I’ve kept some of my first ones too! The amount of cheap acrylic I have on them adds an extra point of toughness ;)

I love the look of blood angels! But I like how you’ve done the ultramarine scheme, nice and grimdark

Looking great! Have you decided on a chapter for your army yet?

Maybe its just my reading preferences, but I don’t know that I agree that they are optimistic generally speaking. A lot of what I have read tends to be either picking up the pieces from the fall of humanity or a warning on human arrogance and hubris. Usually you have some kind of humanity ending issue that gets resolved but usually has an element of sacrifice or loss in getting to that resolution. Ive always found sci fi to be a “this is how terrible it could be if we dont hande X issue correctly, but at least there will be people like the protagonist who will try and do the right thing”. I think if you took away that optimistic resolution to some of these plots, they wouldn’t be very compelling as a read. I think to more directly answer your question, these stories are often trying to make a point. Some of the ones I’ve enjoyed most tend to do a better job of incorporating the death by a thousand cuts you describe but are ultimately trying to say something about a specific issue. I think its also hard to argue that our modern time isn’t better than the past. That’s not to say its perfect or that there isn’t suffering, but if we were to describe our lives to someone from a thousand years ago, they might feel that our current world is fairly ‘optimistic’ as well.

This could definitely be some bias on my choices though so grain of salt lol.

Thank you! Purple is such a fun color to work with. The newer models have such great detail on the carapace. I tried a few different approaches but found just a simple bright grey dry brush always ended up looking better than anything else I tried.

To shreds you say…

Thank you! I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. I was kinda just working with the paints I had on hand so ended up base coating with a slightly warm brown, valejo natural wood or something like that. Then I just added a little white at a time up to something flesh like. For the actual painting, I really tried to bring up the raised areas with the lighter shades while leaving the dark in the contours. I I used wyldwood contrast from citadel (a dark brown) like a wash around the eyes and cleaned things up with my previously mixed skin tone. The eyes wasn’t anything fancy, an off white, black and a steady hand. Getting the pupils lined up took a few tries, and I got them close but they are definitely not the same size on both. Fine enough on a table, but noticeable up close.

My Tyranids are purple, but gaunts are a pretty good way to practise anything organic/flesh and even with the different colours, the principles were all the same.

Looks like an osprey!

Those look amazing! Love the patterning you went for and man, that red really pops.

The black company had some good reread value, at least the first three! If you havnt read em, you absolutely should.

you are doing nothing wrong. To my knowledge, there is no effective firewall app for android that doesn’t occupy the VPN connection. From my understanding, you either have a VPN or a firewall. I have found no work around for both that was effective.

Wow, your basing is fantastic! How did you do all those cool plants?

Not sure what your hardware looks like but I set up a degoogled RPI running on linageos 22. Been running solid for about 6 months now. Definitely not a beginner project, took me a bit of work to get it up and running but hasn’t failed me yet!

https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi4/LineageOS22-ATV/

Its honestly a coin toss. Great resource for finding books, don’t get me wrong, but its hit or miss if the book you want is in the right format for what you’re asking.

I’m currently on Children of Dune. I’ve listened to the core six a few times on audio book but figured I’d actually put the time into reading them. Its honestly pretty close to a first time experience. There was so many little things sprinkled throughout that I totally missed in audio book.

Man, spoilers much? So much of the beauty of book four was having that click in my brain. There’s a reason Erikson doesn’t use his real name through dead house gates…

Not sure if Lemmy supports comment spoilers but that would have been the time to use them, might not be too late to prevent others from getting spoiled.

On the hiking note, it also shows a lot of trails. I used it to navigate to a trail head and was pleasantly surprised to see a rough outline of the trails I would be using plus some others I didn’t know were there.

Honestly, I’m blaming user error, kinda just slapped it together and hit post. Good to know for the future though!

Oops, you nailed it. Probably should’ve checked everything actually uploaded…

And used on first nations protesting pipelines and the like.