Today didn’t start up well, I stayed up way too late, or more accurately couldn’t sleep so I kept getting up to look up things online or in the Big Red Book. So as a result I slept in or just lay in bed for hours…
The first thing I did when I got up besides check my email and this blog’s stats was to start updating the index page at nurgle.muschamp.ca. I’m committed to this blog and painting more non-Nurgle stuff, I just had to drop back into Nurgle mode to get 1500 points of demons on the table by Sunday, but after tomorrow I’m going to be working on some non-Nurgle Chaos Space Marine stuff and then back to terrain, Van Doos, Servants of Decay, and zombies. Mmm Zombies…
I’ve been putting my newly painted models on Flickr, but now I think I may put up a pile of old pictures of older but still well painted models or just use my new photo set up and the almighty iPhone to take some fresh snaps. I like my old Flickr integration in iPhoto as I could add all the tags before uploading, hopefully Apple fixes that as they put the third party app makers out of business. Anyway now one random miniature photo, from Flickr, appears on my Nurgle homepage.
Much more work was getting the RSS feeds to display. The age of static HTML has come to a close, the fact I still have 100s of static HTML pages online is a testament to my stubbornness as much as anything. I could move all the content into a CMS such as WordPress. I’m not even hosting this blog myself or paying to have it hosted, why bother, the few plugins and tricks I can’t do on WordPress.com don’t really take anything away from the blog. Before I was more of an IT guy, now I’m just over-educated and unemployed.
We’ll see if these small changes result in more traffic to my Flickr photos and this blog. Nurgle.muschamp.ca was a lot of work over a long, long, period and even though it doesn’t have much PageRank it still does fairly well in Google.
The Beasts are basically done, the Plaguebearers are still ranked up on the shelf where I photographed them. I think I’m going to have to put them in a miniature case, probably the biggest one I own, not because the army has such a high model count, it doesn’t, because the beasts and Demon Prince are odd shaped and fragile and fitting them and 40 Plaguebearers in a small case would require custom foam I don’t have the time to do…
I’ve got a number of cases but I think someday I’ll buy another as Battlefoam is making some really useful custom foam inserts. I think if you put a lot of time into your army and you want to play anywhere but your house you’ll eventually want to invest in the best case you can. I used to make custom ones myself, but now there is so much foam out there from pluck and pull to these custom cut ones.
Well time to get going, I’ve been at home too long, we’ll just make room to photograph the Beasts and Slim and I’m outta here.
There turned out to be enough room in Sabol Designs pluck and pull tray that I’d fitted into a Charon Skirmishpack to carry two tanks for what turned out to be West Coast Mayhem. That is the case I’m using to transport my Daemons as I bought some vehicle and bike/cavalry foam too for it, but it also holds a hundred plus man-sized or even bigger based daemon-sized models which is doubly important when your model is all metal. Only about four of the models are multiple pieces though, most are solid.
While re-basing the Beasts I freshened up some of the guts with spare GW Blood Red and Reaper Master Series Clotted Red, along with my custom red-black ink based wash. I’m pretty pleased the paint job on Sluggie (the green one) has held up as well as it has, the flesh is drybrushed and the paint job is over 15 years old I think, one of the oldest models with the original paint job still serving in the Diseased Sons warband.
Busted Esmerelda
So I’m moving again. This time I’m moving less than 300 meters to a condo I bought in Calgary. I got all my Beasts of Nurgle to Calgary without busting them. But I couldn’t remember how I did it. I tried making a custom spot for each one in the Sabol foam, but I crammed too much in too tightly and busted a tentacle off of Esmerelda.
I haven’t done much gaming during Covid, indeed any gaming and haven’t painted maybe all year, but I had to box up all my miniatures that were in my display case and although I have plenty of cases and foam, I don’t remember what goes where and I seem to have more and more non-standardize models. The foam that worked the best so far is from Charon and Battle Foam. I did some Googling and found this old post, so after the move and after I likely buy some new furniture I will be ordering more foam.
I also hope to get back to painting, gaming, and updating this blog. But packing my miniatures was such an ordeal I took to Instagram but ultimately I was able to identify the useful big roomy foam trays. I doubt I’ll ever start a new army and GW keeps making models bigger, look at the latest Plague Marines let alone the Blightlords.
So if you have thoughts on Nurglings, transporting miniatures, foam, or miniature cases you can leave a comment below.
Musk's Miniatures 
Apparently I’m not done re-basing stuff. While lying in bed unable to sleep I figured out a solution to the problems I was having with the horde of plaguebearers. Problem one is the musician not ranking up right, problem two is the standard bearers ineffably tipping over if you try to move the unit.
The solution to both problems is re-basing and throw in some of the high strength magnets I ordered. I already test fitted the magnets and after the games I’ll be fixing my basing problems for good this time.
Well that was a long evening. I just could not sleep, my sleep schedule is all messed up, I finally started to dose off around sunrise. I tried to stay in bed, but besides ideas on re-basing models, improving the look of the banner, modifications to the army list, how to increase the size of the daemons force without buying any models, rereading various sections of the rules, reminding myself not to forget this or that…
In short I got very little sleep, save for a few hours since true dawn. I need to get a move on as I plan to walk to Strategies Games and play my first game of Warhammer Fantasy Battle in over a decade!