Watching Bond movies from the 1980s with Sean Connery is bizarre, confusing and noncanon. I’d like to see a Bond movie where all the Bond actors who are still alive… all of them I think, are forced to work together but only to established canon and to the mockery of the rest.

Never SAG Never Again.

LibrePlanet is almost over.

Very tired.

But success, I think.

Vito’s Tavern is a new North End.  bar with an eclectic menu.

No Mac and Cheese and Lobster Ravioli here. Korean inspired tacos and Sloppy Giuseppes are on the menu here. And UFO, oh how I missed you!

Took a decent walk around the North End after dinner, hitting up the Connah Store, a bodega that makes fun of the Boston accent, complete with handwritten notice that cigarettes have gone up by 10¢ but you can always quit.

From here headed to the Golden Goose, a decent sized grocery store and connected a part of Boston up with another in my mind and then got sidetracked walking back to the subway trying to avoid rats from all the construction.

As I write this Boston is somewhat. on fire. A power generator blew up. in a parking garage and Fenway- bound favorite TCs Lounge (two. blocks over) also had a fire.  Unconnected coincidence it seems.

The MBTA and Boston fire department are working hard tonight to make sure everyone’s safe and getting home.

As I write this on the bus home, its freaky to see how dark everything looks when there’s no power.

That’s the Prudential center!

I’m pretty excited about the package that just came in the mail.

Marine

Captain

Marine Guard

Marine Advancing

Death Squad

Marine Firing

Heavy Laser

Missile Launcher

Collectively known as the C100 Space Marine set from 1986.

And especially this guy

Who some of you may recognize as the first ever Space Marine figure. He’ll be heading back to the UK soon to be painted by the folks at Golem in Manchester.

Time to get the rest painted up.

As mentioned previously, I have a Mantic Corporation army due in the next few weeks. This is the first of three packages from Mantic as part of their first ‘Elite’ subscription. In the next three months, I will receive:

1. Corporation Army and General
2. Project Pandora: Grim Cargo, the first space-themed dungeon crawler from Mantic
3. Veer-myn Army and General

The Veer-myn are a new race to Sci-fi gaming — Space Rats, whereas the Corporation are fairly standard Humans with big guns, hell bent on trickery and deceit. Sounds like some corporations here on earth, perhaps.

It’s a lot of painting, but I hope to make the best of it using shading, washes and of course, The Army Painter base-colors that I rely on so heavily.

Last weekend saw the 25th anniversary of Warhammer 40k, a game I have never played and have little interest in the game in its current state. However, 25 years ago, Warhammer 40k was a very different game (then called Rogue Trader, with the Warhammer 40,000 name bolted on later) — largely compatible with Warhammer itself.

Rob Myers often talks of these days as being quite awesome, and over the summer while waiting for Mantic’s Warpath game to be released, I spent some time and energy picking some books and other info on the older versions of the game.

Rogue Trader itself is a pretty wonderful book, and very different from the way the game feels now, from the super small demos I’ve seen and played. Long out of print at this point, but it features many races that never made it into later editions of the game, or were dropped quickly after the second edition was released. Of these, my two favorites are the Squats (ie. Space Dwarves, or Dwarfs as Games Workshop calls them, and the Jokaero, a race of simians for which GW recently released a new model.

As the anniversary was coming up, I decided to pick up a Jokaero, a copy of the monthly White Dwarf catalogue/magazine and also the special 25th anniversary Space Marine model, which recreates an image from the cover of Rogue Trader. This was my first model purchase from Games Workshop in sometime, and my first non-Specialist Games purchase for a few years, as well the first time I’ve encountered their ‘Finecast’ material — also known as Failcast due to a lot of manufacturing issues.

I’m pleased to say that I found Finecast an absolute delight to work with — better than both plastic and metal, requiring very little cleanup and not hard to assemble. The price is insane, but then so was the detail.

Both models are on my desk, currently being painted.

I am keen to get them sorted soon, as immediately after LibrePlanet 2012, I will have a Mantic Corporation Army and General coming my way, and I’d like to make some efforts with them as soon as I can.

I have recently picked up a couple of new wargames I’m interested in playing.

They have a few people in common, further cementing the idea that Nottingham really is the epicenter of all things wargaming.

First up is Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring, published by Games Workshop and written by Alessio Cavatore (with help from Rick Priestley, who wrote original versions of Warhammer and 40k) who wrote Kings of War and Warpath — the games I usually play.

I picked this up at a time when Games Workshop is finally putting some effort back into the Lord of the Rings games, possibly because The Hobbit is coming, and possibly because they’d let it dwindle for a while, and needed something to fill the gap before the 6th edition of Warhammer 40k comes later this year, early next year.

I’m interested in LOTRWOTR, as its called, because unlike most Games Workshop models, uses true 28mm scale models, so no big heads here.

I’ve not played it, and I might never play it, but it’s a very good book to read and has a great hobby section.

The second game is Rick Priestley’s first game since leaving Games Workshop — Hail Caeser — an ancients game similar to his previous game Black Powder, perhaps. I love listening to and reading interviews with Rick, as he seems very laid back about the competitive nature of wargaming and focuses a lot on having fun. He also revealed he doesn’t really play anything other than historical games anymore, which is a bit of a shame.

I am keen to see what Warlord Games does next, and I think between Warlord and Mantic, we’re seeing some very interesting alternatives to Games Workshop.

In time, I hope to see companies like Warlord and Mantic replace all of the Specialist Games Range from Games Workshop with alternative games and complementary figures.

Spent some time this weekend working on my Forgefathers. I decided to take a leap and put a webcam on my desk taking a snapshot every minute or so as I worked.

Here are all the photos: http://matt.lee.name/img/warpath/

Resolution isn’t great but you can see my leader here:

And you can see some of the mods done to the restic models here:

I suspect I will continue with this, but have a new HD webcam to try out next weekend.

I don’t like to mix work and personal stuff, but this is both. On March 24th/25th, we’ll be having another LibrePlanet conference in Boston.

This will be the fourth conference, and I believe the largest so-far. It’s at UMass Boston, who have a beautiful campus and facility — so beautiful in fact we’re probably going to have future conferences there as well.

We have a really impressive list of speakers: From the FSF: Bradley M. Kuhn, Brett Smith, John Sullivan, Josh Gay, Ward Vandewege, plus Alison Chaiken, Chris Webber, David Sugar, Deb Nicholson, Eben Moglen, Eben Upton, Evan Prodromou, ginger coons, Joel Izlar, Jonathan Nadeau, Karen Sander, Matthew Garrett, Mike Linksvayer, Richard Fontana, and Rubén Rodríguez, with more to come…