Hello.
~ F.R.A.N, Stargate Atlantis
As one might expect, I haven't done a lot of work on either iToysoldiers or my hobby-ing. So instead, let's do a quick year in review. 'cause, you know. It's a thing.
Printing
Okay. I spent WAY too much money upgrading my 3D printing gear. Largely because of catastrophic failures of my existing equipment. My Ender 3 Max decided that it's temperature sensor needed to die and in the process of fixing that I cut through a cable ribbon and essentially "bricked" it because I can't find the right cables. Well, that's easily fixed! Instead of futzing with the Ender I picked up a K1C! I'm so so so very happy with it. I will never fix the Ender 3 even though that was my intent. It's so fast! The prints are so clean. BEST. PRINTER. EVER.
Then to make matters worse, my resin printer decided to leak. Not a minor leak, mind you. No. The seal that's around the exposure plate leaked and resin flowed into the inner workings of the printer. It was a disaster. There was resin in the fans, all over the board. Every single moving part was covered in resin. I read some posts about fixing this and the consensus was that it could be fixed but it'd take six to 12 months of cleaning and testing and cleaning some more. That's a big ol' nope. So I picked up a Creality Halot Mage Pro. The build plate is too big for my cleaning station so I'm gonna need to sort that but... It's a great upgrade.
iToysoldiers
I've finally settled on what iToysoldiers is going to be and there's been a release! I'm gradually adding my collection to the site and now that the holidays are done I can spend some more time building out functionality. I want to praise the folks at Collective Access for making such a powerful tool for organizing a collection. I'm sure my use case isn't what they had in mind but it's so great.
Hobby
This has been sparse. My bad. Some highlights:
- I picked up the Robotech RPG Tactics game.
- I added a bunch of stuff to my Legions Imperalis collection (including a Titan Battle Group! Yay!)
- I picked up a Sisters of Battle Combat Patrol so I can have "good guys" to take pictures with.
- I did not play a single game of Warhammer 40k.
- I did play a single game of Warhammer Underworlds as part of the household "12 Board Games of Christmas".
- I finally "won" a game of Stellaris. Virtual Ascension, Shattered Ringworld start, and Cosmogenesis for the win.
- I still haven't entered Armies on Parade.
- Convinced my sweetie to take a swag at painting miniatures. She's been painting the miniatures that come with our board games. She doesn't love it. But she does it because I paint slow and my backlog is HUGE.
What 2025 may bring
I hesitate to speculate on what 2025 may bring but here's some stuff I have in mind (in no particular order):
- More stats for iToysoldiers.com
- Getting my collection totally recorded.
- Working through my pile of shame.
- Playing less Paradox games (it kills everything else).
- Get my terrain into shape.
My sweetie shared with me some thoughts from the designer of Deep Regrets. The gist is that there's a ridiculous amount of effort that goes into games. Respect that effort. Buy what you love and put your effort into it. I need to wrap my head around this and embrace it. My armies need to be beautiful and pay tribute (as best I can) to the effort that was put in to bring them to my collection. They do better so shall I.
Happy New Year.
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