Terminally Incoherent

My brother Ark owns bunch of Nerf guns that we occasionally use for an all out nerf war. His arsenal includes several Mavericks, a Longshot and a funky crossbow that I can’t find anywhere online. Since we are both Warhammer 40k nuts we always joke around how the Mavericks look a bit like Bolt Pistols. I mean look at them:

The longshot in its short retracted state looks a little bit like a regular bolter. We even talked about painting them up to make them look like the authentic things. All you would really need to give it a nice paint job and then attach the distinctive curved magazine clips to them. Ark actually wanted to use them as part of some elaborate Halloween costume but that never happened. Imagine my surprise when I found that we were not the first people to come up with this idea. Apparently, there is some guy who paints Nerf guns and sells them on ebay and his work seems to be heavily influenced by 40k artwork. Just check out his Maverick:

It really does look like a bolt pistol. It’s just missing the magazine. Also check out the Longshot:

I’d be afraid to use these as it would probably ruin the paint job real quick. But this just shows that this sort of thing is possible given enough time and patience. Ark will probably be furious that someone has beat him to the punch and made these.

Anyway, if you don’t know what Warhammer 40k is, and you don’t find Nerf guns fun, just ignore this post. We will resume posting the regular content that you came to expect from this place tomorrow.

You might have seen this image in /dev/random feed (btw, there is a link to it in thesidebar now):

img found @ knuttz.net

This is actually a sculpture by an artist who goes by Pierre Matter. Pierre doesn’t seem to have a website of his own which is kinda lame. But Opera Gallery has some info on him and a pretty good samples of his work.

I’m showing you this to illustrate a point. Normal person will look at this and think about how this sculpture juxtaposes the organic, and technological elements. Perhaps find some sort of angelic figure rising out of dark and twisted bowels of machinery. Maybe they will find this to be a statement about technology in general? Or perhaps they will just see it as a cool, sci-fi sculpture.

But when I look at it, I instantly go “ZOMG! It’s a fucking C’Tan!”

I don’t know how big that sculpture is, but I would shrink it to about 6″ in size, and plop it on the battlefield in seconds. Yes ladies and gentlemen. Once you get the Warhammer bug, there is no going back. Your mind will be irreversibly warped by the sheer awesomeness of that game.

And yes, I do think that the C’Tan background is a wee bit lame, but they are part of the 40K cannon now so I guess we just need to get used to them.

Over the holidays me and my brother were playing a lot of Dawn of War over the LAN. Its tons of fun even though I’m getting my ass royally kicked cause Ark has beat this game like 7 times by now, and is able to win skirmish battles with 8 computer enemies on hard almost every time.

I haven’t really played it much, and it is very different from the tabletop game (DOW is an RTS). I usually play Eldar because that’s what I play 40k. After being mercilessly demolished several times I decided to try other races and see how would it be to play Space Marines or Chaos. Ark picked Eldar, and holly shit!

In the tabletop game the Eldar Fire Prism tanks are overpriced and marginally useful. At least in the old Codex. I think their new value is less prohibitive, but still - I never really fielded them. But in DoW they kill! Or at least they do if fielded in large squadrons. What Ark did was to max out his vehicle cap on them, forgoing Wraithlords, Falcons and Vypers. I never really thought about that cause I always liked to have 3-4 of those large wraithbone constructs in the game.

A squadron of 6-8 Prisms is almost unstoppable though. I couldn’t believe how effective they were. Basic troops could barely scratch them, and because the prism area attack most units in combat were dispersed. Furthermore, it only took 2-3 combined salvos to total any SM tank/dreadnought I could throw at them. When supported by an infantry raid from a nearby cloaked Webgate a Prism squadron could take on anything.

I tried the same strategy in a skirmish game against the computer, and I managed to zoom around the map destroy 4 enemy bases with the same 6 prisms without taking any losses (other than the life bar of few vehicles being in yellow).

Which brings me back to the tabletop game. I’m now considering actually fielding a Prism in a game to see how it functions on the battlefield under the new rules…

Wohoo! I just got the brand new Eldar Codex in the mail:

Please be warned that a rant about how GW nerfed the shit out of x, y and z and how they awesomized q is in the making.

I didn’t have a chance to really read through the rules yet or check out the fluff section, but the book looks great.

This is a most awesome Lego creation I have seen in my life!

found on the internets; author unknown

I wonder if it is up to scale. I would figure that it would be a little bigger than a standard dread.

Btw, if you have any idea who made this can you please post a link to the original source in the comments? I would love to give the creator of this thing all the credit he deserves.