Today I learned that if you don’t update WordPress for four years, it starts to crumble apart like a sand castle with the tide coming in.

Anyway, here’s a video.

So hey, it’s been a year since I posted. Neat.

Before I started this blog, I spent a few years writing a hobby article on another site that was just, “what I’ve been working on this week”. Each article typically featured 3-5 different projects, and individual projects would be spread out over many different installments. I found this frustrating, because when I wanted to show someone the process I’d followed to build something, I had to provide them multiple links, and the person needed to do a lot of scrolling within each one to find the relevant snippet. Not a great reading experience.

When I moved to my own site, I decided that I wanted the format to be different. I wanted each article to encapsulate one entire project from start to finish, or in rare cases, one major chunk of a big project with multiple phases. This mirrored the types of blogs I preferred to read– go to a person’s site, scan through everything they’ve ever done, and deep-dive through the specific projects that catch my eye.

And for eight years, that worked. “Hobby time” is the major measuring unit by which I divide my life. I am always working on multiple projects, which gives my ADD-mired brain different tracks to jump between. When I need to schedule things, I close my eyes and visualize my year in terms of the projects on my docket and how long each one is expected to take up in my schedule. I don’t schedule things for “November”, I schedule them for “after the terrain project but before I airbrush the new army”. And while any given project might get procrastinated out across several months, I’ve usually been able to find something to finish and talk about on my blog around once per month.

Productivity is my default mode. It’s the core of my identity. I waste a lot of time on video games and other useless activities, but those are always temporary diversions between blocks of industrious creation. I feel uncomfortable sitting for long periods without doing things; I only watch TV and movies as background noise while I’m working, and I don’t enjoy traveling because my brain just sees that as time that I can’t spend making things.

Always making things is my function as a living being.

And then 2020 happened.

And I don’t make things anymore.

Like 1 in 8 humans alive right now, my existence is currently an unending chain of video conferences. However, just because you can’t go outside without killing everyone you’re ever loved, that does NOT mean that you can’t play with your Space Men!

Behold: ZOOMFINITY.

Here’s what you’re looking at:

• The board is half-scale (2ft x 2ft). All measurements in-game are accordingly also cut in half.
• The terrain is flat craft foam, with implied heights and a relatively simple abstract LOF system for determining who can see what.
• A webcam is suspended in the air over the game board.
• My opponent’s army is proxied (since I likely don’t have the exact models they want to play).
• I connect to my opponent through Zoom. They tell me where to place and move their dudes, and we both roll our own dice.

And now we arrive at the end of this long, long, long journey.

If you’ve been linked straight to this post and for some reason you’d like to read 35,000 words of repetitive photo captions before coming back here to look at the pretty pictures– look, I’m not here to kink shame, you do you— feel free to start at Part I. Otherwise, please enjoy, without further commentary, the final outcome of my three months of labour.

If you’ve been following this series in order, then by this point you’ve endured the construction process for ten chibi Foreign Company models out of an army that I have explicitly mentioned is only ten models strong. Given this, you might be wondering what exactly I’m purporting to fill a fourth installment with.

A reasonable query!

In short, this post is “everything else”. I tried to keep the writeups contained to just the sculpting process for each model and some nice shots of them all painted up, but there were other elements to the project that didn’t really fit in the main installments. So for all of that stuff, we have this episode. 😀

I feel like this is a good spot for me to mention that I’ve never seen the old A-Team show and have zero desire to do so.

The Bradley Cooper movie was pretty fun.

*shrug*