Mike Monteiro has written some of my favourite articles on about Twitter, most written from a place of frustration, sadness, and anger at the avoidable decline and lack of leadership. I wanted to bookmark them here so I had one simple place to refer back to them from, and to share them with any readers who hadn’t yet come across them.

Continuing from yesterday’s Ancient, I figured that if this ends up becoming my Armies on Parade entry, I’ll need an HQ, to give the force a sense of purpose.

This model was much less work than the Ancient. The only time consuming bit was removing the sword hand without wrecking the wrist armour, and replacing it with a Forge World power scythe. Other than that, it was just a head swap and attaching a couple of suitable bits to decorate.

I should probably add some Troops next…

I’ve wanted to enter Armies on Parade for several years now, but I’ve never managed to get myself organised in time. This year might go the same way, but I’ve at least started on the display board, which is further than previous years!

I have a unique constraint on my entry: for logistical reasons, my entire entry must fit in a carry case. Assuming I use the largest I have, the Battlefoam P.A.C.K 720, that means my entry has a footprint of 12″ x 15″, give or take. The standard size for Armies on Parade is 24″ x 24″ – so I have roughly half the space available to me of most other entrants!

I’m not 100% set on which army I’ll be taking. Most likely it’ll be Space Marines of some order, for 40K. If I enter for AoS, it’ll be the Deepkin army I started through a Path To Glory campaign. I have the clearest idea for a 40K board, so that’s where I’m starting today.

I ordered 2 custom cut pieces of plywood to serve as my base board. This saved me the hard part of betting my edges straight. I’m only using 1 for now, so the other is on standby, just in case.

With my base sorted, I needed to figure out a theme, and how I was going to build it. Kill Team is providing the inspiration this year, so I figured the Sector Imperialis look is the perfect place to start. I could also cheat a little bit here. I had a solitary tile from the Sector Imperialis Realm of Battle board lurking at the back of a cupboard, from a previous planned entry. Obviously, it’s too big for my diminutive board, but that’s why Man invented power tools! I laid the board on top of the tile, where I thought I’d get a good mixtue of details, traced around it with a sharpie, and then set about it with a jigsaw. 5 minutes of cutting with a blade rated for aluminium, and I had a section of the tile roughly cut to size.

Which when laid over the board looks something like this:

You might have noticed one of the corners is bare, due to where I cut the tile. That’s fine – I’m going to fill it with rubble or something similar, so it won’t be noticed once everything is complete.

You might also have noticed all the edges look a bit wierd. That’s because when you cut using a powertool, it usually generates enough heat to melt the plastic. I’ll be tidying that up when I get around to filling and sanding the edges – but that’s a job for another day!

I finally got these up on the wall, after what seems like forever. Despite some careful planning and marking out where the pins were to be placed, Dhalsim still ended up slightly out of position. I’m going to chalk that up to manufacturing tolerances in the frames…

Quoting:

“”

In recent months, museums in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany have begun to address the fact that large portions of their collections are, well, not theirs — and were stolen from other countries during the colonial era.

But there’s no consensus on how to deal with the issue. And as the Washington Post reports, some museums are proposing “loaning” the artifacts back to their countries of origin for limited periods of time — rather than actually returning them.

The whole thing stinks in my view. These items should be returned to the countries they were taken from. Not “loaned” – returned.

via European museums may “loan” stolen artifacts back to African countries – Vox

I’m one of those people who still cling to their RSS Reader as a way to aggregate and read interesting things and news. Even though half the feeds in my blog folder are dead, I keep them around in the hope they one day spring to life again as we all get tired of the social media walled gardens, and start publishing on our own sites again. I’m sure it’s part habit, part convenience, part nostalgia.

At the moment I’m using The Old Reader, and using Stylus to fix the horrible, horrible default reading experience. TOR has worked fine for me up to now, but I was already near the subscription limits of the free tier, and I have a whole lot of new feeds to import that would basically double the number of sites I follow.

I know I could just use Feedly, as the free tier supports unlimited sources. That’s my fallback, but I left Feedly for The Old Reader several months ago, as I was becoming increasingly annoyed by some of their attempts to push Feedly Pro and team-based features. I just want to read my news, not create collections or share with teams, or whatever else they’ve come up with since. My RSS reader is not a shared experience.

So I’m probably going to have to start paying for a web-based reader, I want to make sure I’m using the best one I can. TOR is ok, but paying for something I have to use an addon to “fix” seems a bit silly.

If you’re using a paid-tier reader, which one are you using? My basic list of requirements are:

  • 3rd Party Apps can use it as a synchronisation source, so I can read on my iPhone or iPad.
  • Support for 200+ feed sources
  • A nice reading experience in the web client

Let me know in the comments what your preferred reader is!