2025 End Of Year Report

This was another strange year. I was basically taking the year off, my focus was mainly on finishing old projects and learning new skills. It feels like I got very little done, but some of the things that I did achieve I'm quite proud of. Still, time really did fly.

My vision has been deteriorating even further. Spending tons of time staring at my phone hasn't helped, and I've been too busy and too broke to get my eyes looked at again or to get a proper pair of glasses. At this point I need reading glasses AND magnifiers when painting fine details - sometimes even details that aren't all that fine. It kinda depends though; sometimes my eyes feel worse than others.

I've been extremely busy with cats this year. That's not exactly new, but it might even be worse than last year, and not having a salary made the financial side sting more. Perhaps this is a good thing though, a learning experience. Perhaps.


Old Resolutions
I didn't fully stick to the calender thing, but I used it a bit, so it was a start I suppose.

I can't say that I took much better care of my health; I was too busy taking care of a whole gaggle of cats with lots of health problems of their own. But I think I'm eating a bit healthier than I was in the past, and there were period at least - especially towards the end of the year - where I was able to stick to a routine that included exercising (although it never lasted all that long before something got in the way, but still I feel like I'm slowly getting better at sticking to it).

I guess I didn't have too many issues facing obstacles where I would need to remember to break them down; still, overall I think I did a better job of throwing myself into things, starting small if needed, and not wasting too much time procrastinating. So that's kinda nice.

I haven't gotten many of my old hobby projects done, which sucks, but I did complete some projects that I feel rather proud of, so that's something.

I did get better at some of the things I've been trying to learn. I made some progress with Blender, I designed and 3D-printed some useful stuff, I feel like I understand microcontrollers and single-board computers just a little better than I did before, to the point that I feel like I can actually do things with them now - when I can find the time.

Unfortunately the idea of supporting myself doing things that I love feels farther away than ever; I've gotten better at things, but they've taken so long that it feels even more unrealistic than before to imagine trying to make them profitable.


New Resolutions
I've really found that sleeping late has a very negative effect. A big part of why I sleep late is that, after each hectic day is finally done and I can settle down in my room with the door closed and all the possible distractions gone, I feel the need for a "hit"; I watch videos or read webcomics or things, waiting for the elusive feeling of "that was good, I'm satisfied now" to magically materialise and somehow release me from... whatever it is that won't let me put my head down and stop feeling like I'm in a race. Dopamine addiction or something, I REALLY need to get past the feeling that if I'm not doing something else I need to pick up my phone and check social media or chase some sort of distraction like Youtube.

I'm addicted is what I'm saying, and I need to break my dependence. But especially, or at least initially, at night when I should be sleeping. If I can sleep early, that will help a lot with my days. So yeah, let's go with "I need to put my phone away and be in bed before midnight". Well, that's not exactly the perfect routine, but it would be a start.

I also want to start reading actual books again. I used to consume books like food, but I haven't read a physical book in ages. There's reasons for that, but the biggest one is probably that smartphone-fueled dopamine addiction. So instead of picking up my phone, I want to pick up a book. I need to keep one next to my bed so I can grab it when I'm on a break. Maybe I need a chair to sit and read instead of just flopping on my bed? I'll having to figure something out I guess.


What a lot of this comes down to, is I want a healthier daily routine. Wake up earlier, check the calender, write my daily to-do lists, do some regular exercise, avoid spending ages on my phone, read actual books, sleep early. It shouldn't be so hard, but somehow it is. I seem to be bad at multi-tasking; I need goals, but can only focus on a few at a time, when there's too many I let things slip, and I always have too many that I keep cycling between. I keep getting distracted by random life stuff and it feels like I lose my progress each time and have to start again. I guess I need to prioritise the routine over the projects, and not allow things to slip even though there's "more important" things to take care of.

I have to avoid getting into a funk state where I just sit around feeling depressed and killing time, especially late at night when it ruins my next day. I don't know how to avoid it, all I can think of to do is to try to keep reminding myself, to try to clear my head and "reset". Maybe I need to do some meditiation or something. That sounds good, maybe I can make it a nightly thing? I don't have to figure out the specifics right now, I just have to have a goal of having a healthy routine.

So yeah, I guess that's the goal this year. Find and stick to a healthy routine; the rest are just steps, sub-goals. Of course "quitting a social media addiction" is a hell of a sub-goal...

Repurposed Pen Box

I was making a box to store some lighting-related stuff. The idea was to cut foam inlays for the box to hold the bits. I was actually working on this box concurrently with my recent gaming accessory box, and so it was part of the same batch of experiments (such as using the same batch of resin for the inlay). However I somehow made a mistake when programming the G-code and only made it 3cm deep instead of the intended 5cm deep, and I didn't even realise it until I was cutting the foam. So I decided to use it to store some of my nicer pens that don't have their own proper box instead.

From left: Noodler's Konrad Dixie No. 10 Methuselah, FPR Himalaya green ebonite, FPR Himalaya amethyst purple acrylic, Parker 51, Omas 361, Pilot Elite, Lamy Scribble, Aurora 98 Archivi Storici, Rotring Esprit retractable graphite, Pilot Decimo dark grey.

I was using the leftover 20mm foam from when I made a foam insert for a statue. I thought it would be cool to have a protective piece of foam actually attached to the lid rather than have one sit on top of the contents, so I inlet a large pocket inside the lid. Unfortunately the plywood I was using was just over 5mm thick, and with the resin inlay on the outside I was afraid to cut out too much incase the lid became too flimsy, so I only cut the pocket for the foam to a little under 3mm deep. Which is quite thin, but still probably enough foam to protect the contents?

I glued in a sheet of foam, and then trimmed it flush on my hot wire cutter.

Since the box interior was 30mm deep and I was using 20mm thick foam, I had to actually slice one piece in half, down to around 10mm thick, to make up the 30mm thickness. This would be the bottom piece. I did this by sandwitching it between two pieces of wood, marking the line I wanted to cut, standing the wood-foam-wood sandwitch on it's side, and carefully running it along the fence on the hot wire table while trying to keep it upright so the wire would cut a consistent thickness.

I found that the foam insert in the lid actually catches slightly on the foam inside the box, creating resistance to closing. In fact the lid tends to "bounce back" after closing, leaving it open by a few mm. It can be rather hard to get it to fully close. Initially this was MUCH worse; it was hard to close at all and impossible to get it to stay completely closed. But I cut the inner piece of foam a bit lower and now it's much better, but still annoying. I'm not sure what the best solution is, perhaps I can find a way to cut the lid insert to be slightly thinner than the recess, or I just need to cut the body inserts to a bit lower.

I printed a template for the cutouts for the main piece of foam. I cut the inner pieces out of the template, then pinned the template to the foam with tailor pins.

I then cut out the pieces of foam on my wire cutter. This was a little fiddly as I had left very little material for the walls, so the whole block lost it's structural strength very quickly, making it harder to manouver across the wire cutting table.

I probably got too greedy and tried to fit in too many pens. The wood is also probably too thin, and annoyingly the lid is slightly bowed out - I really want to use solid, stabilized wood in the future, but that's a lot of work and I'm not really set up to process wood properly. Well, overall this box came out OK and it's nice to have a better storage solution for some of my pens.

Improved Game Accessory Box

My last attempt at a gaming accessory box for Warmachine worked fine for the cards, but it was very inconvenient when it came to the gaming tokens - at least in the amount that I carry around for Warmachine. After checking my carrier box I decided I had room to make a larger version that could organize everything better. I couldn't increase the height if I wanted it to fit in my case, but I could increase the width and depth. So I designed a new double-sided box; this would allow me to store cards on one side yet still have a large, shallow area for storing and organizing tokens on the other.

On one side I have enough room to store 3" cloud templates (up to five of the acrylic ones I'm using; I don't think WMH uses the larger 4" and 5" templates anymore) and still have several compartments left over in my 3D-printed divider for dice, tokens, pens, etc. I think I could even fit a small measuring tape in the middle, if I could find a good one. The other side has four compartments, each large enough for around fifty game cards in Dragonshield sleeves. Of course they can also be used for more tokens if needed.

This box took me longer to make than I had hoped. Double-sided boxes are something I've been having trouble getting dialed in, likewise partitions have been proving tricky. My first attempt actually didn't quite go together right, and the box glued up wonky. So I went back and modified my code, double-checking pretty much every aspect of the sizing and tolerances. I also changed my workflow to focus on accuracy (at the cost of a great deal of speed; this box took many hours to mill).

Previously I've been using a 3mm compression bit, and cutting through the entire stock in one pass. This is very fast, but I was getting some deflection. So this time I tried a 1.5mm bit (single-flute upcut as that's what I had) and used multiple very shallow passes; this gave me much better dimensional accuracy (and also meant I could use dogbones without them being nearly as noticeable), but took much, much longer. I also broke the 1.5mm bit, but that turned out to be because a connector for my spindle power cable was crap; it's only a few years old but the plastic had become brittle and the retaining tabs had snapped off. I noticed this and taped the connector ends together, but the tape apparently decided it couldn't be bothered to do its job and just kind peeled off partway through a cut, allowing the cable connector parts to separate and leaving the machine trying to drag a non-spinning bit through the plywood.

Speaking of plywood, I'm not too happy with the quality of what I'm using right now. Lots of voids in the middle, and it all splinters very easily, the box finish getting damaged during assembly and sanding (in a way that feels like it shouldn't be happening). This was especially true of the box lid "runners", the tongues and grooves that hold the box lids in place. So to try to reinforce them, I added varnish first, before sanding to fit. I actually tried to apply the varnish and then put them in a vacuum pot to draw the varnish deeper into the wood, but I don't think that really did anything. Regardless, I think the varnish helped to reduce the damage to the tongues and grooves when making the second box.

I wasn't too happy with some of my other materials either. My old wood glue had turned weird and yellow, so I threw it out and bought some new wood glue from the local hardware store, but this stuff... feels different. It's labelled HP Gold Synthetic Resin Adhesive, and it doesn't feel like the PVA wood glues I'm used to; it doesn't spread very well for example, and I feel like it might be setting more quickly. It worked, but the difficulty I was having spreading it might have been compounding the issues I've been having with box glue-up.

You see, applying glue to the correct places on all the sides and partitions was taking so long that the glue would start to harden before I was done, and pieces would end up setting slightly out of place. So for my second attempt at this box I tried applying glue to just two pieces at a time, then quickly assembling the box parts and applying pressure so that the two pieces would set in the correct positions. Once they were set I would take everything apart, apply glue to two more pieces, and repeat the process. This again took a long time, but I feel it worked better. I do need a better clamping solution though; my clamps are too big, elastic bands actually work better than clamps for smaller boxes but the ones I have are too small for this box.

I did think the resin inlays worked much better this time than in my last attempts. I started by applying a very generous coating of Coprabel's Easy Color wood stain varnish in Palissander 506 into the inlay to seal the wood. It's the varnish I used for the finish on my previous game box; I hoped the very dark colour would create a sort of blackline around the actual resin. After giving this a day to set, I applied a clear varnish (National Protective Coatings synthetic varnish clear) to the entire top of the lid. This was to avoid the issue I had with the previous box, where sanding the resin inlay flat created a coloured dust that settled into the wood top and refused to come out, leaving it looking slightly pink. I also wanted to wet-sand the resin as I've found it to be MUCH nicer than dry sanding (at least for resin), and hoped the varnish would protect the wood from the water.

When all the varnish was dry I applied the resin. I used gold Art Nation mica powder in ResinVentures Art Resin. The Art Resin has proven to be very vulnerable to yellowing, but I didn't feel that mattered in this case, and the mica powder worked much better than my previous attempts at using dyes or GSW metal powders. Being able to use a vacuum chamber (a relatively recent aquisition) to reduce the amount of bubbles in the resin also helped. Of course I passed a heat gun over the surface to pop the rest of the bubbles too; I think the heat gun moving the resin around also helped create a more organic looking pattern.

After giving the resin three days to fully set, I tried sanding the inlay using wet/dry sandpaper in a 3D-printed sanding block. While most of the clear varnish actually got sanded off the wood, and a fair bit of water soaking into the unvarnished wood on the other side, overall it still mostly worked out OK; I didn't notice any real warping of the wood or discolouration from the resin dust. The dark outline came out very nicely too, I'm quite happy with that. I did a quick polishing pass with a Dremel tool and Dremel polishing kit/compound. This did deepen the gold colour a bit and give it a bit more shine, but the wet sanding had already given the resin quite a nice smooth surface so the polishing wasn't too important in this case (I think I used a rather finer grit of sandpaper than I needed to for the initial sanding). Besides, there was still another varnish layer that was going to go over the resin, so the polish was too early (I didn't end up polishing again as it didn't seem to do enough to be worth it to me - especially when the rest of the box ended up looking a little bit rough anyway).

With the box assembled I started the final sanding (dry) to smooth everything out. Once this was done I coated the outside of the box with the clear varnish (applied by brush) and left it for a couple of days. This varnish was not very even; some areas felt very smooth, while others had a rough wooden feel. They actually felt rougher than they had after sanding, as if the varnish had lifted the wood fibres. So I applied another coat, then after giving that a couple of days to dry gave the whole box a very wet sanding. This evened out the surface a bit and actually gave it back a bit of the textured wooden feel, which I was happy about. However in some areas, where I felt the need to sand a bit more heavily as there were some thicker spots of varnish on the surface, I ran into some issues where the varnish didn't sand very well; it almost seemed to gloop up like an almost-dry PVA glue. Perhaps the water, and heat from the friction of sanding, was affecting it?

There were also some spots where the varnish didn't soak into the wood properly, perhaps because of my clumsy use of the wood glue earlier. These spots show up as pale spots and look pretty bad. Overall the final finish is not great, I actually think my previous box came out looking and feeling a bit better. The stained Coprabel varnish was much more expensive than the clear National "synthetic" varnish, so material quality might be a factor. I also dry-sanded that one much more heavily compared to the light wet-sanding I gave this box (to try to get rid of the excessive staining), creating an aged look and a more natural raw wood feel than the varnished look and feel of the new box.

Oh well, maybe the next one will be better. I want to try working with solid wood rather than plywood; I'm also hoping to eventually try using stabilized wood, which should be stronger and not require varnish. Fingers crossed.

Slow And Steady

I ran a demo game for a new member of our hobby group. This was my first game of Warmachine this year. I had put together two 30 points Unlimited lists in preparation. I ran a silly Strakhov2 list that I could use to show off a little of the jankier things you can do in this game, mostly centered around Alexia and LoLS to demonstrate soul and recursion mechanics. I don't think either of used a command card all game (though I did mention how he could use them a couple of times), but we both had Blessing, Lucky Penny, Old Faithful, Hit & Run, and For The Motherland (which I guess is not legal anymore but w/e).
Strakov2 (proxied by Strakhov1)
-Kodiak
-Elite Kommandos (2)(proxies)
-Reinholdt
Koldun Lord
Alexia 2 (& Thralls)(proxy)
Battle Mechanics
Legion of Lost Souls (Risen conversions)

The list I made for new players was intended to be simple and solid, mostly centered around demonstrating the basics, including the use of straighforwards buff spells. Ruin was a no-brainer. I included Bombardiers as versatile faction models with good overall stats and enough armour for Butcher's Deceleration to be meaningful. The Forgeseer fit with the MOW, was painted, and could help counter Strakhov's cloud/stealth tricks. Mechanics made sense as they are cheap and could repair most of the army.
Butcher1 (buff version)
-Ruin (proxied by Juggernaut)
Greylord Forgeseer (Bombshell conversion)
Man-O-War Bombardiers
-Bombardier Officer
Battle Mechanics


Pre-Game
I placed a simple 12" zone in the center and said any model could score starting from the second player's second turn, with the first to 5 points being the winner. I went firsts so I could demonstrate basics rules first. I gave him the terrain so he could place them as he wished.


Deployment
I put Strakhov and his support near the forest. The Kodiak in the center, with the Mechanics behind him, and Alexia and the Legion to the left. He spread his MOW in a line in front of the rest of his models (I could not remember the rules for deploying units).


Round 1:
Strakhov cast Inviolable Resolve on the Kodiak and Quicken on himself, used the Sneak battle plan and ran into the forest. His support followed. The Legion ran into the zone, clustered up in a shield wall. The Kodiak, excited to get to grips with the enemy, "accidentally" vented steam and killed all three mechanics. Oops. Oh well, accidents happen in war. Alexia respectfully and surreptitiously pocketed their souls - no point in letting good corpses souls go to waste, right? Walking up, she used the souls to craft three Thrall Warriors, who immediately ran forwards.

Butcher's army ran up, with Butcher himself staying behind the wall of Bombardiers, while the Forgeseer alone split off from the force. Butcher cast Deceleration, and put Vengeful on the Bombardier Officer.

Round 2:
I upkept both spells. Strakhov moved forwards just enough to take a shot at the Forgeseer, hitting and rolling just low enough to not do any damage. Alexia walked up and slung a Hellfire at a Bombardier, also somehow rolling just low enough to not do any damage. The Legion walked forwards and shot their pistols, doing some damage. The Thralls charged the Bombardiers, although only one could make the 3" needed for boosting damage. They finished off one Bombardier, but the return swing from Vengeful on the officer killed a Thrall. The Kodiak trampled up and used Vent Steam, the Kommandos then walked forwards and did the same.

Butcher upkept Vengeful and allocated to Ruin. The Bombardiers shuffled up a bit and killed the Thralls, allowing the Officer to lob a shot at the Legion; it missed but a roll of 10 on the blast damage still killed the target. The Mechanics then repaired some of the damage on the Bombardiers. Butcher Feated and cast Deceleration again. Ruin charged the Kodiak, dispelling Inviolable Resolve. I was surprised that even with Butcher's Feat and the free charge from his Bond, he still only just managed to finish off the Kodiak on his final hit (doing only one point of extra damage). The Forgeseer walked in to the zone and cast a Hoarfrost at the closest Legion grunt, killing it and also a second with another roll of 10 on the AOE damage. At least Alexia was close enough to take their souls.

Round 3:
I dropped Quicken. The Legion charged the Bombardiers, killing one and bringing back a member of the unit. One attack hit the Bombardier Officer, triggering Vengeful. The Officer's attack did no damage, but it was a Crit allowing him to use Shred to attack again (it was only later that it occured to me that Crit Shred is only during the model's combat action), unfortunately he rolled low again, leaving the Legion trooper untouched.

Alexia charged Ruin, using souls to buy attacks and boost damage rolls. She did some damage, not that much. One Kommando charged Ruin, the other I feared would block Strakhov's charge so I charged the Forgeseer instead, leaving her on one health. Reinholdt gave Strahkov a Lucky Charm (which came in handy as I think I rolled three 1's on a damage roll at one point). Strakhov then cast Last Stand on himself and charged Ruin. After buying all his attacks Ruin still had around 10 health boxes left; pow 11 is just sad really. The Koldun Lord managed to land a Brittle Frost on Ruin but did no damage.

With all my activations done Last Stand kicked in and Strakhov keeled over; karmic retribution for killing his own Mechanics no doubt.


Post-Mortem
It was a fun game that flowed fairly smoothly. I did end it somewhat prematurely using Last Stand, but I felt there wasn't much point in drawing it out too long. Still, in retrospect I probably should have let him take down Strakhov himself using Ruin. But this was actually my first game with Strakhov2 and I thought it would be funny for Strakhov to basically kill himself. I do think only have one jack per side is a bit of a problem, because losing that jack is hard to recover from; having a couple of jacks just sort of "buffers" the impact of losing one, or at least creates more of a back-and-forth. But I wanted to have a bit of everything without having too much of the power in the battlegroup as that might make the rest of the army feel redundant; I feel that gives a more accurate impression of the actual game. I think the Butcher list did what I wanted it to quite well, but I might re-write the Strakhov list.

A Prototype Deck Vault With Accessory Compartment

This design actually predates the gaming accessory box I posted earlier. It was intended for card games that use dice and tokens, like MtG. It would in theory work for games like Warmachine, but I think the accessory compartment is a little small as Warmachine requires rather a lot of tokens.

It is of course a double-topped design. I engraved a hand of cards on one lid and a dice on the other, to mark the different compartments. The accessory compartment is designed to be large enough for 16mm dice.

This was a prototype; you can see that I used dogbones for the box joints. For a "production" piece I would manually cut the pockets square so there won't be any holes. You can see that the resin inlays in the engravings did not come out very well; I've improved my technique since then, although I still need more practice.

I was using metal powder in two-part epoxy resin; despite my efforts to seal the wood first, some of the resin still seeped into the wood and dropped below the surface. Funnily enough those are the parts that look better; I mixed GSW metal powder into the resin, and it looks pretty good most places where the surface was not disturbed, but not where I sanded the resin flush with the wood, even after polishing with a dremel polishing bit and compound. I also tried to mix alcohol ink into the resin on the card deck symbol, to try to progressively change the colours of the cards, but that didn't quite turn out the way I had hoped. Since then I have obtained some coloured mica powders that seem to give better results.

One issue I'm having is splintering around the lid grooves. This might be partly caused by the quality of the plywood, but it is a bit of a delicate area. For this box I applied superglue to the tongues and grooves of the lids to try to strengthen them and prevent splintering (followed by some sanding to adjust the fit), and you can see where some of that glue got away from me and spread out across the surface. The box was not varnished; hopefully varnish will work to strengthen the tongues and grooves, removing the need for superglue.

I've been planning to take these to the local gaming spot and see if people are interested in having their own boxes customized with their own engraving etc, however I really want to make the final boxes from nice wood, not plywood, and that's surprisingly hard to get around here in appropriately sized sheets - at least with my current budget.

A Partitioned Gaming Box

The card box that I was using to hold my Warmachine cards couldn't hold any more, and I couldn't make it any deeper as it wouldn't fit into the accessory tray in my Warmachine transport case if I did. So I designed a partitioned box to hold two stacks of cards instead. I also added a third partion that was wide enough to hold dice and just long enough to hold my marker pen, with enough space left over for some tokens. The lid was also recessed slightly to serve as a tray; the idea was that I would hold the cards in place with my hand and dump all the tokens and dice onto the lid-tray.

I tried a new varnish and varnishing techniques; the varnish was brushed onto the body normally but airbrushed heavily onto the lid. It kinda looked quite green, so I sanded the body and lid lightly to reduce the tinting. The result wasn't what I was going for but it's kind of an interesting "aged" look. The box itself is fine, but that narrow rear compartment is awkward and doesn't have enough room for all the tokens and accessories I like to bring with me for Warmachine. I've decided that I have enough room to extend the rear compartment, so I might make another one in the future with more room. We'll see.

A Demo Game For Old Times' Sake

I ended up holding a demo game of Monsterpocalypse. I didn't play myself, instead walking both sides through the game phases and explaining the rules as we went along. For the most part I tried to leave both players to make their own decisions, but I did push them to use power attacks (which I walked them through) for several turns after the monsters got close enough, and gave suggestions on good plays when they asked towards the end of the game as the monsters' health started to get really low.

It was pure G.U.A.R.D. versus pure Empire of the Apes. We played using only base rules and models stats, with none of the rules on the models' cards (except High Mobility ofc, and sometimes Flight). The game was close, with King Kondo managing to pull off a rare win against Defender X. I believe both players knew a little about 40K but had no actual wargaming experience, and both seemed to enjoy the game. They seemed perfectly happy to not bother with the card rules; I think for their very first game just the core rules were enough for them to worry about. There was a bit of a discussion about the game's availablity, and it was nice to be able to say that there are digital models available.