Old school horror flicks on TCM this month, starting... TONIGHT!

DVR free space be damned! - TCM is showing some AWESOME old school horror flicks, every friday night this month (Oct).

Included in the deal are some of my favorite films from Hammer. Those Brits picked up the American Universal's torch and ran with it - after they formed an angry mob with the rest of the villagers and chased the monster to the old mill and burned it to the ground using said torch, that is.

Anyway, here's tonight's offerings (EST):

.8:00 PM....Horror of Dracula (1958)
.9:30 PM....The Brides Of Dracula (1960)
11:00 PM....Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966)
12:45 AM....Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1969)
.2:30 AM....Psychomania (1973)
.4:00 AM....Daughters of Satan (1972)

Anyway, if you dig the old horror, especially Hammer flicks with Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and the usual bevy of babes...


...then you'll wanna tune in or at least DVR/Tivo them (possibly never to actually watch them via those recordings, like me... sometimes ;^]).

Oh, BTW, I have quite a few of these already on DVD, especially most of tonight's selections, but some of them coming later this month are not very easy to find on DVD, or so it seems. The Reptile, for one, is up next week, and I have NEVER seen it. I'm totally GEEKED to finally get the chance.




Same deal with Plague of the Zombies.




OK, put a stake in me... I'm done.

"Aw, cripe!"

Painting minis again: the kiddies join in too!

Well, it's been a while. I almost forgot how to do this posting thing. Looks like a month has flown by since my last one. I guess I'll blame it on summer vacations and such...why not? This is my first summer since beginning to blog, so maybe it's somewhat normal. Hitting some of my favorite blogs during this seasonal break of sorts (remotely usually via my phone), I do in fact see some that have slowed down quite a bit, while other diehards have kept up their usual impressive pace.

At any rate, I have previously noted that I wished to get back to painting minis. I haven't done so since the mid '80s! I have shown some pics of a few of my old Grenadier, Ral Partha, Citadel, and TSR lead minis from that era, but other than those, I really don't recall dipping a brush and slapping the paint on any of them since then.

I dug through some of my old painting gear, and as it turns out it almost all pretty much useless at this point. Paints have dried up and brushes have become mutilated. It was time to update my supplies and have a go.

I snagged some Reaper paints at a local gaming shop, then stopped by a local art store for some brushes, palettes, knives, sticky-stuff, primers, and finishes. I already have tons of minis to paint - tons of old lead figs, some newer lead-free ones, and some plastic guys too.

Now my son has really taken an interest in minis, and even my little girl has been known to join in some games, so I knew they would want to make a mess... err... do some painting too. So I set up the kitchen table, because that's just where you're supposed to gaming and gaming related stuff (IMO), and we all sat down to paint us some minis.


Here's my little girl's first (and last) attempt. There's something utterly terrifying about pink, glittering undead, ya'know?:


And here's my son's first go at it, same zombie fig, as I have (quite literally) 100 of them:


I figured I'd start them out on the zombies, mainly because I have so many of them (cheap and great for undead minions and mobs in general), so that if they totally hosed them up, they could just grab another and hit it again.

Well, my daughter spent somewhere around a whopping 5 minutes in her miniature painting career and retired from the hobby...for now, at least. Best part about her supplies - the pink glitter that she absolutely insisted on using is actually your basic glitter glue, which actually turned out perfect to sum up a 3 y.o.'s infatuation with princesses, Barbies, Littlest Pet Shop, etc. The artwork completely mirrored the artist in this case. Well that is, minus the whole undead, brain-eating thing.

However "the boys" stayed at it. My son's next attempt was a plastic Dwarf Crossbowman:


This fig is from that bunch of Dwarves from the Grenadier Fantasy Warriors game, as discussed in some comments of this post. I have bunches of these figs, as well as dwarf axemen, orcs, goblins, etc from that same game. They too are great for minions, or bigger groups of baddies, as well as good specimens for the kiddies to learn how to paint. Heck I even used one (a staff wielding dwarf) for one of my current 4e characters, a Dwarf Invoker - looks exactly the part for that guy. I'll post a pic or two of that mini. It was one of the first few I did in this return to painting minis endeavor. I just don't have the pics on me ATM. Ah well.

Although he chose the flesh color for the dude's beard, I'd have to say that for a 5 y.o.'s second attempt at painting a mini, he freakin' rocked the house! I am very, very proud of his work. He is too. Check him out modeling his masterpiece:


It was pretty funny when he asked across the table, "Daddy, what color are you using for your guy's face?" I replied a bit smart-@$$edly, "Uhmm....the face color. That one right there." He replied, as if nothing was strange about his choice, "Oh, I used that color for my guy's beard." Awesome. He did a great job on some of the details, like the hand-axe on the belt, the crossbow, sections of the armor, straps, etc. That face and beard swap is freakin' funky though...hehe.

As far as my own mini painting, the only one I have with me on this SD card is this Reaper Gnome:

I needed a good gnome for another current 4e character I'm playing, a Gnome Illusionist Wizard. I couldn't find a good gnome caster mini from the WotC D&D mini sets, and this guy looked a lot like how I pictured my character, so I decided to paint him up and use him for those sessions. I know I didn't do a very good job on him, but I guess all things considered it actually turned out better than I expected. It really has been a looooooooong time since I did this....hehe. I went a little crazy with the gold dry-brushing, but after I accidentally got a little bit of it on his hair, I kinda liked the glitter look (thanks to my little girl's zombie influence?), and decided that since he worships Garl Glittergold, why the F not just sprinkle it all over him. And so there it is - an excuse... err... a reason for my messy dry-brushing techniques....cool. What say ye, Garl?

"Meh."

I'll try to collect the pics of the other figs we painted that day and the next, as some of them are quite interesting. My son made up his own version of washing and dry-brushing...with mixed results. I think he did some retouching on the crossbowman fig too, IIRC, so I'll post more pics of that one, if that's the case.

After feeling all good about myself for still having (some) skills, my wonderful wife served me up with this gem: "So which one did you paint and which one did Bobby paint?" And she was serious.

Laugh it up fellas. Laugh it up.

Reeeeaaaaaaal funny.

Dinosaurs vs Undead: The Battle on the Greatroom Floor

So, my son and I decided to bust out some other minis for some good ol' front room carpet battles. See I've had the "Fuzzy Heroes" and an expansion? to it called "The Lost Toys" sitting on my desk in the "office" (err... geekroom) for a while now, and have yet to actually sit down and play them. My son is 5 y.o. and the idea of taking his pile of stuffed animals and action figures and playing a cool game with them, rules and all, seems like it would be a blast. Add in the cool review I've seen of it on GeekDad, for example, and one of these days, we will play it....darn-it all!

But...on this past weekend (extended for the Easter holiday), he and I only got so far as gathering some dinosaurs from some clearance special ($1.12) at Target, a bag of 28 count dinosaurs & accessories in the "Party like Crazy!" line, which I can't seem to find online any more for a nice pic...ah well. Best I can find is this: they are basically these figs, but in a 28 count pack.
Anyway, then a different idea struck. Let's just play simple army-men type stuff, but with dinosaurs and ...hhmnn ....something else. What shall we use?

It was then that I noticed the bag o' ZOMBIES!!! (100 of those freakin' freaks! for use in the Twilight Creations game "ZOMBIES!!!") sitting there all lonely, and thought yeah, that'll do.
Dinos vs Zombies....cool!

Before I forget, during my search for a cool pic to throw in at the top of this post, I found a near perfect image: this awesome t-shirt design, by a guy called Smacktastic, at threadless.com:
That's one coolass t-shirt, and I may just have to buy a couple - an XL and a 6T....ha! Anyway, awesome shirt design Smacktastic!

Ok, back to the party...

Well, once ya start thinking about these things, of course the geek (especially a recently 4e playing geek) comes shining through and the concepts of a boss, brute, artillery, skirmishers, artillery, etc and of course minions, take shape and now your simple army-guys game turns into a whole new animal.

But that's fun too. So we ran with it. My son has a few of the MEGA Bloks plasma minis that you can assemble, disassemble, mix&match, etc... the ones with the ball-joints at the neck, shoulders, hips, etc. So far, IIRC, he has the T-Rex, the Mummy, and the Ghoul (which is really just a winged skeleton, and just so happens to look completely badass). Well, the Ghoul fell victim to a Sword of Sharpness, or so it would seem, as his wings keep breaking off...errr ....keep getting severed at the joint, so he's still in sick-bay getting super-glued yet again. That stuff doesn't seem to be so "super" these days, that is except for when I botch the job and get some on my fingers... "skin-be-gone" is a better product name for it.


Sssshhhhhhhh..... don't tell anyone, ok? "What they don't know, won't hurt them."

Anyway, so our choices of cool bosses for our game really sorted themselves out, and we decided on the T-Rex for him and the Mummy for me. I did let him pick, and he hilariously changed his pick 3 or 4 times, as I kept describing what types of things a T-Rex could do, and what cool powers a Mummy has, none of which we actually put into our rules...ha! But I would have loved a little Mummy Rot, Mummy's Curse, or even just some good ol' fashioned Fear....boo!

So we had out bosses and our minions: 6 zombies for me and 6 various dino for him, including the pterodactyl he chose first. I decided to give that bad boy "flight"... well as a power to use in the game, that is. But this left me at a disadvantage that we noticed in our first few minutes of play, so I took a Shadow mini from the WotC group and just called him a "Ghost" for simplicity's sake. So now I had a "flyer" too.
Ok, so we started out on the carpet of our greatroom/frontroom/family-room (whatever you like to call it) but those piddly little zombies kept falling over - a premonition?

So I got out a Chessex BattleMat. I recenlty snagged a backup mat, mainly because it was so cheap. It's one of their "irregular" ones, which you would really have to be pretty hardcore to really care about the irregularity of this mat. It was something like a quarter or less the "regular" price for this thing, so I figured it would be a good backup, additional, or "kids' copy" of my main BattleMat. It made sense to just grab it here and not roll with it.

So we flattened it out, as much as possible, utilizing dice cups and crates (props) from our boss minis (they come disassembled in those crates...a kinda cool concept), and started drawing our landscape battlefield. We threw on some trees that came in the bag of dinosaurs for some quick flavor and some obstacles to avoid, and made a cheesy river running thru the middle of the field with a single bridge to cross it. That looked a little weak on the choices of where to move our figs, so I made some dorky little spring-board/teleporter device to use to cross the river too. We also decided that our "flyers" could just fly over the darn thing. Makes sense.


After that, we made up some pretty cool (albeit seemingly simple) rules for movement, attacks, defenses, health, etc. I will spare you those details here, as I am blabbering waaaaaay too long about a simple fighting miniatures game already. I must say though, that by the end of the game, with some modifications to the rules based on play-testing and such, I think it was a pretty cool little game we created. Don't get me wrong, it's not like we totally reengineered miniatures gaming or anything, it's just that sitting down to play army men and finishing up how we did felt like a nice little accomplishment of creativity in some manner or another.

I took some pix of the thing as it progressed, capturing our rules and changes along the way. My son said he wants me to write it all down on paper for us to use again, and I put him in charge of the artwork. I have a feeling it's gonna be freakin hilariously cool if he takes the gig....ha!

Anyway, here's a few more pics of the game as it progressed. The photo quality kinda sucks, due to the fact that I had only the camera in my phone, and it isn't very good for taking closeups...or really even far-a-ways....ha! Anyway, please bear with the pix quality.

Starting out: "Hey there T-bone! What're you lookin' at?!?!?"

Bobby's Dinos:

Daddy's Undead:

Ghost vs T-rex (not my smartest move of the day):

Bobby's not diggin' that "1" he just rolled:

"Every Mummy say 'HEY' (hey!)...say 'HO' (ho!)...say 'HEY-HEY'..."

Dino Graveyard:

I lost to this freakin' pipsqueak?

Bobby wanted a wii-styled final scoreboard:

That Mummy looks sad. Boo-hoo!