School Is Back In Session

Starting next week, school is back in session, which means that I'm going to be trying to avoid work and get my mind off grading quite a bit. I'm going to go to the tried and true writing, and try to finish up 4th wall all the way through, and then also get back painting. I've been playing with paint a bit, but it's not as much as I was doing in the past. Here's a quick update as to what Magnus looks like now days.

Writing

For the first time in a long while, I've found myself writing and enjoying it.

Previously writing was a chore. It was something I was forcing myself to do because that's what I had to do. I've edited a third of a book in two days, and the best thing in the world happened this morning while I was doing it - I lost track of time.

It's why I started writing. I love the fact that while I write the world around me melts away and what I feel like is only a few minutes of effort, I'm able to plow away hours of work. It's part of the reason that I knew that I wanted to write for the rest of my life and consider myself an author, because when push came to shove I'd rather enjoy good stories and lots of words, rather than looking at math equations and formulas.

I could do science. In fact, I still wonder if I could do science better than I do English, but there's not what happened this morning (and other moments like that in my life) where I've lost time. English is the only one that has ever been able to do that to me. It's the only one where I can start to focus on it, enjoy every second of it, and then I find myself with two feet that are asleep, a solid kink in my neck that sounds like a machine gun when I crack it, and hours missing from my life. I like that feeling. I love that feeling. That feeling is the feeling of getting lost in work and enjoying every second of what you're doing so that you're more focused on what is going on and what you're thinking about than anything else. During that time Facebook, the internet, all of lives problems and concerns, my mother in law sitting two feet away from me, disappeared. During that time I was living in a place that I liked, my world, with my characters, that fit perfectly how I wanted to see them.

It was nice to go back to that.

I really, really missed that feeling.

8th Edition

Well, it's that time again, time to sort out what I've got in 8th edition now that 7th is dead and gone. Sure, I had 3,480 points in 7th, but now we've got more stuff and I want to know power levels. The fun part about all of this is that power levels don't worry about upgrades. You just say what you've got and points are based and the upgrades don't matter.

The point calculation took me a long while, but now, it's a race for power levels in 8th and I've got the easy math to put it all together. Let's do the math.

Chaos Lord x2 = 10
Chaos Lord in Terminator Armor x2 = 14
Daemon Prince (we're going to count the old model of the Lord of Change as a DP) = 30
Sorcerer x3 = 21
Chaos Space Marines - I've got 33, so 20 = 15pts, 13 = 12 pts - total 37
Cultists = 6
Terminators = 27
Rubrics = 28
Chosen = 8
Possessed = 6
Helbrute = 8
Rhino = 12
Raptors = 7
Warp Talons = 9
Heldrake = 10
Predator = 10
Maulerfiend = 9
Magnus = 21
Exalted Sorcerer x3 = 21
Scarab Occult Terminators = 13
Herald of Tzeentch x2 = 8
Herald of Tzeentch on Disk x3 = 15
Pink Horros x2 = 10
Flamers x2 = 10
Screamers x3 = 15
Burning Chariot x2 = 10

So, yeah, that took me less than a half hour, and I can now say that all of my chaos models together power leved all together, I can field somewhere around 375 points of chaos and daemons.The weird part is that with list building it always took me so long to sort everything out, so it seems wrong that it didn't take me that long to piece this all together. .

The most depressing part about the entire deal? Everything in red isn't painted.

Another Week - More Painting

With another week here's what I've worked on this week.

Always Want to Know

I always want to know just how many points that I have worth of Warhammer stuff. It's a question that gets asked, and it's a tricky one to answer because of a few things. The biggest thing is that I have enough models that a few of them can stand in and double as quite a few other things. The most basic example of that is something like chaos terminator lords, they can also be terminator sorcerers, or if I'm feeling it, I can have the terminator just be the unit champion. So right now I have two terminators that can be looked at like they're champions (purely because they're modeled a bit more impressively standing up on a stone) but the question at hand is what do I put them as a point cost? Do I make them a unit champion? Do I make them a terminator lord? Or do I use them as a terminator sorcerer? Even then with the later two, how much stuff do I give them? Do I count potential sorcerer levels and items?

With all of this complication in mind, we have to sort out just what I have in models, and then sort out points. Let's go through what's painted, and then we can worry about the point tally. Here's the break down by unit.

CSM - Marines
2 banners
heavy bolter
flamer
powerfist + plasma pistol
12 CCW + gun
13 bolter only

Cultists
 6 w/ CCW + gun
2 flamers
1 big gun
1 champ with sword and shot gun


Thousand Sons Rubric Marines
19 regular
2 aspiring sorcerers

OR up to
5 aspiring sorcerers
16 regular

OR it can drop to
4 aspiring sorc
16 regular
and then upgrade the one sorcerer into an actual chaos sorcerer instead of the TS aspiring.

OR all things considering if we're going min/max of things, I have 16 rubrics that can't be anything else. If I'm feeling evil, that could be one unit of 16, with one aspiring sorcerer, and then four  regular sorcerers running around doing whatever they want. This is where the options become a bit crazy, and the point cost for them becomes very fuzzy.

Heldrake - only have one, and it's got the flamer mouth weapon

2 Daemon Prince - Hanz and Franz (again the points that can be dropped into them is over the top)

Chaos Lord - Sword + Plasma pistol

Helbrute - multimelta - powerfist

Terminators -
Terminator Champion (or lord or sorcerer) - combi bolter - power staff
Terminator Champion (or lord or sorcerer) - combi bolter - chain fist
Terminator - combi bolter + power fist
Terminator - combi bolter + force axe
Terminator - combi bolter + force axe
Terminator - reaper autocannon -
Terminator - multi melta - maul
Terminator  - melta - maul
Terminator - combi bolter - chain fist
Terminator - combi bolter - axe
Terminator combi bolter - axe
Terminator - combi flamer - maul

The difficult part with these guys as well is determining their shooting weapon. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time seeing the difference between a melta and a flamer. I'm working off of pictures at this point and I'm not sure if what is there is a flamer or a melta, so when in doubt if I couldn't tell for sure, I just put melta.

2 (almost 3) rhinos - again difficult because not sure if it's going to go bare bones, or if it's going to pick up all of the things to get all of the random bonuses.

1 Las cannon predator

5  warp talons

Now to sort out the math behind all of this.

Limited point cost list, just doing some basic body counts, not sorting out any special weapons or anything at all. This is literally the worst math I can throw at these things.

30 CSM  = 450
Cultists = 50
Thousand Sons = 495
Heldrake = 170
2 daemon prince = 290
Chaos Lord = 65
Helbrute = 105
11 Terminators = 341
3 Rhino = 105
Predator =  140
5 Talons = 160

So, low ball of all low balls, I have 2,371 points.Note - that's no special weapons, no upgrades, no artifacts, so chaos marks, no bonus spell levels, and little to do with how they actually get plaid. We're going horribly wrong here and thinking that the worst case scenario this is how they could potentially get fielded if there was no understanding of the army.

To show just how bad of a level that is to even guess at point value, a Daemon Prince, has to have a mark, typically I'll give wings and armor as well, which increases the value of ONE of them to 220, two of them to 440, and that's still not counting magic and artifacts.

Hell, I think I even counted things wrong because I know that I have 33 CSM, not 30. I even forgot my maulerfiend!


Either way, let's dive in and try to real list this with more realistic point values behind everything.


CSM - 620

3 units of 11 each.

Unit 1 -  Start (75) + 6 models @ 13pts (78) + Mark of Tzeentch (22) + icon of flame (15) = 190

Unit 2 - Start (75) + 6 models (78) + Tzeentch (22) + icon of flame (15) + champ with pistol and power fist (40) = 230

Unit 3 -Start (75) + 6 models (78) + Tzeentch (22) + plasma gun (15) + heavy bolter (10) = 200

Cultists - 112

Unit 1 - Start (50) + 6 models (24) + autogun (5) + 2 heavy stubber (10) + flamer (5) + champ with shotgun (2) + tzeentch (16) = 112 points

Thousand Sons - 663

3 Units
Unit 1- Start (150) + 1 more (23) + sorcer metla bomb (5) + rhino (35) = 213

Unit 2- Start (150) + 1 more (23) + sorcerer melta (5) + rhino (35) = 213

Unit 3- Start (150) + 2 more (46) + sorcerer melta (5) + rhino (35) = 236

Sorcerer - 165

Base (60) + 2 mastery (50) + spell familiar (15) + Tzeentch (15) + sigil of corruption (25) = 165

Helldrake - 170

Maulerfiend - 125 

Helbrute - 105

11 Terminators - 455

2 units
Unit 1 - Start (95) - 3 more (93) - Tzeentch (30) - 2 chain fist (30) = 248

Unit 2 - Start (95) - 2 more (62) - Tzeentch (25) - Autocannon (25) = 207

Predator -  140

Talons - 160

Chaos Lord - 100
Start (65) - Tzeentch (15) - melta (5) - plasma pistol (15) = 100

Daemon Prince - 665

Hanz
Start (145) + Tzeentch (15) + 3 Mastery (75) + wings (40) + armour (20) + black mace (45) = 340

Franz
Start (145) + Tzeentch (15) + 3 Mastery (75) + wings (40) + armour (20) + burning brand (30) = 325

Total of a better guess = 3,480

Again, this could swing a few hundred points a few different ways depending on what I put on leaders, if I want more HQ or not, but that's about how I run my lists, and what I spec different models with. That's just close enough to say that I have about 3,500 points of Thousand Sons. 


The really stupid/weird part about all of this is that I have about that many points to still construct or paint. The only catch to that is that out of that 3,500 points, I have Magnus at 650 points, 3 exalted sorcerers, 3 sorcerers on disk, and a daemon prince in that to do pile. It's easy to double your points when your to do pile is nothing but hyper overpowered (and high point cost ) HQ options. 

Another Week, More Painting

Done For This Week

Right arm, and then assembled a Lord of Change. I'm not going to be treating him as a Lord of Change, I'm more going to be using him as the third daemon prince to team up with Magnus to make the horrible formation of DOOM that just flies around and makes people cry during the psychic phase. (Totally forgot the name of it, and I'm too lazy to look it up).

I'm too lazy, and don't want to post more just for photo uploading, so here's what I've been working on this week - 4/27

They're Back Together

After the fall they went through, everything is finally glued back together.

Slight Delay

My painting will take a slight delay. Last night I went up to my office to paint a bit and ran into this.

One of my shelves decided to fall out of the wall yesterday. Oddly most of the models that I thought would not have survived the fall (skeletons, zombies, even some of the guardians in the Eldar force that have fine bits on them) worked out just fine and there were no injuries from them, or at least very few injuries. For example, my swooping hawk unit made it through the fall without any issue to their wings or bases at all.

However, a lot of things did break.

So, instead of painting, I've gone back to superglue and trying to puzzle piece models back together in hopes of making any of the breaks not super evident.

A reminder

I am putting this here as a reminder to myself.

I DO NOT NEED TO BUY ANYTHING NEW.

I was tempted to buy a few new things for Warhammer a few nights ago, but luckily my store didn't have what I wanted. Then I went home and realized that I have ARMIES to paint. Yes, I do have the joy of the one painted CSM army that I posted up a while ago, but then I looked in my shelves and bins, and realized that I have HUNDREDS of models that still need some painting love.

Just as a reminder to myself, here's a few of the armies that need attention -

Then by accident I found some bretonian bits, and some skaven bits, not to mention the half painted chaos army for fantasy. That's not to mention the vargheist box that I have for my VC army, or the batallion box for the high elfs. Then, of course I still have to assemble and paint a little guy named Nagash. You know, little things.

Then comes the stupidity of 40k.

Within 40k I still have the eldar army to paint (picture pending), and then to add insult to injury, I have the fateweaver that I'm running as a prince, the start collecting tzeentch box, the extra screemers, the occult terminators, the exalted sorcerers, and the tzangor chosen that I'm running as sorcerers. On top of ALL of that mess, I still have to assemble and paint Magnus.

I do NOT need to buy anything new.

I just have to keep reminding myself of all of the grey host armies that I have floating around and the work that I need to do on them FIRST before I do anything else new.

WIP - Franz

Here's my current work in progress, Franz, the other daemon prince that I have on my table that is hopefully going to be flying around with Hanz, a third daemon, and Magnus one of these days.

Insults

I wrote this as an example for my Stretch A class and wanted to share it here just for some giggles.

Insults typically don’t work that well against me. When people try to get me riled up and react to what they’re saying, most of the time it doesn’t do anything to me. If someone is doing the overplayed joke of poking fun of my mom with a classic ‘yo mamma’ joke, I’ll most likely pile in with a few of my own about her. They’ll want to say ‘yo mamma is so fat, dumb, stupid,  or anything like that, and of course I jump in and say my mamma is so far in denial about her son that she still treats me like I am thirteen and trusts me to do nothing. My job last family reunion was to bring coloring pages for people to color on – the crayons to color on them was my niece’s job. 

Once that falls apart and they realize that they can’t insult my mom, some people trying to get a reaction from me might want to make the very stupid mistake and start insulting my wife. I love my wife. I wish I could be the knight in shining armor that rushes to her aid in the time of need to defend her honor, but she’s got a knife and can stab people all by herself. There’s no need for me to rush to her aid because if she even catches the scent that someone was talking bad about her that will be the last mistake that they will ever make. 

My mom is off the table of insults, my wife is off the table of insults, and that doesn’t leave much room in my life to insult. Some really creative souls try their best to insult me, but the down side to that is that I’ve pretty well come to terms with who I am. Jokes about my lanky body, glasses, nerdy hobbies, voice, mannerisms, musical inclinations, or anything else doesn’t really phase me. It’s impossible to insult someone about something that is true. Yeah, I do look goofy. Yeah, I do listen to weird music. Yeah, I do have glasses. I can’t really argue against truth. 

As Zen as I try to be, and as much as I try to act like the world will go on and nothing will bother me, there is one type of insult that will motivate me beyond anything else in the world. Anytime I have an eye on doing, being, or achieving something, if someone tells me that I can’t do it or are unable to do it because I’m not smart, fast, old, or young enough to do it will kill me. 

People telling me that I’m stupid, or that I’m not smart enough to do something, stick with me, and they stick with me for a long time. In second grade I was trying to run for class president, and my competition made a quick jab towards me that I didn’t even know how to spell ‘book’ right. I still remember it. I still replay that moment in my mind. I try my best to not let it sit against the guy too much because it was firmly in our past, but every time I see him (we grew up in the same neighborhood and whenever I visit home I see him) that is one of the memories that I have of him.

I have a list of people who have laughed at me, told me I couldn’t reach my dreams, or simply told me that I wasn’t smart enough, and they are a major motivator to do things. Logically I know that most of their comments and restrictions about my life were in passing and not well thought out. In my right mind, I know that none of these people even think twice about who I am, what I’ve become, or where I’m going. When I have my mind about me, they are ignorant people who could not see the big picture. When I’m not thinking right, they are what keep me up until four in the morning trying to become something more. I can’t stand it when people tell me that I can’t do something that I know I can do, if only I try. 

Insults can be shrugged off and forgotten, but limitations become a gauntlet thrown to the ground begging for me to pick it up. 

Limitations about things that I don’t care about can be forgotten. Someone telling me that I will never be a football jock, a fashion model, or the typical dad because of who I am is nothing to me. I don’t care about those things, and so it doesn’t matter if I’m not achieving it. Trying to tell me that I will never be an air force pilot because I’m too tall isn’t really a limitation because I never wanted to fly. Trying to limit me by saying that because I’m built the way I am I’ll never be a good lineman, doesn’t quite bother me because that’s never been a passion of mine. 

The limitation, that turns into an insult, that turns into a grudge, that turns into something that haunts me for far longer than it should, is when someone limits me because of my intelligence.

In 9^th grade I was a slacker, a smart slacker, but still a slacker. I was in all honors classes, and I was actively failing my geometry class because I simply never did the homework. I aced quizzes and tests, but bombed out and ultimately had to retake the class because I chose not to do my homework. When I finally sat down with my counselor who had never met me and knew nothing about me in 10^th grade, he said that I should go to a more basic math class, and that I should not try to take any more honors classes. He wanted to transfer me out of a challenging course because he thought I wasn’t smart enough. 

My GPA went from a struggling 2.0 where I was slacking my way through honors classes learning just enough to get me through, to my senior year where I took summer school, not because I needed to retake classes, but because I wanted an extra space in my schedule to take a heavy load including an Economics, AP Lit, AP Bio, Pre Calc, and Physics. Because of his complete lack of faith in my brain, I could not stand it. He, and a few others at that school, tried to limit my knowledge, and it became an insult against me. 

Then came the insult that I still cannot understand, I was not smart enough to think in more than threes. 

I try to think about when in the world I should only think in threes and its mind boggling. I stretch to come up with an idea of where three is the only answer and only complication to any resource to talk about, and I find a blank. Even when talking about something as basic as the three primary colors, I have to ask which form of colors are being discussed. The primary colors of additive coloring are different than the primary colors of subtractive coloring. If the primary colors really are red, yellow, and blue, why in the world when a printer runs out of ink does it need ink that isn’t red or blue? Yellow is fairly constant within both forms of primary colors, but even then there’s more than three primary colors. 

Just like I don’t see it ever possible to limit myself to only thinking in threes, I can’t process how to only defend a topic with three ideas when writing. According to some very lost souls in the English teaching world, not only is there only ever three ideas about a topic, there’s only ever three defenses to one of those ideas. If I ever get arrested for a crime, which is bound to happen one of these days, I’m picking my lawyer by asking them to write a five paragraph essay of how they plan to defend me. If they actually write a five paragraph essay, I won’t hire them because they’re limiting my defense to keep my butt out of jail, on three ideas, with only three defenses of each idea. If I’m on trial for my life, I want all of the defenses. I do not want my lawyer to only think of three; I want him to think of three hundred. 

Five paragraph essays are the haiku of the prose world. They’re full of limitations and guidelines which make it impossible to write a good one because rules and structure become more important than the message. The only good part about haikus and five paragraph essays is that they’re impossibly easy to write. 

A haiku is a structured poem of three lines. 

I want to go on and say more about what it takes to write a haiku, but my hatred of three cannot make it past this point without having to say something. If an idea is more complex than three lines, in the haiku world, it is not worth having.  

Within those three limiting lines of a haiku, the rules are always based off of syllable count. The first and last lines have five syllables, and the center one has seven. If an idea is more complex than seventeen syllables then haikus will avoid them. The easiest way to write a haiku is to write a normal sentence, and then just hit enter once the syllable count is hit for that line.

Haiku’s Suck – A Haiku

Haikus are stupid.

They make people think they could

Be a real poet.

That’s all it takes. Five paragraph essays are in the same boat of simplistic writing. It doesn’t take any brain power or resemblance that the author is thinking to write a five paragraph essay; it takes a long list of rules and guidelines that they have to follow. Five paragraph essays don’t show or demonstrate how a person thinks, they demonstrate a schooling system that doesn’t want to see complexity of thought because complexity is difficult to grade. It’s not just insulting; it’s limiting. 

Looking around and seeing just how complex the world is around me, I cannot understand that the art that is supposed to share that complexity has so many rules about it. I can stand some basic rules like spelling and punctuation, but after that there is no rational reason for me to limit my ideas. If I’m trying to make sense of the world around me, I’m going to use every tool and complexity that I can to try to do that. I’m not about to let myself be limited simply because someone is too lazy to read. 

People can insult my hair, my glasses, my car, my taste in music, my taste in hobbies, my books, my house, my religion, my job, my (lack of) masculinity, without any response from me. They can insult the holes in my socks, the cello in my closet, the glowsticks in my desk, or even my name of Adrillf and no sleep will be lost. The real way to fire me up, send me on a quest, get me to see red, and vow vengeance is to limit my intelligence. Call me stupid, call me inept, call me inadequate, or say I’m simply too simple to understand, and I will do everything I can to prove that wrong. 

I know I should let the limitations roll right away along with the insults, but I will remember the student who was double my age who screamed at me during a class that I wasn’t an authority on what I was teaching them. I will remember Professor Thayer passively mocking me and the idea that I would ever be able to publish. I will remember Mr. Santana saying that I should take basic math. I will remember Skyler saying I was too dumb to become a second grade class president. I will remember, and quote to anyone insulting me, that my mamma called my graduate program a “cute little program” like she was talking about a middle school production of The Music Man.

I WON!

It took a while, but my Thousand Sons army fianlly won! It's one of those things that I don't even believe it because I was getting to the point where I was sure that I was always going to be loosing.

The best part about it is that it was aginst hte space wolves. For those that don't know, that's their bitter rivals. We're talking thousands of years of bad blood, and my army managed to win.

I think I've finally got a bit of understanding with the army. Daemon Prince with wings and the burning brand are a great thing, making him level 3 psyker is even better. He just flew around spitting out spells and flamer templates throughout the entire game. Also preditor with las cannons > helbrute and maulerfiend. As awesome as they look, they are dead 200 points. The preditor with las on it easily did more damage than either one of the walkers did ever.  Also, the heldrake is starting to earn its keep, being able to do what it does is a nice one.

As for the psychic phase, the two major disciplines I give anyone who's not level 1 and has to go 100% into Tzeentch, is a mix between Tzeentch and telepathy. When in doubt telepathy has some killer things in it, but worst case scenario is psychic shriek. Once I get a doom bolt and maybe some other fun Tzeentch fun, I might hit divination for one of my units just to see if I can roll something really helpful with blesses, but Tzeentch and telepathy seems to be a great combo together.

Either way, I'm pumped. I finally did it. I finally won a game of 40k.

Army Overview 9.0

Army Overview 8.0

Army Overview 7.0

Army Overview 6.0

Army Overview 5.0