Carving game scenery from foam; plaster castle molds

Recently I bumped into the Hirst Arts website again, and I became consumed with the idea of buying one of their latex molds and making a bunch of castle-type models in plaster. The molds are interesting because they're designed to create building blocks rather than finished items. They're carefully set up so that one mold can be used to pour the parts for a number of different models.

Plus, I've cast plaster in latex molds before, it's really easy and the results turn out great. I've wanted to get into casting and molding for a while, but resin casting and mold making seemed too daunting and I never get around to it.

The mold I am most interested in is a fairly generic one for making random-stone walls, their first fieldstone mold on this page. You could use it to make  castles, towers, or dungeon tiles.

Of course, I could also see filling my house with these castle models and not really having a good place to store them; and I don't play enough wargames to actually justify my desire to build an entire medieval city (a city where all the citizens somehow have the money to build beautiful stone homes, of course).

And plaster models are quite heavy. One of the links I got to from one of my favorite wargame modelers' sites, though, provides an alternative that solves this problem and skips the expense of buying a mold, by virtue of directly carving sheet foam to make similar random rock walls. The link was to this German tutorial for building a 'Vampire's Castle.' The tutorial is in the form of a series of photos with German captions. You almost don't need to read it. Of course I have a live-in translator for any rough spots, but still, it's well worth a look. It's an amazing project. I can't wait to get my hands on a thin sheet of foam and try some wall carving.

Image from the Vampirburg tutorial

Questionable Content has been unquestionably good lately

Jeph Jaques has introduced some new characters to the ongoing coffee opera that is the webcomic Questionable Content lately. I like what I'm seeing there. The longtime character of Hannelore, who is desperately OCD and whose dad is a mad scientist, has been developing some delightful spunk. Jaques has built up her inhibitions nicely, and now he can play against them, as when she resists her fear of dirt long enough to stick around and help a friend.

Ever since Adam Cadre introduced the concept of aspirational liking of a comic into my life, I've worried that I like Questionable Content because I aspire to be a laid-back college kid who hangs out in a coffee shop all day. Possibly because that is so different from my actual life. I hang out in an office all day. Lots of coffee is involved either way.

It's probably not worth worrying about. But thinking that way makes me realize that the characters in QC don't actually ever do much. It's not like I'd actually want to be a fellow who works in a dead-end job in a library. Granted, I wouldn't mind having a sexually adventurous bisexual girlfriend now and then, but somehow I think my family would object.

What am I trying to say? I like the characters, and I get a kick out of their sass, and sometimes they warm the cockles of my heart. There you go.

_Consider Phlebas_ by Iain Banks

I've been trying to get hold of some Iain Banks "Culture" books for a while. This is the first one I was able to get from the library. I'd read one other book of his, The Algebraist, a year and a half ago.

I enjoyed this book, but it was quite different than I expected. It was less about the Culture and more about a fellow who hates it. And it was a fairly straightforward adventure romp. It had a great action opening and the action rarely let up after that.

Before I go into a list of problems I found with the novel, I should say that I still recommend it. In a way it feels like a noir Star Wars: it manages to put a highly adventurous protagonist into a flamboyant galaxy of robots and weird worlds, but instead of the adventurer striding into the crux of the galaxies problems and solving them, he's a tiny part of the big picture and he does not manage to win significance for himself. Banks has said he was writing in reaction to a lone protagonist cliche in science fiction.

Now, problems...to start with, I thought the title was quite useless. It's apparently taken from a line in T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. I felt misled. Given what I knew about the Culture, which I understood to be a highly principled and advanced society, and the philosophical sound of the title, I expected a gentle philosophical novel, whereas this was a fast-moving action movie.

The plot was a little odd in that it jumps around locations...like James Bond only with planets instead of countries...so that the antagonists from early on can't really recur later. I wanted something more like a slow build over the whole course of the novel. But I think the external conflicts were less important than what was going on inside the main character's head. And there is a character who tracks the main character throughout. This could have been developed more. There's even a character who never directly encounters the main character, analyzing him from afar, and that plot sideline was never developed enough for me to see what it was there for.

My other main complaint would be that the main character's hatred of the Culture isn't well explained or supported. It's a given in the man's personality. But the character is well drawn nonetheless, and I was fully involved in his problems by the book's end. He stuck with a mission far past its importance, though, and that never quite made sense to me.

So that's a litany of complaints, and I have to say that they don't matter much. It's a fun book and it makes you think and it takes you on a wild ride through Banks' future galaxy, and it manages to be poignant and realistic while delivering, on occasion, Mission Impossible-style action.


I'm trying out Blogger's new Amazon Associates features. Signing up as an associate makes it ridiculously easy to add links and images of products to a blog posting, so that makes book blogging simpler. 

Fixed some headphones

My son had pulled the wire out of one side of a pair of cheap headphones. These things break all the time, but they're so cheap I rarely think to fix them. This pair had an ear-wrap feature that he seemed to like, though, so I cracked open the casing on the speaker and discovered that the wires had simply come off their solder pads. A little wire-stripping and solder later and we were back in action. I was even able to snap the casing back together without glue.

It's not always easy to fix modern products, but when you can, it's a great feeling to avoid throwing something into the trash stream.

Simplified Capellini Pomodoro

We eat a fair amount of pasta, and most of the time what we make is angel hair. It replaced spaghetti as my favorite noodle some years ago.

Every now and then I order it as Capellini Pomodoro in a restaurant, and last week I decided to cook that for the fam. It was ridiculously easy.

I lacked the fresh basil that is normally required, and I didn't use canned tomatoes as the recipe I started with called for. Instead, I just chopped some tomatoes. I also didn't bother seeding or peeling the tomatoes. Peeling them is probably worth trying, but I've often tossed sauteed fresh tomatoes into a sauce, I'm not afraid of them.

So, what I really did is super simple: I diced some garlic and sauteed it in olive oil. Added diced fresh tomato and fried for a few minutes, dropping in some dried Italian seasonings. Then I added it to a big bowl of angel hair, added some parmesan, and tossed that together.

Tanya was working late, so I set aside some garlic after I sauteed it, and added some uncooked, diced tomato, putting the whole mixture in the fridge. I reserved some noodles for her as well. When she arrived, I was able to make up a bowl for her on the spot and serve it hot.

It was so successful, I'm considering actually adding side dish to the experience....instead of sticking with my perpetual one-dish meals.

Also, it should be noted that my cooking dinner has been greatly enhanced by having kids who are old enough to do things like start noodles boiling before I get home from work. :)

Castle Panic is as good as I remembered

I totally lied when I wrote, about Castle Panic, that I "planned to pick up a copy as soon as it was available." It's a $35.00 game and I'm a cheapskate, so I did not hurry. But my 12-year-0ld was in a hurry as soon as he saw it at Dragon's Lair. So we cut a deal and split the cost. We've played one game so far, and it was great.

It's a quick play, and it supports 1 to 6 players. That means solo games as well as 2-player. Not many games are good for two players, but we found it to work well.

This game has some neat design elements. The art is good, and I like the 3-sided monster counters that you rotate when you damage the monsters.

Holds reduced to 5 at our libraries in Austin

Wow, I almost wish I hadn't blogged excitedly about how much I love the library's system of letting you put books on hold via the net. You could put 10 books on hold before, now they've reduced it to five.

I almost wish that. But I've found that the system leads me to check out books I don't really want to read, and to check out too many books at once. I still love it, but I've had to restrain myself. I don't think the 5-limit is going to be a real problem.

A perfect month of 500 words a day

Hey, I just did a full month of writing 500 words a day without missing a single day. Though this is my running goal, it's still rare to have a whole perfect month. Congratulations me!

As a reward, I'm going to forgive myself for purchasing both a graphic novel (Ex Machina Volume 7!) and board game (Castle Panic!) in the same week. Luckily, they are both awesome purchases. ;)

It was me

It was Sunday...Tanya had bought a pack of Doublestuff Golden Oreos and foolishly left them out in the open.

I ate a whole row out of the pack in ten minutes. Later I'm upstairs changing clothes and I hear her holler about the cookies, asking who ate them.

I keep silent.

Then she starts yelling at the kids.

I start laughing, one of those uncontrollable laughs, I awkwardly get my shoes on, go down, helpless with laughter, hollering, gasping between breaths..."don't kill them, Tanya...it was me...it was me."

It was me.