Piper

So here's Piper, one of the companions you can take along with you as you adventure through Boston in Fallout 4. As ever, human miniatures present me with the most challenge, although Piper looks...okay, I guess. Good enough to be recognized as the character if you've played the game, at least. 

Red Mirelurks

Or, as some call them, "Canadian mirelurks." I don't think they're as nice as my original green mirelurks, but it's nice to have some variety on the table. 
 

Escape from Gilligan's Island: The Miniatures

I finally cashed in my rewards for supporting HeroForge's 3D-printed colour miniatures initiative. I used my rewards to design 28mm-scale miniatures for the castaways of Gilligan's Island, suitable for any roleplaying game set in the modern era, but of course meant primarily for my own Escape from Gilligan's Island. The S.S. Minnow pictured here is a present from my brother; I painted it a couple of months ago. 

Here's a closer look at the minis: 

With Gilligan!

The Skipper too!

The millionaire and his wife!

The movie star!

The Professor and Mary Ann!

They're all here, on my blog. 

Anvils and Meter Sticks

Here's a freshly-painted pair of workbenches for Fallout: Wasteland Warfare. I try to give identical terrain pieces different colour schemes for variety's sake; in this case, I think the black and green version outshines the black and white. I like that I was clever enough to paint one meter stick yellow and one silver to suggest a wood and a metal meter stick, respectively. 
 

What a Revoltin' Development

I don't know why, but I take great amusement in switching around action figure heads to different bodies. In reality, Ben would need a bigger suit of armour. 
 

King Trooper

Workbenches and Cash Register

Last night, I painted three workbenches for Fallout: Wasteland Warfare and a cash register for . . . well, any number of modern-era games, I suppose. I don't think these workbenches are as nice as some others I've painted in the past, but I was experimenting with different colour schemes and weathering ideas. I think the chem station at right is the best of these experiments; the fluid tank looks pretty rusted out, and I was hoping, and the overturned beaker looks pretty authentic. 
 

Steampunk Desert Fortress Corner Wall

A few months ago, Sean gave me some Warhammer terrain pieces he wasn't using. I've been turning them into what I think is going to be part of an outer wall of an abandoned steampunk desert fortress. Lots of earth tones, accented with bronze, gold, and silver, and highlighted with weathering effects--chiefly some sandblasting and mud here. The pod at the top looks to me like some kind of air conditioning unit or maybe a moisture collector. 

This is the third piece I've finished out of five. Thanks, Sean!
 

Desert Home

Earth tones seemed like the right choice for this small desert home. 

Nothing really fancy here, just an exercise in trying to paint "between the lines." 

This was a pretty cheap model, so it's lacking playability features such as functional doors or windows. However, the roof comes off if your adventurers feel the need to duck inside to hide from enemies (or ransack the place). 

A Spiffy Skiff

I painted a 28mm-scale skiff and its base of frothy water. But it has no rigging! I've purchased dowels and brown thread, and I have rigging instructions. I have to admit, though, the task intimidates me. Sails? Pfft. Not this time. 
 

Amok Truck

Sean kindly gave me this amped-up truck model several months ago, and last weekend I finally painted it. the scheme is fairly simple, but hopefully effective: I painted the body red, the engine parts steel, and the tires and tread black. I also smeared some artificial mud on the wheels and body. 

A Colourful Magic Shoppe

Last month I painted a little fantasy-themed building in a rainbow of colours. 

Painting every individual rock took a lot of time, but I think the final result was worth it. 

Here`s the inside. 

And here`s the rainbow-hued roof. Well, almost rainbow-hued; there are only seven colours in ROYGBIV, so I added pink. 

Hopes and Dreams for 2022

Number one, I hope we can arrange a really nice birthday celebration for Mom's 80th this summer. Number two, which, of course, has a large impact on number one, I hope we bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control. Number three, I'd love to hear some more good news in general, some hope that civilization can still save itself. 

Go big or go home, right? 

Movies I Watched in 2021

 

I know, I know, over 3,000 movies is too many movies to watch in one year. Please remember that at least half of these are shorts ranging from 10 seconds to 20 minutes in length. 

To my surprise and disappointment, I still haven't seen a movie in theatres since 2019 (The Rise of Skywalker, blech). 

Some of my favourites from 2021, along with a graph of when I was watching.

In 2021, I continued my efforts to broaden the geographical and genre range of the films I watch. The United States still dominates, but I'm glad to see strong representation from Japan and Europe. I need to watch more Indian films. My ratings follow a pretty typical bell curve, and I think that's because I'm not seeking out good or bad films in particular; I'm just watching anything that seems interesting. 

You'll probably remember a lot of these faces from last year. Mel Blanc, James Stewart, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Bruce Willis, and Gary Cooper made my most-watched list last year and return this year as I work to complete their filmographies. Tracking down their older and lesser-known films can be pretty challenging, but between streaming services, YouTube, TCM (before we cut our cable), and physical media, I've managed to screen virtually all of the well-known works and a sizeable portion of obscuria. 

I really want more women on my all-time stars list, hence Bette Davis' strong showing here. It helps that she's great. But who's John Livingston? Well, in a fit of nostalgia, I tracked down and watched all of those Hinterland Who's Who you might remember from Canadian television back in the 70s and 80s. John Livingston narrated them all. 

There are a lot of big names on this list, but I'm betting most audiences today will only recognize Woody Allen, John Ford, and maybe Neill Blomkamp. Anime fans will recognize Hideaki Anno; he's here because I watched all of his Evangelion work and went on from there to watch some of his earlier efforts. Ford and Allen are here because I'm working through their filmographies; the rest mainly because I'm watching many, many films from the 1890s to the 1910s. Alanis Obomsawin is an Indigenous Canadian; she's here because I spent some time exploring films from the NFB. 

Here's the map for 2021. North America, Europe, and Oceania dominate the numbers, but I did try to add more movies from South America, Africa, India, Russia, and the Middle East. 

If you're masochistic enough to be curious about what I watched in 2021, you can find the entire list on my Letterboxd page in reverse chronological order. 

My New Year's Resolution for 2022: fewer movies, more books. This is not a diss on movies; it's just that I clearly need more balance in my leisure time. 

Books I Read in 2021

In 2021 I read 58 books, a personal all-time low. As you'll see from the list below, I didn't attempt to tackle anything particularly challenging. The stress of 21st-century existence leaves me with diminished capacity; escaping into film taxes me far less than slipping into a book these days, a truth that profoundly saddens me, but one I can no longer deny. Silver lining: for the first time, I read as many books by women as by men. 

In 2021 I sought out escapist fare, often re-reading old favourites that took me back to comfortable alternate realities and in some sense to a more vital past self. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the books I read are non-fiction, mainly covering topics in popular culture. 

A couple of novels stand out. Severance, by Ling Ma, uncannily anticipates the COVID-19 catastrophe and, like the real disaster, reveals the silliness and futility of the ways we live and work in the modern world, how the systems we've built serve only a select few. Come Closer, by Sara Gran, is one of the scariest novels I've ever read, and one of the most heartbreaking. It's the internal monologue of a woman who is either going insane or is genuinely being slowly and methodically possessed by a demon, and Gran's touch is so deft and sure that the moments of terror come out of nowhere, seeming to slip between the sentences so that by the time you realize what's happening to you and the protagonist, it's too late to brace yourself for the abyss. 

Martha Wells continues to impress with her Murderbot diaries, and I'm still enjoying my journeys through the works of Jo Walton. I indulged in a couple of near-legendary works of dreadful fan fiction: Jim Theis' The Eye of Argon and Tara Gilesbie's My Immortal. Anyone who enjoys art gone wrong will love these. 

Thanks to Leslie, I learned that I'd fallen behind on Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric series. Catching up was like going on a short trip with an old friend, carefree and pleasant. Bujold remains a favourite, and I hope she keeps writing for a long time. 

Finally, I was delighted to discover that Ulrich Haarburste released his cycle of Roy Orbison in clingfilm stories, expanded to novel length. If you don't feel like buying the book, sample some of the stories. 

Here's the list of what I read this year: 

January: 10
Or What You Will (Jo Walton, 2020) 
Star Trek Adventures Quickstart Guide (Modiphius, 2017) 
Axiom’s End (Lindsay Ellis, 2020) 
The Vanished Seas (Catherine Asaro, 2020)
Lightning Strike, Book One (Catherine Asaro, 2014) 
Lightning Strike, Book Two (Catherine Asaro, 2020) 
Carrie (Stephen King, 1974) 
Way Station (Clifford D. Simak, 1963) 
The Wounded Sky (Diane Duane, 1983) 
My Enemy, My Ally (Diane Duane, 1984) 

February: 7
The Lightest Object in the Universe (Kimi Eisele, 2019) 
DC Comics Covers (Nick Jones, 2020) 
DC Comics Supervillains: The Complete Visual History (Daniel Wallace, 2014) 
Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian (Phil Szostak, 2020) 
The Big Lie (Julie Mayhew, 2015) 
Passage (Connie Willis, 2001) 
The Romulan Way (Diane Duane and Peter Morwood, 1987) 

March: 6
The Eye of Argon (Jim Theis, 1970) 
My Immortal (Tara Gilesbie, 2006) 
Later (Stephen King, 2021) 
Star Wars Complete Vehicles New Edition (Kerrie Dougherty, 2020) 
To Lose the Earth (Kristen Beyer, 2020) 
Severance (Ling Ma, 2018) 

April: 3
The World of Cyberpunk 2077 (Marcin Batylda, 2020) 
Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History, with Illustrations (William B. Jones Jr., 2001) 
Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth (Fredric Wertham, 1954)
 
May: 3
The Ten Thousand Doors of January (Alix E. Harrow, 2019)
Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (Martha Wells, 2020) 
Fugitive Telemetry (Martha Wells, 2021) 

June: 2
Ulrich Haarburste’s Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm: Plus additional stories (Ulrich Haarburste, 2019) 
Forbidden Knowledge: 101 Things No One Should Know How to Do (Owen Brooks, 2019) 

July: 3
Critical Failures (Robert Bevan, 2012) 
Living Memory (Christopher L. Bennett, 2021) 
Come Closer (Sara Gran, 2003) 

August: 5
The Physicians of Vilnoc (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2020) 
Masquerade in Lodi (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2020)
The Assassins of Thasalon (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2021)
Billy Summers (Stephen King, 2021) 
The Princess Saves Herself in This One (Amanda Lovelace, 2016)

September: 2
Then Everything Changed (Jeff Greenfield, 2011) 
The Stand (Stephen King, 1980) 

October: 2
Available Light (Dayton Ward, 2019) 
Knot of Shadows (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2021) 

November: 7
The Apollo Murders (Chris Hadfield, 2021)
Visiting Friends: Or, What I Did on My Summer Vacation (Jo Walton, 2021) 
Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir, 2021)
2034 (Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, 2021) 
Untold Horror (Dave Alexander, 2021) 
The History of Science Fiction: A Graphic Novel Adventure (Xavier Dollo, 2021) 
Forever and a Day (Anthony Horowitz, 2018) 

December: 7
The Steranko History of Comics, Volume One (Jim Steranko, 1970) 
The Steranko History of Comics, Volume Two (Jim Steranko, 1972)
All in Color for a Dime (Richard A. Lupoff and Don Thompson, 1970) 
Comix: A History of Comic Books in America ( Les Daniels, 1971) 
The Psychology of Time Travel (Kate Mascarenhas, 2018) 
The Grownup (Gillian Flynn, 2014) 
Hench (Natalie Zina Walschots, 2020) 

Fiction: 42
Nonfiction: 15
Poetry: 1

Genre
Fantasy: 8
Horror: 3
Mainstream: 11
Science Fiction: 14
Star Trek: 6

Top Authors
Lois McMaster Bujold: 4
Stephen King: 4
Catherine Asaro: 3
Diane Duane: 3
Jim Steranko: 2
Jo Walton: 2
Martha Wells: 2

Books by Women: 29
Books by Men: 29

Books by Decade
1950s: 1
1960s: 1
1970s: 6
1980s: 4
2000s: 4
2010s: 16
2020s: 25 

Kyle's

I bought this 3D-printed post-apocalyptic food shack from a store on Etsy and painted it in Vault-Tec blue and yellow, along with several metallics. I dubbed the place "Kyle's" with a weathering pencil and glued a Nuka-Cola pin and a cartoon ghoul head from a Fallout-themed paper clip to the sign. So the place serves ice-cold Nuka-Cola and it's run by Kyle, a non-feral ghoul. That's him on the sign! 

Pretty happy with this new building for Fallout: Wasteland Warfare. It'll be a good place for encounters and loot exchange. After all, I'm sure Kyle serves more than just Nuka-Cola...
 

Doomsday Garage with Garage

My original shipment of this terrain set was missing the carport (right). I've now painted said carport and added it to the Doomsday Garage. 

I quite like the badly-scrawled "CLOSED" graffiti. 

I'm also glad I took the time to come up with a consistent colour scheme/branding for the sacks. What do they contain? Grains? Zorball? Road salt? 

Wonder Woman vs the Sea Monsters

I didn't intend for the human miniature to look like a casually-garbed version of Wonder Woman, but, well, I painted the jeans blue, randomly chose red for the top, and thought yellow would look good for the belt and . . . there you are. She's actually supposed to be a character from Fallout 4, and she'll still serve as such. Incidentally, she also represents one of my better paint jobs of a human figure. 
 

Fog Crawler

A few weeks ago, I painted this fog crawler for Fallout: Wasteland Warfare. It bugs me that I'm consistently better at painting creatures than people. 

Here's a shot of the base. I tried to make it look like a sandbar with water on each side. 

Here's a shot of the fog crawler's backside, showing off its colourful tail. 

Another forward angle just to show off the texture. As with the mirelurks, I painted this model while it was still in pieces to avoid getting the wrong paint on the wrong parts. 

Mirelurks

I'm quite happy with this pair of mirelurks. This time I painted the shell, body, legs, and bases separately, which helps me a lot with my "painting outside the lines" problems. Moreover, I feel like the shading and textures give the models a touch of realism. 

Here they are from the back. 

 

Xmas Hosts 2021

 

Sean cooked a delicious Christmas meal for Mom, Sylvia, and me, but in so doing he also badly injured his thumb while slicing potatoes on his mandolin. Thankfully he has a beautiful and loyal cat to console him while he heals, which will, I hope, be soon. The scalloped potatoes that caused the injury were utterly delicious, but I'd gladly forsake them if I could go back in time and prevent the accident. 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2021 Day 24

Santa and Mando
Snatch Infinity Gauntlet
And top to save day:

Christmas stars align
The Mandalorian finds
His Baby Yoda

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2021 Day 23

Small trees for big gifts
But a mother's heart breaks for
Silent, empty pram
 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2021 Day 22

Poor Baby Yoda
Alone at the train station
Saved by Thor? Malfoy? 
 

Lego Advent Calendar 2021 Day 21

Weapons festival
A new Christmas tradition
Now with pumpkin spice