My apologies in advance for the somewhat bad-quality pictures – my camera is not that awesome. I’m sure you’ll notice the color bleed from the minis to the white background.

Tzeentch Demons

I painted the Tzeentch ones first. Partially because, as I said before, it’s the one I like best in the board game at the time being, but also (admittedly) because I imagined the Horrors would have to be somewhat easy to paint – mostly a drybrush job.

Lord of Change, Back

The Lord of Change on the other hand was tougher; I wanted his robe to be white-ish with blue hue, with the inner bit being darker than the arm pieces, and there were all the gold details. I added highlights by washing the lower edges of some trims with black, and it seemed to work out well – I continued that with the other models.

Finally, the Warp Stones (green-yellow stuff) took a bit of time and quite some iterations to get right. I wanted these as close to the game’s tokens as possible.

Slaanesh Demons

Next, I painted the Slaanesh demons. Arzo, my wife, pointed out that the Demonettes weren’t purple enough at first, so I washed their corsets or whatever-that-is with purple. I took some care to make the claws of the Keeper of Secrets a different purple than its (more pink) body, so they’re clearly distinguishable.

I’m not absolutely happy with the way the Demonettes‘ bodies turned out. The color is fine as it is, but the drybrushing strokes are too clearly visible, particularly to their left (as seen from the front).

Khorne Demons

Khorne came next. I googled a bit for the exact coloring of the Bloodletters; I didn’t remember the exact color of their horns. Turns out I couldn’t actually possibly remember it, as there’s all kinds of variations between red and black horns. Still, inspiration was a good thing, it made me color them slightly more orange to try and get some of that “hellfire” feeling.

While painting these, I had to resist the urge to stand up and shout something along the lines of…

Blood for the Blood God!

Nurgle Demons

Finally, my favourite Chaos God, Nurgle. Lots of details on these models, with all the worms and blains and all – another reason (apart from me wanting to save the best for last) why I took them last, after having warmed up. The skin of the Plaguebearers took quite some layers until I was happy with the sickly-rotting green-brown mix.

Note how the Lepers, the Plaguebearers and the Great Unclean One all share the green base color, but have different color nuances themselves – giving a coherent picture while maintaining distinguishability. At least that’s what I tried to do

Are you painting minis as well? Any comments or suggestions?

The cultists are already done:

Cultists of all Chaos Gods

I’ll upload the pictures to Board Game Geek as well of course. Here’s a few mug shots of each of the four groups:

Khorne Cultists

Bloodsworn, the cultists of Khorne, the Blood God. He mostly lusts for battle, thus cultists (who do all the corrupting and pillaging for the gods) aren’t as interesting to him. Since the game really plays differently with the different gods, this means that it also provides less cultists for him (and more demons to beat stuff up with).

Nurgle Cultists

Lepers, the cultists of Nurgle, the Lord of Pestilence. Interestingly, he does most of his victories through corruption, which in turn is the main purpose of the cultists in this game – and he has less of them than Tzeentch. Ah well, he has more and cheaper demons instead. Nurgle hits a soft spot for me, I always loved his fluff. My all time favourite Chaos God

Tzeentch Cultists

Acolytes, the cultists of Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways. He’s the god of magic and intrigue, a control type character. So I think the mage style robes work pretty well. The demons will be in a lighter blue. Tzeentch has most cultists, and he teleports them around the board in a pretty unpredictable way. Currently my favourite god to play in this game.

Slaanesh Cultists

Seductresses, the cultists of Slaanesh, the Prince of Pleasure. It is interesting how these are the only cultists that are supposedly female. Not sure why “Seductors” wasn’t chosen. I added another layer of light (purple mixed with white) drybrushing here after thinking they looked too similar to the Tzeentch ones (before trims), I think they’re much more obviously purple now and it really brings out the detail in their robes.

Teaspooned Tzeentch Cultist

Interestingly, what took me longest with these cultists are the little trims around their hoods and sleeves; they’re just so tiny that it’s a lot of work to get these right. To the left here, you see one of the Tzeentch ones in a teaspoon for size.

The demons and greater demons will be next, I’ll do those one god at a time. With the cultists, I thought it made most sense to paint all of them at the same time: The steps I took with each of the Chaos god’s deluded followers were very similar, even though I tried to make them convey different moods through more vivid (Slaanesh) or muted (Nurgle) color schemes. Since the demons look really different for each faction, that approach really doesn’t make sense for them.

I am not certain whether I will keep the Politblog. Maybe one of the reasons why I didn’t feel like posting anymore was that it started feeling too much like work. What do you think? Should I keep it?

So, this was one of my first “dear diary” blog posts in this blog. Back to more interesting more random subjects again soon

But I don’t really like that solution.

I think I might change my approach and make a new commenting policy rule. A quite simple one at that: Every comment that uses some kind of product name as their “name” will be deleted (also those who were made before today), no questions asked, and I re-establish the DoFollow plugin.

I can always delete the links that lead to sites I don’t want to support afterwards, although I’d of course need to introduce an explicit disclaimer for that as well. (Luckily, my current disclaimer reads “I reserve the right to delete spam as I see fit, even if it’s handcrafted”, so I won’t break any promises if I delete things that are spammier than I like retroactively).

On the other hand, I really love your contributions, and I really don’t want to make contributing with comments harder than it apparently already is…

What do you think? How do you handle that kind of thing in your own blog(s)?

Politblog

So I went and started a second blog. Finding a theme and installing WordPress was one thing, but how do you tie those things together? And while we’re at it, why not add stuff like the Twitter feed or Delicious bookmarks? And why not make a mini-tutorial out of it? (That idea actually wasn’t mine, thanks @knowLED!)

When looking at easy ways to create such a mashup for a portal site, I stumbled upon the Google AJAX Feed API, and was amazed. Essentially, it does everything we need, in a format that’s incredibly easy to style with CSS. The higher-level FeedControl class is easy to use, and does exactly what I need: display a collection of feeds in <div> elements.

If you want to use it as well, I suggest you sign up for an API key (although it’s not mandatory). The code that actually fetches the feeds then is simple. Add this to your HTML <head> element…

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>

…and then include bits of JavaScript that load the feeds. Since I wanted to be able to style the blog feeds a bit differently from the other feeds, I created two empty <div> elements that they’ll go into in the HTML body, with the ids “blogfeeds” and “otherfeeds”. Empty because they’ll be populated with the AJAX JavaScript goodness.

<div id="blogfeeds"></div>
<div id="otherfeeds"></div>

This is the JavaScript code, populating two FeedControl objects in an array and then rendering them to their respective <div>s. The feed URLs don’t have to be escaped, the escaped bits you see are what the Google API puts in as titles; I wanted those to be links to the respective feed source. Make sure you put it between <script></script> tags, best in the page header:

google.load("feeds", "1");
function initialize() {
  var feedControl = new Array(new google.feeds.FeedControl(), new google.feeds.FeedControl());
 
  feedControl[0].addFeed("http://www.haslo.ch/blog/feed/", "<a href=\"http://www.haslo.ch/blog/\">Blog</a>");
  feedControl[0].addFeed("http://www.haslo.ch/politblog/feed/", "<a href=\"http://www.haslo.ch/politblog/\">Politblog</a>");
  feedControl[1].addFeed("http://feeds.backtype.com/haslo", "<a href=\"http://www.backtype.com/haslo/\">BackType</a>");
  feedControl[1].addFeed("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/14274896.rss", "<a href=\"http://twitter.com/haslo/\">Twitter</a>");
  feedControl[1].addFeed("http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/haslo?count=15", "<a href=\"http://delicious.com/haslo/\">Delicious</a>");
 
  feedControl[0].setNumEntries(6);
  feedControl[1].setNumEntries(6);
 
  feedControl[0].draw(document.getElementById("blogfeeds"));
  feedControl[1].draw(document.getElementById("otherfeeds"));
}
google.setOnLoadCallback(initialize);

That’s it, that will populate the <div> elements with the feed data. Unstyled, this does look a bit ugly though, a mere list. So I added some CSS, and used this nice tutorial here for making the footer stick to the bottom. Go and have a look, it’s all explained nicely there. Inside that footer, I styled the elements (with Google’s classes, found easily with Firebug) like this:

.gfc-results {
  height: 460px;
  overflow: auto;
  padding-left: 3px;
}
.gfc-resultsRoot {
  height: 500px;
  float: left;
  position: inline;
}
 
#blogfeeds * .gfc-resultsRoot {
  width: 23%;
}
#otherfeeds * .gfc-resultsRoot {
  width: 18%;
}

Finally, for the title, I made an absolutely positioned <div> at the top, et voilà.

The last step was making Facebook aware of the fact that I now have two blogs. As you may know, you can only add one source of the type Feed/RSS for automatic updates (nice tutorial for adding RSS feeds to Facebook). Which is silly.

But anyway, the way around this involved Yahoo Pipes, or rather, just one rather simple pipe that involves a union of the two feeds, and then a descending sort by date. I made a copy of it public, have a look. They’re nice like that, you can just drag-and-drop elements that you want to use, and connect their outlets (lower end) with other element’s inputs (upper end) until you reach the “pipe output” element, creating a flow diagram that works out of the box.

Portal

That’s it already, and here’s the result. I hope you can use an element or two out of this post for your own projects

First, games. There were plenty of new games I tried. Let’s have itsy bitsy tiny mini-reviews in alphabetical order, as part of my great catchup

• BattleForge – it’s  now also play4free, but you won’t have as much fun with only the 32 cards you get initially – more are obtainable with microtransations. The strategic focus lies in deckbuilding, actual battles are more tactics-based.
• Braid, but it’s less interesting once you completed it for the first time – admittedly, I had to cheat a bit with some puzzles.
• City of Heroes / Villains – it’s a very subjective rating, mostly because I’m horribly bored by the traditional MMO formula by now. But the game does have an incredibly nice character editor.
• Cogs, mainly due to lacking long-term motivation for me personally, but still a great filler and brain teaser.
• Dawn of War II – it’s the epitome of WH40k’s grim future. I particularly like how the single player (more action-RPG) and the multiplayer (deep strategy and tactics without base building, finally) are essentially two entirely different games.
• Defense Grid: The Awakening, a great continuation of the tower defense meme that begun with Warcraft III custom maps and found its way into countless Flash games (like this one) to date.
• Mirror’s Edge – I played through it three times! Splendid how they mixed up the FPS formula. Not that much to do after you finished the game though. (Yes, I did enough time trials to unlock them all.)
• Plants vs. Zombies, which was surprising for me, I do not like any of the other PopCap games this much.
• Team Fortress 2 Sniper vs. Spy Update. Would have been more if it weren’t for how the unlocks were introduced (merely as random drops). And, I still got no hat, what’s up with that?
• Zeno Clash,  but I would like to give it more. It’s so charming and well-executed. It just didn’t make me actually want to finish it, and I can’t even put my finger on why that is.

I guess my rating average is rather high (3.7 stars, which pretty much translates to  “Hey, that’s good!”) – but arguably, that is because I don’t even play the games I know I wouldn’t like.

Have you tried any of these games? Do you agree, or disagree, with my rating? Let me know, I love comments

If you notice any issues, I’d be glad about a comment here. The FTP upload had some hickups and corrupt files that I fixed, and might well have had some that I didn’t.

(Oh, and nope, the diploma thesis is not done yet )

But I’ll take things slow

Oh – never, never ever snowboard or ski without helmet or back protector. I was wearing them, and I wouldn’t want to know where I’d be now without.

Anyway, enough “dear journal”, I really have to quote these few sentences from Thomas Metzinger’s book, Being No One. While they do build on a lot of what he has written up to that point (starting with definitions of “transparency”, said constraints, “representation” and “phenomenal experience”), they’re utterly brilliant on their own as well, I think, and a big stepping stone for tackling the problem known as the hard problem of consciousness.

[...] If all other necessary and sufficient constraints for the emergence of phenomenal experience are satisfied by a given representational system, the addition of a transparent self-model will by necessity lead to the emergence of a phenomenal self. Phenomenal selfhood results from autoepistemic closure in a self-representing system; it is a lack of information. The prereflexive, preattentive experience of being someone results directly from the contents of the currently active self-model being transparent. [...] Under a general principle of ontological parsimony it is not necessary (or rational) to assume the existence of selves, because as theoretical entities they fulfill no indispensable explanatory function. What exists are information-processing systems engaged in the transparent process of phenomenal self-modelling. All that can be explained by the phenomenological notion of a “self” can also be explained using the representationalist notion of a transparent self-model.

Really, just brilliant.

(I do hope that this falls under fair use in the context of scientific research, if the quotation is too expansive please notify me and I will remove it, or narrow it down further, immediately.)

The Cyberdemons and the Spider Queens didn’t make it, but rushing them (or the marines) would be a pity, I’ll rather paint them well with ample time after the weekend.

Without further ado, here’s the whole bunch of the marines. I took Space Marine Scout miniatures from Warhammer 40k for them, as they just have waay more detail than the ones that came with the game itself.

Doom Marines

All the details did take their toll, time-wise, I spent close to 20 hours on them. But considering they’re the good guys and the only minis the marine players will ever control, they better look good.

I made individual pictures of the three strike teams (red, green, blue), have a look at them here:

Red Marines

Blue Marines

Green Marines

Note how they’re quite a bit cleaner (looks-wise) than the other minis – I didn’t drybrush a bit here. That and the strong color palette emphasizes a bit that they’re the good guys, I hope.

Time to relax now