Painting Guide – Kit bash Squat

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Painter: Stickfight

Model(s): Arkanaut Company and any space marine parts that take your fancy (space marine scouts have the best fitting arms)

Paint(s): Chaos Black (spray), Leadbelcher (spray), Abaddon Black, Gryph-Hound Orange, Balthasar Gold, Leadbelcher, Nuln Oil, Drakenhof NightShade, Seraphim Sepia , Druchi Violet

Method(s):

  1. Spray Chaos Black, once dry spray Leadbelcher.
  2. Wash Nuln Oil, once dry paint all armour sections Gryph-Hound Orange.
  3. Paint trim of armour with Balthasar Gold.
  4. Paint gun cable Abaddon Black
  5. For heated metal on Melta, from end of barrel wash Drakenhof NightShade, Druchi Violet and Seraphim Sepia

Paint Time: 1-2 hours

Notes:  With the old lore that squats can carry unlimited heavy weapons, you can get away with OTT weapons sizes

 

Painting Guide – Blackstone – Traitor Ogryn

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Painter: Dultoriminis

Model(s): Originally Blackstone Fortress: Traitor Command, now Kill Team: Blooded

Paint(s): Chaos Black (spray), Dark Reaper, Abaddon Black, White Scar, Leadbelcher, Averland Sunset, Bugmans Glow, Cadian Fleshtone, Kislev Flesh, Druchi Violet , Agrax Earthshade, Reikland FleshShade, Zandri Dust, Nuln Oil.

Method(s):

  1. Spray Chaos Black, Base the skin including the claw with Bugmans Glow, paint Averland Sunset in eyes, clean up around eyes with Bugmans Glow if required. wash with Reikland FleshShade, layer Cadian Fleshtone over 2/3 or skin leaving any dark recesses, highlight with Kislev Flesh. mix Druchi Violet with water 1:1 and wash over all skin.
  2. The claw – apply 2 layers of Druchi Violet over the claw allowing plenty of drying time in-between. Paint the teeth/bone including the face bones in a 1:1 mix of Zandri Dust and averland sunset, wash with Agrax Earthshade.
  3. Pants – base with Dark Reaper, highlight with a 1:1 mix of Dark Reaper and White Scar.
  4. Steel – base with Leadbelcher, wash with Nuln Oil.
  5. The remaining black (boots/mask etc) can now be highlighted with Dark Reaper.

Paint Time: 3-5 hours

 

Painting Guide – Base Mouse and Rat Fur

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

Painter: Dultoriminis provided this list as I end up with a lot of mice and rats in my models

Paint(s):

Fur: Brown:

Fur: Grey:

Fur: Ginger:

Tail:

 

FileZilla Download Issue

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

FileZilla is one of the best FTP clients ever, however while they’re perfect, everybody else isn’t.

What this means is that if an FTP site isn’t configured correctly, then trying to download files that have special characters or accents in them using the FileZilla client will fail. The FileZilla team don’t want to support it because they’re doing the correct thing standards wise (UTF-8 settings on the server) and it’s other people’s failings that are causing the problem, but other clients Do support this kind of behaviour e.g. firefox which is a shame…

This means that we do need to find a way around the problem with FileZilla, the first sign that something has gone wrong will be in your failed downloads tab.

A quick glance at the file usually shows you that there is a special character or accent in it, in this case a “À”.

To get round this, I found the easiest way is merely to select all of the items that have failed, right click then export them.



This will give you an XML file, open it up and look for the “File” sections, then find and replace the special characters in the “localFile” section with a none special character, save the file then import it into fileZilla (file –> Import), you will find that it will download all missing files.

It would be nice if there was an automated version of this but as far as I can tell the FileZilla guys are sticking to standards. 🙁

<File>
    <LocalFile>/mnt/Slow/DownLoads/Anime/Series/Ongoing/Kirakira Precure A La Mode/[anon] KiraKira Precure À La Mode - 47 [1280x720].mkv</LocalFile>
    <RemoteFile>[anon] KiraKira Precure À La Mode - 47 [1280x720].mkv</RemoteFile>
    <RemotePath>1 0 5 Anime 6 Series 7 Ongoing 26 Kirakira Precure A La Mode</RemotePath>
    <Download>1</Download>
    <Size>571273852</Size>
    <ErrorCount>1</ErrorCount>
    <DataType>1</DataType>
</File>

Christopher Odd Youtube Channel Review

Posted on by Mark Myers Leave a comment

This is a social review post done when I should be doing technical articles, but I REALLY enjoy this YouTube channel and as this particular YouTuber is moving to running his channel full time it seemed like a good opportunity to do a review.

The channel is called @ChristopherOdd and it’s a ‘let’s play’ channel or ‘long play’ as I used to know them, in which someone plays full video games while narrating what they are doing, there are hundreds of them out there so what differentiates this one from others?

  1. Christopher Odds voice: His voice is far more like an audio book narrator than a gamer, he doesn’t get hysterical, he doesn’t make you wince, he doesn’t get over excited in a fake way (though he suffers badly from jump scares in horror games) it’s a pleasant dulcet tone to listen too, as someone that listens to a huge number of audio books I’ve come to really appreciate the quality of a narrator, and as far as I’m concerned Christopher Odd is the best narrator for games that I have currently met on any platform.
  2. Mental speed: I don’t know his age and I haven’t looked into it 1 but he’s about my mental speed, he solves problems at about the speed I do, I don’t want to jump up and down and yell for him to do things faster or slower, he just thinks at a nice pace and I feel after he has completed the game that I have seen all of that game and that it is as complete a play through as I would make.
  3. Being correct without being too correct: Christopher is constantly correcting himself while he’s playing, you can see from one video to another that he is learning and changing his opinions as things grow and change, Cultural slips are corrected, things said in the heat of the moment are amended instantly and this is at a time when his popularity is at about 300000 YouTube followers, a time when a lot of YouTubers think they can get away with saying offensive things without any backlash. It makes you think he is a good person in real life.

These and the choices of the games he plays result in a channel I can watch all day, a rarity in this day and age 🙂

But even if he is a joy to listen too, why would I want to watch a video of someone playing computer games? for me there are two reasons:

  1. He plays a series of games that I would never play!! I do not want to play Dark Souls, all the Dark Souls series are massively frustrating to play and that’s not something I am interesting in experiencing, but I am fascinated with their worlds and want to learn about them 2.
  2. He plays most of his games based on their story and that story is often better than a lot of TV series. To me watching him play is as enjoyable as a series, in fact more so because I can predict most elements of a TV story line (As can most people) but when watching a game there will be surprise elements based purely on his game play, over and above the story, the same cannot be said of TV.

All this has meant that I am now a Patron supporter of his channel and treat the news of him going full time with great delight, his channel is by far the one I watch the most and at the current quality I see no reason to change that in the future. 🙂

  1. it feels a bit stalkerish to start looking at peoples age and things like that[↩]
  2. After watching the play through I now feel invested in the game and From Software actually get money out of me when they normally wouldn’t as I have bought Dark Souls books and merchandise.[↩]