Apocalypse Prep: Part 1

As I mentioned in my last entry, I thought I'd post my progress in painting and converting my Tau Apocalypse army for CanCon 2011. Well here we go.

I plan on fielding three Tigershark AX-1-0's in my force. These are beautiful Forgeworld models that look like this:

There's one small problem, however. Each one costs 140 pounds. Gah. I just don't have that kind of money. Luckily, I have a solution.

Hasbro makes these:

They're from the GI Joe movie and they're called Night Ravens. The body piece, which is the part from the little red intake behind the front wings back, is exactly the same dimensions as a Tigershark. Exactly. The best bit is they cost me $14.99 from Aldi. Each. Sweet. So my plan is to turn them into this:

I have spare Railguns (the black gun bit under the red intake) and burst cannons (the multi-barrel gun under the wing) that I will cast up in resin and add to the body. I'll chop down the nose section which, fortunately, doesn't come attached to the main body.

I've already made progess on this. I've managed to chop down the nose of one of the models so that it fits into the main body similarly to that shown above. With some gap-filling and a proper paintjob, I expect they will look enough like a real Tigershark to pass muster. I hope to have one finished (bar painting) this weekend. Sweet.

Where HAVE you been?

Wow. The months fly by. Its such a cliche but at the same time its not uncommon to look up and think, "Geez! Where did that time go?". And so it's been for me. So what has been keeping me so busy?

Gaming.
I've mentioned my liking for the miniature games Warmachine and Hordes before. What I may not have mentioned that I am a volunteer rep for the company that produces them. For those of you not familiar with these games and their parent company, Privateer Press, we reps are called Press Gangers (Privateer Press - Press Gangers; get it?). Each year in Australia we hold a National Championship for these games to crown an Australian Champion. Its normally held at GenCon Australia, formerly Australia's "Premier Gaming Event" and this year I volunteered to run it. About 8 weeks out from the event, GenCon Australia announced they would not be running this year due to "financial concerns". This created a few hiccups around the traps but eventually we found a new venue and ploughed ahead with running our National Titles anyway. I wanted to make this event the biggest and best Nationals ever seen and to that end I wanted to give every player a prize-pack for coming along. It was quite a lot of work getting it all together. I could bore you with all the details but to make a long story short, I ran the event (with much help from friends and fellow Press Gangers), the players played and walked away with their swag of stuff and the various champions walked away with a swag of prizes. I thought the event went along pretty well on the whole but it ate a large chunk of my spare time.

Work.
I won't say much about work as you never know who's reading your blog and don't want to unnecessarily offend certain people. Suffice to say that I've had some big issues at work and have been focusing on getting under control there. Its been pretty stressful and I'll be glad when its all sorted out some more or I go on holidays a few weeks (yay January!).

Family.
Before you get worried, my wife and son are fine. We still have a few sleep issues with our boy but they are slowly improving. He goes to sleep much better now than he used to, he just gets pretty restless some nights and finds it hard to settle himself. We're working on it. Other than that, our boy is a pretty happy lad who is fairly easy to take care of. He has his good days and bad days but on the whole, the good far outweighs the bad. My wife is enjoying being back working at least two days a week and feels like she's contributing something (as if looking after our son wasn't enough). No, my family issues have been with one of my brothers. He suffers from pretty severe depression and recently it got the better of him. Thankfully, nothing tragic happened but it was touch and go for quite a while. While I didn't have to deal with most of the problems, it still made me worry a lot at a time when I had lots of worries already. Depression is a very serious mental health issue that many people don't realise is quite so bad until they have to deal with it (and I didn't deal very well with it I have to say).

But thank heavens a lot of it has passed and things are looking up. I hope to be blogging more regularly in the near future. I'm heading to Canberra to play in an Apocalypse tourney being run by my mate Bart in January and I am really looking forward to it so to motivate myself to get my figures ready I'll try and blog about my progress. Stay tuned.