were absolutely one-sided blow-outs. The Tyranids won 29 points to 4, and the Custodes wiped all but three of the Necrons off the board by turn 3, oof.

It's also hilarious how large the boards are versus Kill Team... the cut-down Combat Patrol game which was just two players is still double a regular Kill Team board, or the standard size you'd use for a three or four player game, and the full game board is just HUGE. I used to play 40K way back in the day and know it's a 60"x44" board but the vastly smaller scale of Kill Team has made me forget just how big that actually is. 😅

warhammer 40k darkroom gaming games workshop necrons tyranids seven hills space marines adeptus custodes

Posted on 31 January 2026, 18:58

A photo of the kick drum setup for our electronic drum kit in the office. Instead of one beater (the bit that moves and hits the drum, or in this case the sensor pad) there are two side-by-side, with one pedal in the normal spot and another off to the left connected to the main pedal by a metal rod.

My word, at some point since I was last in we got a double kick setup. 😅 Never having played one before, I am unsurprisingly not very good at it!

The jam session was fun, unfortunately the bass guitar had a dying battery in it so we couldn't use it but the other people I was playing with were fine with me requesting to go back to simple chord changes so I could play guitar, and we also did some extremely-excellent-fun power chord chugging. 🤘🏻

darkroom drums in the office jamming

Posted on 29 January 2026, 19:46

A high-contrast black and white photo looking down onto part of the Sydney CBD from the 30th floor of our office. Lots of tall modern buildings interspersed with the older shorter ones that have been here for decades.

I'm in the office today for the first time this year for an after-work music jam!

My RAW-taking photo app of choice is Halide and they released a preview today of the next version of it, which includes a black-and-white process and my goodness does it look nice. It's even more striking looking at the original HDR image but that all gets stripped out when my website resizes the image and removes the EXIF data (and I also don't know if GoToSocial would keep it as HDR either).

sydney black and white buildings in the office halide

Posted on 29 January 2026, 16:38

A photo of the aforementioned paper guillotine thing. It consists of a flat board with an arm on one side with a sharp blade. There is a piece of paper with some of the Kill Team character cards sitting on the board, with small chopped-off pieces of paper on the floor next to it and a scattering of the already-chopped cards sitting off to the right.

Achievement unlocked: bought one of those paper guillotine things that teachers have!

All of the Kill Team squad rules come in printable PDFs for chopping up into 120x70mm-sized cards for easy reference. I got one page in to chopping them out with scissors and went "Fuck this" and then remembered that these guillotines are a thing that exist, and man I wish I'd bought one of these years ago when I was into chopping out Magic The Gathering and Warhammer Underworlds proxy cards.

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 23 January 2026, 18:56

A photo of the game board at the start of the battle. It's all ruined industrial-looking concrete buildings with rusty pipes everywhere. On the left-hand side is my terrain that has on top of the ruins and in various spots down the sides snow that's fallen and collected so it looks extra desolate. At the far-right are my converted all-women squad of six Space Marines clad in huge blood red armour, in the top-left are the six Death Guard who are all hulking and pustulant and gross in green armour, and at the bottom-left are the twelve Ratlings, who are essentially hobbits with sniper rifles.

Went over to a friend's place today for a game of three-player Kill Team, my Angels of Death versus Death Guard versus Ratlings! I would have liked to take my shiny new Wyrmblade but I haven't read the rules for them at all yet so I figured I'd stick with my trusty Space Marines (plus, fewer miniatures).

Two of us have fully-painted sets of the terrain from the Hivestorm box so we decided to break that out for a change from our standard close-quarters Gallowdark map, and we played the "loot" objective, where you once you gain control of the objective marker that's it for the turn and nobody else can take it, which added a whole extra level of tactics to everything. I ended up squeaking out a win, the final score was 6-5-4, but in part because one of the objectives at the beginning of the last turn had my leader, the Death Guard leader, and the Death Guard Icon Bearer all on it waiting to see what the outcome of the imminent fight was to determine who was going to be able to control it. Instead, one of the Ratlings snuck up and used their special ability that allows them to make mission actions (in this case looting the objective) even if the objective is contested, so that meant that neither me nor the Death Guartd could take control of it, so I activated another operative instead and stole the objective that one of the unactivated Ratlings was on! My other objective was far enough away from everyone else that they couldn't get it, so I ended up being able to get two victory points from that and I vaporised the Death Guard Icon Bearer with my leader's plasma gun. She survived the counterattack from the Death Guard leader's plasma gun thanks to some poor rolling on his part, which also meant that he was denied another two kill points, and I ended up coming out on top in terms of kills as well!

darkroom gaming kill team games workshop death guard seven hills space marines ratlings

Posted on 18 January 2026, 19:36

A photo of the original Deep Space Nine miniature before I painted it. In shape it looks very cool, it consists of a larger outer ring with another smaller ring in the middle, connected together with three equidistant arms, and three curved fang-like structures coming out both above and below the outer ring which give the station a bit of a predatory look. In colour though, it's a very bland grey/brown without very definition, and the yellow colour in the windows is misaligned with a lot of where the actual windows are.

And the same miniature but after painting! It's much darker now, with far more definition on all the edges where I've drybrushed it to a lighter grey, and the yellow on the windows is actually confined to the windows now.

@[email protected] has gotten really into Star Trek: Deep Space and a few weeks ago I remembered that I still had my collection of Star Trek Micro Machines miniatures that I got when I was in primary school, one of which was Deep Space Nine itself! From what I can tell the set was this limited edition collector's set, but the paint jobs on the ships aren't great, and the Deep Space Nine miniature in particular was quite bad.

I gave the miniature to @[email protected] to put on her desk but with it sitting on top of the monitor stand, it really blended in with the grey of the stand and yesterday she suggested I could repaint it, so I did! Black prime followed by a couple of layers of drybrushing, then just some yellow in the windows and bam, infinitely better. I didn't realise quite how munted it was until I was repainting it (the docking pylons are quite bent), but fortunately with the correct viewing angle you can manage to make it much less obvious. 😅

our house darkroom painting star trek: deep space nine

Posted on 17 January 2026, 16:41

A photo of five fully-painted miniatures from Warhammer Quest: Cursed City. Four of them are fairly standard-looking skeleton warriors with battered and worn-looking armour and spears and swords, and red cloaks flying around in the breeze. The one in the middle is a Kosargi Night Guard, a hulking zombie-looking brute that's a good 50% taller than the skeleton warriors, with rotting skin and wearing a torn-up knee-length cloak and a Mongolian-style fur hat. He's got a big long beard and is holding an absolutely massive axe.

We are nearing the very end! Another five miniatures down, only five to go!

our house darkroom games workshop painting warhammer quest

Posted on 16 January 2026, 21:55

A photo of the small square fluro green box that is the Sensiron SPS30 air quality sensor, plus the cables that plug into it. There's also a small square circuit board in a little plastic ziplock bag (the air quality sensor), and a folded-over set of 40cm-long female-to-female cables.

I've had a Plantower PMS5003 air quality sensor running outside to measure the PM values for a few years now, I already had to replace the sensor a couple of years ago and now the current one is dying too. I figured there had to be alternatives to that specific sensor, and it turns out the company Sensiron that makes the so-far extremely excellent SHT30 I'm using for temperature and humidity outside also make an air quality sensor. I ordered one and it arrived today, so that's yet another project to add to my list. 😅

I also bought another indoor air quality sensor that measures TVOC and eCO2 to put into the back room to see how dreadful the air quality gets when I'm airbrushing in there.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 16 January 2026, 10:43

A selfie taken looking down a pub table with all the aforementioned people smiling at the camera.

Another fedimeet success! Excellent as always to see @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected], and thanks to @[email protected] for organising!

selfie me darkroom friends surry hills fediverse meet

Posted on 15 January 2026, 22:03

A selfie of me, a white man with a short red beard and short brown and extremely receding hair, holding a bass guitar. Behind me Logic Pro is open on my main computer monitor, the window for EZKeys is open on my laptop's internal display which shows an Wurlitzer piano and all the various controls, then on a third little monitor in front of the laptop is the window for Superior Drummer 3 which shows the current drum kit that's been selected.

Having gotten sick of the lack of instrument sounds that really grab me with Logic Pro's built-in instruments, I bought Toontrack's EZKeys 2 and the Dark Industrial and Vintage Vibes expansions for it, and oh man I am having so much fun right now. 😁 The Vintage Vibes expansion is a recording/recreation of a Wurlitzer electric piano and it sounds amazing, I've got a bluesy swing thing going on that's such fun to play bass along with.

our house selfie me music darkroom bass guitar

Posted on 11 January 2026, 15:27