Canadiana: Honeymoon Suite

Honeymoon Suite is another 80's Rock Band that received plenty of airplay on Canadian radio stations, thanks to the CRTC Canadian content rules. If i'm not mistaken, 30% of all music played on canadian radio stations had to be Canadian. That percentage has since increased to 35%.

Burning In Love



Feel It again



New Girl Now



What does it take

Hirst Arts - Making Your Own Dungeon Tiles

One of the more enjoyable facets of building your own dungeon tiles is creating additional molds to add your own unique pieces, as well as speed construction. At the beginning, it is smartest to restrict yourself to using the molds available from Hirst Arts, but at some point you may want to branch out and customize your dungeon tiles.

Bruce Hirst encourages people to do so, while observing that creating original molds is an exacting process. So far, my mold making efforts have been confined to creating molds to speed construction.

Here is an example. I created this mold to assist in the production of my floor tiles. It yields 14 half-by-one inch edged blocks, and 7 half-by-half corner blocks.



To produce this, I needed to make a master (the original blocks are glued to this piece of 5" x 8" glass.



You'll need a frame, in order to pour the silicone over the master and keep the silicone from running off the sides. In this case, I raided the lego collection of my son and made this 4" x 6" frame.



You'll also need some silicone. As far as I can tell, this Mold Max 40 is the same silicone that Bruce Hirst uses for his Hirst Arts molds, and it sets up fairly quickly.



The goal is to produce more of the floor tiles pictured below. While I have a glut of the one-inch centre blocks, I have very few of the edge pieces, thus necessitating my mold-making effort above.

Canadiana: Bachman-Turner Overdrive BTO

Bachman-Turner Overdrive played music for the generation that preceded mine.

It doesn't mean I can't enjoy them, but I suspect their music is more meaningful to that generation than to me or mine. I still crank up the volume when I hear them on the radio though.

Trampier: Master Of Light And Shadow

You can't help but marvel at David Trampier's mastery of light and shadow. Here's a beautiful example ripped from the pages of The Dragon, Issue Number 12, Volume II, No. 6, February 1978.

This DAT illustration accompanies a preview of Andre Norton's Dungeons and Dragons-based book, Quag Keep. If you pay attention, you'll notice that the seated adventurer, in the foreground, is wearing a bracelet encrusted with oddly-shaped dice.

Politics And Potato Salad: Sesame Street Edition

Here endeth today's civics lesson.

Canadiana: Nash The Slash

Dance after curfew (12inch Mix) by escaton78

I still can't find my favorite Nash the Slash song, I'm An American Band. Dance After Curfew will have to do.

Nash the Slash is the one wearing the fez, and wrapped entirely in bandages. That was intended to hide his true identity.

Warren Buffet To Legislators: Stop Coddling The Super-Rich

I'm speechless. You can read the entire New York Times article here.

Warren Buffet's concluding sentence: "My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice."

Canadiana: The Spoons

Dice Pron

There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for dice pron posts. Here's a sampling of my dice. The picture above is my dice from the Holmes Basic DnD set. And the photo below is my new 7-sided die. It gets to be featured individually, as it is the first die that I paid more than $5 for.
And, finally, the rest of my dice. Lots of purples and pinks there. Those are for the three ladies of the house.

Hirst Arts - Cobblestone Floors

There's an old saying: make hay while the sun shines. With only 4 months of the year available for casting here in Calgary, i'm spending as much time as possible pouring plaster to make more Hirst Arts elements. Here are more fruits of my labours. Several 3" x 3" cobblestone floor tiles.
Some of the tiles have straight edges, while others have a wavy edge. The wavy edge permits the tiles to be placed along side each other, while minimizing the seam between the tiles.

These are my "master" tiles. Using these, I will create new molds to speed up the floor tile casting process.

I still need to get working on my wall tiles. Once I have produced a couple, I will post them.

Microgame Collection Update

My microgame collection is coming along quite nicely. I recently added a couple of titles, including Artifact, Goblin and Hitler's War. I'm missing most of the Dwarfstar Games, but I never collected those when they were first released, so they must be purchased from the resale market, meaning they are out of my price range (at least what i'm willing to pay).