Media - darkroom - Page 8 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the battlefield at the beginning of the game. It's played on a roughly six-by-four foot play mat that's decorated like grass, and the terrain is almost fantasy-looking, there are some sections of hills and a bunch of various stone ruins. Closest to the camera are the orange-clad Space Marines, including two large walkers (the Dreadnaughts) and a gravtank with a big lasgun on its turret), and on the opposite side are the hordes of "Tyranids", which all look like a cross between crabs and the actual Tyranid models. There are a ton of small ones, and two HUGE ones that a towering over everything else.

A closeup photo of one of the large "Tyranid" units ( I don't remember what it was, but it's all chitin and huge claws and if it was actually alive and real size would scare the fuck out of you) towering over a squad of Space Marines.

Today started with me hopping on the Metro first thing after breakfast to go to Crows Nest to pick up my last two fully serviced and restrung guitars (the Ibanez JIVA10 and the Epiphone SG Standard), then I headed over to a friend's place for lunch (it was tuna mornay and it was gooooooood) and to hang out and watch a game of Warhammer 40,000! It was Space Marines versus "Tyranids", where the Tyranid miniatures were some custom 3D-printed alien crab things. They didn't end up doing the final turn because the Space Marines were already ahead 50-35 and it wasn't going to be possible to bridge that gap.

There was some hilarious dice rolling though, including a squad of 20 Termagaunts firing their Spinefist weapons at a squad of Space Marine Scouts, which involved rolling forty dice. 😂 (The Scouts ended up dead, unsurprisingly.)

warhammer 40k darkroom gaming games workshop guitar tyranids seven hills space marines

Posted on 8 November 2025, 18:38

A photo of a standard-looking silver 16" M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. It has two Deep Space Nine stickers on it, one shows has Garak the Cardassian from the chest up standing there smiling with his hands up as if in greeting, he's looking very pleased and it says "Friend of Garak". Behind him is a rainbow. The other sticker is Major Kira holding a Bajoran phaser upwards in front of her and pressing a button on top of it, with the caption "This machine kills fascists." (Presumably she's setting her phaser to kill.)

This toot is brought to you by my ex-work MacBook Pro that I installed Asahi Linux on! (I figured I'd chuck a couple of stickers on it to distinguish it from my completely and utterly identical-looking M4 MacBook Pro work machine that arrived last week.)

Gotta say I'm extremely impressed with the job the Asahi team has done, the installer was a breeze, it all Just Worked and I even have working brightness and audio keys (and audio!) out of the box! I decided to go for the KDE environment, partially because I haven't used that since 2003 when I took this screenshot of KDE 3.1 back under Mac OS X when I was mucking around with running XWindows inside it, and partially because that's the Asahi team's main focus in terms of polish. I haven't pushed it yet but just doing light browsing and general poking around getting things set up, the battery life is exactly what I'd expect the machine to be under macOS; right now it's reading 85% charge and 10 hours of battery life remaining, and it's completely cool and silent.

I haven't looked into the keyboard shortcut swapping yet (having Ctrl-C be copy everywhere except in a terminal session where you have to remember to use Ctrl-Shift-C irritates the bejesus out of me every time, and in general I find the ergonomics of having the Command key position being the primary modifier to be far superior to Control) but that'll probably be my next mini-project. I got 1Password working, although they don't have a proper distribution of aarch64 binaries yet so I'm having to start it in a terminal session like some sort of barbarian. The browser extension works fine at least.

[EDIT] Well that was easy, someone wrote a thing called Toshy that takes all the hard work out of remapping everything!

our house darkroom linux

Posted on 26 October 2025, 20:14

A photo of a slice of lotus biscof cheesecake sitting in a plate. It has three layers and the top has a really intricate swirly pattern.

We went to Crows Nest today to drop my remaining two guitars off at Mannys for a restringing and full setup, and caught up with @[email protected] for coffee and sweets.

We get on the Metro at the very first stop, today there were a ton of people already there, 90% of them Indian and like 75% dressed in either Australia or India cricket jerseys (including kids being dressed in the Australia jerseys and their parents in Indian ones), and it turns out the third game of the Australia vs. India one-day match is today. It was a good vibe, everyone was cheerful but MAN was it absolutely chockers by the time we got off at Crows Nest!

I was wearing one of my Arch Enemy t-shirts and when I got into Mannys the guy behind the counter said "Cool t-shirt!" and then pointed out the Arch Enemy tattoo he had. And then on the walk back to the carpark on the way home someone was wearing a Fear Factory Obsolete t-shirt, and we both did the metalhead nod of recognition to each other, haha.

darkroom food portrait mode crows nest guitar dessert

Posted on 25 October 2025, 15:00

A photo of two round golden brown loaves of bread dusted with flour sitting on a cooling rack. They both have excellent-looking splits on top and look amazing.

And done. 👌🏻

our house darkroom food portrait mode bread

Posted on 10 October 2025, 12:03

A photo of a dining room table with the game board and cards around it. On the very outer section of the board are a bunch of people who have invented something or made scientific discoveries, then directly inside of that is (not in order) their inventions. Then inside THAT is a hexagonal ring that you move around, inside which there is a THIRD section that involves three concentric circles, and the inner two are raised higher on a plastic circular ring that sits inside the middle of the game board. The cards that are sitting next to the board have the inventors on it, then there are smaller cards, some of which you can trade to other players, and the whole thing is just bizarre from a gameplay perspective.

Tonight we went over to a friend's place and played Beyond 2000: The Boardgame! (For the non-Australians, there was a TV show called Beyond 2000 that was a staple of our elder Millennial childhoods, it was basically an educational science and technology show about new technologies and scientific discoveries.)

Apparently at some point someone decided to make a board game out of it, but it was weird. It was part Trivial Pursuit but had all these extra elements as you get further in like being able to steal cards from other players or join forces with them, and they all felt really disconnected from each other, like they'd come up with three different ideas for games but decided they should mush them all together. The facts were interesting but man, we're not going to be playing that again. 😅

darkroom board games seven hills

Posted on 5 October 2025, 23:04

A photo taken from our patio looking out into our rather modest backyard. The grass is looking rather overgrown and very weedy, and there is grass coming up from between the bricks of the patio, and the small slightly raised section that's directly in front of the back fence is also completely overgrown with weeds.

The exact same view as the first photo, except the grass is short and neat, the edges are all neat and tidy, and I've gotten rid of all of the grass that was in between the bricks of the patio too. Looks MUCH nicer.

Finally got around to mowing the lawns and doing the whippersnippering, and now I am dead. I was going to do the edging along the driveway too but ran out of steam.

our house gardening darkroom

Posted on 5 October 2025, 13:38

A photo of a lightly forested area with a bunch of plants covering the forest floor. Through the trees you can see the sky is completely blue and sunny.

A photo of an open field with a lightly mottled white horse with a black mane leaning down nomming on grass. Right behind it and partially obscured is a smaller white horse sitting down on the ground.

A photo of what I'm fairly sure is a white deer standing in a lightly-forested area nomming on some plants.

A photo looking off the side of the walking track, there are a bunch of long grasses then trees behind that. Everything is very lush and intensely green, and the sky is clear and blue except for some fluffy white clouds.

Despite having lived in the area for well over twelve years now, we'd never actually walked through any of the Western Sydney Parklands tracks, so we did that this morning! Two and a quarter hours, and 9.2km. We met some horses, a deer (!), and while there was a nice breeze that picked up at various points, it definitely could have had more shade. Even though it was only 25˚C, the sun was warm enough that I think that was probably our last walk until autumn arrives given it's meant to be getting into the 30s starting tomorrow.

horses darkroom trees doonside deer western sydney parklands

Posted on 4 October 2025, 12:52

A photo of a bright red electric guitar with a black pickguard and maple fretboard sitting on a stand.

New guitar day! 😍

It's a Fender "Made In Japan Hybrid II Telecaster" (how's that for a mouthful) and damn does it look good in red. I'd been considering getting a Telecaster for a bit though never really thought about a red guitar, but the lead guitarist in We Are Lady Parts had a red SG and I was like "Oh, yes."

The Hybrid series in particular is neat because it has a fourth pickup switch position that runs both pickups in series and so you get a really meaty sound out of it.

our house music darkroom guitar

Posted on 3 October 2025, 13:09

A photo of the Anker charger, it's a white cube probably roughly 5cm a side. It has an angled "lid" that comes up from the top of the cube that my iPhone is attached to, a little pop-out shelf at the right where the Apple Watch lives, and behind the lid is a spot for my AirPods Pro case to charge.

I got some more referral bonuses from the union for getting people to join, and have spent this batch on an Anker 3-in-1 Qi2 charger, so I'm now living in the future with wireless charging!

our house darkroom new toys

Posted on 29 September 2025, 12:49

A photo of the box of the Deep Space Nine complete DVD set.

Yessss it is finally mine to own!

Unfortunately it's a US-region DVD set so the next step is going to be finding a region-free drive with which to rip it.

...although I have a vague memory of there being some relatively small number of region changes you were allowed to do on non-region-free drives, and I suspect the Apple SuperDrive I bought back with the original-gen MacBook Air waaaay back in 2008 probably has never had its region set more than once... 🤔

our house darkroom star trek: deep space nine

Posted on 18 September 2025, 12:25