(I went crazy) Auctions and Adepticon

One of my favorite FLGSes is actually 1.5 hours from my house. Games Plus is located in a quiet suburb of Chicago, and it's been around for close to 40 years. I went there when I was a high school freshman, when the shelves were lined with Avalon Hill, Steve Jackson, and Ral Partha. It still has the most diverse inventory of any game store I have visited in my life. Of course, there are the complete lines of GW, Corvus Belli, Wyrd, PP, Flames of War, FFG, etc. There's also all the older and obscure stuff like Microarmor, Star Fleet Battles, many flavors of historicals, and every RPG and board game I've heard of.

Twice a year, they hold a three day auction. They've been doing it for decades. I had missed every one of them until this year. Sunday was the miniatures auction (RPGs and board games are on different days), and with my 11 year old daughter in tow, we waded into the fray.

Adepticon 2015: Photostream

Craftworld Burgundy 

Well, another Adepticon has come and gone. Each year, it gets harder and harder to carve out the time, but this one was special. I attended Thursday and Friday. I will have separate reviews of the some of the games I played, but for now,

Adepticon 2013 Part 2:The Haul and The Find

Illustration by Taytonclait on Deviant Art.

I went on quite a shopping spree at Adepticon this year. The new separate vendors' room made it simple to keep orbiting the tables and finding more and more stuff to "need". Of course, I spent too much at Forgeworld, but I was restrained enough to not buy any Black Library...simply not enough hours in the day for casual reading.

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Adepticon 2013 Part 1: My favorite army, Despicable Me

So I'm noticing that more and more people are blogging about Adepticon, so much so that any sort of summary on my part would be redundant and incomplete. So I thought I'd take the next few posts just to talk about some of the fun stuff I found there. I'm sure even these personal thoughts will be covered elsewhere, but, well, on with it!

I wanted to show you my absolute favorite army I've seen since I started attending Adepticons.
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Adepticon is upon us. Let's meet!

From Adepticon 2010

OK, folks. This is simply an FYI post. For the past few years, I've been taking a LOT of pictures at Adepticon. I tried to get a picture of every display board the first year, but I gave up fairly early even though there were under 300...it was just too hard to navigate through the crowds. Here are some shots.
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Wargamma Tortured Lands Bases

When I went to Adepticon in April, I met a nice vendor who was selling some interesting sculpts. I thought they were very well done, but what caught my eye were his Tortured Lands bases. I basically bought his entire stock.

Wargamma Tortured Lands Bases

I was going to use them for my Grey Knights since I was going for a Draigowing configuration. Since then, my plans for GKs keep changing, and I didn't really have enough of these bases for any of my other planned armies.

Enter 6th Edition, and in particular, allies. I bought some bloodletters and daemonettes for my fluffy Khorne Berzerker and Noise Marine-centric Flawless Host warbands. I decided to paint them up:

The movement trays are from Armorcast. Click to enlarge.

They look pretty good and they are very easy to paint up. Click to enlarge.

Bleached bone, Tentacle Pink basecoats. Devlan Mud wash for the skin, Baal Red wash for the innards. Tin Bitz for the staples. Very characterful. I'll post these again when I base the daemons.

This is not a Post Adepticon report...

I meant to send this out last night, but as you may have guessed, I passed out and only dreamt that I submitted it.

So it's the wee hours of Monday morning. I have to be on the train for work in less than 6 hours. Adepticon has packed up and left town, and I'm still a little shell shocked even though i did not attend on Sunday. Instead of trying to get some shuteye, I'm working on a school project for my 10 year old. Who the hell asks a 4th grader to build a SCALE model of a General Store? I almost wept with relief when I found out that I don't have to expose the interior.

So you'll have to wait for a show review later in the week. But I do have something indulgent to talk about...my weekend haul!

Adepticon Friday

OK, I will be there all day Friday and Saturday. Come by and say hi! Ask me to photograph your display board.

Interweb Fatigue

The Internet is surprisingly immature for its age, and I think that says a lot about human nature. Everyone blames 4Chan and Something Awful for lowering the floor of acceptability, but trolling and really bad arguments have been around since before the Web (anyone reading this still use Usenet?).

I haven't posted lately. It's mostly due to work; there are a lot of transitions occurring, and I'm still trying to get my footing in the New World Order. And I've had an incredible flu that is still lurking around...if it's just sheer muscle pain and fever, would it be Nurgle or Slaanesh?). But the main reason is a bit deeper-seeded: I'm getting really tired of the lazy discourse that makes up the 40k blogosphere. There is almost nothing that ends up positive. Exciting teaser rumors start a shit storm of complaints from "GW is stupid" to "The OP is an idiot". Any posted list becomes an ad hominem attack-laden tirade.

But the worst is the unsubstantiated assumptions, "facts" and faulty argument that infest the comment sections of blog posts like this:

 BoLS Article

Did you make it through the comments? I couldn't do it. Now, I want you to do me a huge favor. Take a look at this infographic.

Seriously, really read this.

Now try looking at each comment posted and see how many of these fallacies fit. Just in the first 30 or so comments, I think I hit a bunch of them (definitely all of the categories). And I don't mean to pick on BoLS; they have a job to do (generate revenue through website traffic), and like them or not, they do it better than anyone in the hobby. This lack of well-researched conclusions and strawman arguments can be found in a lot of places and not always in the comments. In a few posts that I've made both here and at MWC, I've attempted to question the actual claims about GW's practices and ethics, and they've been met with apathy, in my opinion. So my perception is that people like to argue, and the content or logic of the argument is tertiary, behind both volume and frequency.

And yes, I have been guilty of the same thing. It's easy to slide by with just about anything when everyone else seems to be deaf to all but their own voice. But I don't want to be like that anymore. Don't get me wrong, I don't want Stelek or Kirby or Brent or MBG or Dakka or Warseer to change anything about their tone. Being confrontational is its own flavor, I guess. But I've grown tired of it.

So instead of jumping into comment about the ridiculousness of someone claiming that GW is raising prices to "fuck over Australia" or that mathhammer always/never works, I'm going to chill out and just post my painting progress and share what I can in a hobby I love.

I hope you readers, and there's quite a few now if Google Analytics can be believed, will stick with me, but if you don't, I understand. I just appreciate the fact that you took the time to read some of my posts.

I'm going to Adepticon on Friday and Saturday. If you want to stop me and say hello, I'd certainly appreciate it. I'm the old Asian guy with a small red and black camera backpack, and it's most likely I will ask you if I can photograph your army. It's one of my favorite things to do, and I really love all of your skills and creativity.

Thanks for reading!

[REQUESTING ADVICE] Alternative balancing

If this article is too long, let me just get to the point up front. In the comments, please give me your input of a specific army list you have played that seemed well-matched to another specific army list. Thanks!

The last time I was this into 40k, there was no World Wide Web, no established tournament scene in the Midwest (US), and no netrage community. FLGSs were king, and I was blissfully unaware of minmax lists, monobuilds, and WAAC neckbeards. [Read More]

WIP: Emperors Children Sonic Dread...color blocked

Not even remotely related to this post.

Not much time to post this evening. It's already 1:00am and I have a bunch of work to do for a 9:30am meeting. But I wanted to show the progress I've made on my little 3 year project, my Sonic Dread.
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Adepticon and Bargain Devastators

Adepticon is coming up quick, and it's going to be a doozy. Being an old dude, time seems to be accelerating, but I can use Adepticon to gain some perspective. For example, last April was when I met Goatboy and had a nice discussion of the then-new Grey Knights Codex. The year before that, I met Jen Ikuta of Privateer Press, and she gave me a run through of their fairly new WarMachine. This year, I predict, will be a watershed moment for this con. The hotel is completely booked, the 40k tourney sold out immediately, and every indicator points to sheer mayhem - in a good way, of course.

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Plus there are exactly two cosplayers: the giant Army Transport mascot and the young lady who works for one of the vendors who dresses as a Sister of Battle. I can't remember what her name is, but I would like to thank her for distracting all the neckbeards so I can cut in the Forgeworld line.

I keed! I keed!

But seriously, I'm looking forward to going, and I think I'm going to do a guerilla giveaway hen I'm there. It will totally be on the down low, and it will be a "Where's Waldo" kind of thing. Stay tuned...

Are you going to Adepticon? Please let me know in the comments. What are you most looking forward to?

Here's the second part of this post. This is probably something that a lot of you have already firgured out, but it was new to me...I'm relatively new to Dev squads. So look at this picture:

Front Row: Sergeant, Hvy Plas, Hvy Bolter, Hvy Bolter, Rocket Launcher
Back Row: Hvy Las, Hvy Plasma, Hvy Las, Multi Melta, Sergeant

Although they are in various states of completion, you can clearly see the complement of weapons available in the Devastator Squad box. So how did I double the number of Devs? Here's what I did.

I purchased:

1 Devastator Squad box $35.00 retail, about $30.00 street

1 Assault Squad box $33.00 retail, about $28.00 street

5 Pairs of Space Marine legs $5.50 (on Ebay) 

The trick is that the Assult Squad box has an EXTRA sprue of 5 torsos.for use if you are not using jump packs. 

So with these torsos and the 5 extra legs, you have 5 extra platforms for those sweet heavy weapons. And in case there are point cost and loadout issues, I also painted the three bolter marines that come in the $8.50 box with blue devastator helmets for FOC flexibility.

Do you guys already do this? Are there other little tricks and bargains? I'd love to read about it.