Media - darkroom - Page 14 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the eleven miniatures from the Vespid Stingwing squad from the Kill Team Hivestorm box, undercoated but otherwise not painted. There's one drone off the side, but the other ten miniatures are all insectoid aliens with six eyes, exoskeletons, and big wings. They're holding and pointing various guns and are in very dynamic poses like they're mid-flight.

Huzzah, that's the Vespid Stingwings from the Hivestorm box finally assembled and undercoated! Next, I need to actually finish painting the entire squad. 😅 Given how organic they are, I'm hoping a judicious deployment of Contrast Paints will make it pretty quick and painless.

our house darkroom kill team games workshop painting hivestorm vespid stingwings

Posted on 19 February 2025, 20:18

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. At the left are the Angels of Death in their very large resplendent blue Space Marine armour, and 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.

The closeup of the moment the Bomb Squig exploded. The Space Marine captain is standing behind a waist-high barricade, his Power Fist held back behind him partially like he's exhorting his squad and partially like he's about to punch something, and he's aiming a plasma pistol forwards. On the other side of the barricade is the Bomb Squig, a red, squat, very round four-legged creature in mid-run that doesn't even come up to the height of the barricade. It has a landmine strapped to its back and a grenade held in its mouth.

Last night we had another of our semi-regular games of Kill Team, I was too brain-fried from work during the week to play myself so I just observed and my other friends did a 1v1 with the full rules and equipment and everything.

It was Space Marines of the Angels of Death squad versus the new Ork "Wrecka Krew" squad, and in typical Orky fashion the Wrecka Krew were hilarious. We only got through two and a bit turns though we played it out partially into the third and man it would have been close. We did the more casual missions where you've got the primary objective and you also get points for killing the other team, which feels a lot better than the previous edition where you would get nothing for killing your opponent's operatives.

The most hilarious moment came when the Space Marines made the mistake of not fully killing one of the Bomb Squigs (they'd gotten it down to 4 wounds remaining but retreated instead of taking another shot to finish it off because it would have them exposed to a very large rocket). The Squig immediately proceeded to run into the Space Marine leader and explode, dealing TWENTY EIGHT damage to him thanks to the close-quarters rule of blast weapons having Lethal 5+ combined with having a surplus of Wrecka Points to convert failed hits into successes. Because the explosives are a Blast weapon, you also need to roll damage against the Bomb Squig itself which meant it ended up taking a good 15 damage or so as well.

In future we're going to try doing a rotating 1v1 each time so we can actually get through games a bit more quickly and also get used to playing with the real rules rather than the slightly cut-down multiplayer ones.

darkroom gaming kill team games workshop space marines orks into the dark

Posted on 15 February 2025, 23:29

Looks we're finally at the point where the roads are all in and the land's been divided up, and it's just waiting for houses now.

schofields darkroom construction

Posted on 13 February 2025, 15:15

The "middle chaos" photo of our home office: there is a standing desk pulled entirely out from the wall, four ethernet cables running from the wall into the router that's sitting under the standing desk, plus a bunch of cables and external hard disks, a Mac mini, and a vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room, as well as a printer sitting on the chair. Beside the standing desk is a bookshelf with the bottom two shelves empty where the printer, Mac mini, and external hard disks live.

The finished glorious neatness: the standing desk is back against the wall, the printer, Mac mini, hard disks, and router are neatly back on the bookshelf, and the big power board has all its power plugs neatly labelled. Four of the cables (the three hard disks and the Raspberry Pi) are actually fed into a cable organiser that takes them up behind the bookshelf, and the four ethernet cables are neatly tied together. The only slightly messy bit are the four power cables coming down from the standing desk into a second powerboard, but even they're mostly tied together.

We had the electrician in yesterday to run a bunch of new ethernet cable for our new network setup with the additional wifi access points. Yesterday evening after dinner we went out and bought two big 12-port Arlec powerboards with two USB-A and two USB-C ports in them to neaten up the lounge room power setup, and the office too because I was going to move the router there but we'd run out of ports on the existing boards. I spent the rest of yesterday evening after we got home doing the lounge room, at lunch today I wall-mounted and tidied up the access point in the back room, and then this evening pulled EVERYTHING in the office apart and redid it all.

Witness the absolute chaos of the middle of it, and then the glorious neatness afterwards, I even labelled all of the power cables to indicate what they're for!

our house darkroom nerd shit tidying and rearranging

Posted on 12 February 2025, 22:41

A photo looking out of our sliding door onto the patio and into the backyard. The water has come up above the level of the grass in approximately half the lawn area, and it's only slightly less than that on the side of the patio closest to the house.

Bloody hell, the rain is so heavy our backyard has flooded. I've seen it occasionally happen before but not to this extent.

our house darkroom storm

Posted on 10 February 2025, 12:09

A photo of a round white UFO-looking UniFi access point mounted on the wall, with an ethernet cable coming out of the bottom of it. There's a blue circle of LED in the middle, looking all cool and futuristic (he says as the table is moved in front of that piece of wall so you can't actually even see the thing is there anyway).

An absolute mess of mostly ethernet cables, plus a power cable, an RCA cable, and a small white D-Link switch sitting on the floor, looking very rat-nesty.

Well, the one for the lounge room was easy because there's already a cable coming straight from the Dream Router to where I wanted to mount the new access point anyway. And with being able to move everything to wireless because there's now a properly solid signal here, and moving the Raspberry Pi directly behind the TV because the only thing it needs to plug into is power and the amplifier, I've been able to clean out a whole rat's nest of cables.

This Power-over-Ethernet thing is pretty sweet, isn't it?

our house darkroom nerd shit

Posted on 4 February 2025, 21:45

A photo of two round white UFO-looking access points sitting on a table. There's nothing for scale but Ubiquiti's tech specs page says they're 16cm across.

I bought a couple of shiny new Ubiquiti U6+ access points because it turns out our wifi is not super-great particularly in the back room, and completely missed the fact that they're powered by power-over-ethernet ONLY, with no actual other way of getting power into them. Oops.

(Fortunately our Dream Router has two ports that can do PoE, but it'll require some rejiggering of the network at the front of the house, plus we'll have to get a sparky out to run some ethernet cable for the back room.)

our house darkroom new toys nerd shit

Posted on 4 February 2025, 16:26

A photo of five people sitting around a somewhat messy music area in our office. The drum kit is empty because I was on it but stepped back to take the photo, but we have someone on bass guitar, two guitarists, a keyboardist, and a vocalist.

In the office again for the first after-work music jam of the new year! As well as the guitar/bass/drums/keyboard, there's a little Korg synth of some description and one of the people had great fun playing around with that despite not actually knowing how to really use it. At one point I ended up just starting a simple little progression on the bass guitar and then everyone else joined in along the same lines and it sounded so good! Completely improvised but we all got into the groove and it was hella satisfying.

Then at the end we played Black Sabbath's Paranoid and oh man such a good song but I was on drums at that point and it absolutely did my arm in, haha.

darkroom friends in the office jamming

Posted on 30 January 2025, 20:44

A photo of our little temperature dashboard display showing that it's 45.1˚C outside right now. (Inside it's a wonderfully comfortable 24.4˚C.)

NO THANK YOU.

our house darkroom too fucking hot

Posted on 28 January 2025, 15:51

A photo of the box of my iPad Pro. The box itself is white with an image of a black iPad Pro on it, and on the screen is some abstract art, mostly black, with a set of lines that kind of give the impression of something having been vacuum moulded underneath it.

Upgraded to the new 11" iPad Pro tonight, 6 years from my 2018 one is a good run! I had unfortunately dropped the old one a couple of months ago and cracked the glass, and it's since spread and is now registering phantom touches. I also likely would have been upgrading later this year anyway since the old one was getting rather long in the tooth (and I've had to have the "automatically remove unused apps" on for a good two-plus years now because I had very much run out of storage space), this just pushed the timeframe up a bit.

The new Magic Keyboard is MUCH more solid feeling than the old one (and there's an Escape key! 🎉), but the first order of business is disabling all the bloody Apple Intelligence rubbish now that I have an iPad that can actually run it.

our house darkroom new toys ipad pro

Posted on 23 January 2025, 21:58